“Mm-hm,” I mutter from underneath the covers. “Go away!”
“It’s ten thirty,” she tells me, pulling my comforter aside. “Time to get up!”
“Mom!” I bury my head under my pillow. “It’s summer vacation!”
“Which means there are tons of exciting things for you to do.” She bustles around the room, straightening things up. “I’ve let you mope around long enough. It’s time for you to get that A into G.”
“I’m not moping. I’m mourning.”
“Looks the same from where I’m standing.”
“Moping is self-indulgent teen angst,” I inform her icily. “Mourning is the totally justified grief that comes from being separated from the love of your life!” I roll away.
“Come on, sweetie,” Mom says, her voice hatefully perky. “I’ve made lists of possible jobs and activities. I thought today would be a great day to work on your ambition chart!”
I yawn. “Of course you did.”
“Sadie Elisabeth Allen. Out of bed. Now!”
“Five more minutes,” I tell her, closing my eyes again. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I’d been drifting in a delicious daydream involving me and Garrett, strolling the cobbled backstreets of Paris, hand in —
Splash!
I leap up. “What the —?” I cry, cold water dripping down my face. Mom stands over me, wearing a smug look and holding an empty water glass in her hand. “You didn’t!” I gasp.
“I did.” The water-spiller has no shame. “Now, I’m heading into town in twenty minutes, and you’re coming, too.”
“But —”
“No buts. You’re going to get out of those gross sweatpants, put real clothes on, and go and find a job.” She sighs, softening. “I don’t like seeing you like this, sweetie. You need some direction.”
“I have direction.”
“Toward your cell phone, to see if Garrett has texted you.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s like I always tell my clients: you’ll feel better with some activity. And we can even go to the library,” she adds brightly, as if it’s some kind of bribe. Which, to be honest, it kind of is. I’m completely out of new reading material, and everything on my shelves just reminds me of Garrett: the books he’s given me, the books we’ve read together, the books I got because he recommended them. . . .
“Fine,” I tell her. “But for the last time: I am not making, nor will I ever make, an ambition chart.”
“But I got —”
“Not even with the gold stars!”
Mom drops me at the library with strict instructions to canvas the town for babysitting and other such high-profile, fun-filled summer jobs.
“And snap out of this!” she orders through the car window. “Cheer up!”
I browse the fiction shelves, still suffused in my cloud of suffering. Why should I cheer up? Melancholy is a perfectly legitimate state of mind — artists have thrived on it for centuries. War and Peace — there, that wasn’t exactly written in a fit of bright, purposeful energy, was it, now? And Anna Karenina. Tolstoy wasn’t leaping around with happiness every hour of the day, and he still managed to achieve something.
Maybe I should move to Russia; they clearly appreciate inner torment there.
“Sadie? Your library card?”
I look up to find Ms. Billings, the librarian, waiting patiently behind the circulation desk. In the grand tradition of librarian clichés, she’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a preppy little blouse with a tweed skirt, but she actually looks pretty stylish — kind of that British schoolteacher look. She seems stern enough to hush a crowd with a single glance, but she’s a softy really — she’s the one who slipped me a copy of Forever by Judy Blume when I’d read every pony, babysitting, and boarding-school book in the middle-school section.
That’s public service, right there.
“Sorry,” I apologize quickly, handing my card over. She scans the stack of novels, raising her eyebrows slightly as she notices the theme: long, bleak, Russian. “I’m embracing my inner pain,” I tell her.
She smiles sympathetically. “Bad day?”
“More like bad year.” I sigh. “Do you ever feel like fate is playing a cruel joke on you?”
Ms. Billings pauses a moment. “In that case . . .” She looks around, then takes a book from the recently returned stack and shows it to me surreptitiously as if we’re covert spies or something. “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Never fails to cheer me up. You look as though you could use it.”
I turn the slim volume over in my hands. “Thanks,” I tell her, and add it to the stack. “I’ll take everything I can get. Wait,” I add, suddenly hopeful. “You don’t need anyone working here this summer, do you?” A job at the library would be the least painful of all possible options.
She shakes her head. “Sorry. There used to be a part-time gig, but with the funding cuts . . . Volunteer positions only these days.”
“Oh, OK.” I sigh. Volunteering might keep my mom quiet, and look good on college applications, but it won’t get me any closer to that distant dream of my own car. “Thanks, anyway.”
All over town, I hear the same story again and again: the summer jobs were snapped up weeks ago by enterprising students who didn’t have their hearts set on literary camp. Even the HELP WANTED sign at the Dough Hole is out of date — there apparently being no end of willing candidates ready to risk death-by-deep-fat-fryer on a daily basis for the sake of minimum wage.
I slink into Totally Wired and look over at our usual table with a sigh. Without Garrett around, it’s not ours anymore; it’s just mine.
“What can I get you?” LuAnn asks at the counter.Today’s vintage dress is a blue gingham print, open low enough at the neck to show a scrolling tattoo across her collarbone, with text I can’t quite read. It’s a Wizard of Oz–meets–prison-yard look.
“Coffee. Please. Black.” Like my heart, I add silently.
“Sure thing.” She grins and pushes sweaty strands of red hair back from her forehead. “And a double espresso, right? For your boyfriend?”
I blink.
“Tall, cute, joined to you at the hip?”
“Oh. No.” I blush. “He’s not . . . I mean, he’s not my boyfriend, and he’s not coming. So, just the one coffee.”