She answered a few minutes later.
That's my girl! Next stop, Oscars! xoxoxo
I felt sick to my stomach.
My mom thought I couldn't see the worry behind her eyes, whenever I talked about my ambitions. She wasn't much for useful critique or hard-hitting advice, but she was always ridiculously enthusiastic. Sometimes, that was exactly what I needed.
But not now. Right now, I needed to wallow.
I had enough money saved up that I'd be okay for a little while. But the definition of "a little while" was slightly unclear. I knew I'd have to find some other kind of work when I got here, but that nagging, improbable hope in the back of my mind had convinced me to put off my job search for the first few days. After all, wouldn't want to get tied down bagging groceries, only to leave them in the lurch when Robert Rodriguez almost hit me with his car and became captivated by the fire in my eyes.
I would've laughed at myself, if it wasn't so fucking sad.
I found myself in the grocery store. It was so crowded, with such low ceilings, the noise of the traffic outside echoing through the wine racks. I wasn't used to this. Even though I didn't exactly grow up in the boonies, city living was relatively foreign to me. I forgot about how little space everything has, how much everything costs.
But you don't get discovered in the suburbs.
With a sigh of self-disgust, I jostled my way to the ice cream freezer. Ben and Jerry's was on sale - it was almost as if they knew I was coming.
As I reached for the door, tunnel vision honing in on Karamel Sutra, my shoulder collided with something. Large. Solid. Warm.
Shit, it had to be a human being.
I whirled around to face them, and sure enough, I was inches away from a guy who looked like he belonged on the cover of GQ. Great.
Well, it could've been worse - maybe this was about to become my own personal Nora Ephron style meet-cute.
"Do you mind?" he snapped at me.
Okay, maybe not.
"Sorry," I replied, fully aware of the lack of remorse in my voice. "You were in my blind spot."
"Oh, I was in your blind spot?" he shot back. His stormy blue eyes were staring me down, like I'd kicked his grandmother or something. "Maybe you should get some mirrors installed."
Running a hand through his short-cropped brown hair, he blindly grabbed a container from the shelf and disappeared down another aisle.
Well.
Obviously I'd heard the old chestnut about New Yorkers being rude, but this really took the cake. I had bumped into him pretty hard, and maybe I should have been more careful, but it had to be at least fifty percent his fault. Besides, whatever he was going through right now could not be as bad as all of my hopes, dreams, and career aspirations dying a slow and painful death.
Probably.
I finally picked up my Karamel Sutra and headed for the checkout. Picking a line more or less at random, I settled in behind a woman with a full cart of groceries and started scanning the tabloid headlines. Who are these people? What the fuck is Real Housewives of Buena Vista?
"Excuse me, ma'am?"
I looked up, to see one of the cashiers waving me over to another register.
"I can take you right over here," she said, flipping on her light. I wasn't in any particular hurry, but I figured it would be rude to decline.
As I approached the lane, something pushed past me. Something big, and warm, and solid.
Oh, hell no.
"Excuse me," he said, loudly, in a way that suggested it was not so much a request as a notification. "I've been waiting for ten minutes in that line over there, and now the register's broken. This is ridiculous. You have to take me first."
My jaw dropped. He couldn't have been lying more blatantly if he tried.
"Excuse me," I echoed. He didn't look at me, but I figured it was worth a shot anyway. "That's not true. I just saw you at the freezer."
He glared at me. "All right, I'm so sorry I violated grocery store protocol by jumping the line. How can I possibly make it up to you? Bear in mind that every moment I spend defending myself to you, is a moment I'm not using to get the fuck out of here so we can both go home."
It was in that moment that I glanced at what he was holding, and recognized the label.
Karamel Sutra.
Ugh. I already had way, way more in common with this guy than I wanted.
"Excuse me," I said again, pushing past him, and sliding my pint of ice cream towards the cashier. I wasn't going to cave to this asshole, no matter how effective his death glare was.
The poor cashier was like a deer in the headlights. I felt terrible for her, but I could not let this guy win. Finally, after a moment's hesitation and glancing between us like she expected an all-out brawl to start, she rang up my ice cream and took my card. I could feel my opponent looming over me from behind, practically breathing down my neck, but I'd won.
"I'm...I'm sorry." The cashier's voice came, very softly and tentatively. "It says your card is..."
I looked down at the screen. DECLINED.
For fuck's sake.
"You have got to be kidding me." The man snarled, reaching into his wallet and pulling out a wad of bills. He threw them at the register belt. "That should cover both of us, shouldn't it?" He glared at the cashier, who nodded quickly.
"Good." The man picked up his pint and jostled past me, and I absolutely did not notice the scent of his cologne. "Next time, maybe dig under the sofa cushions before you come out grocery shopping. Some of us have jobs to get back to."
Tears stung in my eyes as I stood there, stunned. It was the last straw. Every doubt and hesitation about this city, all those whispering fears that it really would end up eating me alive - it all came crashing down. How dare he? The contempt in his voice was unmistakable. From the looks of him, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Of course he thought the rest of the world was beneath him.
I was still clutching the ice cream in my lap as I sat on the train, riding until the end of the line. Waiting for my stop so I could get out and catch a bus. Too late, I realized that my Karamel Sutra would be half-melted by the time I got home. After growing up in the suburbs, I wasn't used to grocery store trips that took an hour one-way.
A simple enough solution: I'd have to invest in some of those insulated grocery bags. And maybe a few ice packs. But in that moment, irrationally, it felt like just another in a long list of failures that proved I never should have come here in the first place.
As I sat in the plastic seat that was far too narrow for any normal human, my eyes drifted down to an abandoned newspaper on the seat beside me. It was folded open to the middle, one of the pages adorned with blurry pictures of D-list celebrities who'd been unlucky enough to encounter a TMZ photographer while they walked their dogs.