Maggie stepped into view, completely put together, per usual. Her long blonde hair lightly waved down her back, its shade imitating sunshine. Her brown cowboy boots practically went over her knees thanks to her short stature, but they paired nicely with her fringed jeans shorts and white crop top. The whole outfit was a perfect nod to her sassy attitude.
She knew the way to make me feel better always involved carbs, stupid amounts of cream cheese—plain, of course—and a heavy caffeine drip. “Gimme,” I said, leaning my entire body over the back of the couch.
The same couch that I’d become oddly acquainted with since that rainy day in April. I may be a thirty-year-old woman, but by no means did I need to have my shit together, especially after watching my entire planned-out life vanish in minutes. My trusted couch never passed a single second of judgement.
Handing over the coffee, her interrogation began. “Please know this comes from a place of love, but you’ve got to get out of this apartment. I know things are shitty right now, but staying cooped up in here isn’t going to make everything just disappear. At some point, you’re going to have to face it.”
“I haven’t been cooped up. I’ve gone out to Rolling Meadows almost weekly, and George makes for great company,” I argued.
Her doll-like eyes darted into my soul. “Galivanting out in the wild where you can be away from the rest of the world for hours at a time is no different than staying in this damn apartment,” she yapped, scooping up trash from around my apartment. “And hanging out with a seventy-year-old man doesn’t count as socializing.”
“He’s sixty-eight,” I corrected.
Maggie and I were similar in many ways, but not when it came to this topic. I’d always felt most connected to myself while lost. Lost on the dirt roads, lost in the wild, lost in my thoughts, hell, even lost within my own words. But nonetheless, lost. And over the course of the last couple of months, I’d forced myself to repeatedly get lost in hopes of finding something—anything—but I’d come up empty-handed each time, and I was starting to lose that hope.
“Oh, so this wasn’t just you trying to be nice by delivering your best friend breakfast at eight in the morning?” I questioned.
“Scar, you know what I mean. I’ve been here multiple times a week since the wedding, but at some point, I’m going to have to force you out of here and back into society. Things are starting to get questionable,” she said, holding up a takeout box from whoknew when and using her judgy eyes as she peered at me lying in my oversized sweats and Quincey Falls Community College sweatshirt.
“I know.” I sighed, pulling myself to a sitting position and taking a gulp of coffee. “Trust me, Mags, I know. It’s just that this town is too damn small and the oddly familiar feeling of humiliation is smothering. I can’t go anywhere without someone looking at me like my dog just died. Or, god forbid, someone asking me how I’m doing,” I huffed. “Like yes, Sally, I am in fact mortified that my fiancé left me at the altar in front of all of our friends and family and no, I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Wait, are you hoping to hear from Zane?”
My eyes rushed in her direction. “Maggie! That’s not the point.”
“Okay, okay. Just making sure. Because if that man ever steps foot back in this town, I can promise you he’ll wish he hadn’t.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “He doesn’t have any intention of coming back. I’d bet money that man was on the first flight to O’Hare. Or did you forget we were supposed to move to Chicago after the wedding?”
The word wedding got caught in my throat as I swiped away a rogue tear.
She scooted closer and pulled me to her chest.
“You know you could still move to Chicago and accept that job offer, right? You don’t have to stay here just because you didn’t get married, Scar.” Her voice was so genuine, so hopeful.
Mags and I had been friends ever since her family moved to our tiny Tennessee town during a seriously tough year of high school when a few decisions of mine threatened to take me out. When she showed up, it felt like the universe had finally realized that I needed a lifeline and it sent me Maggie. She and I had been inseparable since. We’d both been through our fair share of shit,but we always stood by one another no matter how messy things got.
After high school, we both took the junior college route and stayed close to home. We had different reasons for doing so, but it didn’t change the fact that neither of us ever had any plans of leaving.
That was, until I met Zane Morris. He’d come to Quincey Falls Community College on a football scholarship with every intention of transferring to a bigger school. He’d never factored in tearing his ACL and ultimately being forced to move on from football.
Once he knew football was out of the picture, he quickly pivoted and majored in finance, working absurd hours to climb up the corporate ladder and out of this town. He’d ended up landing a job at a massive company in Chicago—hisdream come true.
“I’m not sure I ever really wanted to go to Chicago, Mags,” I breathed, unknowingly releasing an invisible weight that had been lingering on my chest. “I mean, my job offer excited me at the time, but if I’m being honest, that’s the only thing that allowed me to be okay with the move in the first place,” I admitted, feeling the confidence to shed this layer of honesty as I rested my head on her shoulder. “But now, so many things have changed, and I have absolutely no desire to take the job. Which is both a relief and an obnoxiously large source of stress.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’d always loved writing. It was a part of me, a piece of who I was. The way words could be strung together to evoke emotions that would otherwise get lost in translation was damn near the closest thing we’d get to magic, of that I was sure.
But after Zane repeatedly reminded me that poems and lyrics weren’t going to pay the bills, I jumped ship and forged another path. Journalism might not have been my passion, but it was away for me to still have one foot in the writing world. So, when I landed a role at a small magazine based in Chicago, I jumped at the opportunity.
“What? Why didn’t you tell me any of this before now?” Maggie asked, unlatching me from her embrace so we were face-to-face. “And are you sure that’s the only reason you didn’t want to leave?”
“I’m sure,” I urged, knowing exactly where she was going with that comment. “I don’t know. I guess I just thought that because we were getting married and he’d gotten a job in Chicago, it meant that we were going to Chicago. It was his dream job, and if I was going to be his wife, then I wanted to support his dreams.”
“I love you for that, I really do.” She exhaled. “But you shouldn’t have had to forget about your wants and dreams just because the two of you were getting married. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” I rushed out, despite the fact that I didn’t actually think I knew that. I quickly changed the subject before I lost my poker face. “Plus, you know how much this little town means to me.” I smirked, snatching the bagel from the coffee table. “Asiago bagel, extra toasty, plain cream cheese?”
“As though I would ever dare to bring you something different.”
