CHAPTER THREE
As expected, Kelly and I lose most of the next morning to our shared hangover. We roll out of bed around ten and amble about my little apartment, pounding water and nibbling on toast. She finishes all my crusts, as always. I’ve never been able to finish the last few bites of any meal, no matter how small.
After all these years, we’ve got our hangover recovery strategy down pat. It’s like a tag-team event for us. I suppose I can go a little overboard with my drinking, sometimes, but I figure there are far worse things I could be into. Sure, I’ll occasionally smoke a joint, and even pop a Molly if the mood strikes me, but that’s as hardcore as I get. And if I’ve made it this far without getting into narcotics or the like, I think I’m in the clear. Besides, I still have plenty of time to grow out of it all and get old and boring.
“Don’t work too hard today,” Kelly says, giving me a big hug goodbye.
“What? Me?” I ask innocently.
“Why do I even bother?” Kelly sighs, “I’ll come back tonight to make sure you haven’t been crushed by an avalanche of text books.”
The second that Kelly is out the door, I force myself back to my studies. I’m in the home stretch of grad school, now. I can’t get lazy and drop the ball. If I want to take off with a bang and get my own startup off the ground, I need to find a way to focus. That means soldiering through my hangover and getting back to work.
Wearing a loose¸ off-the-shoulder tee and my favorite cotton panties, I curl up on my well-loved couch and open up my laptop. I begrudgingly scan all of my social media accounts, laughing out loud when I see the mopey Facebook status Stephen posted after leaving last night. “Are those Dashboard Confessional lyrics he’s quoting?” I muse to myself, “Isn’t that just the sweetest, most passive-aggressive thing...”
I wouldn’t even bother with Facebook or Twitter if social media wasn’t such an important part of my industry. My dream is to launch a crowdfunding site of my own, and an operation like that is going to take a lot of online marketing savvy. I keep up with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, the works, but not for the sake of my social life. It’s all just a necessary evil to me. Like getting my degree. Or shaving my legs.
Sipping on my beloved espresso roast, I dive into preparing for my final round of assignments and exams. School’s always come easy to me. Well, at least when it comes to math and science. I definitely have a mind for numbers, which has always served me well. Back in high school, I was hopeless with the humanities. English, history, creative writing—not my bag. But set me down in front of a set of data, and I’m your girl. Sometimes I wish I was more able to express my creative visions. Every time I have an artistic thought, it stays on lockdown inside my mind. Maybe somewhere along the way I’ll find a business partner who’ll be able to help me articulate my abstract ideas. But until then, I’ll stick with facts and numbers. Leave the artsy stuff to someone else.
Rosalie got all the artistic genes in our family. Her paintings and poetry were absolutely stunning. She could sit down at a canvas or typewriter and just pour out her soul in any form she liked. I was always in awe of her creative freedom. She wanted more than anything to travel abroad, and study painting in Rome and write poetry in Parisian cafes. I never daydreamed the way she did. All I wanted was to get out of my oppressive home and lead my own life. I’ll never forgive myself for cutting Rosalie out the way I did, once I went away to school.
I snap back to the present, somewhere around my third cup of joe. My concentration has obviously started to fade. I decide to give my brain a break and switch to another task for a spell. Lying down on my belly, I pull up a whole new slew of tabs on my browser. Craigslist, Odesk, Elance, Freelancer, all the standard sites. They’re my lifelines for freelance coding and programming work.
Every single day, I visit these sites and bid on project after project. Some people might think that freelancing from home is a leisurely pursuit. And while it’s true that I get to work in my underwear if I like, the scramble to snatch up work is absolutely exhausting. There are so many people out there trying to find freelance work that employers can pay next to nothing. I’m constantly having to undersell myself. The competition is fierce, but I manage to scrape enough work together to get by.
I’ve been paying my own way through grad school by completing little assignments here and there. Before I started my undergrad education, I never gave money a second thought. My family had always been extremely well off, and I honestly had no concept of wealth or capital. Mom and Dad both come from old money, and seemed to make plenty of their own. Rosalie and I had always been told that our college educations and graduate school would be paid for, no questions asked. I could never have grasped the idea of loans and scholarships. Not until I was forced to, that is.
As it turned out, my family’s funds were not quite as bottomless and I’d been led to believe. My father Walt worked in finance—investment banking, that kind of thing. He had all the fine suits, the foreign cars, the status symbols galore. I’d always taken these trappings of wealth to mean that we had all the money we’d ever need. But in truth, our fortune was far from secure. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Dad was something of a gambler. I remember him teaching me basic blackjack strategy when I was still in the single digits. He loved the thrill of throwing his money around, risking it all. I honestly believe that he thought of himself as invincible. And that was all well and good when he stuck to card games with the other neighborhood millionaires. But soon, he was looking for bigger risks, bigger payoffs. Eventually, it was that gambling spirit that would destroy us all. He stopped thinking about his family, got swept up in the rush of putting everything on the line. He went all in, and as a result, I lost it all.
I shake my head, dislodging thoughts of my family. No way can I afford to get bogged down in those memories right now. In rapid fire succession, I shoot out offer after offer for low-paid programming work, sending out my resume to employers all around the world. It’s a daily game, this casting out of lines. Hoping to catch a shark, and usually coming up with minnows. Now, there’s nothing to do but wait for a good bite.
The hours creep along as I troll through job postings. I grab a couple slices of cold pizza from the fridge and throw on some music. A pounding, hardcore rock song blasts out of my speakers, surrounding me in numbing, comforting noise. Looking at me, you’d probably think I was all about Taylor Swift and Katy Perry—maybe Lorde, on an “edgy” day. But since I can remember, my music of choice has always been metal, rap, anything hardcore. I used to lock myself in the closet of my childhood bedroom, listening to Biggie and Slipknot. My mother once found an Eminem album in my room and nearly tried to have me exorcised. What can I say? I’m a woman of eclectic tastes.