“As tempted as I am to take you up on the offer of free labor, I’m finished here for now. Why don’t you head back to my office while I check on a few things, and I’ll meet you there in a minute.”
An hour later, Fergus leaves my office with a promise to join my friends and me for breakfast at B&H on Saturday. Our meeting went well, as evidenced by the check on my desk and the list of ideas for the winter ball the MacKinnon Group is sponsoring in the new year.
Needing a quiet moment before I get back to work, I check my personal email on my phone. Most of the messages are from places I should unsubscribe from, especially before the rush of holiday sale emails. There’s yet another email from LoveLinks trying to woo me back to the site. I don’t take the time to unsubscribe from the other businesses, but I do click the link to stopthoseemails. The reminders of my failed match with Spencer were bad enough before meeting him. Now that I know he’s as charming, funny, and sweet as I expected him to be, it’s even worse, considering I’ll likely never see him again.
“I think I want to date a Scottish guy.”
I glance up from my phone to see Jordy leaning in the doorway, looking pensive.
“Not that one, I hope. He’s old enough to be your father.”
She scoffs. “Ew, no, not Fergus. I mean, I guess he’s kinda hot for an old guy, but I’d never try to poach your man.”
Where do I begin dissecting that? “First of all, he’s not old, he’s just a couple years older than I am—”
“My point exactly,” she interjects.
I can’t help but laugh at this kid’s sass. I don’t even mind because I’ve discovered teasing is one of her love languages, and it took us a long time to get to this place. “Anyway,” I say pointedly, “Fergus isnotold, and he’s alsonotmy boyfriend. We’re just friends.”
“Just friends, huh? What’s that like, being friends with guys? Do you have many guy friends?”
“I have a few.” I motion to the chair on the opposite side of my desk. Jordy gives her shoulders a happy little shimmy before sliding into it. She knows whenever I invite her to sit, it means break time, and break time means a drink and whatever snack I happen to have on hand.
I cross the room to the makeshift bar the girls and I built when I got promoted and was given this office. There was already a tiny sink in here for some reason, so we built a small counter around it, plus cupboards overhead. I fill the kettle and turn it on, then pull out a canister of hot chocolate and a container of tea bags, holding them up for Jordy to see. She points to the hot chocolate.
“It’s easy now, but it wasn’t always,” I say. “Being friends with guys, I mean. I was awkward and uncomfortable around most boys when I was your age. It helped that my friend Stella has an older brother and he was amazing.Isamazing. I’ve known him my whole life, so he’s one of my closest guy friends, along with his friend Leland—who’s also Stella’s new boyfriend—plus Fergus, who’s a new addition to our group.”
I’ve added powdered chocolate and a splash of oat milk to two mugs by the time the kettle clicks off. When the drinks are mixed, I set them both on my desk and flop into my chair, pulling open the bottom drawer of my desk, where a large bakery box from my favorite café is hidden. Cravings isn’t the most convenient place to get to, considering it’s housed inside the city’s amusement park, but they make the best cinnamon rolls. Knowing they’re Jordy’s favorite and that she’d be here after school today, I made a detour before coming to work this morning. The way Jordy’s face lights up as she takes one is worth getting up half an hour early.
“Any advice for not turning into a stammering, giggling, blushing idiot around guys?” she asks, picking off a chunk of gooey, cinnamony goodness and popping it in her mouth.
I take a bite of my own pastry to hide my smile. “Well…” I tilt my head back and forth as I chew. “You know how people always say to just be yourself? It’s a cliché for a reason; so many people try to be someone they’re not in order to impress others, and it never works in the long run. You end up changing or hiding parts of yourself, and it’s hard to get close to anyone when you’re doing that.”
“So I should just be myself,” she says slowly, as if she’s pondering my words. “Even if ‘myself’ happens to be someone who’s poor, uses the food bank because her family can barely afford food, and wears hand-me-downs that weren’t even cool when they were originally worn years ago. That’s who I should show people?”
I swallow a sigh along with another bite of cinnamon roll. Things were never quite as bad for me at home as they are for Jordy, but I understand where she’s coming from. I’ve felt the embarrassment and shame. There were times when I’m not sure how I would have survived my teen years without my three best friends.
“Those things don’t define you, Jordy. I was thinking more about letting people see how funny you are. How kind and thoughtful. How much you love music and drawing, and how good you are at taking pictures on your phone.”
Keeping her eyes on her hot chocolate, she makes a little hum of acknowledgement. Silence stretches, and I have a feeling I won’t get anything more from her, so I suggest we do some work while we enjoy our afternoon snack.
I pull out the forms for the center’s Holiday Sharing Program and get Jordy set up with my laptop. She’s a whizz with spreadsheets—a computer whizz in general, like most kids of her generation, it seems—so I try to find projects she can do to help add to her experience and pad her résumé with valuable skills employers are always on the hunt for.
The majority of requests for the program are paper copies since a lot of the families who need the center’s help don’t have easy access to computers or the internet to fill out the digital forms. That’s actually one of the projects Fergus is helping me work toward: an internet café on the premises. The local library has computers that are free to use, but since so many individuals and families are already at the center for various programs and services, it makes sense to offer on-site computers with internet and access to printers.
About twenty minutes into our task, I look up to see Jordy fidgeting in her seat. “I know this is tedious,” I say. “I can find something else for you to do if you want.”
“No, no, it’s not that.” Jordy slouches in her chair, letting out a quiet sigh and tapping the stack of papers in front of her. “It’s just weird because I…I know some of these families.”
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I met Jordy last year when I caught her stuffing small packages of food into the pockets of her oversized jeans. She’d frozen in wide-eyed fear before throwing a package of crackers at me and bolting. I found her sprawled on the floor a moment later, having tripped on the hem of her too-long jeans. I assured her she wasn’t in trouble and asked her to join me in my office, where I made her a cup of hot chocolate, opened the package of crackers she’d hurled at me, and told her there was no need to steal from the center because our job was to help people.Myjob was to help people.
She left that day with two bags full of food. She returned the next week and the week after that. Over cookies, sliced fruit, and hot chocolate in my office, Jordy told me she was sixteen and lived with her dad, a factory worker who did twelve-hour night shifts. She told me about her older siblings: a sister who was twenty-three and pregnant with her third child, and two brothers, one of whom was currently serving time for attempted armed robbery, and one who had moved to Calgary and was working on a ranch.
“He keeps telling me that once he’s made enough money, he’ll fly me out there to visit,” she’d told me around a mouthful of chocolate chip cookie. “He said maybe I could even stay with him for a bit, see what life is like outside of Bellevue, and why I should work hard to get out of this town if I can.”
Her words, paired with the mix of hope, defiance, and sadness in her eyes, had haunted me for the next week. I didn’t see her for a while after that, which made me nervous. Before she’d left the last time I saw her, she casually mentioned how her brother had told her she needed to finish high school and not be tempted to drop out in favor of a full-time job, which was what he’d done because the family had needed so much help at the time. When she finally returned to the center, I was ready with an offer of a part-time job—after school and a few hours on the weekends, plus through the summer—conditional on her staying in school. She’d thrown herself into my arms, laughing and crying as she said ‘yes’ about a dozen times. That was nine months ago.
“I can find something else for you to do if it makes you uncomfortable,” I tell her now.
