This wasn’t middle school. People weren’t here to be cruel or to make fun of her or to hurt her. They weren’t here to exploit her weak spots. She needed to start giving people the benefit of the doubt and stop assuming the worst.
She grabbed her phone out of her pocket and typed.
Hollyn: Thanks again for the curbside service. Mr. Handsome Decaf was delicious. I only felt slightly guilty drinking anthropomorphic coffee.
As soon as she hit Send, she groaned at her use of the word anthropomorphic. Who used that kind of word, especially in a text? She might as well have followed up with #WordNerd.
Jasper: That’s going to be the name of my new coffee shop. Anthropomorphic Coffee. I’ll attach little paper arms to the cups and draw faces on them. Hipsters will love it. Vegans will feel guilty for drinking it.
Hollyn: HA
Jasper: Will I see u in the morning or should I watch for another text?
A little flutter went through Hollyn, and she chewed her lip. Did she want to risk face-to-face when this was going so well? She was so much better in writing than real life. She could rock Jasper’s world in writing. Her thumbs hovered over the screen. She took a breath.
Hollyn: See u in the morning.
Jasper: :) Mr. Handsome Decaf looks forward to it.
The smiley face was everything. Hollyn walked over to her desk chair and collapsed into it.
Holy. Shit.
She’d flirted. And hadn’t died.
She didn’t know who this version of herself was, but she wanted to find out more. Maybe tonight when she went out for her Miz Poppy assignment, she’d try to talk to someone at the bar. She didn’t want to lose this momentum or overthink it.
With that plan in mind, she went to her desk, set Jasper’s coffee-cup drawing in her line of sight, and worked for the rest of the afternoon with a smile on her face.
Chapter Five
Jasper hustled through the side door of the Shifty Lizard bar, his backpack almost sliding off his shoulder as the door slammed behind him. There was a sharp stitch in his side from the jog he’d made after parking six blocks down the street. He checked his watch. His sister had given him the thing last Christmas because she was convinced he wasn’t aware that time existed. She was wrong on that. He was aware of it. He just wasn’t very good at keeping track of it.
After his shift at the coffee bar had ended, he’d driven over to that theater that was up for sale. That hadn’t been his plan, but somehow he’d found himself heading that way, parking, and getting out. The building had been closer to the apartment he’d lived in with his birth parents than he’d thought. Only a few blocks from the theater was the spot where he’d been found at age seven, caught stealing food from a convenience store and wandering the streets alone. He could still remember the fear he’d felt when the store’s owner had grabbed him by the arm as he’d tried to slip out of the store, then the look of pity when he’d seen how thin Jasper had been, his pockets stuffed full of Snickers bars.
Instead of getting hauled off to jail like Jasper’s mom had been the year before, he’d ended up with child protective services. His parents had gone on a bender, shooting up heroin somewhere for days, and had forgotten they had a kid at home to feed. He’d never lived with them again after that. And they hadn’t tried to get him back. Kids were real inconvenient for keeping up a drug habit apparently.
But the neighborhood had changed a lot from what he remembered—new shops and restaurants mixed in with some of the older places, clean streets, and just a more positive vibe overall. He’d found himself sitting on a bench in front of the boarded-up theater, imagining the box office with a poster of the Hail Yes group hanging in it. A line at the door. Jasper’s name listed as owner. Something that was truly his.
The ache that had settled inside him was a dangerous one.
He was really good at fantasizing. Those early years with his birth parents and the rough ones in foster care had given him a penchant for weaving better versions of reality in his head, pretending things were different or could be different. Dreaming. Always dreaming. What he’d gone through should’ve made him cynical. Growing up without food to eat should’ve made him want a steady job with lots of stability. But his mind had taken a hard left onto a different route, one that had more potholes and cliffs. He idealized. Of course he and his girlfriend could succeed in Hollywood even though hardly anyone did. Of course he could be on TV one day. Of course their love was real and forever. Of course reality wasn’t an actual thing that would get in the way.
He’d been smacked in the face with that blind spot in LA when he’d blown his audition and gotten dumped. He’d sworn when he returned home that he wouldn’t let it happen again. He wasn’t ready to ditch his aspirations, but he wasn’t going to be some head-in-the-clouds idiot about it anymore. Eyes wide open. Be methodical. Grind.
Thinking he could woo investors and own a theater was not grinding. It was a fairy tale.
He needed to let that shit go and focus on what he was here to do, what he was capable of doing. In-the-trenches improv, playing the dives, teaching classes for extra money, building a following from the ground up.
But maybe some of Fitz’s advice could help. His group could be doing more to build buzz and get seen so they could land better gigs. So after leaving the theater, he’d bought a video camera and tripod with what little money he had saved in his account so that he could start filming their performances like Fitz had suggested. Tomorrow, he was going to start a social media campaign and try to get influencers in to see their shows.
Influencers.
Fuck.
He usually made fun of that word. Now he was actually using it in a career plan. He was so far out of his depth that he should’ve bought a snorkel instead of a video camera.
He tried to shake the dread that had overtaken him and hurried to the bar’s storeroom, which his improv group facetiously referred to as backstage, and pushed open the door. The other members of Hail Yes were already there, six people crammed into a space that could barely tolerate four. Everyone looked Jasper’s way when he walked in.
He lifted his palm in defense when Leah sent him a dark-eyed glare and Monique flipped him the middle finger as a greeting. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“And now he rolls in,” Danica said as she rubbed some kind of hair product into her blond pixie cut. “Always just late enough to make us worried but not late enough to justify killing him.”
“Speak for yourself,” Church said, wiping his bald brown head with a towel. “I’m capable of murder. You made me sweat.”
Jasper rolled his eyes. The sight of his friends never failed to fill him with this odd sort of familial affection. He’d missed the hell out of them in LA but hadn’t expected them to welcome him back when he came home. He’d been the reason they’d lost their gig at the Lagniappe Comedy Theater. They should hate him. Instead, they’d forgiven him and let him back in. Of course, that didn’t mean they didn’t continuously give him shit about the great abandonment.