My Saving Grace

Chapter 7

I was on the verge of passing out, my chest rising and falling rapidly as the needle came within inches of my wrist. A thin layer of sweat covered my forehead, and I looked towards Alexa, who was calm and beaming with excitement.

"Girl, you're gonna be fine. Just breathe in and out," she reassured.

"Am I gonna die?", I asked Jason, my tattoo artist.

He laughed in amusement.

"No, you won't die, Sophia. Just focus on something else."

"Ok." My breath left in a rush.

"You ready?" He raised a brow.

"Go for it."

He smiled, and the moment the needle came in contact with my skin, I yelped, my nails digging painfully into my thighs.

Holy fuck, this hurt!

"You're doing great, Sophia," Jason said.

I laughed nervously.

At the end of our freshman year, Alexa and I made a pact that if we remained best friends throughout our undergraduate career, we'd get matching tattoos. So here we were, a week before our commencement at the tattoo shop in Dinkytown, about to have the word "Golden" permanently inked on the inside of our left wrist.

The idea came to us one night at a bar in Stadium Village. I had spent six hours in my junior chemical engineering lab and felt like death, and Alexa had just returned from her semester-long study abroad trip to London.

Once we both got into our majors sophomore year, we had very different schedules and barely got to see each other, despite being roommates in the same apartment we shared with two other girls. But through it all, we remained the best of friends.

I was the shoulder she cried on during her rough break-up with Tristan, and whenever I had to pull an all-nighter to write an eighty-page lab report, she'd have a plate of breakfast and coffee waiting on the kitchen counter for me in the morning.

Our friendship was golden--in fact, some of our friends had even started calling us "the golden girls" after the TV show, so that was what initially sparked the idea for our tattoo. Also, Minnesota's college mascot was the Golden Gopher, so "Golden" was the perfect word to capture our friendship and college memories; that's what we'd ended up deciding that night in the bar.

"There, all done," Jason announced happily.

I looked down at my wrist, where the word "Golden" was beautifully scripted then I glanced over at Alexa, and we both burst into tears.

"Wanna go celebrate you not dying in that tattoo shop?", she asked once we were outside, our wrists all bandaged up.

"Yes! Sally's Saloon sound good?"

Sally's was the bar where we had decided which tattoo to get last year.

"You bet it does," she winked at me.

It felt like yesterday when I first came to the university as a freshman, and now here I was, a senior about to graduate. There were so many times I'd debated switching my major--the rumors were true, chemical engineering was extremely challenging--but I ended up sticking with it because I loved what I did; those sleepless nights and hours spent in the labs were all worth it.

My junior year, I had to quit my beloved barista job at Starbucks, so I could focus on my studies. That summer, I landed an internship with Cargill and from it, I'd gained a lot of valuable experience.

This year, I'd started applying for jobs specifically in California to be near home, and after flying out for some interviews over spring break, I was hired by Abbott Laboratories to work as a process engineer.