Chapter Five
Pepper cringed at her laptop screen.Eeesh.Underpaid NSA grunts must be calling in emergency antidepressant refills after checking her recent search history.
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I ruined my life
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Her chest was tight, like she’d just finished sprinting up six flights of stairs. Each breath came hard, a halting, shallow spurt. No point in teeth gnashing or fist shaking; neither would change the fact that any clerkship worth its salt had been filled. She reached for her third candy bar, but her fingers skimmed nothing but another empty wrapper.
Sucking chocolate-stained fingers, she plucked a sheet of bubble wrap off the kitchen table, popping a row. Not remotely satisfying. She closed the computer and buried her face in her hands. All she wanted to do was live in her favorite city and get stable, career-wise, love-wise, well, everything-wise. Life was happening right now. All around. Except instead of pressing Play, she was stuck on Pause.
No. Worse.
Rewind.
She stamped her feet, punched the empty cardboard box off the table, and screamed. “Fuck!” She hadn’t busted tail to escape one small town only to get mired in another.
Now her throat hurt and the neighbors were probably calling the cops. She picked up the phone and set it back down. Talking to Dad was out. He’d spout off feel-good crap like “failure is success in progress,” but she was facing down a big, black tunnel without so much as a pinprick of light at the end. Cliché phrases wouldn’t help.
Tuesday wouldn’t help, either. She’d say, “move back.” As if this boondoggle could be fixed by a simple bus ride home to New York. Not an option given the fact her savings account had dust bunnies in lieu of zeroes, her credit card was maxed from the move and buying work clothes, and oh, last but not least, Mount Student Loans was poised to bury her in an avalanche of debt. Combine that with the fact she’d signed a lease that couldn’t be broken without a termination fine bigger than her entire current net worth and what did she have?
A whole lot of nothing.
Some Superwoman.
She resumed popping bubble wrap. In law school, classmates clamored for Pepper-in-rural-Maine childhood stories on the rare nights that a happy hour chocolate martini craving overrode her introversion. They hailed from cities and suburbs where events like getting lunch stolen by a black bear at the bus stop or chopping through ice for drinking water were inconceivable.
“Wow. Imagine growing up like that,” they’d sigh, eyes bright with idealism of a simpler life.
But her life in Maine hadn’t been one bigLittle House on the Prairie–inspired fantasy. It was work. Hard work. Without the benefit of a dashing Almanzo Wilder to whisk her away on nightly buggy rides. Always one catastrophe away from a hungry belly. No, she couldn’t return to that life, could only march forward.
