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  I get access to the television later that night, after Will finally shuffles off to bed. “You’re watching Model Mission on MTV. We’re getting ready to give one young lady an amazing opportunity at a $100,000 modeling contract with Imagine Models. One girl we have chosen from among thousands will have her life changed forever and be catapulted into a fabulous modeling career with one of the top agencies in the world.” I watch transfixed as the cameras take us to contestant Crystal’s hometown. She’s your typical small-town girl who goes to school at the same high school as everyone else in her town above age fourteen. She has long, blonde, straight hair and those really cute teeth, the kind where the eyeteeth on both sides stick out just a little more from the front four like that actress Kirsten Dunst. They aren’t perfect, but they give her smile unique character that I like.

  Crystal has always dreamed of modeling, but currently works at McDonald’s for extra money. She must beat four other contestants from all over the United States in order to launch herself from Big Macs to the Big Apple. Cameras follow each young girl to their hometown where they talk about their dreams of traveling and making it big in the modeling world.

  I’m twenty-four now, which is over the hill by anyone’s standards for a modeling career, but even when I was a teenager, there was no chance in hell that I could’ve been a model.

  I was an okay baby. Chunky, but I guess I’d say I was cute. Somewhere around the third grade is when I imagine cute ended and painfully-awkward began. I had long, thick hair I didn’t know what to do with. The sloppy ponytail became my signature look. I don’t know which was worse, the extreme over bite or the large space between my two front teeth. To add insult to injury, I started wearing glasses in the fourth grade that got progressively thicker each year I went in for an eye exam. Getting to wear glasses like Mom and Dad was cool at first, but by the time I got to middle school, any perceived cool factor was gone and I was just a goofy looking girl with glasses and bad teeth. I started out tiny like the rest of them, but puberty hit at twelve and I was no longer the slim-hipped, petite pixie gymnast that my gym mates were. As the tallest girl, I was last to march in at every gymnastics competition, and our coach had to raise the high bar to keep my pointed toes from scraping the mats. By high school, I was all muscle from years of balancing on my hands. Sort of like the female version of a linebacker-turned-sumo wrestler, according to the current state of my thighs. I was too tall for a gymnast but, even at five-seven, not tall enough for modeling, especially without the collarbones and the long, slim torso to go along with it.

  I am the antithesis of five-foot ten Crystal, who goes on to win the whole Model Mission competition. She is overcome with tears during her winning runway walk then falls triumphantly into the arms of her family. I wonder what it feels like to make your parents swell with pride and admiration. The show ends as she prepares to embark on an opportunity that most people can only dream about. It’s 11:00 p.m., so I click off the TV, brush my teeth and get into bed, all the while imagining how different my life would be if I were a fashion model on the fast track to fame and fortune instead of an overworked cubicle dweller with a forever fiancé and no wedding date in sight.

  Chapter 2

  One of the few perks of my job is a business casual dress code with jeans allowed on Friday. That means cotton blend casual pants with whatever shirt I can find that’s not too wrinkled through the week and jeans on Friday.

  I push aside the vision of me on a plane to New York City to start my modeling career as I lug a heavy claims file off of my shelf. With a resigned thud, it hits my desk. Opening it, I muck my way through the nine-hour day that never ends and, as zoned out as I feel when I leave the office, I snap out of it on my way home.

  Once again, Will relegates me to street parking. He used to leave the parking spot open for me. That he no longer does stings, a sensation that has become familiar. Rather than face Will’s wrath for blocking him in, I maneuver my way into a crappy parallel parking job down the street. I consider straightening out but I’d probably only make it worse.

  He looks away from the television, acknowledging me as I step into our apartment.

  “Hey, Bumble Bee,” he says.

  Encouraged by his smile and the use of a pet name I haven’t heard in a while, I decide to make a move. “Hey. How about we go to dinner tonight or a movie or both?” I ask nervously, bracing myself for a cop-out, but he surprises me.

  “Sure, I’m just going to finish this game and then we can go.”

  Excitedly, I take out my laptop to check movie times. It’s 4:10 p.m. now. Strike Back starts at 8:00 p.m. and we’ve both wanted to see that since we saw the first trailer.

  “If we leave by 5:00 p.m., we’ll have plenty of time to go to dinner and see Strike Back.”

  “Okay. I’m almost done.”

  He gets a kiss on the cheek for that. I choose my go-to pink cotton top with the cute fringe around the neck. I’m pretty sure it’s the same shirt I wore the last time we went out, but that was a long time ago. In the bathroom, I touch up my lip gloss, then flop down on the couch next to Will and wait for him to finish his game.

  “Almost ready to go?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  His mouth twists in concentration and his hands clutch the controller tighter as the animated football players charge across the TV screen. Twenty minutes later, he’s still at it.

  “It’s 5:10 p.m. Are you about ready to go yet?”

  “Yes, I told you I was almost done. Just give me a minute.”

  I sense a bit of irritation in his voice, so I don’t push it.

  Finally, he pushes the power button on the game controller and gets up, so I do too, but then he says he needs to iron his jeans. It’s 6:00 p.m., already an hour past when I said we should leave, and now he wants to iron his jeans?

  “Can’t you just wear what you have on, or not iron them just this once?”

  “No, it’ll just take me a minute.”

  He always does this. I mean, who irons their jeans anyway? And if it’s not ironing that’s holding us up, he has to shave. That can take up to a good hour. I’m supposed to be the girl, but why does it always take him longer to get ready? I’m twitching with the urge to let him know exactly how I feel about his compulsive desire to iron denim, but it will destroy any sense of harmony that we’ve got going and not only our date, but our entire weekend would be ruined. It’s a sad pattern we’ve repeated more times than I like to admit.

  Instead, I sit quietly with my phone and kill time on the ridiculous time suck of an addiction that is social media. I peruse Facebook and Twitter only occasionally, but my favorite is Instagram. I don’t particularly like @BaileySueKnight’s ugly, felt-brimmed hat sitting in front of an exposed brick wall but I mindlessly fill in the little red heart anyway, pondering what I would have to do to get 1,000 likes. Hmmm...people like Ikea. I imagine myself risking my life to climb onto Ikea’s roof, doing the perfect handstand right above the sign within the ten seconds it takes for the self-timer to go off, surviving the climb down, then carefully selecting the perfect filter. Dismissing it as an option, my finger continues a mindless scroll, sending me down the rabbit whole of grotesquely flexible dancers, cleavage-baring selfies, and superior lives highlighted by must-have outfits and easy-to-make peanut butter brownies with caramel sauce drizzled on top.

  By the time Will gets dressed and we’re out the door, it’s 6:30 p.m. We get into his car and head over to our favorite spot, Antonio’s. It’s a busy Friday night, so of course it takes a good twenty minutes to get seated. The waitress takes our drink order right away.

  “Are you two ready to order?”

  I should really try something else, but change isn’t really part of my vocabulary.

  “Yes, I’ll have the Chicken Quesadilla.”

  Will smiles at me and touches my left hand across the table, eliciting a mischievous grin and an excited hand squeeze in return. By the time our food comes, it feels like the old us—th
e us who used to sit on the same side of the booth and hold hands under the table. When the check comes, I quickly slide it to my side of the table and jam my credit card in the folder, hoping he doesn’t notice. He catches my eye contentiously but says nothing, reaching into his pocket for tip money.

  We’re pushing it, but the theater is within walking distance. I think we’ll make it just in time to miss previews, until I notice the crowd. Throngs of date night couples holding hands and high school kids hanging out surround us as we make our way towards the front of the building.

  “Didn’t you already buy the tickets online?” Will asks when I stop at the end of a very long ticket line.

  “No. I never said I was going to buy the tickets online. I said we should leave at 5:00 so we’d have plenty of time to make dinner and the movie.”

  “Well, I assumed that you would just go ahead and buy the tickets so that’s why I took my time getting ready.”

  “Didn’t you wonder why I kept asking you if you were ready and was so anxious to get out the door? It’s just the movies. There was no need for you to even bother with ironing your jeans.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me just because you didn’t plan ahead.”

  Of course. Everything is always my fault. I didn’t realize we had raised our voices until people in line ahead of us turn around to sneak peaks at our lover’s quarrel. I stare at the ground, arms crossed, cheeks burning with shame. Will has stepped away and slightly behind me. I can’t see his face, but I’m too angry and embarrassed to turn around.

  Why does this always have to happen with us? Why can’t we just go out to dinner and a movie like a normal couple without it ending up in some ridiculous argument? By the time we get tickets, we’ll have missed the beginning and end up breaking our necks staring up at the movie screen if we’re lucky to get a seat at all.

  “Let’s just go home,” I say, pivoting briskly on my heels.

  I feel him follow me to the car, and the silence on the ride home is thick and heavy with words nobody wants to say. We march single file into the house, where he heads for the play station and I head for the bedroom.

  I was only eighteen years old when we met and never would have predicted we’d end up like this, but what does anyone know about anything or anyone, including oneself, when they are eighteen?

  Nothing, but you couldn’t tell me that at the time. Not that there were red flags or anything. No one really needed to tell me anything because Will was one of the good ones, and so was I. My parents thought I was a little young to be so serious about one boy, but they weren’t worried about me getting knocked up. He was looking for a good girl to settle down with, and I was a virgin who had never even kissed anyone. Well, unless you count the kiss on the cheek I got from the biggest nerd of the freshman class when I was a junior, which I don’t, because he snuck up on me and I was so embarrassed, I fled to the girl’s restroom and refused to come out for hours.

  Once I became aware of differences between the sexes, boys became a mysterious population of creatures to be frightened of. I kept my distance and, not surprisingly, they did too. In eighth grade, Phaedra, the most popular girl in school, married Rob, the most popular boy. They had a wedding at the picnic tables on the black top during lunch. With her hair teased sky high and her teeth sparkling with silver braces, she said, “I do.” She even fashioned some kind of veil out of sheer, white material. It was the talk of the entire school for days, which is a long time for the attention-span-deficit teenagers. I still can’t figure out why everyone was so obsessed with her in the first place. I mean, what made her so special?

  Phaedra was bold enough to stage a mock wedding in middle school and I was still too scared to look a boy in the eye by the time I graduated from high school. All the other girls had boyfriends, life or death relationships and all the drama that went along with them, but I was always the single one who never got asked to dances. I had to suffer through the dress-shopping craze leading up to the dances, the Friday before squeals of excitement and the Monday after play-by-play gossip of what went down.

  That summer before my freshman year in college, my best friend Jamie dragged me to more clubs than I care to remember. We were always clearly marked as under twenty-one by our lack of wristband, but it didn’t bother her because she got to mingle with older guys. It was only a matter of time before she would dazzle one with her witty banter, long, silky, black hair and hourglass-shaped, petite body. Said guy would have friends, of course, and it was my job to keep them occupied while she wooed her target. The night I met Will was no different. There I was, making polite but loud conversation over the music blaring from concert-grade speakers while she was on the dance floor seducing her latest crew-cut conquest. She made it look so easy. With nothing more than a smile and a look, she had them in the palm of her hand.

  The polite banter dried up, my throat was hoarse and I was staring tiredly off into space when I got this weird prickly feeling at the back of my neck. When he saw me looking, he turned away, but not before I caught the slight smile on his lips and a dimple flashing in his left cheek. He took an inconspicuous sip of his drink, and I looked away, stomach churning with anticipation. A group of girls glanced in his direction not too far from where he stood, one of them undoubtedly pumped up to go in for the kill. I managed to catch Jamie’s eye and give her that I’m ready to go right now glare and she finally grabbed her guy’s hand and bounced over to our table. After the obligatory exchanging of phone numbers, she finally extricated herself.

  Barely pausing for a breath, Jamie went on and on about this new guy as we made our way towards her car. Then she asked me, “So, did you meet anyone?”

  Just as I was about to tell her no, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the guy with the dimple.

  “Hi, are you leaving already?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I croaked. My voice was all but gone after a night of yelling in a loud club.

  We laughed at my disappearing voice and, with a wave, Jamie left us alone in awkward silence. The streetlights shone on his face and I got a better look at his classically handsome features; not one but two dimples. I self-consciously pushed my glasses up and ran my hand over my hair, which was an absolute tangled mess after a long night out.

  “I’ve been watching you all night. I wanted to say hi, but you were sitting with those two guys.”

  No one had ever said a thing like that to me, nor had I ever imagined that anyone ever would.

  “I don’t know them. They were just being polite.”

  I backed away, expecting nothing. He asked for my number.

  Will could have been a heartbreaker, a deranged psychopath, or the best thing to ever happen to me, but when I walked away from him that night, I assumed I’d never have the privilege of finding out. He called the next day.

  So began my first relationship. The first boy I ever dated turned into the first man I ever loved. It was so long ago, but I can still feel the butterflies of fear and desire coursing through my teenage body.

  He saw me through the glasses, behind the braces, beyond every insecurity I ever had. We bonded over being only children, our love of obscure horror films, and a desire to commit that most people our age didn’t have. When I had bad days and was feeling especially hateful towards myself and miserable for reasons I couldn’t really explain, he held me and told me that everything would be okay, that I was okay. I believed him, and it was. He knows all my secrets and loves me anyway.

  I toss and turn to sounds of guns firing and cars crashing through paper thin walls, but I wouldn’t dare ask him to turn the volume down. Over the years, we’ve forgotten how to meet in the middle and each wrongdoing is a strike against the other. The walls between us grow taller and increasingly impenetrable. We’re terrible together right now, but he keeps me from falling apart.

  Chapter 3

  Since our disastrous date night, Will has been giving me the silent treatment. I come home and go straight into the bedroom to read while he stays in th
e living room with the TV. I wasn’t even mad about anything because I’m used to getting blamed. He was the one holding a grudge, but if he wouldn’t speak then neither would I. He finally got over it, and only a few conversations later, we are already embroiled in another battle.

  I’m a candy junky and usually have lifesavers in my purse at all times but had just ran out, so I asked Will to pick up a pack for me while he was out doing errands.

  “Here.” He tosses me a six-pack of pineapple flavor.

  “What’s this? I asked for Cherry. Red.”

  “Oh, sorry,” he says. “That’s the first thing I saw.”

  I sigh and pull out my wallet to pay him back. I hardly ever ask him to do anything for me, but the one time I do he can’t even be bothered to take the time to get it right. They always have Cherry at that Walgreen’s. I shouldn’t say anything, but I can’t help myself.

  “I don’t like Pineapple. That’s the one flavor I don’t even like,” I say, quietly thrusting a crumpled bill into his hand.

  “I said sorry. What more do you want? It’s not a big deal.”

  Arguing with him is always a lose-lose situation, I learned that a long time ago, but the frustration of living with someone who has a perpetual chip on his shoulder gets the best of me. I’m tired of walking on eggshells, so I pounce on them instead.

  “Nothing is ever a big deal to you until it’s me screwing up. Oh, then it’s a big deal. It’s always a big deal when I make a mistake and you don’t hesitate to let me know it. But if I have any problem with anything you do, then I’m just supposed to shut up and act like it never happened.”

  “What’s your problem? It’s just candy.”

  “It’s not about the candy!” I cry out. “I couldn’t care less about some stupid cherry lifesavers. It’s about us, and what’s happened to us.”