“Or a nice guy.”
I paused the game. “Sure. I’ll have no problem meeting some random guy at a bar who’s single, attractive, roughly my age, and who isn’t put off by a nerd girl like me.”
Aida crossed her arms as well as she could over an eight-month pregnant belly. “Come on. You never have trouble attracting cute guys, Sierra. You just need higher standards. And you need to vet them a little better before you bump uglies.”
“Sex is the easy part, though.”
She gave me the bullshit eyes. “It’s not easy forever. You’re going to have to make small talk with them at some point. Maybe next time you meet a guy, kiss him good night and wait for him to call. It might cut down on your Wyatt ratio.”
“Yeah. But when they don’t call, I’ll have missed a chance to get laid.”
“Did it ever occur to you you could call them?”
God forbid I chase after a guy. “What? To get a verbal rejection instead of the silent one?”
She threw up her hands, and then she got that coy smile I hated. It meant she had an idea. “Maybe . . .” She looked altogether too confident for a maybe. “Maybe it’s all interrelated.”
“What?”
“Look, you’re really great at what you do. You drive your developers to get huge projects done. You’re super confident about your own work. But then you freeze up when you have to do anything resembling public speaking. And you shy away from intimacy with guys. Maybe it’s the same issue.”
“Well, I don’t like to speak in public because I don’t want to make an ass of myself.”
“You’re afraid that people will see the real you and not like you.”
“Okay, armchair psychologist.” I was ready for this interrogation to end.
“No really. I think I’m on to something.”
“And the solution is to do what? Read my horrifying diary to strangers?”
“Don’t you have something old? Like from high school? I’m pretty sure this event is supposed to be as funny for you as it is for the audience. Like reading confessions from the past that no longer relate to you now.”
“Hmm.” I did have high school diaries, but they were boxed up in the basement at my parents’ house out in Norcross.
“What about that one class you took sophomore year at Auburn? Didn’t you keep a daily journal?”
Even though it had been a decade ago, I had a good reason to remember. “Um, yeah. That was that public-speaking class.”
Her eyes lit with a sudden recognition. “No, seriously? The one with the contest?”
“Yeah.” Even ten years later, my heart beat faster at the memory of the ordeal that had paralyzed me so completely. Aida had been there to pick up the pieces, like always. And here she was pushing me into another. “We had to do morning pages for that class. I kept a notebook.”
“So what did you write in it?”
I held up my hands. “I dunno. We were supposed to empty our minds of the concerns of the day and flex our creative muscles. I probably kept it fairly light, worried the teacher might collect them at any moment.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Maybe.”
I cast about my room until I located a box of junk from college that had become a makeshift base for a stack of miscellaneous crap. I removed the shoebox filled with birthday cards, cross-country medals from high school, and other nostalgia I didn’t want but couldn’t bring myself to throw away. The cardboard lid of the storage box had collapsed from the weight. I sat on my haunches and rifled through archaic term papers, copies of student loan applications, housing agreements, and various certificates and awards. Underneath it all, I dug out several spiral-bound notebooks labeled with the names of the classes they’d belonged to.
The bright red one had Comm 1000 written in black Sharpie and other doodles of flowers and geometric shapes. One drawing stood out among the others, mainly because it was too artistic to be the chicken scratches of someone killing time. More intriguing, it appeared to be a rendition of my face, or how I might have looked ten years ago.
I ran my thumb over the drawing, trying to remember how it got there. Ten years was a long time, and my brain only held on to flashes of memories, images that had seared in permanently, and even those had eroded over time or coalesced with other memories to form new beliefs about my past. The details were lost. Or perhaps they were captured in the notebook I held before me.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the journal in my lap and flipped open to the first page.
My handwriting had been so neat, so confident ten years ago. But holy cow, the sheer number of words shocked me. How had I had so much to say?
I scanned the opening entry.
This is my writing journal. I have to write in my journal for fifteen minutes every day. I am now writing in my journal.
Oh, that was how. I went from worrying my journal might reveal too many deep dark secrets to thinking it might be one long obvious attempt to cheat the assignment. Further down, the bullshit fell away, and what I’d written began to show a peek into my nineteen-year-old brain.
“Listen to this.”
Aida propped a pillow behind her and leaned against the wall, where a headboard ought to be, and I read the last few lines on the page.
“ ‘I don’t know anybody in my smaller classes, and in the auditorium classes, I feel invisible. I hope I make a friend soon.’ ”
I glanced up at her and smiled because I’d met Aida in an auditorium class when she’d plopped down next to me after missing the first week and said, “You look like you take good notes.”
The very last line read: This daily journal is going to suck.
Maybe farther back, I’d find more interesting tidbits, but it would take me forever to read the journal cover to cover. I held the makings of a novella in my hands. Plus, there was the more pressing question ...
“How will reading this in public make me feel less anxious?”
“Think about it. You’re worried you’ll be embarrassed when you get up to speak. But if the entire aim is to be humiliated, and if everybody there is hoping to be the most humiliated, then your fear becomes your secret weapon. You’d be swimming in your element.”
It made a weird kind of sense. And the grand prize, if I could win it, would cover the entire expense of a trip to Gamescon whether or not I got picked for the presentation.
“I doubt I wrote anything worthwhile, though.” I flipped through a few more pages, and a name I’d tried to forget jumped out at me. My eyes shot wide open. “Or I might have confessed I was in love with Tristan Spencer.”
Yummy Tristan Spencer.
Tristan had been the classic skater boy, with long blond locks and smooth soft-looking cheeks, often dusted with the sunlight of his golden scruff. Yeah, I’d etched him in my memory with all the poetic imagery of a love song. He’d worn one earring in his left ear, and his unconventional style stood out on the conservative campus, like a rebel, like a rogue. And his lips—
Aida broke my trance. “Tristan Spencer? There’s a revolting blast from the past.”
“Speaking of mortifying moments.”
“Speaking of your terrible taste in men.” She gave me the maternal smile that seemed to have developed along with her child within.