My heart sinks like a week-old jack-o-lantern. I’d almost forgotten about the new chapter I sent her before I left. I scan the rest of the email, my eyes catching on words like “derivative” and “uninspired.” The moral of the story? The two-hundred page behemoth I’ve been working on for the last two years isstilltotal garbage.
Just. Like. Me.
I keep reading in a half daze, my chest constricting as if by python. Not only am I suspended until May, but even if Idoget my job back, I might have to scrap pretty much everything I’ve been working on for the last year. More long nights. More endless hours of research under the library’s fluorescent lights. More precious moments of my life spent building something I haven’t been excited about inyears.
A pitiful, strangled yelp escapes my throat as I start to cry. Not cute crying, but full-on sobs: the kind that rack your body so hard your abs hurt when you’re done. But the tears that spill over my cheekbones aren’t tears of grief or even self-pity. They’re tears of hopelessness. Tears of overwhelming frustration. Of realizing I’ve wasted the last three years of my life on a dream so old I’m not even sure where it came from. I’m slowly losing everything I’ve worked so hard for. Everything I promised my dad I would do.
Anger swells in my body, and before I have time to think it through, I lift my phone and hurl it over the cliff edge with as much force as humanly possible. I watch in horror and fascination as it catches a shrub about ten feet down, depriving me of the satisfying crunch of ruptured technology. I stare at it. I feel better for a grand total of ten seconds before I’m hit with the realization that A. Its replacement costs a thousand dollars I don’t have and B. I’m now responsible for releasing a toxic phone battery into an ecologically flawless environment.
Shit.
I drop a foot off the cliff’s edge, lowering myself with my hands to see if I can reach the ledge below. The good news is I’m tall enough to reach it. The bad news is it’s not stone, but dirt. As soon as I set my weight on it, the ledge crumbles beneath my foot, catapulting me into thebush below. I scramble at the rock face to try and grab for something, but all that accomplishes is scraping my palm before I drop into the foliage. It almost breaks my fall, but I feel something crunch below me as I hit. I reach under my butt to make sure it isn’t my tailbone.
It’s not. Unfortunately, itisthe shattered and now completely non-functional corpse of my phone.
A huge tear I didn’t realize I’d shed splats onto my phone’s surface, obscuring the cracks spidering along its surface. Another hits me in the shoulder.Rain.I have just enough time to tilt my head back to see the newly formed clouds before water begins pouring from the sky without a hint of subtlety. You’ve got to be kidding me. Worse, I don’t see any way to climb back to the top of the cliff, especially now that the stone is slicked with rain.
I’m going to die here. RIP Stella Olsen. Jobless, chronically single, and vaguely reminiscent of a drowned rat.
Could this day get any worse?
“Stella!”
Apparently the answer isyes.
I don’t need to see him to know who the voice is coming from, but Caleb pops his stupidly cute face over the ledge just to make sure. If my track record for self-control wasn’t already iffy, I’d punch the rock.
“Are you alright?” he calls down, and I brace myself for whatever lecture on safety or stupidity he’s about to hit me with.
“Peachy,” I growl.
“Just showing off, then?”
He swings his leg over the ledge, lowering himself down towards me. What is hedoinghere?
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” he calls down, clearly exasperated.
“I’mfine,” I practically shout. “Just let me do this.”
I raise myself up from the ground, carefully unsticking myself from the bush, and feel a sharp pain in my shin. A two-inch stretch of skin looks like it’s been scraped off by a cheese grater. It isn’t deep, but it’s a bleeder. I watch, stone still as the deluge of rain mixes with the blood and sends it spidering down my leg in pink rivulets that stop at the top of my waterlogged shoe.
I survey the final five feet between my face and Caleb’s. There’s a slight slope, and even with the wet rock, I’m still confident I can scramble my way back up to the top somehow. That is, until I make the fatal mistake of looking down.
You’d think that in moments like these, the human body would go into autopilot, freezing itself in place to avoid making any wrong moves. Mine, apparently, just loses its shit. I sway forward towards the cliff edge, dizzy from the drop below me. Only this time, it’s not the ocean I’m looking down at. It’s forty plus feet of jagged, unforgiving rock.
“Oh my god,” I gasp. I drop down to my knees, gripping the offending bush like a life preserver.
“Stella, don’t move. I’m coming down!”
This time, I don’t protest. It’s not that I want his help, but that I’m too afraid if I open my mouth, everything I didn’t eat for breakfast will come pouring out and I’ll not only be wrapped in the fetal position, but surrounded by my own vomit. I hear Caleb’s heavy boots drop down beside me and hope to God this cliff is strong enough for two.
“Are you okay?” he asks as he squats down beside me. I’m definitelynotalright. But something about Caleb asking makes it worse. This man needs a medal for inopportune timing.
“What are you even doing here, Caleb? Aren’t you supposed to be chaperoning a pool party?”
“Tracy was worried about you being out here alone with the rain. Things can get dicey pretty quickly out here.”
