Chapter OneTessI walk through the door to the sound of Taylor Swift blaring through the small apartment, my roommate Kaitlyn and my little Chi-Poo Gizmo running around the living room together.
As usual, our shared two-bedroom is a battlefield of discarded clothes – hers – and paperback novels and writing material—mine.
She looks up with a bright smile, her jet black hair swooshing around her shoulders. She’s in her silk bathrobe and her bikini, having come straight from the club, probably, and for a second I get a glimpse of her crazily thin body and feel a pang in my chest.
My barista outfit feels like it’s clinging tightly to my hips and guilt lances into me when I remember the cake I greedily tore into before I left.
“Hey, doll,” she says, turning to me with a jig.
Gizmo tilts his head and comes running over to me, the little bundle of white fur letting his tongue hang out in his excitement. Gizmo is a tiny dog, a cross between a Chihuahua and a Toy Poodle, called Gizmo after the Gremlin.
I kneel and tickle his pointy, furry ears and then lift him up, letting him lick my face hello and cradle him close to me.
“Good day?” Kait asks, dropping onto the couch and pausing the music on her phone.
I carry Gizmo and drop down next to her, the couch smelling musty, a secondhand freebie we haven’t had professionally cleaned yet.
“Oh, amazing,” I mutter dryly. “I didn’t spill coffee on any customers and I didn’t get caught writing in the bathroom. So, all in all, a victory.”
She grins at me, making me feel old even though I’m twenty-one and she’s twenty. Kaitlyn is always full of life when she comes from the club, perhaps because she has to put on a fake nice face, and it carries over when she’s home … or maybe not everybody is weighted with the handicap of introspection and seriousness.
Even now, I’m thinking about everything too much.
I tug my attention back to my friend.
“I still can’t believe you did that,” she says. “If you really need to write down an idea for your Great American Novel, I’m sure you can find somewhere better than the shitter.”
I laugh, nodding as Gizmo climbs onto my shoulder and perches there like an owl. “Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “How was your day, anyway?”
“An afternoon shift at a strip club?” she beams. “Tess, it’s hell. It’s absolutely hell. No money to be made squirming around on stage for a bunch of bored day-walkers.”
“So why are you so happy?”
“Because I’m a good friend.”
“Okay …” I wait for her to reveal the punch-line, but she just keeps beaming at me. “You do know what you’re saying makes no sense, right?”
“I’m a good friend,” she repeats. “And when my bestie gets some good news, I feel like I’ve got some good news, too. Honestly, Tess, you don’t know how happy I am I found you as a roommate. Six months, fine, not a long time—whatever. But, like, I don’t know … it feels like more, you know?”
“You’re rambling, Kait,” I say, good-naturedly. “But I feel the same. You know that.”
I always feel a swelling in my chest when I think about how Kaitlyn and I met, she the runaway from Tennessee and me the city kid, born and raised here.
Parentless, an orphan, drifting through life with no direction and no hope.
I graduated high school and lived in halfway houses and generally I felt as though I was waiting for life to begin, but now, it feels like it finally has.
Even if I only have a cruddy barista job – even if this apartment is cramped and too cold in the winter – I’ve got Kaitlyn and Gizmo and finally I’m trying to write.
Failing, but trying.
That’s what counts, right?
“So what is it?” I ask, as Gizmo paws at my hair in an attempt to leap atop my head.
I giggle as Kait reaches forward and helps the little guy up. He sits there, balancing perfectly, the weight of him a solid imprint on the top of my scalp.
The summer sun hasn’t started setting yet, and motes of light drift across the apartment, seeming to track Kait’s movements as she leans back and reaches to the end table.
She picks up an envelope and hands it to me.
Being careful not to disturb Gizmo, I take the envelope and look down at it.
I tense up.
Anxiety stabs through me.
Gizmo squeaks and topples happily into my lap, rolling over and pawing and licking my hands and the envelope.
Tanner Telford’s Writing Academy.
The words are written across the bottom, nothing fancy about them, just a simple declaration. I stare and a flash of rage fires in me.
“You haven’t read it,” I snap.
“No,” Kait says, a confused note in her voice. “I’m not in the habit of rifling through your mail.”