Just open up to this, she thought. Just do it.
If she didn’t give this a chance, a true emotional chance, she’d be left with a big, heaping hole of regret inside of her.
But that’s better than rejection, another voice said.
She closed her eyes and listened to the cadence of that voice. Whose voice was it? Who was whispering these words that stopped her from acting on hope? It was the same voice that got her out of Peters.
The question was, who exactly was that?
If she were in a selfish frame of mind, which she was drifting into more and more lately, she would indulge in some deep self-pity over the fact that she and Laura had lost their morning coffee ritual. It was not that Josie was a cheapskate, but rather the free coffee from Laura had been more of a bonus, some sort of extra that came along with the companionship. And it wasn’t that she desperately needed the caffeine as much as she had pretended to when she and Laura had gotten together most mornings. The energy boost from the rich, brown liquid was, again, a bonus.
What she’d got out of her ritual was companionship—someone to bounce ideas off of, a good, deep friend to share the boring details of her boring life and her boring job. Laura had a corporate job that was just interesting enough to keep her there and just boring enough to make it a bit dull. Until Laura had met Dylan and Mike, in fact, they’d both been boring. There had been equity between what Josie would tell and what Laura would tell, a mutual bitching session that in the end balanced them out.
Josie, though, had spent years trying to get herself into a stable economic situation, and boring was an accomplishment. Her life had been more interesting than anyone would wish, growing up. In addition to losing her dad, and putting up with her mom, she didn’t have a smooth time of it at school, either.
“Smartmouth” had been the phrase that teachers had used the most with her. Watch that smart mouth. You’re a smartmouth. And occasionally, along with fingers clenching her bicep, cut it out, smartass, hissed in her ear. That one was the angry English teacher, the furious phys ed teacher—pretty much whichever teacher had a temper and couldn’t stand the fact that Josie did not defer to authority unless authority deferred back.
Socially, she did okay. Being a target for the teachers made her stand out, get notice. Plenty of boys wanted to date her. Though “dating” was a loose term where she grew up. A date meant that maybe the guy paid the car fee at the drive-in and managed to drive you home after he got what he wanted. Or, once you were old enough for bars, on cheap beer night you might get treated to enough drinks to get you drunk—and then, again, a ride home if the guy got what he wanted.
She’d tired quickly of that scene and had hidden in books, her nose in a tome at the local library and later the university branch campus’s meager stacks, hoping to read her way to a better life. It had worked. Nursing school had been her big ticket out of Nowheresville, Ohio. When she’d earned her associate’s degree she’d qualified for a full ride at the small college in Boston, which, for whatever reason and whatever deity knew why, had picked her out of a stack of Josies and made her a queen.
Once she’d transferred to the Boston area, she’d been able to breathe for the first time, a giant exhale of victory.
It was a big, giant f**k you to the rundown house she’d left, the trailer parks, the poverty, the misery of where she’d grown up. And most of all to all the people who had told her that her dreams had been foolish, that she had been overreaching or snobbish, or too full of herself. She’d had to struggle against it within herself—one part of her saying give up, another telling that part to f**k off. It shouldn’t have been as hard as it was. The true Josie had won, though. She had, indeed, said, f**k you to the other part, the part that was essentially the king crab pulling hard on the crabs that tried to escape the cooking pot. If she could have lifted a giant middle finger, tall enough to be seen the six hundred miles from Boston to northeast Ohio, she would have constructed it.
Instead, she faced a rather large structure of her own making that she needed to deal with—and that was nearly six figures in student loans. When you came from where Josie came from, people didn’t have college funds, or grandparents who helped out, or even well-established scholarships. A local credit union had thrown $500 a year her way for four years, and she’d managed to get the full Pell Grant three out of five years. She’d spent four years chipping away at her associate’s, and one of those years, her mom had never bothered to file her taxes. In the ensuing mess, Josie, still a dependent, had lost out on her Pell Grants. Community college and branch campus tuitions were low, but not that low.
It was so worth it, though. All worth it. Her graduation day—their graduation day, hers and Laura’s—had been such a triumph for her. In spite of her mom, Marlene, showing up looking and acting like an older, drunker, version of Daisy Duke. It hadn’t been pretty. A day of massive pride for Josie had turned into unrelenting embarrassment. Rather than striking a chord of fury, though, the embarrassment had actually given way to gratitude. A deep, intense, sense of gratitude that she had made it, that these past six years doing everything possible to change who she was, to defy the trajectory that everyone had assumed she would follow, had paid off. She was not her mom.
If Laura had been there, she could have talked about all of that.
But Laura wasn’t.
She’d moved on.
Inviting Alex over to her apartment for dinner was turning out to be a colossal mistake. First of all, she actually had to clean the place. Her apartment looked like early thrift shop, circa 1994, with a definite hippie tone to everything. She kept it neat, she just didn’t keep it clean. So she had spent most of the day dusting baseboards, pulling things off shelves and wiping under them, cleaning the crud out of the corners of the bathroom and making sure that everything that didn’t really have a place appeared to have some kind of a place. She opened the windows and aired the place out, and burned a little essential oil in an oil burner to fill the house with eucalyptus and lavender. It made her feel more alert, and calmer at the same time, excited to have a man over in her apartment for the first time in forever. Her cat, Dotty, was not a good helper, instead finding various sunny spots on the windowsills to curl up in.
She’d invited Alex for a 7:00 dinner. It was now 6:30. She’d bought all of the groceries earlier that day, but now panic set in. What if he didn’t like her cooking? What if this really was just about sex? What if she’d been too forward in making that joke about the movie? What if he didn’t like her apartment? What if he was a serial killer and he was going to empty her freezer and put little chopped-up bits of Josie in there to snack on over the next month, and no one except Laura would ever know that she went missing, and all Alex would have to do is say, “Oh, I’m enjoying Josie thoroughly, don’t worry,” and Laura would think that was a sexual innuendo? What if?