This Sky by Autumn Doughton
Nope.
Does it bring me solace to know that our breakup is now a YouTube sensation?
Not a bit.
I give a low groan and hurl one of the bed pillows across the room. It collides with a floor lamp and falls to the ground with a soft thump. The sound makes Weebit startle in his cage. He hops off his perch and scurries toward the metal bars to stare at me with wide eyes.
“Sorry, bub.”
Five days.
Five days of being marooned in a hotel room with all of my belongings stuffed into garbage bags and a few suitcases.
Five days of ugly crying.
Five days of lousy television.
Five days of skipping work and sleeping too much.
Five days and my guts are shredded. I’m full of yuck and artificial coloring and way too many preservatives.
Sighing heavily, I jam the earbuds back into my ears and scroll through my favorite playlists until I find another thoroughly depressing collection of woe-is-me songs. I hit shuffle then fall back to the bed and close my eyes.
Dear World, You suck. Love, Gemma
CHAPTER TWO
Landon
My phone lights up and a sharp electronic bleat sounds over and over, alerting me to an incoming text.
I silence the ringer and do a quick scan of my messages. With a twist of my stomach, I see that the newest one is from Abby.
Call me.
I start to call her but stop myself. I can’t seem to cut the woman out of my life completely, but I can at least let her stew for an hour or so. Claudia would be the first to say that Abby deserves a lot worse. In this case, Claudia is probably right.
With a firm tug, I wrench open my desk drawer and place my phone inside. My hands go to my hair, and I drop my head forward. Will it always be like this?
I expel a harsh breath and my attention strays around the barren bedroom, pausing on the five boards lined vertically along the wall nearest the closet. One more is resting on the balcony just outside of the front door, bringing the current total to six. Last week I broke my quad on a set of choppy beach breaks while I was surfing San Onofre. Damn shame because I’m not going to be able to replace it anytime soon. As it is, tips have been lean lately and between paying my rent and helping Abby out when she needs it, things are tight.
Claudia claims I’d do better if I could play up the charm factor. What charm? Two days ago, she actually suggested that I wear a nametag in the hopes that as I pour their drinks, customers will put my face and name together and take pity on me.
Yeah, not going to happen. Ever.
I pick up the small white bottle sitting next to my computer and shake two pills into my palm. Just Tylenol. That’s all. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Swishing spit around my mouth, I swallow the pills down and close my eyes. When I open them, the computer screen comes back into focus. I take a calming breath and try to think clearly.
Truths and untruths.
Here’s a truth: I used to think I had my life worked out. I thought there was nothing on this earth that could get in my way. I thought I could have everything I desired.
I thought I’d be a millionaire by twenty-two. I thought I’d have a house on the beach and a nice red sports car waiting for me in the garage. I thought I’d have an agent to handle my endorsement deals and a slew of adoring fans circling in for my autograph.
I thought my past was something that could be folded into a neat little square, wrapped away inside a box, secured with a padlock and shoved into a shadowy corner. I thought I could walk away and never look back. I thought I could turn myself into someone who mattered. I thought I could become fearless. Untouchable.
As it turns out, I thought a lot of things that are total bullshit.
I don’t matter. I’m not fearless. And I’m sure as hell not untouchable.
I’m like everyone else. I have secrets. I put my pants on one leg at a time. I hate junk mail and getting stuck in traffic. I think yawning puppies are cute. I got teary during the first ten minutes of the movie Up.
At best, I’m average. I’m not special. I was given exactly the same thing as everyone else was given.
One shot.
One life.
And that one life is the sum of choice and chance. The choices I made and the chances I took. So when I chose poorly and took the wrong kinds of chances, I ended up with exactly what I deserve.
Nothing.
Which is probably why I’ve been staring at a blank white screen for the past ten minutes, unsure of how to begin this assignment. My fingers hit the top of the desk anxiously. My eyes dart back to the computer where the tiny black cursor continues to blink, keeping track as the seconds slip by.
Pulling my mouth to one side, I read over the guidelines for the third time.
Write truths or untruths. Write your hopes. Write regrets, what-ifs, should-have-beens. Write stories. Write memories. Write a song. Make it personal. Make it count. Just write and have fun!
Have fun writing? I don’t think so.
The assignment is for an imaginative writing workshop—a ridiculous elective I’m stuck with because it fills a requirement and fits into a time slot in my schedule, keeping me free in the morning for surfing and the night for work.
Up to this point, the semester’s been a joke. All I’ve had to do is make word associations and analyze some lame poetry. I’ve discovered that if I nod my head a lot and use words like range and sardonic and pacing, I get left alone.
But during today’s class, the professor—a woman with an affinity for head scarves and chunky jewelry, who talks to us like she’s speaking to a bunch of second graders—informed us that for the remaining five weeks of the semester, we’re required to keep a journal.
A fucking journal. About my feelings.
It’s times like these when I have to remind myself that things could be worse. After everything that went down, I could be flipping burgers behind a greasy grill for the rest of my life. Or I could be delivering Chinese takeout, or worse, I could be stuck in a prison cell awaiting parole.
Instead, I’m living in a one-bedroom apartment off my student loans and the tips I make from my job bartending at Aunt Zola’s. I’m not where I thought I’d be, but I’m still able to hit the waves. And on most days, that’s enough for me.
I know Claudia worries. She thinks I spend too much time alone. She says I need friends and activities, like I’m an eight-year-old boy sitting by myself at a lunch table. Being alone so much isn’t good for you, Landon.
What she doesn’t understand is that it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in a lecture hall surrounded by forty of my fellow students or at the restaurant or watching TV here in my apartment. It’s the same thing. I’m alone. I’m always alone.
Alone in this body.
Alone in this life.
My fingers move to the keyboard. They bob on the black keys for a moment before pressing down.
Things are shifting, I write haltingly. They’re smoking. Dissolving into air.
Need.
Love.
Hate.
The words move slowly across the white screen.
Soon, what will be left of me besides echoes and negative space?
Gemma
On the morning of day seven, which falls on a Friday, I realize that I am, like, one heartbeat away from dialing a psychic hotline. Something has to change.
I swing my legs from the bed and reach for my phone. Wiggling to get some feeling back in my butt and hips, I text Julie the slightly ominous message: She is risen.
Taking in a long draw of air, I turn to Weebit’s cage.
His grey ears twitch. He picks up a pellet of food and gnaws while he watches me through the cage bars.
He’s not used to seeing me like this. I’m guessing he misses his sane owner—the one who showers and doesn’t reek of processed sugar and gin. The owner who sings Broadway favorites in the mornings and loves romance novels with their happily-ever-afters
“Are you trying to tell me that we should get out of here?” I ask him, dusting chocolate cookie crumbs from my bare legs and stretching out my neck.
Another ear twitch.
I’m pretty sure that in chinchilla speak, that’s a yes. I grip the side of the bed and lean toward the cage. “How do you feel about the circus?”
Weebit looks at me for a long moment then throws himself into his little hidey-hole blue igloo. Apparently, the chinchilla has had enough of my shit.
I click off the open music site on my laptop and push myself up onto unbalanced legs and half stumble, half fall into the hotel room’s tiny bathroom. The overhead light flickers on and I take stock of what I see in the mirror.
Bird nest hair? Check.
Puffy red-rimmed eyes? Check.
Smear of Nutella on my chin? Check.
A little dizzy from being upright for so long, I rest against the metal towel rack. With my chin down and shoulders slumped, I turn on the water and force myself into the shower. I spend a few minutes just standing under the burning jets of water with my forehead and palms pressed against the cool tile. Then I lather up with the bar of hotel soap and watch the grime leave my skin and vanish down the drain in a spiral of foamy white bubbles.
When I’m feeling less like regurgitated puke and more like an actual human being, I step out of the shower, wrap my body in one of the hotel’s thin terry cloth towels and take a look around the room. I haven’t let the maid in all week so the place is an absolute disaster. Dirty clothes and plastic food wrappers cover the floor. The bed sheets are wrinkled and falling off the foot of the bed. My toiletry bag is tipped over and the contents are spilling out over the thin carpet. Sighing, I reach into Weebit’s cage, hand him a few sunflower seeds and rub the soft grey fur behind his round, mousy ears.
From the corner of the shabby dresser, my phone starts to vibrate. I know that it’s my best friend before I see her name on the screen.
“You rang?”
Julie doesn’t miss a beat. She’s so loud that I bite down and pull the phone away from my ear. “I rang? Are you kidding me with this, Gemma? What the hell is going on and what did your text mean? ‘She is risen?’ Are we talking like a vampire rising or second coming? Because if you’ve started having religious delusions about God speaking to you through a Jesus-shaped tortilla chip or something, I am going to drive there and beat you over the head with an umbrella.”
An umbrella?
“Hello to you too,” I say flatly as I bend to look for something to put on among the piles of garbage bags where I’ve stashed my clothes.
“God, Gem.” I hear rustling. “Just, wait a second.” More noises, and when she comes back, she sounds different. “Okay, I’m here.”
“Where is here?”
“I’m at an audition on campus,” she tells me, catching her breath. Julie is a theater student at Mesa in San Diego. “We’re reading for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I’m up for the part of Maggie. But now I’m in a closet.”
“A closet?”
There’s a pause, and I hear clanging and labored breathing like she’s struggling to move something heavy. “Yeah, I came in here so I could hear you. Interestingly, I think it’s where they keep the renaissance costumes because I just found a suit of armor.”
Classic Julie Ackerman.
“So when you were yelling at me a minute ago, were you in front of a bunch of people you go to school with?”
“Does it matter? We’re thespians. As far as these guys are concerned, any emotion is good motivation for the stage. And I’m sorry for yelling but I’ve been freaking out,” she pouts. “I haven’t heard anything from you since that ridiculous email on Wednesday and it’s screwing with my concentration. I keep picturing you lying in a ditch somewhere in a fuzzy pink bathrobe and ratty slippers.” She pauses. “All I’ve got to go on are stories popping up on the gossip sites. Do you know how sad and twisted it is to be forced to sift through crappy tabloid articles for updated information about your best friend’s love life?”
Have I mentioned that Julie is a tad dramatic?
I select a pair of stretchy black leggings and a washed-out black t-shirt displaying the name of a band Ren and I saw perform at The Satellite last year. With a sigh, I lay both pieces out on the bed. Black on black. Don’t judge, okay? I’m in a mourning period.
“I have no more love life, Jules. Now it’s just called a life, and at this exact moment, even that is questionable.”
A couple seconds of quiet tick by. I can hear her breathing in the mouthpiece. “Are you still at that crummy hotel?”
“Yeah, I am,” I answer, running a paddle brush through my damp brown hair. “But I’m definitely thinking it’s time to get out of here. Weebit just pointed out that the quality of the linens is crap, and he’s been complaining about the very limited fruit selection on the room service menu for days.”
“Who the hell is Weebit? Oh my God, Gem, is this like in the fourth grade when you announced to everyone that you had an invisible friend and we should refer to him as Ricardo and keep our heads bowed in his presence because he had a thing about too much eye contact?”
“The Ricardo thing was just a strange phase,” I tell her, wedging the phone between my shoulder and chin and swiping a deodorant stick under my arms. “But Weebit is real. He’s a chinchilla.”
Another long pause. “A chinchilla? Is that code for something?”
“No, he’s a little grey rodent thingy. I got him about a month ago,” I say, stepping into the black leggings and pulling them up over my hips. Absently, I add, “I could have sworn I told you all of this weeks ago.”
“I promise you did not tell me you got a chinchilla.”
“Well, he’s the real deal. And I’m happy to send you a picture to prove it.”
“Send me the picture.” I hear more clanging so she must be moving the suit of armor again. “So, what the hell is the plan about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?”
I struggle to get my head and the phone through the neck hole of my black top at the same time. “Um, plan? There is no plan that I’m aware of.”
“You’re telling me that you’re not going to find a Wiccan priestess and have his man parts cursed in unspeakable ways?”
I snort. “Honestly, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me.”
She sighs with obvious disappointment. “You’re not going to key his car and slash his tires?”
“Uhhh… no? I didn’t think we were still in high school.”
“God, you’re no fun,” whines Julie.
I try joking. “That’s what they tell me.”
She doesn’t take the bait. “But Gemma, aren’t you so mad at him you want to scream?”
“Of course I’m mad. My life is basically over. I have nowhere to live. A video of my boyfriend having sex with another woman is all over YouTube. A woman, I might add, with ginormous porn-star boobs,” I say dejectedly as I glance down at my own small breasts. I take in a shaky breath before continuing. “And it’s more than that, Jules. I feel like I can’t even leave the hotel room without putting a paper bag over my head. All these people I don’t even know are talking about me, thinking I’m either a cold fish or an idiot for not catching on to Ren’s cheating ways sooner. Obviously I’m mad. I’m mad and I’m mortified and I’m a hot mess and, hell yeah, I want to scream!” I end my rant with a little shriek that makes Weebit’s eyes go wider.
“That’s better,” Julie breathes into the phone. “So what are you going to do about it?”
I choke out a frustrated chuckle and flap my free arm in the air. “I’m not sure. Cry? Pout? I’m not saying I’m losing my mind or anything like that but I’m not not saying it.”
“What do Holly and Bill have to say?”
For the record, Holly and Bill are my parents.
“Oh, you know how they are.” I stoop to pick up some dirty clothes from the floor. “T
“What is that? Like a vision quest?”
“With my parents, who knows,” I say. “My mom sent me the name of her aura lady in case I wanted to schedule a phone consultation.”
“She did not.”
“She did,” I confirm sadly as I find my contact case inside my makeup bag and unscrew the lid.
Julie grunts in amusement. “So, are you thinking of heading back to Sacramento to wait out the storm at home?”
“I can’t go home. My parents rented out the house.”
“Oh.”
I pop one contact in and blink my vision into focus. “I think… I think it made them too sad to think of it sitting there vacant for so long.”
Julie makes a sympathetic sound. She’s the only person who really understands the how and why of my fractured family. “So where does that leave you?”
I glance at Weebit. He’s busy on his exercise wheel. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Gem, what are the options?”
“Umm… options?” I chew the inside of my cheek. “Homeless shelter? The underside of a bridge? Cardboard box? Weebit and I are tossing around the idea of the circus. So there’s that.”
“Get real,” she scoffs.
“I am being real, Jules. I think we could have a really cute act. I’ll wear a top hat and carry a cane. He’ll put on a cape. There will be sequins involved. Maybe even a miniature cannon.”
Julie grunts and I can almost picture her—round face, not-quite-blond, not-quite-red hair and large sky blue eyes—stuffed into a dark closet amid a pile of stiff renaissance gowns and a silver suit of armor. “There’s nobody in L.A. you can go to?”
“Not really,” I tell her truthfully. “I’m pretty sure Ren is going to be keeping all of our L.A. friends. He’s a semi-famous actor. I’m a recently fired theme park employee. You do the math.”
“You lost your job?”
“I lost my job,” I say dolefully. God, is this seriously my life? Homeless, jobless and publicly ridiculed? If that doesn’t add up to L-O-S-E-R, I don’t know what does. “Not that being a princess in a theme park was the greatest gig ever, but…”