Free The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost by Rachel Friedman Page B

one who rides a blow-up green dinosaur around the pub when she’s had too much to drink. (And we’ve always had too much to drink. Irish me turns out to be one hell of a drinker.) All the girls are funny and quick-witted, so much that I’m beginning to think of it as an Irish trait.
    Halfway through the summer, I’m still broke, so I take our friend Gerry up on his offer to hire me as a flyer girl. This involves precariously tottering around the cobblestone main street in three-inch heels doling out two-for-one drink-special flyers to groups passing by. I decide this will translate on my résumé to “promotions assistant.”
    Everyone around me is in their early twenties. No one has anywhere to be, so we stay at the bar, drink cheap beer, and play old Irish love songs on the jukebox. There seems to be no limit to our days together. I’ve never had so many friends at once, whom I’ve liked so well, as I did in Galway, where I once felt so lonely and knew no one at all.
    â€œTime to get off the Guinness,” my boss, Brian, urges me discreetly one night, taking a gentle glance at my stomach. I look down, where my belly is indeed protruding more than when I arrived in Ireland three months ago. Back home, this kind of comment would have sent me spiraling into despair. Since middle school, I’ve struggled with body-image issues, like a lot of girls do, denying myself this or that and spending too much time pinching flesh in front of the mirror. So I’m shocked at this moment to realize that I haven’t thought about my body in any self-punishing way in weeks, though by most standards I am woefully abusing it with cigarettes and alcohol. But my mind has twisted in a new direction this summer, and I’ve found it freeing these last few months to let go of some insecurities, large and small, or at least to put them on hold.
    One night in early August, Eileen announces, “It’s official, chicken. You’re Irish.” I surge with pride, as if I have passed a particularlydifficult exam. It’s exciting to fit somewhere when I have felt out of place everywhere for so long. It doesn’t yet occur to me that this is simply my friend’s way of expressing affection; she doesn’t wish me to be anyone but myself, that, ultimately, I can’t be. In Ireland, I become someone entirely different—a wild girl who stays out late, guzzles Guinness, tells coarse jokes, and says yes to every invitation. I let myself loose, a word that before never would have attached itself to me. That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you. I had no past or future, which suited me perfectly, since I did not wish to reckon with either.

[6]
Our heroine returns to her former life as a student, where she normally would be comforted by books and the lofty ideas contained therein, but finds herself unable to muster the necessary enthusiasm for anything but list-making and bellyaching. Somehow she finds the will to both graduate and entertain her relatives. An unexpected call answered.
    A week before the end of my endless Irish days, I call my father to test out the idea of staying. His silence blasts across the Atlantic.
    â€œI don’t understand,” he finally says. “You want to graduate a year late?”
    â€œYeah, it’s just a year. Plus, I can get lots of great student deals if I’m still enrolled in college.” I’m repeating Carly’s words, hoping I’ve imbued them with some of her unflagging confidence. Her mantra buzzes in my brain: What’s the rush?
    â€œKiddo, I think you should come home, get your degree, and then examine your options.”
    â€œI just don’t know what I’m doing with my life, Dad.”
    â€œWho does? I’ll see you at the airport, okay?”
    I’m not ready to