Chapter Four Maddie
Chapter Four
Maddie
For the first few nights, I camped out in the Mount Astra Methodist Medical Center parking lot and I found that sleeping in the back seat was more comfortable.
* But then I had a little bit of a scare when a man pounded his fists on my car and shouted about loose women being damned.
I could barely scramble into the front seat before he was yanking on my (thankfully, locked) door handles.
After that, I tore down my window covers and spent the rest of the night sipping coffee at Waffle House. *
But last night, I discovered the glory of rest stops. You’d think being surrounded by eighteen-wheelers would be intimidating, but there seemed to be some mutual understanding that everyone had the common goal of an uneventful night’s sleep.
I wake up with a slightly stiff neck, but it’s worth sleeping in the reclined driver’s seat after the incident in the hospital parking lot.
I barely even miss my mattress—and I definitely don’t miss the man I shared it with, who slept with a Tempur-Pedic body pillow between us because he was a fussier sleeper than a person who was nine months’ pregnant with twins.
As someone who’s been in school for the last seven years, it took little to no time to source everything I might need to fill in the gaps left by living in my car.
The campus gym opens at six and the showers are pretty decent when you get to them first thing in the morning before they become a pit of loose hair.
And there’s not really anything suspicious about an adjunct putting in a quick morning workout before running to the library to take advantage of the free coffee bar courtesy of an absolutely angelic librarian.
Speaking of, I hold the door open for Junie as she scurries into the library today with her arms full of flavored creamers. “Thank you,” she says as she blows a loose curl out of her face. “I got a new creamer for us to try.”
Junie is the curvy, adult form of the before version of Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries.
Poofy, untamed hair. Plaid skirts that are a few inches too long.
Sweaters that swallow her and loafers that she definitely purchased after reading hundreds of reviews written by swaths of elderly shoppers. In one word, her look is tragic.
I didn’t want to like her, and trust me, I tried not to.
The moment we met, I could tell that she was the type of person who lived to accommodate.
But she wormed her way into my good graces with her array of creamers and insider tips about Astra University.
(Example Number One: The campus bookstore sells expired fruit parfaits and no one is willing to stand up to the dictator of a store manager to have it addressed.
Example Number Two: A Phi Gam named Dustin was running an underground cologne ring from the back of a local dry cleaner.
I took the liberty of visiting the dry cleaner while the owner was working, tipped him off about the bottles of smuggled Acqua Di Giò and Tom Ford, and he was so grateful that, after firing Dustin, he gave me free dry cleaning for the semester.)
The truth is Junie is sweet. Genuinely sweet. No ulterior motives or passive aggression. Just sweet. And maybe I picked up on her people-pleasing vibes and found them annoying because . . . blah, blah, self-reflection.
I follow Junie to the coffee bar, where I help her organize the new creamer additions.
“I know it’s early, but they already had the fall creamers out, so I just went for it. Seasons be damned.”
“Daredevil,” I tell her with a playful nudge.
She rolls her eyes.
“It’s really nice of the university to provide complimentary coffee.”
“Well . . .” She clears her throat and adjusts her headband. “It’s not provided by the university in the traditional sense. It’s more that the university provides me with a salary and I earmark a portion of the salary to stock the coffee bar.”
I pause mid-whiff of fresh coffee. “Junie, these punk-ass kids must be bleeding you dry. You walked in with fifty dollars’ worth of creamer this morning, at least.”
She shrugs. “I want this place to feel cozy. Last semester, the library was a ghost town until finals. If I don’t have enough traffic, I risk a budget cut. So complimentary coffee it is. I’m thinking of doing doughnuts on Fridays, though—”
I smack her hand before it can drift to her chin in thoughtful contemplation. “No,” I tell her. “Bad librarian.”
She lets me loiter at the reference desk for the next thirty minutes while she tells me all about my favorite kind of gossip: drama between people who I will never have to deal with myself but am vaguely aware of.
The latest is about an old high school friend of hers and a recent run-in with her former bully.
The first guy sounds like a tool and the second sounds like a dick.
Before I leave, I berate her once more about blowing her own money and plant the seed that she should include the coffee in her future budget, especially if it drives traffic into the library.
She lets out a long hmmmm as we both watch a first-year boy fill two cups full of nothing but mocha creamer before pocketing a handful of wooden stirrers.
“Were we all that feral during undergrad?” she asks.
I laugh, but fail to mention that I am currently as much of a mooch as that kid.
“Don’t forget to grab the campus paper on your way out,” she says. “There’s a coupon in the back for a free appetizer at Cinzetti’s.” She winks. “No purchase required.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re too pure for this world?”
“No, but I do have to wear medicated sunscreen.”
I’m not sure if the nearly translucent hue of her skin is constitutional or earned by spending every waking moment in this cavernous, neo-Gothic library, but either way, I believe her.
I say goodbye, scoop up the coupon, and drop it into my leather tote bag before heading over to Salih for my first section of the day.
When I applied for the job at Astra, I was hot-spotting off my phone in a Costco parking lot eighteen hours after Gentry Cooper Wade the Third broke up with me.
Well, technically his family’s longtime political adviser initiated the conversation.
I had graduated a month and a half prior and was still studying for the California state bar exam when Penelope Pike sent me a calendar invite.
She wanted to meet at our townhouse, which I assumed would involve talking strategy for Gentry’s first run at the California State Assembly that we were all gearing up for this year.
Back in January, Penelope had sat me down for a conversation with an action plan after some polling she had run (unbeknownst to me).
Apparently, I was lacking in image and likability.
Men felt like I appeared to be unhealthy, which very clearly translated to fat and unfuckable.
Both women and men found me to be stiff, overly rehearsed, and lacking warmth.
Which translated to a bitch. No one mentioned the endless hours I’d spent doing philanthropic work in the midst of full-time law school and occasional work-study programs. And they definitely didn’t mention how I’d untangled the financial mess that was the domestic violence arm of the Wade Foundation and salvaged the programs planned for that year after Gentry’s seedy great-uncle had gone on a cocaine bender with cash he had pulled from the foundation accounts.
After graduation, my polling results plummeted even more.
It could have been any number of things.
There was the charity auction I was required to attend with Gentry’s mom during the week of finals where I was asked by a reporter if I felt that the National Association of Pet Sitters was a worthy cause and I gave a clipped response about the importance of subsidized childcare.
Or the time I wore a two-piece swimsuit to a family weekend at the lake and posted a picture online.
Gentry’s fitness-podcaster cousin reposted the group photo only for his loyal listeners to fill my comments with concern-trolling about my weight and claims that Gentry was only dating me because I had dirt on him.
I love being a woman on the internet. Truly.
So I wasn’t surprised that Gentry was breaking up with me, but I was surprised to find Penelope was doing it for him. As a parting gift, she even provided me with a copy of the fully executed NDA I had unwisely signed the summer after undergrad.
I sat gobsmacked, and after Penelope was through, Gentry gave me a one-armed pat-on-the-back hug like I’d just lost a Little League game. One year of secretly fucking, followed by three years of dating, and it all ended with a pat on the back.
Three years spent drowning in law school courses that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to take and curating a palatable image of someone who was anyone but me.
All because I thought Gentry and I could change the world together.
I was bit by the political bug back in high school and it only took volunteering for a few underdog (and often female-led) campaigns to wonder if I could do more good in the passenger seat of someone like Gentry’s life than I ever could on my own.
So after living the last four years in service of someone else’s ambitions, the adjunct job was a desperate attempt to return home to Kansas, where I was born and raised. It was a place where I didn’t feel like I was existing under a microscope.