Free The Atonement by Lawrence Cherry

it
was going to explode. She was really starting to feel her hangover
and had to lean against the wall to steady herself. When the doors
of the elevator finally opened, she almost knocked over a girl
coming off. She was a skinny brown skinned girl with glasses who
wore her hair in dreds and dressed like she was stuck in the
1970’s. Allyson watched the girl walk down the hall toward the way
where she had just come from. It was her. It had to be.
    “She’s not even pretty,” Allyson huffed to
herself.
    When the door opened in the lobby of the frat
house, Allyson had decided, she didn’t want to go home. Her sisters
would want her to dish on her night with Jason and had it been a
true conquest, she would not have minded indulging them. In the
aftermath of another romantic humiliation, all Allyson wanted was
to be alone. It was still very early, but she knew there was a
cheap diner nearby campus that she could go to that was open at
this time of the day. As she walked along, foot traffic picked up
on the sidewalks as people began to head out to work. Allyson had
to take it slow because her four-inch heels could get stuck in
cracks on the sidewalk and throw her down. She usually never walked
more than a block in her shoes, but she felt she desperately needed
to get away. By the time she got to the diner, her feet were
hurting from the four-block trek. Allyson was one of the first
customers in Chuck’s diner. She slumped into a booth all the way in
the back, kicked off her heels and put her head down.
    “Morning, miss. What can I get you
today?”
    Allyson shot up. She didn’t expect the
service to be so fast, but then again, she was the only one in the
diner.
    “Uh – I’ll have a large coffee, black, no
sugar,”
    “Coming up,” said the woman eyeing her
strangely.
    “There are lots of better guys out there.
Jason’s not really worth it anyway. He’s an heir to a media company
that deals mostly in publishing periodicals. Then add to that the
fact that he’s not very bright. In ten or twenty years, he’ll be
irrelevant and his fortune will be almost nothing,” Allyson
reasoned to herself to assuage her bruised ego. It didn’t do much
to help. No matter what she said to herself, she still felt
rejected and it still hurt. Allyson took out her smart phone. She
scrolled through what had to be hundreds of names in her contacts,
but she couldn’t find one that she thought would actually care
about how she was feeling right now. The loosely connected
individuals that comprised her family were a joke. The one person
in her family who she felt had ever shown her any love, and who had
always been loyal to her was dead.
    “You gotta be strong, Ally. You’re the only
one you can depend on,” she said to herself. Allyson had been
taking care of herself for a long time. She was a survivor and she
was a fighter, but at times like this she didn’t know how much
fight she had left. There were times when she just wanted to be
wanted by someone. But she didn’t want to indulge these feelings
because she didn’t want to be weak. Allyson flipped away from her
contacts and started browsing the web. She checked out one of her
favorite e-retailers and saw that there was a sale on handbags. She
bought five, each in a different color and charged them to her
paypal account. By the time she had to pay, she’d have her next
infusion of cash and credit from her mom. “I bet Ms. Dreds can’t
afford one of these designer bags even at the sale price,” Allyson
thought smugly to herself. Then she switched over to another high
fashion website to see the previews. It wasn’t long before she was
putting some of the items in her virtual shopping basket. “I can’t
wait until next week, that silk muslin is so hot. Trish is going to
be so jealous when she sees me in it. I hope they don’t run out of
my size.”
    Little by little, Allyson’s spirits began to
lift. If only she could coordinate her life as well as