Page 6 of A Fine Line

If this were a movie…this is exactly where it would start. Because as my hands clenched tightly to the green and yellow flier in my lap, I knew then that this was where my life began.Where I was going to hit the restart button in the game of life and I was going to finally take my stolen time back.

I bit down my smile and decided screw it, I was the only one here in this mostly empty, fancy ass apartment. I squealed into the paper, lifting it to my face and shimmying my hips side to side. I turned from my kitchen to face the floor to ceiling windows facing the spectacular view out towards the city and squealed a little harder as I clutched the paper to my chest.

This was it. I was getting out of here. I was leaving this seemingly spectacular view, one that most would kill for, and I was taking my terrible couch and my floor mattress with me. I wasn’t sure when exactly, but I was leaving. I was getting away from this big city, from all the noise and the lights and the daggum pigeons and I was taking everything I had taken away from me back into my life.

This was exactly the kind of life-altering shift I’d been praying, begging, for. A food truck competition where the winner would take home five thousand dollars. Five. Thousand.

That was enough to get me out of my apartment, enough to help me buy myself out of the lease that I was scraping by to barely afford, and take me back home. Where the grass was greener. Literally. You know, because all of the city’s pollution. The greenest grass here was turf and burned beneath your feet. No, the grass I needed was real, soft, fertile strands that ran for miles and miles down my family’s acreage. Where you could run barefoot across the fields with your long skirt hiked up in your hands and dance to your hearts content. Where nostalgia and comfort mixed in this perfect cocktail called Joy and made you feel like the world was spinning just a little slower for you.

Yes, this was it, alright. I was going back home. Home to Willow Creek Farms in Oak Ridge Alabama.

I lifted both of my pale freckled hands to the air, the flier dropping to my feet, and raised two middle fingers to the skyline of buildings on the other side of this window. I laughed like a mad woman- maybe I was one, who knew anymore. I laughed and danced and twirled, shooting the bird at everything around me with the biggest smile I’d mustered in years. Since I moved here, really.

I could do it. I had the skills. I had science on my side, and if there was one thing I knew in this world it was that science would never let you down. People changed, seasons went on, time left like sand in an hour glass but science was always there for you. And as long as I stuck to it in my recipes, as long as I measured and calculated everything with a chemists mindset, then they turned out perfect. Better than perfect…whatever that was. Didn’t matter. It meant I had this in the bag.

The back pocket of my pink checkered shorts began to vibrate violently against my tush. For a brief moment I wondered if it was my landlord calling to kick me out for flipping off the entire city of Philadelphia, then decided I didn’t care who it was. Not while I was in this state.

I lifted the phone to my ear. “Hellooo?” I sang out.

“My, my little Winnie.” A familiar, confident voice sang right back. “Did you recently get laid or are we happy because of another Madam Curie documentary?”

I smiled because if there was anyone in the world I wanted to talk to right now, it was Lottie Walker. My cousin, on my mom’s side, my closest friend, and my only confidant.

The Walker/Meadow families were a nosy bunch, all of them terrible secret keepers. Every Christmas I swear they’d tell you what they got you three weeks in advance because they simply couldn’t hold it back anymore. If you told one of them something, you’ve told the entire family. All of them except Lottie. She was a sealed vault, and good luck cracking her. Believe me, I tried multiple times when I was in high school andher brother refused to admit he did in fact eat the last of my barbecue I was saving for dinner.

‘My mouth is shut, Winnie girl.’ She’d say, miming zipping her lips together and throwing away a key.

So if there was anyone I was going to share this with, it was her.

“Neither,” My smile was so evident in my voice. “You wouldn’t believe what I just got myself into.”

“Let me guess-”

“There’s a competition-”

“I said let me guess!” She yelled back to my, cutting me off. I stayed silent to let her speak her own predictions out.

“There’s a competition.” Lottie mused. “Oh, I am so good. How good am I, Winnie girl?”

“So good.” I dead panned. “But really, there’s this food truck competition here in Philly. And long story short the winner gets…well, let’s just say it’s enough money to get me a ticket down there this fall.”

“Winnie!” She gasped a loud laugh. “Are you serious, right now? Tell me you’re serious.”

“I am so serious.” I confirmed. “The competition is the weekend before Thanksgiving. I don’t know how long it takes for the money to kick in but if I can pull it right, I can be there for the holidays.”

I pictured it already: sitting at a table surrounded by my family, a big turkey in front of us and my handmade apple pies resting on the dessert platter. The smell of autumn and the sounds of the farm in the distant.

“Oh my god, I’m going to cry.” I heard shuffling and then her nose being blown into a tissue. “You’re coming home?”

I nodded and looked out at the view. Rows of buildings, cars, and people all living their own lives. I scowled down at thestreets and like a big ‘FU’ to this city I said right back. “I’m coming home.”

This was never my town, not like Oak Ridge was. This never once felt like home. It was a prison cell with no parole, but now it was like I was handed the keys back. Like a lock was being flipped and I was going to finally exit, just as soon as I timed it right. Moving here was the biggest mistake of my life- coming from someone who once decided she didn’t need to wear underwear beneath her far too short sundress on a brisk windy day down the streets of Philly.

I once put my entire life into the hands of another person, a man of all things, and it left me here. In an apartment I couldn’t afford, with a mostly empty fridge, a financed couch that I was still paying off, and a very thin mattress that sat in my bedroom floor. Everything I owned outright could fit into my medium sized pastel yellow suitcase and I was going to keep it that way. I’d spent so long with a leash around me, being dragged left and right. Being shoved and forced into a mental closet. A small space that only shrunk more and more as time grew on. I’d had five years of my life cut off from the people and the things I loved and I vowed to myself I would never do it again.

This was only the start of that vow.

“First thing we’re doing when you get here is taking a trip straight to Wind Creek and we’re playing a round, just me and you.”

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