by Julie Wright
“You really don’t believe, do you?” He looked surprised at the discovery.
“Anders. We’ve had this conversation dozens of times. Why are you acting like a five-year-old finding out about Santa?”
“I just thought you were being all bluster. I didn’t think you meant it.” He looked disappointed in a way I couldn’t understand. Did he really want to marry Chloe, and my lack of belief was holding him back somehow?
He sort of had a point, though. Some part of it was all bluster. I wrote fairy-tale endings because the idea of true love inspired me. Not believing in something and still wanting it to be true was exhausting, but it was the place where I lived.
I broke away from his intense gaze and stared at the creepy cherubs. I’d once used them as inspiration for a nightmare scene I’d written into one of my darker fae novels. “I want to believe in it. Is that good enough?” My eyes drifted back to sneak a peek at him.
His shoulders slumped a fraction. So not good enough.
“Anyway,” I said, “this isn’t about me. This is about you.” Even as the words fell from my mouth, it felt a little bit about me. I shook the thought off, hating it when the fantasy worlds in my head collided with my reality. I’d made a fool of myself more than once when I’d allowed myself to believe in my own daydreams. “What are you going to tell Chloe when you see her next?”
His slumped shoulders shrugged. “I do believe in marriage. I believe being together is a good thing. Healthy and great if it’s done right.”
I liked that he said that. It gave me hope for the world in general. Nice guys existed. Nice guys who loved the idea of happy endings as much as I did. “I guess the bigger question is: Do you believe in marriage with Chloe?” The back and forth of my emotions was killing me. I wanted to see Anders happy. I wanted to be a good friend. But I also wanted him to stay the way we were: best buds and neighbors in the same apartment building.
“I’m seeing her tonight. But I think . . .” He looked at me, really looked at me as we stood there by the cherubs. The look was so intense it nailed me to the spot. My feet couldn’t have moved if they’d wanted to. “Twenty-eight really isn’t that young. And my farfar is getting old. I’d like him to have a chance to meet the woman I marry before he dies.”
Farfar is what Anders called his grandpa. It means father’s father in Swedish. I remembered him telling me his grandpa was in his eighties.
When I didn’t respond, Anders nodded and straightened his slumped shoulders. “I do love her. And she loves me.” He nodded. And that settled that. Anders was engaged. Not just in theory but in fact.
I took a deep, cleansing breath. Anders was my friend. And I would be cool with whatever choice he made. Besides, he was right. He talked about being married and having kids, or kid in this new situation, all the time. Family life was something he wanted, which was weird because he was from Sweden, and from what he told me about it, Swedes didn’t care much one way or the other about actual marriage, but Anders was different that way. He talked a lot about his farfar and how much his family meant to him. Which made sense. His parents were still together. His one set of grandparents had been together until they died, and his other set had also been together until his grandmother died and left his farfar alone. His sister, who lived in Canada, was happily settled with a dentist. Anders came from solid family stock.
We discussed variables of his newfound engagement after that. Things like where they would live after getting married, possible dates for the event, who his best man would be.
I tried to be the supportive friend I knew he needed, but I couldn’t help the traces of sadness leaking into my heart. He would definitely have to move. His studio apartment was barely big enough for him let alone him with a plus one. He seemed relieved to have come to a decision, relieved to have moved past deciding and into planning.
I am glad for him. But as I thought that, the cherubs seemed to laugh at me. I glared at the evil little stone monsters and lifted my chin, determined to be as happy for my friend as I kept telling myself I was.
Back at my apartment, Anders leaned into the doorframe as we parted ways. “Thanks for coming out to talk with me, Lettie. I always have better clarity when you’re around.”
“We’re friends, Anders. Of course I’m available to talk when you need it. That’s what friends are for.”
He smiled. I smiled.
He shoved off from the doorframe. “Well, I’d better go. You’ve got work to do.”
He wasn’t wrong there, but I didn’t really want him to leave. I opened my mouth to try to come up with a reason for him to stay, but the words clogged in my throat, and I swallowed them back down in much the same way Anders had swallowed down his words earlier.
Instead of replacing what I had wanted to say with something not true, I simply smiled and nodded and watched him walk away down the hall to the stairwell.
I stood there even after the stairwell door clicked closed before I shook myself out of the stupor and closed my own apartment door. Once alone, I shed my coat and paced my apartment for a few minutes to pull myself back into writer mode and to shake off the uneasiness that came with thinking of a future with Anders not being right downstairs anytime I wanted him.
I thought of his relief in making a decision, of how his shoulders stopped slumping as if a burden had been lifted from them once he had decided what the next chapter in his life would be.
As I settled back on the couch with my laptop over my crossed legs, I thought about Anders moving forward and all the ways it affected me. The sad leaked in some more, but I squared my shoulders and did my own moving forward by putting my fingers back on the keys and filling the pages of my new book. This would be the chapter about making decisions and moving forward.
I finished the book a week later, actually writing the words the end just because it felt good to write them. Of course, I deleted them a few minutes later so my submission didn’t make me look like an amateur—but not until after I took a screenshot of the words and updated my social media account with a celebration gif. I didn’t include any of the actual words of the book in the screenshot except those words: “the end.” I was not a read-the-last-page-before-the-first kind of girl, and no one else got to be while they were on my watch.
Several of the people I traded critiques with online left encouraging comments and virtual high fives.
I expected Anders to come up to my apartment and celebrate the completion with me when I texted him to tell him I was done, but he only texted back a jumping smiley-face emoji and a congratulations. He didn’t show up. In fact, he hadn’t been physically back in my apartment since that moment he’d agreed to let Chloe be right when she’d decided they were getting married.
I tried not to take it personally. Of course he’d be busy. Of course he’d be spending his time with her and not with his neurotic neighbor.
Only I did take it personally. I’d known I would lose him as a best friend once they were married, but I hadn’t thought it would happen now, during the engagement part. Wasn’t there supposed to be some adjustment period?
I almost sent the book to a few of my critique partners, the regulars who, with grabby hands, wanted everything I wrote. But this book was different and deserved to be unveiled all at once to everyone in a way that could be celebrated. Instead I ran a spell-check and let the book sit on my computer for two days. Then I went back over it again, reading each word out loud. After that, without even having to look up her address because I practically had the woman on speed dial as far as my email addresses were concerned, I sent the book to Jennifer Apsley—the agent of my dreams—crossed my fingers, and celebrated alone with more ice cream.
This time, I actually had some in the freezer because I’d decided to own the fact that fairy godmothers don’t exist. In the real world, you had to learn how to make your own magic. And not only did I have ice cream, I had the
raspberry fudge that felt fitting as a metaphor for the moment: smooth and sweet. A tingling sensation worked its way up my spine. The sensation felt like a premonition that my days of eating rocky road as a life metaphor were over.
With the book finished, there was nothing left for me to do except return to my day job at Frankly Eyewear. The unseasonably warmer weather turned to rain and misery. Even the skies mourned my return to the day job. Nicole Hall, my boss, was in my glass cubicle before I could get my drenched raincoat off my shoulders. Since she insisted on being in my personal space so early, I didn’t feel too bad when shaking out my coat ended with her being splashed. Sometimes karma needed coaxing.
“Have a nice vacation?” The question would have been benign from anyone else. It might have even been friendly coming from a different mouth. But from Nicole, sarcasm and contempt dribbled out between the words.
“I did. Thanks.” I scooted around her to hang my raincoat up on the human-sized fountain pen that decorated my cubicle. The five-foot pen had been a gift from my dad when I graduated college with an English degree and a confidence that I would be a writer. Dad wasn’t around much, but he showed his solidarity where he could. He’d told me if writing didn’t work out for me, I could use it as a jousting stick.
I considered that option as Nicole prepared to rant at me. She waited several moments longer than I’d expected before she finally exhaled her first dig.
“To take all of that time off at once was incredibly irresponsible,” she said.
“I had the PTO to cover it.”
“PTO isn’t meant to be stored up and then taken all at once.”
I imagined her, with her fake-baked leather skin and her dark shaggy hair, as a dragon blowing smoke and flame as she ticked off on her fingers all the reasons why my taking off so much time at once was an inconvenience to the entire office.
I settled into my chair and pressed the computer power button on, since it would likely take the entire time that Nicole lectured me for the computer to warm up to the idea of working. My computer was a derelict throwback from the first of the century. When I once denounced the machine as a contemporary of the dinosaurs, Nicole told me that as a writer, my work didn’t require very much memory or speed. I complained that I still had to do research and be on the internet, which required speed, but she turned a deaf ear to my complaints, saying they had to save the nicer machines for the designers and web developers.
“The company allows PTO to accumulate over two years before they force you to take it,” I said calmly. I stayed calm because she hated it when people didn’t get worked up about things the way she did. “This means that company policy is fine with it being accumulated over that time and then taken whenever the employee needs it. It’s in the employee handbook.”
“You left everyone in a lurch!” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “It was selfish!” I pretty much tuned her out after she insisted on hashing through the reasons I had done everyone a huge disservice a second time. Instead, I imagined myself holding a shield with magical properties that blocked out the smoke and fire to protect innocent villagers, or, in this case, my coworkers, who were all watching through the glass dividers.
I might have been an eccentric, quasi-shut-in writer, but it didn’t mean I didn’t like my coworkers. They were actually pretty cool people for the most part. And if my absence really had left them all in a lurch, then I genuinely felt badly.
Except, based on the looks of pity they were casting my way, I didn’t believe they’d been left in a lurch. They would have looked mad at me if they were upset. Besides, my files were accessible on the server, and there was enough generic content in those files that anyone could piece together pretty much any kind of content they needed without too much lurchiness taking place.
Regardless of my belief that Nicole was exaggerating the peril my absence had caused, her displeasure meant that I would hit the ground running. As she explained her vexation, she also explained the mountain of work ahead of me. While I was away, the company had decided to do a refresh on the website, so Nicole’s declaration of being left in a lurch wasn’t entirely false, just mostly false, since the only one really inconvenienced had been her. When I explained that she could have plugged in the content in my files from the server, she acted as if she had never seen those files before. I’d shown her the files at least once a month since I’d started working with the company four years prior.
Instead of telling her that maybe she would have better luck finding things if she got her hair out of her eyes via the means of a haircut and a decent ponytail holder, I kept quiet, waited for her to finish ranting. Once she left, I got to work. The next week and a half would have to be spent zealously overworking to compensate for my time gone. I would write advertising copy and articles for Frankly Eyewear’s online magazine with fervor and passion even if that passion came through gritted teeth. It honestly killed my soul to write for someone else after writing for myself for three weeks. But, writing for myself had yet to pay any bills. Writing for someone else paid for all of them. This was why showing up to work and playing nice was essential.
A refreshed website meant refreshed content, which was grueling work. Creating engaging content that was also informational, in order to induce the masses to buy eyewear they probably didn’t need because the eyewear they purchased at their doctors’ offices would do just fine, was a lot more difficult than one might think. Ali and Nate stopped in my office when it was apparent that the dragon had vacated and showed no signs of returning.
“I tried to warn you that she was on the warpath.” Ali sat on the edge of my desk. Ali was the company editor, which made her my editor. Nate remained standing and did double duty as lookout in case Nicole ambushed us. “But all my calls went straight to voice mail.”
I cringed. “Yeah . . . I broke my phone and was out of the loop for a while.”
“What did you do during your time off?” she asked.
Nate grinned. “Please tell us it was something amazing that involved a lounge chair on a beach and sunlight and someone massaging your hands from all the typing you do.” Nate was the company photographer.
I laughed. “Almost. Trade the lounge chair for a couch, the beach for my living room, the sunlight for my really awesome moon lamp, and the massage for a workout—because I was typing—and you’ve got it right.”
They both looked at me like I’d grown an extra eyeball in the middle of my forehead.
“That sounds like we weren’t right at all,” Nate said.
“Are you telling me you spent your vacation writing?” Ali asked.
“I did.”
Neither of them much liked that confession. They were horrified to know that I’d pretty much never left my apartment. They’d assumed that three weeks off meant I was backpacking Europe or exploring tombs in Egypt or ancient ruins in Mexico. To take that kind of time off for sitting at home and typing all day came across as pure blasphemy to them.
Not long after Nate and Ali left my cubicle, the entire company knew what I’d done during my break.
None of them could understand why I would stay in my living room and do what I did while in the office.
It became evident that the rumor had made it to Nicole when she showed up at my cubicle. Only this time, instead of looking cross, her bony arms were across her chest and her hair hung in her face, almost covering the sneer on her messy, lipsticked lips. “You stayed home to write?” she asked.
When I didn’t respond, she said, “Don’t tell me. Another book. Another, what? Three hundred? Four hundred pages that will never be read by anyone—not even your mother, since we all know how well you two get along.”
I couldn’t be mad at her for the mom-jab. It’s not like that part wasn’t true. But the rest . . . Didn’t she have apples to poison or cauldrons to clean?
“I know you think I’m being mean to you, but I�
�m just trying to keep you from being disappointed. You’ll never earn a living writing books. You could have stayed at work, and we’d have paid you to write.”
“Technically, Nicole, I did earn money writing this book. You did pay me to do it. Since I did it while out on my paid time off, I made just as much writing for myself as I would have made writing for you during these last few weeks. The only difference was my level of enjoyment. You’re a smart woman. You figure out which I enjoy and which I don’t.”
She left, growling and grumbling about my attitude and human resources.
That altercation and the several others that followed left me excited when the weekend rolled back around, allowing me to go home and live my own life without Nicole using my dreams and goals for target practice, and my coworkers casting curious glances and shakes of heads in my direction. It didn’t hurt that we had a company-wide early-out Friday. I was out of the office by noon.
The excitement of my weekend off died immediately upon opening my front door and finding that the lights were on. They weren’t on because I’d been mindless regarding energy preservation and electricity bills, but because someone was in my apartment.
Chapter Four
“If you have struggles, you can’t blame the Evil Queen. At some point, you have to make your own choices and stand by them.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Know Yourself” Chapter)
The noises of that someone rattling around deep inside my apartment made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. How many times had Anders warned me to lock my door because Steve down the hall acted creepy?
The briefest joy tumbled in my stomach at the thought that maybe Anders had finally come to visit. But he hadn’t been by in weeks. The chance of him being inside now, especially when I wasn’t there, was absolutely zero. Besides, the noise was coming from my bedroom, not my kitchen. If Anders had decided to ascend the stairs for a visit, he would’ve headed to the kitchen to sneak into the stash of chips and my homemade salsa.