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ChapterOne
Julia
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I sat down heavily on the ancient stool, which nearly gave way, and buried my head in my arms. I lay across the desk, exhausted, hungry, and smelling like stale beer.
Definitely not like this.
“Jules!” a voice from the other side of the office door called. “Julia!”
Dammit.
I couldn’t even get a minute just to rest my head. Just to shut my eyes and pretend everything was like it was a year ago. Before I came back home to Boston. Before I started frantically working in the bar in order to save it.
Before Dad died.
A year ago, I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Columbia. I had degrees in marketing and journalism. I was going to besomebody. I was going to write articles for theNew York Times and start my own magazine. I was going to be one of the “top thirty under thirty.” I was going to live a lavish lifestyle of travel, but still be humble, eat street food in Tijuana and Mumbai, bathe in the waters of the Rocky Mountains, and sleep in a sleeping bag under the stars in the Appalachians. I’d be Hunter S. Thompson of Boston, just without the drugs and in a dress.
I was going to be who I always thought I would be when I was eleven.
A year later and I’m back here, back in the bar, back in the office trying to hide away from the nighttime responsibility of telling the drunks to go home and cleaning piss off the wall in the men’s room.
Somehow, I was here. Home. Dirty, rotten, stinking home. Miserable, dumbass, backward, filthy home.
It was my first day back in town, and I already wanted to throw myself off the Charleston.
The door was thumping now, but I kept my head down. I was rocking it back and forth and muttering to myself.
No. No. I don’t want to go back out there.
“Jules!” the voice cried from the other side as the knob turned experimentally over and over. I had locked it, but it wouldn’t hold. I knew it wouldn’t hold.
It never did.
“No!” I called out, my voice muffled by my own shirt. “No, I don’t want to!”
Thump, thump, thump.The banging on the door was loud and reverberating around me. My name was being shouted but I didn’t care. They couldn’t make me. They couldn’t. I would just stay here forever. I’d…
Then I woke up.
I pushed myself up on my elbows as I looked around wildly. I was in a hotel room, not the bar. I couldn’t be in the bar. The bar still wasn’t open yet.
It was a dream.
Thump, thump, thump.
“Jules?”
Ahh, that part wasn’t.
I sat up fully, realizing that I had fallen asleep, face first, onto the bed without even changing my clothes. Without even getting under the covers. I had walked in, tossed my bag to the side of the mattress, and collapsed down on my face.
I recognized the voice now that it wasn’t being filtered through the nightmare of escaping work. It was my sister, Lena. My fraternal twin, and the only person in my family I didn’t actively avoid. She was also the only person I told where I would be staying tonight. I didn’t want to put Lena out, didn’t want to do an all-night wine and whine marathon with my bestie Caroline, and couldn’t possibly imagine the awkwardness of staying with Mom, so I chose the hotel. It was down the street from the pub, had a bus stop right outside, and had the cleanest beds of any of the places anywhere close by in South Boston.
I could rest here.
“Just a sec,” I called out. I caught a vision of myself in the mirror. Total winner right there. Smeared lipstick, hair a tangled mess from the bun that fell out and then wound itself tighter and in knots, a Tasmanian Devil t-shirt I’d had since I was eight and now showed off my stomach, and yoga pants.
It was practically the customer uniform of Wawa.
