Between Boyfriends (Book 1 in the Between Boyfriends Series)

Chapter 11

Partially-filled-out applications littered Jan's desk. Hidden under them were several layers of unopened bills, which had begun showing up in her mailbox over the past few weeks. Jan coped by shoving them under the pile and pretending they weren't there.

Thanks to Jan's wonderful organizational skills, the surface of her desk was no longer visible under the mound of papers. Lisa had long ago dubbed Jan a mess freak (which is what Lisa called people who were the opposite of neat freaks) and Jan was finally living up to her full potential.

The only hope Jan had of ever seeing her desk again was to get a job. Her bills would not magically pay themselves and disappear, even though they'd always seemed to before.

Oh well, she thought, and forced two new bills into the heap. Out of sight, out of mind.

Her computer at least remained unchanged; it was as sticky and dusty as always. Jan took comfort from that as she sat staring at the blank screen. It was now three weeks since her disownment, and Jan was still in denial. Juan had tried to talk to her nearly a hundred times about it, but Jan pretended not to hear him. She preferred to sit in her apartment and mope, which is what she'd been doing for the last six hours. She kept thinking about her rash decision to reveal the existence of the savings account that held the refunded tuition money to Joshua. Her mother's assistant had called her the day after the fight on Halloween night and Jan had told him everything. Now that she was facing the reality of how expensive her life was, she wished she'd kept that bit of knowledge to herself.

She also wished she had the courage to tell her mother what a bitch she was. She had nothing to lose now. She'd surely been taken out of the will, off the Christmas card list, and been erased from the family tree. Not that Jan cared much about any of that. She was just grateful she hadn't been blacklisted from the country club. Working out had become her new method of escapism. Staring at men in short workout shorts was almost as good as going out with them, she told herself.

Unfortunately, her thirty sessions with Shauna were running out. Jan knew that regardless of how much she had begun to appreciate the benefits of regular exercise, as soon as she wasn't being held accountable for her workouts, her consistency would suffer.

Jan sighed and got up from her desk, preferring to pace back and forth in front of her window. She'd almost worked up the nerve to open a few bills and organize them. Lisa had advised she start with the most crucial bills first, ones that related to living expenses versus luxuries like DVR, and put them in order by due date. This small piece of organizational wisdom had been given to Jan along with many other practical suggestions for money management within minutes of sharing the news of her monetary woes.

Besides dispensing good advice, Lisa had rounded up Becki, and a rather reluctant Nichole, to brainstorm potential jobs for Jan and collect applications, though Jan suspected that the two applications Lisa had sworn were from Nichole — one for a petting zoo attendant and the other for a position as a candy striper — had actually come from Becki.

So far, about twenty applications had found their way to Jan's desk. She was grateful, and a little surprised, that her friends had been so productive and was glad to have the applications handy. She was running out of toilet paper, and figured the applications might be the answer.

Although it wasn't that Jan was morally opposed to working. It was simply that being raised in luxury had robbed her of the necessary coping skills needed to work crappy jobs. If she'd been raised like Lisa (poor), she would have developed a tolerance for working and felt she could have actually enjoyed it. But being born to privilege meant she was somehow disadvantaged when it came to searching for and obtaining a thankless job.