My phone rang in the middle of my shift, and my boss heard it before I could silence it.
“No cell phones on floor,” he growled at me in his thick Albanian accent. “You know this.”
“Sorry, Mr. Sokoli. I was running late this morning and forgot it was in my pocket.”
He knew I was one of his best waitresses, so he just grumbled in Albanian and waved me off. “Table eight wants more coffee.”
I hustled with the coffeepot, making sure to at least silence the phone. I felt it vibrate with a voicemail, but I got double-sat again because the girl in the back section was new and couldn’t handle more than three tables at a time, so I was busy running my two tables at once in her section, plus the six tables in progress in my own. By the time we closed and I got through all my side-work, it was after eleven at night and I hadn’t even had time for dinner, so my stomach was growling. I counted out my tips, tipped out the bus boy, pocketed the rest, and headed for my bike.
By which I mean bicycle. The old Camry of Mom’s I’d been driving since I was sixteen—handed down from Mom to Charlie, to Cassie, to Lexie, and then to me, had over a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it—and it had finally died. Dead, done, buh-bye. It needed a new transmission, which Mr. Sokoli, who knew a bit about cars, told me would cost more to fix than the thing was worth. So I was stuck using a twenty-year-old ten-speed I’d gotten for ten bucks at the Salvation Army.
Two roommates had moved out with boyfriends, which left Jillie, Leighton, and me paying extra rent, and things had been dead lately, and…well, the truth is, I was just broke. I had two hundred and nineteen dollars in my bank account, another hundred and five in my pocket, and rent was due tomorrow and it was three hundred. That would leave me with…shit, math is hard…twenty-four dollars to my name. For food, for everything I would need until my next shift, and I was scheduled to be off for two days. I’d have to pick up some shifts. Whenever I could, I worked doubles and extra shifts and even picked up some shifts at the cafe where Leighton worked, washing dishes for cash. But I was always a day late and a dollar short.
I’d gotten partial scholarships to local colleges, and Mom had made an open-ended offer to pay for community college if I wanted, and I’d tried that for a semester, but I just…I had no clue what I would study, so why waste the time and money? I was turning twenty in a week and had no education beyond high school. No talents, like Cassie with dance or Charlie with being, like a super genius with five degrees or whatever, and now Lexie was this world superstar musician all of a sudden, and even Poppy was like the most talented artist I’d ever seen—she took photographs and painted over them, used magazine cutouts and feathers and just about anything that inspired her, and she would embellish the photograph until it was this whole new thing.
All my sisters had talents and skills and careers and futures.
And then there was me. Torie. The middle child. You’d think Lexie would be the middle, since she had Charlie and Cass above her and Poppy and me below, but somehow I was the middle girl. The quiet one. The one who never went out for the school play, never did volleyball or soccer or music lessons, or dance. I didn’t paint or sing, I didn’t excel at academics. I had nothing. I just…was.
I waited tables and smoked pot with Leighton and Jillie. I didn’t even have a boyfriend. I’d never had a boyfriend. Max didn’t count—we fooled around when we were stoned, but it was just fooling around, and I’d told him I wasn’t going to sleep with him. I wasn’t wastingthaton a stoner loser like Max. I say that with affection, because I’m a stoner loser too, and he’s been my best friend since third grade. But I don’t love him and so we just fool around.
The bike ride home was long and cold because it was late and I’d forgotten my hoodie this morning, and then it started drizzling and by the time I got home I was soaked and freezing my tits off. Leighton and Jillie were watchingThe Last Unicornfor the billionth time, so I jumped in the shower to warm up.
And by the time I got out, I was dead tired and went straight to bed.
I forgot about listening to the voicemail from earlier in the day, or even looking to see who’d called. My phone never even made it to the charger.
So when I woke up the battery on my phone was dead. I juiced it up enough to turn it on and saw the call had been from Lexie. The voicemail was like, four minutes long, and that just sounded super boring, so I just called Lexie back.
“Torie!” Bright, chipper, happy. “Did you get my voicemail?
I sighed. “Why are you so loud?”
She laughed. “Are you stoned already?”
“No, I wish. I just woke up. I saw your voicemail, but it was like an hour long so I figured I’d just call you. What’s up?”
“You really should’ve listened to it,” she said, “because now I have to say it all over again. But it’s better to say it directly to you than on a voicemail anyway, so…the story, Torie, is I’m getting married.”
I blanked out. “Uh. To who?”
“Myles North.”
“The country dude you were on stage with?”
“Yeah, him.”
“Dude, he’s hot.”
“I know!”
“You’re marrying him?”
She laughed. “Yeah, I know, it’s a little sudden but it’s, like, the most amazing thing ever.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Like, four months.”
