CHAPTER TWO
Jessica
“Hear ye, hear ye,” Abby announced, marching proudly into the living room. “The most important thing of the evening has arrived. I’ve got the wine, ladies!”
“Hear ye, hear ye?” Katy repeated. “Jeez, Abby. What are you, like four hundred years old?”
“What are you?” Abby retorted, a bag full of booze in one hand while her other rested easily on her hip. “Like, the biggest bitch in all the land?”
“Someone’s cranky!” Katy said. “What’s the matter, Abbs? Another boyfriend decide not to call you back?”
“Jesus, you really are an asshole, you know that? Like, the biggest asshole I’ve ever met.”
“Don’t I know it,” Katy said, grinning. “Now come here and let me see what kind of wine you brought.”
“Guys!” I shouted, wondering if either of them had taken the time to see if somebody was already in the kitchen they were taking over with their never-ending noise. “Seriously, do you have to be so loud? Some of us are trying to work, okay?”
“Trying to work, huh?” Katy asked me brightly, the tone of her voice such that I already knew what she was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. “Does that mean you found a job? I had no idea. Looks like it was perfect timing for the wine, then.”
“No, actually, I didn’t. I did not find a job, and I seriously doubt that I ever will if you two insist on wandering through the house, making all kinds of noise, without checking to see if people are trying to concentrate!”
My outburst was met by complete silence, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. Out of the three of us, me and my two roommates, I was typically the calmest. The one who was least likely to randomly flip her shit over trivial things. I figured in a house full of chicks, it was important that at least one of us didn’t get her feathers ruffled easily.
Katy was older than me by a couple of years, twenty-five to my twenty-two, but she was also quick to get pissed off when it came to Abby, our twenty-one-year-old roommate who hadn’t yet gotten old enough or broke enough to stop being a bit stuck up. The two of them were annoyingly quick to bicker, and seeing as I was naturally a laid-back kind of a girl, it made sense to me that I would be the one to take on the role of peacemaker. It had been easy to keep things cool between the three of us, right up until I finally graduated from college. Actually, it had been easy until a couple of months after I graduated, when the glow of my accomplishments began to wear off and the realization that I still didn’t have any kind of a reliable job set in earnestly.
Once that happened, keeping my cool became a whole lot harder, and everything Abby and Katy did suddenly annoyed me at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t really their fault, which made me feel super bad on the rare occasions when I could take enough time to think about it. The only one who had changed in this situation was me, and it wasn’t a change that was particularly easy on them.
“Whoa, there,” Katy said slowly, putting both hands up in a “don’t shoot” kind of a gesture. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get in your way, Jessica. You’re right; we should make sure you aren’t trying to work before we just barge into a place, making a bunch of noise.”
“Or she could just work in her room like normal people,” Abby grumbled to herself, picking at invisible lint on her shirt with an expression full of serious discomfort. “That would be another option.”
“Are you for real right now?” Katy cried in exasperation, looking at Abby like she was the pettiest person ever to live. “Maybe you should, I don’t know, try and cut her a little slack or something.”
“No,” I interjected, rubbing my eyes vigorously and trying to stave off what was already promising to be a wicked headache. “No, she’s right, actually. It’s totally unfair for me to lose it at you guys over something like that. I have my own space, and it’s not like you just barged into my room, making a bunch of noise.”
“See?” Abby answered sulkily, taking one of the bottles of wine out of its bag and opening it up as she did so. “I’m right. She has a bedroom, right? And it’s the master, too, so there’s plenty of room in there for her to freak out.”
“She’s not freaking out,” Katy said immediately, coming to my defense as she almost always did while simultaneously pulling three wine glasses out from one of the cupboards. “She’s just stressed. Right, Jess? That’s all it is, right?”
“No, actually, Abby’s got it on this one. I’m most definitely freaking out. I’ve got to find a job, you guys! It’s been like, almost four months since I graduated, and there hasn’t been so much as the hint of a prospect, never mind an actual offer. I’m starting to get really nervous.”
Abby and Katy exchanged looks at that, quick looks that broke off just as quickly. Abby poured generous glasses of wine, and Katy pulled some snacks out of the pantry. I didn’t know with absolute certainty what that look meant, but I could venture a few guesses. The first thing that came to mind was what I’d studied in college.
My parents fought me on my choice to double major in art history and French. We argued about it so much it resulted in a year-long standoff, during which I hardly spoke to either one of them, and I didn’t go home for a single family holiday.
They warned me that my degrees wouldn’t get me anywhere in the real world. They insisted art history and French were impractical. I scoffed, waving a lofty hand in the air and telling them they knew nothing about the way things worked in “modern” times. Much to my dismay after graduating, I found out my parents knew a whole lot more than I’d given them credit for.
I was extremely qualified for certain jobs. Working in an art gallery immediately came to mind. But no one had openings for those types of jobs. Like, at all. Or if they did, they weren’t anywhere close to my San Diego home with Katy and Abby, and despite my parents’ increasingly overbearing suggestions, I had no plans on moving back in with them. San Diego was my home now, and moving away would be the same as conceding defeat.
Even worse, it would have been the same as telling my parents they had been right all along, and there wasn’t a shot in hell that I was ready for a thing like that. That was the kind of thing I planned on saving for when it got down to a life or death kind of a situation. I knew that much, but in the meantime, I had no idea what I was supposed to do to live from one day to the next. Abby and Katy were really good roommates for the most part, but that didn’t mean they would, or even should, take on the burden of taking care of me financially. Which left me, as far as I could tell, absolutely screwed.
“Have you considered going back to school again?” Katy asked me tentatively as she handed me a glass of wine. “Maybe asking them if you can have your bookstore job back until you find something else?”
“I’ve tried that already,” I answered glumly, feeling worse about my situation with every passing second. “They made it pretty clear that those jobs are only for current students.”
“Did you tell them they should have given you a degree for something other than how to be a super-duper pretentious person?” Katy asked me with a completely straight face, something that put a look of horror on Abby’s face while causing me to burst out laughing.
“You know what? That question slipped my mind. Maybe I’ll call them back in the morning, see if that argument carries any weight.”
“You could always just go back to school,” Abby said breezily, sipping her wine casually as if going to grad school was the easiest thing in the world. “If you go to grad school, you’ll be able to get your job back.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, trying very hard not to lose my temper. “There are two things I see wrong with that plan. First of all, that’s a terrible reason to go to grad school. That’s a really big undertaking, and there’s no point in going unless you’re really passionate about the whole thing.”
“Preach it, sister,” Katy said loudly, sipping on her wine and watching Abby and me, like she watched a tennis match instead of a conversation. “Tell her how it is.”
I shot Katy a smile that was also a warning. If she wasn’t careful, she would get into yet another fight with Abby. “Secondly,” I went on. “Grad school is crazy expensive, and there’s not a chance that my parents would pay for it. There’s a chance I could get a scholarship, but I doubt it. Besides, all the deadlines for that have passed. I would have to wait a whole year, and in the meantime, I’d still have nothing to live on.”
Abby shrugged her shoulders and grabbed for the box of crackers Katy munched on. She didn’t have any idea what I was talking about, which was painfully obvious, but it was difficult to blame her. She was still young and not out of college, and her parents seemed to have an unending supply of patience. She wasn’t going to be worrying about finances any time soon.
Katy frowned. “I know you don’t want to do this—”
“I’m not moving home,” I interrupted quickly, not even wanting to hear her speak the words. “I’m just not, okay? It’s not an option.”
“Good! That’s not what I was going to say. What I was going to say was you should expand the jobs you’re looking at. I know you want a job in a gallery or something, and I totally get it, but if you have to find something totally unrelated in the meantime, then so be it, right? Believe me, I’m not thrilled to be a waitress, but it’s what pays the bills right now, so it’s what I’m doing. Maybe broaden the parameters of your search and see what you find. If nothing strikes your fancy, no big deal. But if you find something, then awesome. Just think it over, okay? And also, drink up, because we’re not going to let all this good wine go to waste.”
I took a sip to satisfy her, but it was difficult to enjoy it. Katy was right, and I knew it. Looking for something that had nothing to do with my degree felt like another form of failure to me, but it was more like a theoretical failure. I faced the very real possibility that I would blow through what was left of my meager savings and not be able to pay my portion of rent. Given those two options, I was willing to take the failure.
With this in mind, I searched online for something, anything, as long as it the paycheck would be halfway decent. I was so sure that it wasn’t going to work that I almost didn’t click on the ad for a nanny, something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. I wasn’t even sure why I clicked on it, even when I did it, except that it was a job opening and I always had and still did love kids. That was the reason I clicked on the listing for the job. When I saw the pay, I knew I had to apply. I looked at other jobs after sending in my resume for the nanny position, but when it was all said and done, and I was free to enjoy the wine with my two roommates, the nanny job was the one I couldn’t get out of my head. In my mind, that was going to be it. That was going to be the job that would become the answer to all my problems. It just had to be.