The Opposite of Falling Apart [Formerly Three and a Half Good Legs]

6 (free sample)

B R E N N A N

Brennan took off her hairnet and tossed it in the trash, untying her apron simultaneously with her other hand and pulling it over her head.

She was exhausted. She was supposed to have had a day off this week, but instead, here it was Saturday and Brennan had now worked six days in a row, thanks to her coworker with the 'backache'.

Brennan trudged out to her car, immediately getting hit by a wave of humidity as she exited the air-conditioned store. Nice, she thought, taking off her glasses that had immediately fogged up. I love Illinois summers.

She sighed, getting into her car and putting the air conditioner at full-blast.

She made it home. It was late; her parents would be in bed. She punched in the code for the garage door and went inside. Her brother, Ayden, was sitting in the living room, playing some game on his phone.

"Hey," she said, tiredly.

"Hey," he muttered, not even looking up. "There's food in the fridge."

Brennan trudged sleepily to the kitchen. "Nope," she said. "Too tired. I'll just take a piece of fruit."

He shrugged. "All right then. Good night."

She headed upstairs to her bedroom, and changed into shorts and an old t-shirt before flopping into bed and staring at the ceiling.

Brennan felt bad; she hadn't actually sat down and written anything out for her book. No one would know; since she was too much of a coward to post it to the writing website she'd found, allfixx.com, no one could read it. Even so, when she rolled over and turned off the lamp, casting the room into darkness that was only broken by the white light of the moon through her open window, she felt the familiar punch of failure in her gut. Like she should have been more productive, and had instead given in and had...well...not been.

Brennan was conflicted, because she thought that maybe writing was this big journey, like an adventure of sorts, that should be enjoyed one step at a time...You would work hard and then, one day, look back and realize where that hard work had led...However, she also wanted to feel like what she was doing mattered now, at least to someone. Give up, her brain scoffed. You can't even read your own writing without wanting to change it. That means no one else will like it either.

In high school, Brennan had written Harry Potter fanfiction. The fact that Brennan wrote fanfiction had been a running joke. Eventually, somewhere along the proverbial road, she'd stopped telling people what she enjoyed, because she only got too excited, and most people looked at her like she was crazy. You could like Harry Potter, but you couldn't love it the way Brennan did, to the brink of obsession, to the point of writing fanfiction. Once she started toning down the 'fangirl' part of her, Brennan became the most boring person ever. Even when she eventually started writing her own work, she didn't tell anyone, because the Act of Telling felt like exposing herself, somehow. All of this came from her mind, after all. There had to be some psychoanalytical crap buried in there somewhere, that said something about Brennan. She didn't want to know what it said about her. She didn't want to give people the chance to think about it.

Brennan sighed, turning on her side and facing the wall, pulling her blankets up to her chin. In the dark, it was easy to start worrying about college again, because her room at college would smell different, and there would be the shadows of different trees dancing on her wall. The familiar sick, nauseous feeling twisted her stomach. She shut her eyes and tried to fall asleep. She was tired, after all.

It was one of those nights that, no matter how tired she was, Brennan couldn't sleep.

She wondered if college would be like high school. Everyone (her parents, her guidance counselor, the old lady she worked with at the deli) constantly said that it would be nothing like high school; people wouldn't be so fickle, or people would be more accepting...They were more themselves. Something like that. Brennan wasn't quite sure that she believed them.