Sweet Girl

by Rachel Hollis

  I watch some tension come out of his shoulders. Maybe he was expecting something more traumatic, but he doesn’t understand how traumatic this is for me. No one does.

  “You don’t understand.” I suddenly feel the need for at least one other person to understand, even if it is a near stranger.

  I look up into his eyes. How had I never noticed that they are the exact color of black-forest-cake batter?

  I shake my head to get rid of the thought. Rather than stare into something that prompts ridiculous analogies like that, I look down at his forearm colored in pattern and ink. I follow the lines of his tattoos in order to avoid looking at the questions in his eyes. The story comes out of my mouth without my volition. It just pours out into the quiet hallway in a near whisper.

  I tell him about baking with my mom as a child and how it has always been my dream to do it professionally. I tell him about Avis Phillips and how much I admire her. How I knew she worked at the hotel and how I got a job tending bar there because even though I didn’t have the courage to try for my dream, I wanted to watch others do it. I tell him about getting the job at Dolci and convincing Joey to let me keep it. I even tell him about how excited I was to buy my shoes, which makes me cry all over again. And then, because I have no pride left, I tell him about the shorthand and how I’ve been summarily canned without ever really getting the chance to prove myself.

  When I finish I feel totally deflated. I put my forehead back down on my knees. Maybe I’ll never get up from this spot. They’ll find me here years from now, a fossilized memorial to epic failure.

  “OK, look.” Taylor’s voice is overly loud in the nearly empty space. “Between my mama, my gran, and my little sister, Dee Dee, I grew up surrounded by women. So I know that you’re probably not looking for a fix here. Experience tells me you’re not even looking for a pep talk; you’re just looking for someone to listen.”

  For most women he’d be dead on, but I’m not most women. I don’t even really want him to listen. I can’t believe I actually told him all that; it just came out.

  “But even though you’re not looking for it,” he carries on, “I’m going to give you both.”

  “Both?” I ask stupidly.

  “Advice and a pep talk,” he answers.

  “Great,” I grumble.

  My aggravation puts me back on steadier ground.

  “Oh, hush,” Taylor says, sounding as southern as Landon.

  When I only raise my eyebrows, he continues.

  “So you don’t actually know what you’re doing. Who cares? That’s the same as half the people in this town. If this is your dream job, then you have to try. You can’t give up without a fight.”

  My eyes fly to his in shock.

  “I did try! They don’t want me!”

  He doesn’t even flinch at my tone, just shakes his head slowly in response.

  “They didn’t say they didn’t want you. They said you weren’t qualified.”

  “I’m not qualified,” I say viciously, because it is true and I hate to admit it.

  “Yeah, but can you do the job?”

  “What?” I ask, confounded. What did that have to do with anything if I didn’t have the job anymore?

  Taylor smiles and crosses his arms.

  “When I was in the fourth grade, there was this kid named Monty Kirchner.” He looks over at me. “You following me here, Jennings?”

  I cross my own arms.

  “I have no idea,” I answer honestly.

  “I’m an Okie,” he tells me conspiratorially. “We tend to expound on a point, and we love to share childhood stories like they’re proverbs. Just go with it, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “So Monty—”

  “Kirchner,” I supply.

  “The very same,” Taylor agrees. “He decided he hated me. I don’t know why or what I did to piss him off, but he decided he was going to beat the crap out of me. I knew this because he screamed it one day at recess. Just like that. No conversation, no chat, just those two facts screamed across the sandbox. He hated me and he was going to beat the crap out of me. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, except that I was maybe sixty pounds soaking wet, and Monty was twice my size. I know it’s hard to believe that I wasn’t always this glowing specimen you see before you.”

  He winks and I roll my eyes, but he is right. He is well over six feet tall and has a full sleeve of tattoos on each arm. Even though his arms aren’t bulky, they are solid muscle, and so is the rest of him. It’s hard to imagine him as a scrawny kid.

  “So Monty decided he was going to murder me, only he didn’t do it that day. It was so much worse, because he put the fear of God into me and then didn’t act on it. Every day he’d find me in the hallway or on the playground and tell me how he was going to beat the crap out of me, and every day I went home sick to my stomach. Finally, one night at dinner my mama noticed I was off my feed and asked me what was wrong. I was so keyed up that I started crying like a baby. I told her the whole story. Even though I knew she’d tell me that violence isn’t the answer and we’re supposed to love our neighbor, I was sort of hoping there was a chance she’d call the principal or let me be homeschooled or something.”

  He smiles at the memory and shakes his head.

  “But you know what she did, Jennings?” He looks over at me. “She got down on her knees and looked me right in the eye and asked, ‘Bennett, can you take him?’ I was so shocked I just stared at her, and so she asked again, ‘Do you think you can take him?’ The thing is, I didn’t think I could take him, but I could see in her eyes that she did. She didn’t want me to get pushed around or bullied, and she wasn’t about to let me run away. So I nodded and told her that yes ma’am, I could take him. She smiled, like she expected this all along, and then she said, ‘Bennett Taylor, you aren’t allowed to start a fight, but if you get in one, I expect you to finish it.’ You get it, Jennings? This is your fight to finish. I didn’t ask if they wanted you there or if you were qualified. I asked if you could do it. Can you?”

  I think about the last few days, the last few years, and the decades before that. I look at the hallway around us and then down at the chef coat I’m still wearing and the tangerine-colored rubber shoes on my feet.

  “I can,” I say, looking over at him, “but how do I convince them of that?”

  It’s the first time I’ve asked anyone for advice in as long as I can remember. I can’t believe that he is who I am turning to, but he is here and I have no one else to ask.

  Taylor doesn’t say anything but jumps to his feet like motion might propel us to the right answer. He reaches a hand down to me, and I let him pull me up.

  “They need someone who can recreate the recipes, and I don’t understand them. It’s like they’re written in Greek!” I tell him helplessly.

  He purses his lips in amusement. “Then I guess you’d better figure out how to speak their language.”

  I nod in response because my mind is spinning too fast to come up with words. He is right; Joey didn’t fire me because she didn’t want me there. Hell, she is desperate, which means she’d probably take a well-trained dog right now if it meant she had a replacement. She fired me because she believes understanding the shorthand is both necessary and impossible to learn quickly. I’ll have to prove her wrong on that second part, and I need to do it in a hurry. She needs someone to do her job, and she has even less time now than she did when I met her.

  I am so energized that I walk halfway down the hall before I realize what I’m doing. I pause midstep and turn back around. Taylor stands at the other end with both his hands shoved down deep in his pockets. He smiles like a proud parent, which is kind of mortifying, really.

  “Did you finish it?” I ask him.

  “What’s that?”

  “The fight, with Monty—did you finish it?” I clarify.

  “Oh, hell no.” He chuckles. “He beat the snot out of me before I could even get my fists up. But I went down swinging, Jenni
ngs. You get that?”

  I nod in response. I totally get that.

  “So you promise to go back to being a jackass the next time I see you, right?” I ask him.

  He laughs once. “Absolutely.”

  “OK then.” I fiddle with my bracelets nervously and then take a deep breath. I’m not a child; I shouldn’t be nervous. “Thank you,” I tell him sincerely. “Seriously, thank you so much.”

  Taylor grins and a single dimple catches my attention. He rubs his jaw self-consciously. It is the first time I’ve seen him look embarrassed.

  “You’re welcome,” he says. “I’ll see you around, Jennings.”

  I pull my backpack onto my shoulders as a plan already begins to form in my mind. I am heading down the hallway when Taylor’s laugh catches up with me.

  “Out of curiosity,” he calls, “where are you headed now?”

  “To learn Greek,” I call back.

  Chapter Seven

  “Quiz me!” I demand as I slam the piece of paper down on the table in front of Joey triumphantly.

  She looks at me with equal parts pity and annoyance, which might very well be the worst combination of expressions you can have aimed in your direction.

  The kitchen staff members sit silently around the lunch table, looking back and forth between the two of us. I found them all here enjoying the cool air and the coffee in the break room. The audience is unavoidable.

  It took me the last four hours hunched over my laptop in the hotel lobby, but I now know every possible letter, number, and code word she could throw at me. I am utterly confident in this.

  “This really isn’t necessary—”

  “My dream.” There, I say it. I lay it out there in front of all seven members of this crew. It’s mortifying, but whatever. “My dream is necessary. You said I couldn’t work here without knowing shorthand, and I know it now, so quiz me!”

  She starts rubbing her back, a sure sign of agitation. Harris throws me a reprimanding glance. He doesn’t want me upsetting his very pregnant wife. I get that, but I’m not going down without a fight.

  “Look, Max—”

  “10X?” an old voice barks from behind me.

  Joey drops her face into her palm with a groan. I spin around to see Avis standing in the doorway. She holds her box of cigarettes in one hand and flicks a lighter idly in the other. I don’t need to be prompted again.

  “Powdered sugar,” I answer.

  “What’s the ten stand for?” She narrows her eyes.

  “It’s the coarseness of the grind,” I tell her. “How fine the sugar is, I mean.”

  Avis lets out a slightly maniacal laugh.

  “Uh-oh, the Stork’s been studying up,” she announces to the room.

  I turn back to look at the much aggrieved sous-chef.

  “Quiz me,” I demand again.

  Joey rolls her eyes like she is dealing with a toddler.

  “Do I need to quiz you?” she asks sarcastically.

  “No,” I say emphatically. “I know it all.”

  She mutters something in Spanish, and beside her Harris smothers laughter with his giant hand.

  “Fine.” She sighs. “Then go make the cupcakes and don’t come to me again until they’re perfect.”

  “I won’t,” I tell her.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  It takes me a moment to understand what she means, but I finally catch up.

  “Yes, Chef.”

  As I walk out of the room past a table full of grinning bakers and the old woman I idolize even though she is kind of crazy, I don’t even try to hide my smile. I might go down, but at least I’ll go down swinging.

  Four hours and five dozen cupcakes later, I leave the kitchen.

  I am exhausted after all the emotional drama of the day but also running on the high of having managed to get my job back. I would love to follow the rest of the crew back to employee parking and head straight home to bed, but I am scheduled to work the eight-to-two shift at Gander. I try not to think about how tired my arms already are from hauling big trays around or how much more tired they will be after hours of making drinks. I focus instead on the new vocabulary I learned today and hurry off in the opposite direction, straight to the women’s employee locker room.

  My gym bag is close to bursting at the seams, but it holds everything I need for both my shifts. I have just enough time to wash my face and reapply some makeup, though the cheap florescent lighting means that the results are less than stellar. A shower isn’t an option, but I guess that’s why God invented Victoria’s Secret body spray. Once I have mostly replaced the smell of the kitchen with a hearty dousing of Love Spell, I slip into the skinny jeans, black boots, tight white button-down, and suspenders that make up my uniform. Another glance in the mirror reveals that my hair is unattractively flattened to my head in random places because of wearing a bandana all day. The bandana is totally Karate Kid, but way better than a hairnet. I run my hands through my hair a few times to try to fix it, but it is the kind of mess that no amount of product is going to remedy. I normally don’t care all that much about my hair when I’m at work, but it’s pretty terrible-looking. When I say flattened I don’t mean Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby; I mean Donnie Wahlberg in The Sixth Sense.

  Not cute.

  I finally give up, pull an old vintage scarf out of the bottom of my bag, and tie it around my head where the bandana had been. It looks a little more rockabilly than I would have liked, but it is the best I can do.

  I use what remaining energy I have to run down the back hallway while scarfing down some almonds and chugging a bottle of water, and I make it behind the bar with no time to spare. I have a small heart attack when I realize Landon is sitting at the counter waiting for me. I have no idea how long she’s been there.

  “Good grief, girl, where have you been?” she calls to me as soon as I am close enough to hear it. “I’ve been looking forward to this drink all day, and I’ve been sitting here for half an hour already waiting for you.”

  Maybe if I focus on the second part of the sentence, she’ll ignore the first.

  “You could have asked someone else for a drink,” I say, grabbing a lowball glass for her. “Jack rocks isn’t hard to accomplish; any one of the other geniuses here could have figured it out for you.”

  “Yes, but it’s so much more fun to be served by you,” she says, slipping her phone into her black Cole Haan.

  I can’t help but smile, remembering the intervention Miko and I staged to get her to move on from the pink-and-gold monstrosity of a purse she came to LA with. Our argument that no high-end client would take her seriously was finally enough to persuade her to buy a classier handbag.

  I place her drink on the cocktail napkin in front of her, then casually lean my elbows on the bar. It is a Monday night and relatively slow, so it is easy enough to stop to chat. And truthfully, I am exhausted and not really interested in running from one end of the bar to the other. Landon takes a little sip, then reaches back to fluff up her hair. God forbid it should lose any volume in the eight minutes since the last time she fluffed it.

  “So why weren’t you around today?” She raises her eyebrows dramatically. “Don’t tell me you have a secret boyfriend who took you on a day-long date.”

  I snort in response.

  “No secret boyfriend to speak of. How about you?”

  As soon as I ask it, I regret my question. I want to change the subject, but I don’t really want to initiate a heart-to-heart about her and Brody’s relationship. I love both of them, and I worry about how close they are getting. If—or really when—they break up, it is going to seriously screw us all, so it is probably better if I don’t get too invested in their relationship now.

  Landon gasps, her typical response to any given situation. “Are you actually interested in how things are going with us?” she asks excitedly.

  “Actually, I—”

  An older businessman sits down a few chairs away from us, and I ha
ve to take care of his request for wine before I can finish my sentence. When I come back to Landon, I pick up where I left off.

  “Actually, I can think of several things I’d rather do than hear about you and my brother,” I tell her. “Off the top of my head, I’d say, oh, watching an obscure Polish film without the use of subtitles, or getting a bikini wax from a one-armed clown, or—”

  Landon screeches with laughter. “A one-armed clown?”

  The businessman scowls at us over his glass of cabernet.

  “Well,” I tell her, “I was trying to think of the worst thing I could. Bikini waxes and sad-faced clowns are at the top of my list.”

  “Just below hearing about Brody and me?”

  “Exactly,” I say, but now I’ve opened some kind of door, and it’s only polite to ask, “But if you must, how are things with him?”

  Landon smiles and takes another drink. “Oh, he’s fine. Granted, it’s harder to apply the wax now with only the one arm, but—”

  I laugh loud enough to startle the businessman again. He picks up his glass and moves to a seat outside of my section. I grin over at Landon.

  “You’re becoming quite the smart-ass, Landon Brinkley,” I tell her happily.

  She shoots me a cheeky grin. “Yes, well, I’m learning from the best, aren’t I?”

  “Pay attention or I’ll let you scorch the caramel at least twenty times before I show you how to make it properly,” Joey tells me the next day.

  It’s not like I’d ever ignore her on purpose, but Avis is across the room making a profiterole tower with a spun-sugar overlay. Watching her stretch out the hot sugar strands like spun gold is kind of mesmerizing, and since I’ve never seen anyone do it before, I keep getting distracted. Joey’s threat works perfectly, though, because (a) I don’t doubt that she’d let me burn twenty cups of sugar if she thought it might teach me a lesson, and (b) I’ve never made caramel before and I am dying to learn how to do it properly. Joey reaches for a small saucepot, but I grab it before she has to struggle on tiptoes with a belly that is constantly getting in her way.

  She pulls out sugar and water and then surprises me by getting a lemon.