Page 1 of College Town

1

Growing up is shit.

It sucks.

Not because adulthood itself sucks all that much. It does…I mean, it really does…but the problem isn’t the achy back, or the fuzzy short-term memory, or even the crushing anxiety of thinking you might have to declare bankruptcy. None of that.

No, it’s realizing that the person you thought you’d be when you were a kid never manifested. The beautiful house, the flashy car, the high-paying, prestigious job. You didn’t wind up with any of those things. And worst of all, the absolute gut punch of it all, is the crushing truth that, as an adult, once that sugar-sweet high of adolescence has worn off, there’s no such thing as true love. There’s love, sure: all sorts of love. But that bone-deep, blistering, clean-scouring and soul-transcending sort of love you read about in books and watched unfold in movies? That’s not real. The tooth-rotting love you felt as a kid fades in the face of the real world; it slips away.

The best you can hope for, then, is something like contentment.

~*~

“Welcome to Coffee Town, the only place you can soar with the Eagle Espresso. Can I interest you in one of our fresh-baked Danishes?” Lawson deadpans, features schooled to match.

“Pffft.” Dana leans across the counter and socks him in the arm. Hard.

He cracks. “Hey!” Laughing, he rubs at his arm. “Jesus. See if I ever offer you quality customer service again.”

“Offer me an Americano and go on break so you can keep me company.”

“No can do, chica. I lost break privileges.”

She lifts her brows, disbelieving. “You what?”

“I’ve” – he lifts his hands to do air quotes – “abusedthem, apparently.”

Her gaze drops to the counter, then lifts again. “Are you writing on your breaks?”

“Well…” He tries not to cringe, but fails. “It’s just,” he rushes to say, “coffee house, computer – that’s a peanut butter and jelly match made in heaven right there.”

“Yeah, but you writing in public isn’t,” she says, and raps her red-painted nails on the marble. “Come on. They can’t deny you breaks – that’s like, I dunno, an EEOC violation or something. Americano.” She points at him, then over her shoulder. “Join me.”

“But–”

“Now, Law,” she says over her shoulder, and wends her way through the crowd toward a table.

Lawson pouts, but only a little. Takes the next order, then begs an unimpressed Megan to take over at the register, pulls Dana’s Americano, snags a cookie for himself, and makes his way to the prime window table she’s procured for them.

“You could at least sit in the corner by the bathroom,” he says as he folds his long frame down into the chair and slides her coffee over. “It’s bad enough my manager’s gonna be pissed, now we’re taking up, like, the best table.”

She makes a face of faux affrontery. “I’m a paying customer. I can sit where I want.”

Lawson puts his elbows on the table and hunkers down over his cookie.

“Sweetie, don’t slouch. Your manager’s not gonna say shit while I’m here.”

That’s true, and hearing it honestly helps a little.

By virtue of the fact that Lawson is almost forty and a failed novelist, working the counter at his home town coffeeshop, his manager, Kyle, is younger than him. A lot younger than him. A little floppy-haired tyrant who walks with his ass on his shoulders, running Coffee Town like it’s a place that matters, and not the shop nearest campus and the busiest by simple virtue of walkability. Kyle screams if Lawson fucks up the machines; screams if he has to recount the till after close every night; screams if he gets so absorbed in writing that he eats three cookies instead of his allotted one and lets his break run three minutes over the allotted fifteen minutes.

Lawson hates him, but, well, it’s not like he has any other job prospects at the moment.

Look at me now, he thinks in the direction of the kids who’d harassed him in high school.Even more of a fuckup than you all thought I’d turn out to be.

Dana, though, golden hair braided in a princess crown on top of her head, all of her glowing with good health in the radiant sunlight beaming through the window, is very much not a fuckup. She’s anything but. His best friend – real tried and true, since they were in diapers, blood brothers and die-for-each-other BFF kind of love between them – started college the summer after high school graduation, right here in little ol’ Eastman, and got her bachelor’s in three years. Then her masters after that. Then opened her own accounting firm, just one block down from the sun-warmed table where they now sit. Dana is a practical person. A shark, he tells her, laughingly, so she’ll shoot him the bird and then smirk. She was never cursed with romantic passions and creative streaks; was never crippled by the sorts of big dreams that have held him and weighed him down, iron shackles around both ankles.

Today, Dana wears a simple, perfectly-tailored white shirt, and a black skirt, both understated enough to tell him they’reexpensive. Diamond studs wink in her ears, and he knows for a fact that her tasteful nude lipstick is seventy-five dollars a tube.

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