Page 7 of Holiday Romance
Not by text.
Not on Christmas Eve.
She wouldn’t.
Beside me, Andrew goes very, very still.
She would.
“White wine?” The oblivious flight attendant reappears beside him, two plastic cups in her hands. “We aren’t supposed to open the bar until after takeoff, but—”
“Yes!” I exclaim, half standing as I startle the poor woman. “Yes, please.”
Andrew doesn’t move as I take the drinks and neither does our new friend, who looks a bit too pleased with herself.
“I know we said we’d let you off easy,” she says as he stares down at the text. “But seeing as it’s our last flight before Christmas, we couldn’t ignore the opportunity to embarrass our passengers.”
I glance behind her as two other attendants make their way toward us. Oh no. “I don’t think—”
“Happy Birthday…”
Ohno.
A deep pink flush spreads upward from Andrew’s neck as the cabin crew and then the majority of passengers take up the song.
“Happy Birthday, dear Andrew…”
As they do their rowdy best with the octave leap, Andrew slowly raises his head to look at me.
“Happy Birthday,” I say with a weak smile, and down my cup in one.
CHAPTER ONE
DECEMBER 21ST, NOW
Chicago
I took a quiz the other day. One of those “what should you do with your life, you indecisive idiot” ones. Each question was meaningless (pick a color, choose a salad dressing) and interspersed with memes of celebrities I don’t recognize anymore. At the end of it, I was told to become a kindergarten teacher. I didn’t like that, so I took it again. It told me to go to medical school. As if that was a thing I could just rock up to one evening.
I’ve decided to quit my job, you see. No, I’ve decided to quit mycareer. Three years of law school, four years of law, and five weeks ago, I sat at my desk several hours after I was supposed to have gone home, closed one document, opened another, and realized that not only was I completely miserable, but I had been for a while.
It was like the shower in my first apartment, warm and normal one second, icy cold splinters the next. Don’t get me wrong, it was a relief to finally acknowledge it, but ignorance is bliss, and when my next stage of enlightenment didn’t come, when I didn’t suddenly realize my passion for salsa dancing or my hidden dream to become an accountant, all I was left with was this sick, twisted feeling in my stomach while two little words echoed in my mind, over and over and over again.
Now what?
I still don’t have the answer.
When most people decide to change their lives, they usually know what they want to change themto. They take over a crumbling chalet in the south of France, they retrain as a social worker, they sell all their belongings and become a nun.
They tend not to talk about things like rent and student loans and health insurance. There’s never a four-part YouTube video about all the things I’ll still somehow have to pay for. Never a three-thousand-word blog on how to start again in a realistic, not-completely-abandoning-my-old-life way.
“Molly.”
Maybe I’ll start playing the lottery.
“Molly.”
Or I could get a cat.
