“Okay, Ella, tell me what you think of this,” I said to my roommate as I read the job advertisement out loud.

“Marketing firm seeks excited, hip, hardworking millennial with a bachelor’s degree in communications or English, eager to help launch a social media campaign. Must be great at tweeting and using Facebook. Familiarity with WordPress a plus.”

Ella didn’t even look up from her magazine as she said, “You don’t tweet. You don’t even have a Twitter account.”

“I could learn.”

“You go to BINGO night for fun and you don’t ever update your Facebook account. You’re practically an old person. I think you should try for a different job.”

“Hey!” I said tossing a pillow at her.

“What?” she said, finally looking up at me after she easily dodged the pillow. She didn’t even have the grace to look particularly concerned that she had offended me.

“Just because I enjoy BINGO doesn’t make me an old person,” I said moodily.

“Sorry,” she said with a shrug looking back at the magazine now in her lap.

“I’m going to apply. The worst they can tell me is no, right?”

Ella didn’t answer.

“Helloooo? Are you even listening?”

Turning the page of her magazine lazily, she said, “Nope. Not listening at all.”

I tried not to get upset at her careless words. Ella was just an abrasive person and I knew I shouldn’t take it personally but it was close to the holidays and I was missing home. And it pained me that in a city so big, the closest person I had to a friend was Ella who pretty much spent most of her time wishing she didn’t have to have a roommate. Needless to say, she was a complete jerk most days, but I thought my sunny disposition would at least rub off on her a little. I had been wrong. If anything my cheerful personality made her even more inclined to either ignore me or treat me like last week’s leftovers.

Feeling like crap and not wanting my homesickness to get me down, I got up and told Ella that I was going out. She didn’t respond and so I just shrugged and left. I had the annoying habit of wanting everyone’s approval and I needed people to like me. I couldn’t help it. I was a people pleaser to no end. People in the small town I was from had found it endearing. In New York, it was just seen as a weakness.

As I walked down the street, I thought of how much I missed my grandmother back home. Maybe moving all the way to New York wasn’t the best idea, I thought for probably the seventh time that week. I took my cellphone out of my pocket and called my grandmother. She had raised me after my parents had died and I needed to hear a friendly voice. I was beginning to feel like a loser. I was a cashier at a grocery store although I had graduated with honors from a prestigious college in Connecticut just last year. I hadn’t been able to land a job in my field and I now figured maybe the world hadn’t needed any more communications majors. Add that to the fact that I didn’t have any friends and I felt that I was pretty much losing at life thus far.

To my surprise, my grandmother didn’t answer. I stared at the phone and decided to call again. I was instantly concerned since she always answered when I called. She had suffered a stroke right before my college graduation and although the doctors said that for the most part she had made a full recovery, the idea that a stroke could happen to her again at any time filled me with dread. So much so in fact, that I had put my plans to move to New York on hold until she was better.

“Hi kiddo!” my grandmother said immediately answering the second time I called.

“Hi, Grandma.” I said with relief, smiling at the sound of her voice.

“Uh oh, what’s wrong?”

“Everything. Nothing. No...just about everything.”

“So which one is it? Everything or nothing?”

“Everything,” I said with a sigh.

“Don’t worry about it sweetie. I’m sure whatever it is will work itself out.” I got my undying optimism from her, or as Ella would call it, my annoyingly positive outlook on life. Ella was right about that. After my parents had died, Grandmother had given me time and space to grieve, but she hadn’t allowed me to wallow in sadness. That had been ten years ago, but I could still hear her words in my ear, telling me that life was for the living and that my parents wouldn’t want me to stop loving life just because they were gone. I had known she was right so after their deaths I had vowed that I would live my life to the fullest. And so when I got older, I had taken more risks, been the first in my small town to try new things. And I kept my attitude positive, always hoping for the best even when life’s problems seemed insurmountable.

“What’s going on? Are you heading out somewhere?” I noticed that when she’d answered, she’d sounded harried.

My grandmother took a while to answer and I briefly wondered if maybe she had accidentally hung up when suddenly she said with obvious reluctance to share, “Well, you remember Mr. Davis, right?”

“From the warehouse?” I asked. Since I could remember, my grandmother volunteered weekly at a warehouse that distributed food to needy families throughout the county. My parents and I would help her during the holiday season and I remembered Mr. Davis fondly. He was a tall older gentleman who had at one point been a priest before he started working as a social services coordinator for the small county where we lived.

“Yes, well, he uhhh, asked me out on a date.”

“What!” I said smiling widely and picturing my grandmother blushing. “You’re going out on a date?! That’s great!” I said really meaning it. She hadn’t dated anyone at all as far as I could remember growing up and my grandfather hadn’t been in the picture my entire life.

“I know...I have an appointment at the salon and I think I’ll skip over to the mall to buy a new dress. I’m so nervous. I haven’t been on a date in over thirty years. I don’t know what to expect. I tried researching what to do on the Internet but mostly that just served to frighten me.”

I laughed, “Dating in the twenty-first century is scary. Trust me. I once went out with a guy who insisted I call him Peter Pan and tried to get me to---. Never mind. You can imagine how that date went.”

I could hear my grandmother laughing on the other end and I smiled, feeling better than I had minutes before.

“Well enjoy yourself tonight and tell Mr. Davis that I said hello.”

“Will do. Wish me luck!”

“You don’t need luck. You’re hot.”

She began to laugh so hard, she started to wheeze. I snickered and reluctantly, I let her go. I tried hard to not think about how my grandmother was able to find a date in our small town but I was in a city surrounded by millions of men yet I hadn’t met one guy who was genuinely interested in me. I had a suspicion that the guy who had wanted me to call him Peter Pan had been on drugs especially when he asked me if I’d ever gotten high on a roof naked before. I had thought he was joking until he asked me if I were interested in trying it right then and there. I had pretended to have to use the bathroom and had excused myself and walked right out the back exit. Sadly, Peter had been the only guy to ask me out in the past six months.

I didn’t think it was because I wasn’t attractive. For the most part, I took pretty good care of myself. I walked everywhere and did some ab work when I felt my pants were fitting a little tightly. I had plain brown hair and green eyes, which I thought were my best features. I thought I was moderately good-looking, but given that I was in New York where supermodels casually walked down the street as if it were a catwalk, I knew I was probably well below average when it came to New York’s standards.

Not that I was looking for a relationship, I was still too busy trying to establish my career to think about a relationship, but some sort of companionship would have been nice. I shook my head. Something had to give soon or I would find myself back in small town Texas without a penny to my name and nothing to show for all the hard work I’d put into earning my degree.

I wasn’t interested in returning to my apartment so instead I went to a coffee shop not too far from where my apartment was located. I sat down and ordered a small cup of coffee and just sat there enjoying doing nothing. I had a ten hour shift later on that day and I wasn’t looking forward to it. The thought of the smell of the grocery store was enough to make me start looking for jobs again and I used my phone to scan the job ads online. I came across a non-paying job at an animal shelter, but it was an internship in their communications department. I applied with one click and continued looking for anything that sounded even remotely related to my field. Soon enough, it was time for me to head to work and so with reluctance I stood up and headed back to my apartment to change.