The Art of Moving On | ✔

CHAPTER ONE; part one

     Here's how I don't get the job.

     I don't get the job by bluffing my way through interviews and fluffing my resume. Things like 'expert grocery bagger', 'coupon scanner extraordinaire', 'exceptionally good at picking up singles from a stack of bills — doesn't even need to lick his fingers' don't exactly sell the way I expect. And okay, every once in a while I need to moisten the tip. The tip of my finger, that is. God, that sounds like an innuendo. Completely not an innuendo. Unless the hiring manager finds that stuff kind of funny?

     As it turns out, the cold hard truth of zero job experience and complicated school schedule don't open a lot of professional doors for me. Desperation had led me to my local grocery store, and every fast-food joint in a fifteen-mile radius of my home, to no avail. So I'm starting senior year utterly broke and completely jobless.

     Probably it doesn't help that on the first Monday back, Halston, Grace, and I head uptown to buy lunch and catch up in the ways texting all summer has failed.

     Halston fondly reminisces about her campers, while Grace enthralls us with tales of her romantic misadventures. I mostly lament my mom's sudden, vehement interest in long distance colleges between large bites of my even larger burrito. Last spring, she and I had agreed that I would stay local. But now that applications have to go in, she's dropping hints left and right for schools that are across the country, and even wants me to apply to at least three of her choice.

     "She clearly wants to get rid of you," Grace says with a laugh. "And she's not being very subtle." She stretches her legs in front of her, long and lean from cheerleading, and still a shade darker than her normally deep tone from her summer in Jamaica.

     "Yeah, and she's not really giving me a choice, either. Since she's paying for my applications," I complain as I roll up the sleeves of my shirt. The summers bleeding into the fall, the way it often does in Aurora, and my school's uniform feels more stifling than ever. "Thus," I proclaim. "Why I need a job. I may have to start stripping."

     "Ooh, I'm down," Grace responds with a suggestive lift of her brows. She pats her stomach through her school vest. "Probably going to have cut down on our chipotle binges, though."

     "As if you two could ever," Halston remarks, amusedly. Grace makes a disbelieving sound, and I laugh. The reality is, there's not a place in Aurora that I could get away with working a G-string and a pole. And, anyway, my mom would disown me for even enthusing the idea. Not that I really am, I suppose.

     "Hey," Halston says suddenly. I look up at her questioningly. "What about that place? Did you apply there?" She gestures with her chin in the direction of what used to be Flow Yoga. The place had closed at the beginning of the summer, but had been empty till, well, now. It looks like someone has not only rented the place, but is just about ready to open.

     "Is that a coffee shop?" I ask.

     "Looks like it could be pastries?" Halston responds.

     Grace isn't paying attention, careening back in her chair, head tipped toward the sun like she needs the Vitamin D to re-juice her soul. A group of boys walking by, dressed in the same uniforms as us, check her out, but Grace is uncaring. She's cheer captain so she can have pretty much anyone she wants but she's also devastatingly beautiful, so she can have anyone she wants. Which is why she usually wants the people who don't want her. There aren't many left.

     "Yeah, but they're not even open yet," I say eyes scanning over the storefront. There's a Coming Soon! sign in the window, with a cupcake drawn next to it. A cupcake bakery? Doesn't sound like the place for me. I lack certain skills necessary to do anything productive in a kitchen — which is to say I lack any and all skills that would assist in even the simplest of cooking tasks.