It Could Have Been Great

Chapter One

It’s predictable really. Nothing ever goes entirely my way. It’s always been Kate Everett against the world, and I’m determined to never let the world win.

My connecting flight is canceled. In fact, all flights out of Cheyenne are canceled. Hotels are so full that it makes Bethlehem’s little situation, where they had the audacity to send a pregnant woman to a barn to birth a baby, understandable. And there is only one rental left at the Avis counter.

A ridiculous sardine can of a vehicle that undoubtedly will careen off the side of any icy road. So, naturally the keys are now heavy in my hand.

Because what else am I supposed to do? Sit idle in an airport where all the subpar food options are shut down?

Anyone that really knows me understands I will not function for more than four hours without a proper intake of espresso.

“Do you have a map?” I question the frail girl with a fantastic splattering of freckles across her nose and a pout on her face that makes me believe she’d rather be anywhere other than here. She’s not alone in that. This isn’t exactly where I want to be.

She looks me over, her eyes shifting up and down before they flutter upward as if she’s determined that I’m quite possibly the most ridiculous woman alive, standing here in my satin stilettos about to embark on an adventure that may end with the police discovering my frozen corpse in a snowbank by morning. At least I’d look good dead.

“A map?” Her dubious tone furrows her eyebrows.

Her beautiful thick eyebrows that have been spared from the tweezer disease that infected thousands of girls decades prior.

We plucked our poor hairs until they were too scared to regrow, resulting in the ridiculous trend of microblading with yet another monthly appointment to restore what once was.

I glance at her nametag. Genovia. Oh, this poor girl is named after a fictitious kingdom from a millennial favorite.

It isn’t just our eyebrows that have suffered.

“Okay, G. Can I call you G?”

She nods her head—nervously, I might add.

“A map is a piece of paper with our current whereabouts drawn upon it, usually detailed with roads that help a person navigate unknown terrain,” I detail out rapidly.

She blinks her eyes, her brain slowly processing behind those gorgeous eyebrows. “Don’t you have a phone?”

I shove my phone in her face, pointing at the lack of bars next to the battery that is currently red and blinking.

“Oh,” she sighs.

“Oh, indeed. You’d think with our technological advancements in artificial intelligence that some of that aptitude would have been focused on methods that can actually help the average person, but it appears vanity and simulation is of greater importance than being able to utilize GPS when it’s needed the most,” I ramble.

“So, G. I need a map. Preferably one that has a larger font that I can read. My eyes are no longer made for small print.”

Genovia ducks below the counter and I hear the shuffling of things—small things, large things, paper things, and not-so-paper things. I hear her sigh…loudly. Once. Twice. And then a third time. I can’t blame her. I’m a lot to handle, according to my mother.

Finally, she reappears, a shiny sheen making her fresh young skin glisten. She places a wadded-up booklet that looks very much like a map on the counter between us. Possibly outdated. But it’s a map.

“Is this okay, Mrs. Everett?” she asks with a tone lacking any amusement.

“This will be sufficient, G. And it’s Miss Everett.

And please never, ever, for-the-love-of-all-things, ever pluck those perfect eyebrows God has blessed you with.

You’ll save yourself a few thousand dollars and painstakingly late nights wondering what possessed you to change something about yourself that never needed to be changed. Just, trust me. Okay, G?”

She stares at me blankly, as if the advice of the likes of me isn’t as life changing as I know it could be. I’d do anything for the eyebrows I had when I was sixteen before I let a girl named Kacie rip them into two thin lines that looked more like rotated commas than eyebrows.

“Alright, G, I’m assuming you don’t know where I need to go from here.”

“No,” she mumbles before starting to tear at the cuticles on her index finger with her teeth.

I grit my teeth before more unsolicited advice spills from my glossed lips and instead focus on the task ahead.

“Very well. I can figure it out. Thanks, G. I can’t promise that this…

” I pause to look down at the label dangling from the car keys.

“Mitsubishi Mirage won’t sustain some injury tonight, if only emotional. Wish me luck!”

Genovia manages to momentarily take her hand away from her mouth to give me a small wave, but I notice the deafening silence in which she does not wish me good luck.

She probably won’t be surprised when the news broadcasts of my doom amidst a blizzard that reports have indicated are the worst they’ve seen in twenty years.

But again, they stopped serving coffee here two hours ago.

My circumstances didn’t really give me a choice.

The parking lot is empty, except for the tiny silver car. The headlights look as if they are surprised to see me, and they aren’t even illuminated yet. It’s probably perfectly content to sit this snowstorm out, to stay safe amid the frozen wonderland I am about to force it into.

“It’s just you and me,” I say confidently, patting the small hood.

But a few minutes later, after the starter fails three times before finally roaring alive—and roaring is being generous, it definitely sounded more like a squeak—I can tell the only one confident here is me.

And mine is a somewhat ignorant kind of confidence, so I’m not sure what that’s really worth.

I turn the temperature all the way into the red, praying that heat will engulf the compact space quickly.

I shake the bent-up, abused-from-neglect-and-not-use map out, hoping my geography skills from seventh grade will somehow rattle free from somewhere within my brain to help me determine my way home.

Home for Christmas.

Because that’s where you are supposed to go for the holidays.

Even though my home is more of a pristine masquerade of holiday cheer than the real kind that includes a cozy fire by a Christmas tree strung with handmade ornaments collected over the years, or gifts wrapped imperfectly because little hands had been allowed to use the good scissors and tape to produce a present they were proud of, or cookies piled high to Heaven with frosting because sticky fingers and smiles had decorated them.

No, Christmas where I grew up wasn’t the warm kind made with memories that made you want to go back home.

My phone beeps in the cup holder before it fades to black.

“Fantastic,” I grumble, my reality beginning to shake me slightly.

But I will make the best of this situation. I’ll make my way home and have quite the tale to tell in doing so. The Christmas Kate wrestled with a blizzard and won.

My mother will be irritated, frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t just do the proper thing and wait out the storm in the airport.

But my dad would have laughed.

I smile at the thought, allowing the memory of his laugh to trail around the ridges of my mind and the deep richness of his amusement to inspire me forward. He always loved my determination, and sometimes misplaced recklessness, that made for the best of stories.

Like the time I cut my blonde hair into a short bob, convinced that it was weighing me down from climbing the rope in gym class as quickly as the boys.

They taunted me for days saying, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair,” before bursting into a wild fit of laughter that only revved up my resolve. I beat them all by the end of the week.

Or the time I rode an actual, real live, bucking bull at a rodeo with zero experience because my brother dared me, thinking it’d be too crazy for me to actually agree to. It wasn’t.

Or the time I decided that a street race in my Mustang was a good idea. Boys could do it, so really, how hard could it be? Fortunately, only the car needed an emergency room.

These were things my mother and most of the world would agree were sheer stupidity, but my dad’s lips would part into this marvelously warm smile that made all the pain of pushing through worth it.

He’d laugh in the moment and for years later.

When I’d talked to him last before the cancer took him, he’d said, “Katydilla, don’t let anyone douse your fire.

You’re the brightest light I’ve ever seen. ”

I’m not sure it’s true—that I’m the brightest light. But I was his brightest light and that had to amount to something. If it didn’t mean anything, then it’d be admitting that what he saw in me wasn’t true. And I so want it to be true.

There’s a splotch on the map in my lap, alerting me to the tears that have begun to drip from my eyes and down my cheeks. I am a lot of things, but I’m not a mope. I will not sit and sulk in what I’ve lost, not when there is something to do to put purpose to it.

“All right, this has got to make some kind of sense,” I mumble as I try to figure out the map that is unfortunately in small print, making me squint to determine the direction that my trusty steed (that is definitely more of a mouse inside, just like Cinderella’s horses had been) and I need to go to make it home.

From my rough calculations, it is a thirteen-hour drive without a blizzard.

And honestly, nothing makes any sense, but I put the Mitsubishi Mirage into drive, and we attempt to ride the white wave of snow. We were doing just fine for about three hours, surprisingly. Until we weren’t.

“Hold on, Miranda!” I yell, and yes, I named the car Miranda, as I grip the steering wheel tightly.

The road beneath Miranda’s tiny tires has become a frozen skating rink, and it seems Miranda and I have something in common: we both don’t ice-skate.

We slip and slide from one side to another until we plummet into the snow-packed ditch with me screaming and Miranda’s engine scolding me as if it’s telling me “I told you so”.

“Don’t be like my mother,” I scold back. “Bitterness is not becoming!”

I put Miranda in reverse before pressing hard on the pedal.

We don’t move. Except maybe forward, and while I’ve often told myself that two steps forward and one step back is still progress, it unfortunately doesn’t apply to a situation where you only want to go backward.

“Come on,” I plead, pushing hard on the pedal again. “I didn’t mean it. You’re not like my mother. You’re the opposite of her, and that’s honestly the biggest compliment I could ever give to anyone or anything.”

But nothing happens.

“Fine!” I sigh in frustration at the small car that’s already given up on me, just like every boyfriend I’ve ever had. “If you can’t do it, then I will.”

I fling the car door open before sinking my stilettos into the deep snow, gritting my teeth as the frost forces its way through my threadbare clothes, nipping at my flesh.

The truth is, I know I’m in quite the predicament. I haven’t seen another pair of headlights along the road for at least an hour, my phone is dead because I’d left my charger in my apartment back in New York City, and now I’m stuck. Well Miranda is stuck, which means I am too.

I drop to the ground, my entire body engulfed in the cold of the snow as I use my ungloved hands, something I’d also forgotten to pack, to dig out the front tires. But soon the chattering begins. The kind that shakes your teeth and crumples your spine as you begin to freeze from the inside out.

I stand up, my extremities beginning to fade into nothing as they become numb. I scramble back into the car, and it’s now I realize, out of habit of exiting a vehicle, I’d turned it off.

“Oh no!” I cry. “No! No! No!”

I turn the key, but unlike earlier when Miranda had reluctantly woken up, this time she stays asleep. Nothing is going to rouse her. I’d made her brave a blizzard when she hadn’t had the grit to brave it.

I tuck my hands into my armpits, hoping to thaw them, but even my sweat has frozen. I can’t find any warmth, and my clothes are beginning to stitch themselves into me, thread by frozen thread.

I watch out the window as the snow continues to bury us alive.

And by us, I really mean me.

Because most likely, Miranda will survive. She’s metal, plastic, or aluminum—whatever cheap cars are made of these days. She will drive again.

But me.

I’m flesh and bones and blood.

And no one knows where I am.

Except the young girl with the fabulous eyebrows that I’d frightened at the rental car counter.

I’m not sure she’ll send any rescue team after me, but hopefully she will at least remember to never pick up a pair of tweezers and possibly change her name from Genovia to something less…pear-like.