Page 7 of Finding Jack
JACK: MILLIONTH? I could have understood to the thousandth power but the millionth is just hurtful.
EMILY: Funny…except not to my BOYFRIEND. Will you stop Photoshopping pics of us?
JACK: Sorry. Yes.
JACK: Wait, there’s an US?
I should have left it there. I really should have. But for reasons I couldn’t really explain, I did a fast and much sloppier photo edit on his mountain biking picture, cropping his head then pasting it onto the body of the first image I found under a search for “bodybuilders.” Now his bike-helmeted head was on top of a big old muscle guy in a tiny speedo. Then I pressed send.
EMILY: No more doing Photoshops for Ranée. You’re enabling her, and she needs NO encouragement. Stop supplying her or I’ll start putting up this kind of garbage all over the place.
JACK: Uh…that wouldn’t bother me. But I get why you’re bothered. Can we start over?
EMILY: ???
The longest chain of “…” in the history of modern communication disappeared and reappeared. At last a message popped up.
JACK: Hi. I’m Jack. Sometimes it’s short for Jacka…never mind. I kind of know your friend Ranée. Every now and then I take a joke too far. I think I recently did that to a girl named…you. So could we start over if I swear not to do any more favors for Ranée?
Was he serious? He wanted to be friends? I could understand that he’d only been doing Ranée’s bidding, but he’d caused some friction between me and Paul, and I was still irritated about having to smooth it over.
EMILY: That’s a nice offer, but no thanks. I just can’t deal with your man bun.
That should shut him down permanently. I closed the chat window and wandered into the kitchen for a bagel. When I finished eating it, I discovered I hadn’t shut down Jack at all. Another message was waiting for me.
JACK: I was going to let this go and stay out of your hair, but then you had to go and make a crack about mine. This man bun is my crowning girly. I thought you were a better woman than that.
I couldn’t let it go. Only an incredibly evolved human could have left such a perfect typo alone.
I was not evolved.
EMILY: Your crowninggirly? I mean…you said it.
JACK: I MEANT GLORY. MY CROWNING GLORY.
EMILY: Your subconscious knows the truth even if you don’t. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You do you.
I waited for another smart remark, but not even the dots appeared, and I realized I’d spent a full two minutes waiting for them. Which was stupid. The whole point of sending a message at all had been to get him to stop paying attention to me, so mission accomplished.
I shut my laptop and took it to my room, then changed into my workout clothes for my kickboxing class. Or as Ranée called it, my “kickdancing” class. I had just scooped up my keys when my phone chimed with a DM alert. I didn’t like the little lurch my stomach gave because my brain told it that it might be Jack.
“Shut up, both of you,” I told them. And then just to break a ridiculous habit before it started, I swept my phone into my gym bag without even checking it.
Which would have been a totally boss move if I hadn’t checked it the second my kickdancing—BOXING—class finished. And there it was, a message notification from Jack.
Well. I wasn’t going to read it. Who cared? It wasn’t a big deal. I was in a relationship with a good guy, and I wasn’t the kind of girl who was going to get distracted by the next hot guy that came along.
Not that Jack was hot. Because man bun. Maybe if it weren’t for that he’d be the kind of guy I’d notice. But that was a moot point.
I drove home and threw myself on the sofa, trying to figure out what I wanted to do to relax. Normally simply walking through the door would do the trick. Ranée and I had met when she worked in marketing at my software firm. We’d clicked right away, and even though she’d taken a job with another company shortly after, we’d decided to share an apartment. Our personalities complemented each other, but so did our tastes. My preference for minimalist lines married with her love of bright pops of color produced an upbeat mid-century design scheme inside our cozy apartment.
I’d found the perfect charcoal gray vintage sofa and she’d livened it up with lime green throw pillows. It was like this throughout our living room and the dining nook/kitchen. The perfect symmetry of my furniture lines and the cheerful splashes of her color always calmed me when I got home, no matter what kind of day I’d had. But right now, I still felt buzzy with unspent emotional energy.
Maybe mindless celebrity stalking would do the trick? I curled up with aPeoplemagazine.
“Where have you been?” Ranée asked, padding out to the living room in bare feet. She had toilet paper shoved between each of her toes. They sported a shiny new shade of purple.
I sat straight up again. “Take that picture off your Facebook.”
