He grabbed the pen his mom had been using to cross things off the grocery list, flipped over the coupon, and carefully wrote out a few words: Text me and tell me the total.
He signed his name and then carefully printed the ten digits of his phone number.
“I’ll be back, Mom,” he said.
“Mm-hmm,” she hummed.
Jonas crutched quickly back to the deli counter, scanning the employees for familiar big glasses and hair-netted brown hair. He saw Brennan when she came out of the back cooler.
“Back so soon?” she said. Her glasses had fogged up a bit in the corners from the temperature change between the walk-in cooler and the counter. Her fingers twisted the edge of her apron, transferring her nervous energy to the fabric.
“Hi, again,” Jonas said. He didn’t know what to say next, exactly. He sighed. “Look, just take this.” He handed her the coupon face up.
She studied it. “One dollar off shredded cheese?”
His mom was calling to him from a distance. “Jonas! I’m ready to leave!” Jonas’s gaze flicked rapidly to his mom and then back to Brennan.
“Look, I—”
“Jo-nas!” His mom was getting closer. “Time to go.”
Jonas forced a smile in Brennan’s direction, eye contact as poor as her own in the moment. “Expand your cheese horizons?” he said, shrugging against his crutches. He cringed at his own joke. When he spoke again, his words were frustrated. “Flip it over. I have to go.”
Then he turned and left, but he glanced back at her one time to make sure she flipped it over.
She did.
He felt a tiny bit better.
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.
“Did you email Aunt Kim about shadowing?” her mom asked. Rose Davis pushed her glasses up on her nose. Bad vision was the thing Brennan had inherited from her mom. Brennan remembered being little and asking her parents what parts of her looked like them—did she have Dad’s nose? Mom’s smile? The older she’d gotten, the less she looked and acted like them. Sometimes she looked at her family pictures and imagined being adopted as a baby—she didn’t match in the pictures. Ayden, Rose, and Dan all matched. Then there was Brennan.
She nodded in answer to her mom’s question but didn’t offer anything more. She felt a little guilty. Maybe she didn’t match because she didn’t put enough effort into it—into being part of dinner conversations and outings to Ayden’s scholastic quiz games or track meets.
When Brennan had come down the stairs and into the dining room for dinner, her dad had widened his eyes in pretend shock. “Well, well, well. Look who decided to join us!”
Brennan hated when he said things like that. She knew he was joking but part of her wondered if he really would like a different daughter—one who showed up to family dinner and talked about her day and didn’t have anxiety eating her up at any given moment.
After dinner, Brennan was tired. It was like she had a meter—full at the beginning of the day but depleted by every interaction between her and any other person.
She headed back upstairs, turned out the ceiling light in her room, and crawled into bed. She left the lamp on her nightstand on for the moment, not quite ready to plunge the room into total darkness yet.
Brennan sighed, turned on her side, and faced the wall, pulling her blankets up to her chin. In bed, trying to turn her mind off, it was easy to start worrying about college again, because her room at college would smell different and there would be the shadows of different trees dancing on her wall. The familiar sick nausea twisted her stomach. She shut her eyes and tried to fall asleep. She was tired, after all.
It was one of those nights that, no matter how tired she was, Brennan couldn’t sleep.