Free The Good Life by Jodie Beau Page A

summer and I was wondering how the heck I was going to live without him for three months and distracting myself by anticipating lots of passionate goodbye sex during the next few days.
    Instead, passion came in the form of a pregnant chick nearly tearing my door down demanding to see her boyfriend. Long story short – on the nights he wasn’t with me, he wasn’t sleeping at his parents’ house. He was living with his girlfriend and her parents. She was eight months pregnant. And a senior in high school. And her name was Destiny. Oh, and he wasn’t even a student at UNC. He’d been making up a bunch of lies about his classes and even pretending to do homework. Truth was, he was a high-school dropout who worked as a custodian for the school – and NOT in a Good Will Hunting kind of way.
    I was devastated. And I was angry. But even worse, I was embarrassed and ashamed and I felt like it was my fault for trusting someone without question like that. I was young and I didn’t know then how cruel people could be. But I learned. And that was one lesson I wouldn’t need repeated.
    A few days later I drove myself home to Michigan in a rental car, and that was the beginning of the summer that will always be referred by me as The Summer of Jake and Roxie.
    I got a job as a cocktail waitress at a hip bar that was popular with the college-aged crowd. It was called The Bar, as in Raising the Bar. It was supposed to be a classier version of a college bar. Anyway, Jake, who shared an apartment with my brother at the time, was a bartender there. Every night after my shift, I would sit at the bar to count my money and Jake would pour me a drink or two and then drive me home since my parents had finally given my POS Buick to the POS graveyard.
    I would go home after work, cry myself to sleep over Jim’s betrayal, sleep in until past noon, mope around for a few hours and then go to work to start the cycle all over again. I was too depressed to even go shopping! I was making hundreds of dollars a night and wasn’t spending a dime. It was a sad excuse for a life, and I was growing tired of it. I needed something to keep my mind off of my battered ego and wounded heart. And just like having a drink in the morning when you wake up with a hangover eases the pain for a bit, hooking up with another guy after one guy hurts you is a bit of a heart bandage. So one night, when my brother was in Cleveland for the weekend with some of his friends, I got into Jake’s pick-up truck and asked him to take me to his place after work instead of mine.
    “Are you fighting with your parents?” he asked curiously.
    “No.” Leave it to Jake to need this spelled out for him.
    “Did you leave your sheets in the washing machine? I’ve done that before.”
    “No, Jake.” I stared straight ahead through the windshield and started to wonder if this was a bad idea. “It’s not that I don’t want to go to my house. It’s that I want to go home with you. Get it?”
    “Umm …”
    “Oh jeez,” I said, exasperated. “You’re being a buzz kill. Never mind. Just take me home.”
    “No. We can go to my place.”
    “Forget it.”
    He turned to go toward his apartment instead of my house.
    “I said forget it. Take me home.”
    “I don’t want to,” he said. “You said you wanted to come home with me so that’s where we’re going.”
    “It’s pointless now. You’ve ruined the moment.” As he turned onto his street I crossed my arms and stared out the passenger window feeling mortified that this conversation was even happening.
    “You can’t blame me for ruining a moment I didn’t even know we were having. Let’s start over. Tell me to take you home with me again.”
    He pulled into his apartment complex, found a parking spot and put the truck into park.
    “I feel really stupid,” I said. “Can you please just forget this ever happened and take me home? There’s really no way to make the moment sexy again.”
    He turned off the ignition.