Page 106 of The Frog Prince
This morning I took a cab to work, but I take a bus home. There’s no reason to hurry now. Nothing to do.
It’s the middle of the morning, not yet ten thirty, and the bus isn’t even a quarter full. The bus stops, and no one gets on or off, and I watch the city pass by, beautiful in the crisp yellow morning light, the sky overhead an endless French blue.
The snorts and squeals of the bus are a strange melody as I head toward my part of town, the little city within the city that’s become home.
I’m going to miss City Events. I really liked working there, and even though there were games and stresses, I learned a lot. I made new, true friends. I discovered I can handle pressure and juggle multiple accounts. I realized that Jean-Marc wasn’t the be-all and end-all, that life continues even after heartbreak and failure, and it’ll continue now. I might feel horrible (and I do; I’m about as low as I could imagine being… rejected and cast out), but I’m not alone or lonely.
I forget who said it to me, but all things end. Yet endings are also beginnings, and someday I’ll look back and see this as the beginning of something new. Something good.
I don’t feel good, and as I climb off the bus, I feel as if a thousand pounds rested on my chest. I breathe in little gasps, because if I breathe too deep, it hurts far worse.
Don’t think about feelings, I tell myself, turning the corner to my street. Think about goals, action, plans. Think about what needs to be accomplished, not what’s happened. The past is the past. I can only go forward.
Again.
Change is inevitable. Change is essential. Change—
“What are you doing home, Holly?”
Cindy.
She’s in the driveway, loading some kind of athletic gear into her trunk, and even in her cropped khakis and fitted white Gap T-shirt and her baby blue Skechers she looks taut, polished, honed. Maybe it’s her smooth, glossy hair, her pale olive complexion, or the snapping glints in her eyes, but she’s always on the money. Tough. Incisive.
And I know I will never be this way. Ever. It’s not bad. It’s just not me.
I know this. I will always give others the benefit of the doubt. Approach with high hopes and expectations. Trust because trust is better than mistrust. And maybe it’s naive, but I learned to be open and kind and friendly in my small town in Central California, where the Marshes and the Parkers and the Bothofs treated everyone well. Visalia was where you could buy seventy-five-cent hot dogs and twenty-five-cent strawberry sodas at Taylor’s Hot Dog Stand, and your bearded pediatrician, Dr. Castiglione, made you feel as though you were the only patient in the world.
I will always be grateful for the lessons learned in places that are small and friendly, kind and unpretentious. I may have missed out on the glamour lessons, the sophisticated shops, and the distinctions between designer shoes, but I got other things, like how to distinguish orchards, drive in the tule fog, and enjoy the sweetest smell in the world: the scent of orange blossoms on a hot, dry summer night.
No one in a city can know that smell.
No one from a city can know the dust and boots, the jocks and the rebels, and the hundreds of kids with big-city dreams.
“I got fired,” I say calmly.
“Are you going to be able to pay your rent?”
“Hopefully.” And with a nod, I jog up the stairs to the apartment I never really could afford anyway.
*
I’ve been homebarely twenty minutes when the phone rings. It’s Tessa. “What the hell did you do?” She’s swearing, cursing, a gibberish of angry words. “You are such a dumb-ass,” she rages. “Jesus, Holly. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Why cut your own throat? Why be a freaking martyr?”
“I’m not—”
“You damn well are.” She takes a short breath, a swift intake that sounds almost like a sniffle. “Don’t be a dumb-ass anymore.”
Is Tessacrying? “I’m okay, Tessa—”
“The fuck you are.” She sniffs, pauses, then clears her throat. “Jesus.” She takes another breath. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything? When things are hard, you don’t quit—”
“Right.”
“And when things get bad, you don’t lay down and die.”
“I know. But, Tessa, I don’t have any proof, and I don’t even know for sure what happened.”
“Bull. You know, I know—everyone knows: Olivia shafted you.”