The Opposite of Falling Apart

CHAPTER 6 - BRENNAN

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

She was exhausted. Tired of deli meats and cheeses and putting on her I'm-totally-together face and talking to customers.

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, which had immediately fogged up. I love Illinois summers. For some reason, the past couple had been particularly bad.

Or at least, worse than she remembered them being as a kid. Maybe that happened when you grew up—the things you used to like (like warm sunny summers) became somehow less exciting and more of an inconvenience. (Maybe adulthood was the age of inconveniences.)

She sighed, got into her car, and put the air conditioner at full blast.

At least she was getting off earlier today. She hadn't had to close.

At home, her mom was making dinner. Brennan made it upstairs to her bedroom with nothing more than a mumbled hi and an okay when her mom asked how her day at work had been.

In the safety of her room, she changed into shorts and an old T-shirt before flopping onto her bed and staring at the ceiling.

She 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, she felt the familiar punch of failure in her gut. Like she should be being more productive and had instead given in and, 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 fan fiction. It had been a running joke. Eventually, somewhere along the proverbial road, she'd stopped telling people what she enjoyed, because she 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 fan fiction. That was just odd. Once she started toning down the fangirl part of herself, Brennan became the most boring person ever. She was lucky Emma had even taken the time to get past her walls and see anything there to like. The Walls kept most people out.

Even when Brennan eventually started writing her own original work, she didn't tell anyone, because the Act of Telling was 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.

At dinner, Brennan was mostly silent. Her brother, Ayden, talked a bit about his day. Eventually, he fell silent, too, and Brennan knew that would mean her parents would look to her next.

"How was work today, Brennan?" Her dad, from the head of the table. Brennan's hair was the same color as his, but that was about where the similarities ended.

She shrugged. "Okay." One word answers; keep it simple. Actually, work was awful. I basically had an anxiety attack in the cooler and felt like throwing up for half my shift. She choked down a bite of food and took a sip of her milk.