Free Awake by Elise Daniels

from the daughter of Tom Wexler to the daughter of Jack Cassidy it would cause a semi-seismic scandal in multiple directions with two families and a company forever dragged down by it.
    All of our names would fly around on the gossip circuit of the Palisades for months, maybe years. Most personally, it would drive a wedge between my father, stepmother and me.
    I don’t want to do that to my family or even Tori, but more than anything I don’t want to be the thing that destroys Wade’s standing among his investors or compromise his friendship with Reed. He would lose his restaurant and he would have me to thank for it.
    Shamed and alone and quite possibly penniless, he would in time learn to rue the day we ever met. Love can decay just like anything else.
    I felt my phone vibrating in my purse earlier. Out of respect for my teachers I never take out my phone in class. It is almost always Kat anyway with some catty comment about someone she is dealing with in her class or job or maybe to tell me yet again about Kip’s hotness.
    I’m happy for Kat that she has a nice little thing going with Kip, but some of us are not set-up so cozily for a Friday night. Some of us have to listen to lame pickup lines by drunk dudes or watch romantic comedies alone in our pajamas on a Friday night.
    Saturday night is my twenty-first birthday. I can finally throw out the ID of Ursula Pederson and start using my own. Kat has insisted we go out with the girls to Sunset Strip.
    Tonight I’m on my own and haven’t decided what to do. Just outside of class I stop to check the text. My heart skips a beat when I see that the message is from Alodia. Who knew she could text?
    Girls night. My house at 7pm?
    I smile and consider all the students rushing off to their all too generic Friday night plans of drinking, clubbing and romancing.
    Yes , I text back.
    She texts back her address. She lives in Venice. Cool.
    I’d like to start going back to the shelter, but on nights when Wade is not there. We have to move on. Both of us. I know that I need new energies in my life. People like Alodia, Vivi and Cesar. People who are passionate about things other than money and romance.
    I also want to help out in the least pretentious way possible. I don’t want to be that lady wearing a ten-thousand dollar necklace who writes a hundred dollar check a few times a year to make herself feel better.
    It’s time to get feeling alive again, stop dragging my tail. I’ll treat myself to a manicure and then figure out what one wears to girls night at a sixty-year-old professor’s house.
    * * *
    I take a taxi to Alodia’s Venice bungalow. Showing up in a town car with a driver on her tree-lined, bohemian street would have made me feel like a snob. I arrive ten minutes early. I am charmed when I realize her little avocado-colored house is right on the Venice canal.
    There are wild flowers all around me as I walk up her narrow footpath to her covered porch which features a gorgeous lilac-patterned rug. A skinny, gray cat tickles past my ankles. When I step forward to the interior door, Alodia pushes it open and greets me with a bright smile and an even brighter apron.
    “How beautiful you are, Minnesota,” she says and then gives me a quick hug and shoos me into her magical dwelling.
    Alodia takes my hand and walks me through her home full of cluttered collections of artifacts from seemingly every culture on Earth. The only common thread I see is color. There are no muted colors. There are no prime colors either. Everything pops. There’s texture and tone to everything. Every color seems like a color I’ve never seen.
    “Alodia,” I say, “your magic is everywhere.”
    “I am just a lifelong collector of lost things,” she says. “I like to bring in only colors that exist outside the rainbow.”
    We enter her kitchen which overlooks the canal. The rustic view through the overgrown greenery of her backyard makes me feel like I have been transported to Italy.