Chapter 2 #2
I loved Sue, but she was like if a tornado made a wish to become a human. I needed to clear up some mental space to handle the rambling conversation that would take up the front end of our call.
“I know you aren’t calling me to yap, what’s on your mind, lovebug?” Sue rasped after recounting a fight she had with a groundhog burrowing under her porch. We were twenty minutes into the call already.
I sucked in an anxious breath. “Can I please come up during opening week?” The words came out in a jumbled mess. Desperation clenched my voice as I sat at my kitchen table, laptop still open on a dozen different tabs with my proposed Mexico trip ready and waiting.
Sue was silent on the other end. She knew there was more to the story. Sue always knew.
“Nick and I broke up,” it was weird to say it out loud for the first time.
“I really could use a getaway, and I know it’s never busy that first week.
I’ll pay full price and even work while I’m there.
I really, really can’t be in my apartment anymore.
” I thought the tears had all but dried but my cheeks grew damp as I groveled.
“Oh, Danbam, I’m so sorry,” Sue cooed through the phone, her voice tinny from poor cell service. “Let me check some things and see if you can come. You’ll be okay, please don’t do anything spur of the moment just yet.”
She spoke to me in the same way she did when I was young and scraped a knee running around camp. Her voice was soft, slightly husky from a past life spent chain smoking at rural dive bars in the eighties.
We’d said our goodbyes, I begged a little more, thanked her for even trying, then wiped my cheeks and hung up the phone. It was silent now, even the traffic and birds outside seemed to stop. The life had been sucked out of the apartment.
Sue would get my firstborn child if she could let me stay for the week, but Cozumel stared me down from the laptop as I paced around my kitchen again. I tried to take her words to heart, Mexico could wait a little while longer.
Hardly an hour later, I got the text.
Sue
gud 2go luvbug, on us ;)
C u then
Her cryptogram-like text speak was another quirk of Sue, she was a relic of a different time with scarce internet access. She and Randy didn’t watch television, didn’t have kids, and only made the trek into town to restock.
They were the ideal people to forget a horrible ex with, and their camp was the ideal place to do it.
My heart leapt as I read and re-read the text. I would get my escape, and my bank account wouldn’t suffer the effects of my sudden slip into impulsivity.
Cinematics could now slip back in.
A coming of age tale! A trip that would transform my life!
Everything was laid out ahead of me, I could eat, pray, love myself into being happy again. I could emulate Reese Witherspoon in that one hiking movie without the near death experience.
I started up the shower to give myself one more deeply dramatic cry, and I savored it.
I thanked my mother for the shower speaker she got me as a stocking stuffer for Christmas a few years back, despite how badly I’d wanted to discount it as the kind of gift one gives someone they hardly knew.
My curated breakup playlist was able to trickle through the water droplets thanks to her half-assed generosity.
Andrea texted me that she and Caroline had arrived at my apartment as I was towel drying my hair. I tossed on a well-worn hoodie and boxer shorts and padded to the door.
I could barely open it before I was physically accosted by a Barbie clone.
“I’m so sorry, are you okay? You look okay. Honestly you look hotter now that he’s gone, I don’t even know how that’s possible. But like, fuck men amiright?” The words spewed out of Andrea as she threw herself at me and a handful of blonde hair flew into my mouth.
In her heels she towered over me and her head rested firmly on top of mine. She swayed and shook me about like I was a ragdoll. In the romcom movie version of my life she would be played by a severely underrated character actress.
As I was flung about, her fiancée laid a hand on her shoulder to pry her off of me. “Maybe loosen up there a bit, hon?” Caroline said.
“Shit, sorry,” Andrea released her grip on me and click-clacked her way across the apartment.
Caroline stepped in behind Andrea with a bouquet of flowers and a box of pastries. She embraced me in a far gentler hug and whispered in my ear, “you made the right decision.”
She pulled off her beanie and fluffed her curly black pixie cut before walking into my kitchen to retrieve a vase for the flowers. I watched as they danced around each other, choreographed as two people in love always seem to be.
I couldn’t help but hold a bit of jealousy seeing how they were more aligned than Nick and I had ever been.
Even three months ago, when I’d witnessed their engagement on a snowy Saturday in the center of Boston Common, some deep, sad part of my soul knew that something that beautiful magical could never happen to me.
Andrea and I shared a long history. She’d seen her fair share of my heartbreak, just as I’d seen hers.
I squealed with her in our senior year apartment living room when she got a text back from the cute girl in her photography elective class.
I watched her and Caroline fall in love.
I fell in love with Caroline too and I happily existed as their third wheel.
Andrea’s and my standard breakup protocol was simple: cannolis, a dozen roses, and the heartbroken one’s choice about how we’d spend our night.
We’d evolved from lovesick college kids to something now resembling functioning adults.
The breakup procedure hadn’t been necessary for either of us in years, but from the bouquet of pink roses on my kitchen table and the box of cannolis Caroline was unpacking, it was clear Andrea hadn’t forgotten. My eyes grew watery again.
Andrea patted the cushion next to her and called me over from my mannequin-like stillness in the doorway as I was taking it all in. I scrubbed away a few tears that had tumbled onto my cheeks. At least that was growth from sobbing on a bathroom floor in our college dorm at nineteen.
“Is that—” she gestured to my laptop sitting on the coffee table as I crossed over towards her. It was currently glowing with a document tab that was half outlines and half rambling.
I gently shut it from behind, before she had the chance to read anything. “It’s not ready yet.”
“It’s been like three months, how much have you written?”
The truth? Nothing. Zero. Not a single word on the page that was worth anything.
“A bit,” I lied. “I’m a little stuck. I didn’t think it would be this complex, it feels like I’m starting from scratch.”
She cocked her head, “didn’t you say you had a hundred and seventy thousand words written already or something like that?”
One hundred and seventy four thousand six hundred and eighty one to be precise. Every single one of those words existed in the universe of Sword of Thorndown.
Sword of Thorndown was impossible for me to talk about without getting giddy.
It was the show where I’d join a conversation with strangers if I heard them talking about the episode from the night before.
The hoodie I was currently wearing was emblazoned with the crest of one of the rivaling clans in the show, worn and cracked from years of wear.
To say I loved Sword of Thorndown was an understatement.
That show occupied far too much of my brainspace and nearly a decade of my life.
Through the countless amount of fanfiction I had written about it, the show also occupied most of my computer’s memory.
That aforementioned one hundred and seventy four thousand six hundred and eighty one word document held the biggest fanfiction endeavor I’d set out on. “Ice on the Turret,” an odyssey I’d been working on for roughly two years, uploaded chapter by chapter to a popular fanfiction website.
In those one hundred and seventy four thousand six hundred and eighty one words I’d written, every bit of dialogue was spoken by the valiant hero main character Sir Erwyn Nightingale of Rospice, his love the quiet leader Lady Juperitus Premble, or another character in the show.
I knew writing this much was an achievement in and of itself, and accepted that my fanfic’s popularity would probably be the closest I'd come to actual recognition. In true best friend fashion, that wasn’t what Andrea wanted for me.
She constantly told me that I should be putting out best sellers and going on glamorous book tours and sitting on panels at conferences.
If I romanticized the mundane parts of my life, Andrea was completely delusional about my possible future.
She’d been working as an assistant for a literary agent for over a year now and constantly pressured me to submit my work to her. Work that, as of right now, still didn’t technically exist.
My entire documents folder was filled with drabbles, one shots, and my lengthy work in progress I had added a few hundred words to this morning. None of it was something that could be published outside the confines of the internet.
I knew I should be writing something that I could submit, or at the very least outlining something, hell, even thinking of a concept—but my brain wouldn’t let me.
Recently I’d placed even more effort on writing fanfiction.
My nights were unusually quiet now, I could write to my heart’s content.
Hunching over my laptop like a gargoyle and plunking the keys as words turned into sentences and paragraphs had always served as my escape from whatever mess I was experiencing in my personal life.
In the fictional lands of Andoriaan, my heartbreak didn’t exist, and the canonical slow burn love story between Sir Erwyn and Lady Premble was far more romantic than my own had ever been.
No matter what I wrote, be it canon-divergent, self-indulgent, or something else, Erwyn and Premble would always end up together.