Page 126 of We Met Like This
We were sitting at the dinner table, a plateful of street tacos between us. We’d both just gotten home from work. Mr. Twenty-Three (twenty-two?) was right, sneakers were a must. I’d been on my feet all day and I was tired. I hadn’t even had a second to feel sorry for myself. Okay, fine, I had a few seconds for that.
“I don’t believe in myself,” I said again. “I believed in everything my sister ever did with all my heart, knew she would succeed. But when it came to me, I second-guessed, let myselfbe talked out of everything, just assumed I would fail. I have always gotten in my own way.”
“Your sister isn’t innocent in all this.”
“I know,” I said, squeezing a lime over the cabbage and meat on my taco. “But it’s not her life. It’s mine. She is not the arbiter of success. I do not have to do things the way she did them in order for them to work. I don’t always have to defer to her.”
“Amen,” Sloane said.
“I’m going to post in more writer forums and travel to writing conferences. Get myself in front of writers.”
Sloane’s eyebrows popped up. “Yes, you should.”
“I know, I should save my money.”
“I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
I laughed. “Yes, you were.”
“Yes, I was,” she said around a bite of taco.
“I’m going to borrow money from my parents so I’m not so strapped. Because I believe I’m going to be successful and I didn’t do a good job of making them believe that. I’ll make a PowerPoint or something. They’ll eat that up.”
She squeezed my arm. “Tell me you’re going to quit your new job.”
“Ha! Yes, I am. Because I’m going to put more time into my business.”
“Because you are going to succeed,” she said.
“Because I am going to succeed,” I repeated.
CHAPTER 38
I endlessly swiped as I lay in my dark room. Rejection after rejection. I knew which face I was waiting for. He had come up time and again whenever I’d redownloaded the apps for the last three years. He would come up now and it would be a sign that I was supposed to message him, forgive him. After all, he’d only known a week before I had. And he had tried to tell me in the car and in the silo and now that I thought about it, when he was drunk too. I hadn’t let him. I needed to get over myself. Our meet-cute was these damn dating apps. They’d thrown us together in the beginning and they’d throw us together again now.
Only he wasn’t coming up. It felt like my finger had crossed my screen more than a hundred times. The screen was smudged at this point and it was harder to swipe away each denial, my palms clammy. Maybe this was the actual sign.
I exed out of the app and set my alarm for eight o’clock the next morning. I had work to do. Now wasn’t the time to get sidetracked with the drama my life had turned into.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Kari said.
The living room was dark. Sloane had pausedPromising Young Womanwhen my phone rang and we both saw Kari Cross’s name on the screen. It had been another long day full of quitting a job I’d only worked one day at. Apologizing profusely to Cheryl about how I hoped this wouldn’t reflect poorly on her (she understood and said it wouldn’t). Presenting a PowerPoint to my parents, who were both delighted to hand over the asked-for sum with assurances about how proud of me they were. I was sure my mom felt guilty about how the showdown in Audrey’s backyard had gone, but I wasn’t going to question the change of heart.
It was now nineP.M.Not too late, but too late for Kari Cross to be calling me. It was elevenP.M.her time.
“You’ll do what?” I asked Kari, confused. “Is this about the videos I sent? Did they come through okay?”
“They were amazing. Everything I needed and more. You went above and beyond.”
“Thank you. I had fun.”
“I could tell. I need to pay you. Will you send me your e-pay info?”
“Of course. Thank you.”
“But that’s not why I called. These videos along with the latest notes you sent and how genuinely invested you are in my career is why I’d like you to be my agent.”
I stood up and the popcorn bowl that was in my lap crashed to the floor, hitting the coffee table on the way down and spewing popcorn all over the carpet.
