It Takes Two, page 31
“Hey,” Zoey says, leaning against the couch as she faces her. “You know, I had a best friend once. She was like my sister almost all throughout my childhood. We’re talking playdates every Wednesday and sleepovers every other weekend. Fifty different friendship bracelets made with like, every beading kit our parents bought us. But then when we were thirteen, she decided she didn’t want to hang out with me anymore because she thought it was weird that I liked girls. And I still haven’t talked to her since, even though I see her around town all the time. It’s literally the worst thing that has ever happened to me. So, I get it. Losing someone you love is no joke.”
“Zoey… I’m so sorry…”
How she can tell such an awful story while still with that carefree expression on her face, Jazzy will never know.
“It’s all right. You get through it. There are more important things in life sometimes that you have to just discover in your own time.”
They’re both silent for a while as Jazzy suddenly has to bite her lip and try not to laugh.
“You know,” she begins, “I think that being depressed over losing a best friend is still more socially acceptable than mourning a breakup.”
“Shoot, that’s true.” Zoey sighs in exasperated defeat as Jazzy giggles. “Okay, you’re right, I admit it! My life is more depressing than yours. But you know what, that’s such bullshit. I’m sorry, I usually don’t swear, but… goddamn it.” Jazzy presses her lips together. “You’re allowed to feel sad and weak and destroyed if someone you loved abandoned you. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
Zoey begins switching through different channels on the TV once the show they’d been watching concludes, and Jazzy sits silently, considering her words. She’s not quite sure why such validation from just one person makes her feel slightly better about being so upset over something that seems trivial compared to so many other things. But it does, just a little bit.
“Oh, I’ve always loved this show,” Zoey says as she pauses on a channel she switched to. Jazzy follows her gaze back to the screen and her mouth nearly drops open.
“Oh, my God, it’s my favorite.” Jazzy laughs as the intro to Say Yes to the Dress plays.
“Right?” Zoey agrees excitedly. “Those mermaid gowns are actually my life. I have a real obsession with them.”
“They’re my favorite too! As long as they’re not lace.”
“Ugh, anything but the lace gowns, really,” Zoey groans, making Jazzy laugh. “I will never understand why everyone likes them.”
It makes Jazzy absurdly happy that someone else feels the same way.
Chapter 36
Tori had decided to take Glen clothes shopping with their fairly-adequate paychecks from the TV show that just wrapped and is expected to be renewed for a second season. Apparently he needed a makeover, so she took him to get a bunch of new outfits so he can have a “fresh look”, as she had put it. It honestly doesn’t make much difference to him, clothes are clothes, though she did pick out ones whose price tags were a bit more noticeable than his usual haul.
“Do you know how well this series is going to do?” Glen asks her as they head up the stairs to his apartment. She’s been spending a lot of time at his place. He goes to hers occasionally, but his building is closer to work, so it’s more convenient. He likes having her there. The elevators have been temporarily out of commission for a while, which has been a tad of an inconvenience for everyone else, but Glen has never minded the stairs. “They’re saying ABC is looking into picking it up.”
“I know. And I thought this was just gonna be some web series or something. It’s a good thing you’ll be lookin’ hot in your new getup for all the premieres and press interviews, right?”
“Several getups, you mean,” he reminds her as they lug their handfuls of shopping bags up the stairs. “I don’t know; I’m just glad we have secure jobs at the moment.”
“Yeah, no more worrying about scavenging dead-end gigs for a little while,” she agrees. “Hey, did you hear from your friend?”
“Ian? Yeah, he just called me last night; his flight left yesterday morning.” Glen shakes his head to himself as they clunk up the echoing stairwell, unable to suppress the somewhat mournful feeling he gets when thinking about his by-default best friend. “I still can’t believe he got a job in New York. I guess all his complaining really did pay off. He always tried to tell me.”
Glen hasn’t really been paying attention to where they’re walking, his mind now on Ian’s miraculous New York gig he actually got through a recommendation from Tony Arulo, as he follows Tori up the stairs. So when they come out on the wrong floor, he doesn’t realize until they halt a few steps in and look around in confusion. She always mixes up his floor number.
Glen hadn’t even realized how his eyes had been automatically scanning for Jazzy’s door until it suddenly opens, and two complete strangers walk out.
He freezes just as he and Tori had begun to turn back toward the stairwell, nearly dropping the bags in his hands to the ground as he walks further down the hall, watching as the two strangers, a man and a woman who look to be in their mid-thirties, lock the door behind them before heading down to the other side of the hall.
Roommates, he thinks at first. She’d gotten roommates. But it’s only a one-bedroom apartment, and two people can’t be sleeping on the couch.
Friends of hers, then? But they had a key. They had walked out as naturally as if they had been coming out of their own home…
As Tori asks him what’s wrong, he tries to think of the last time he saw Jazzy and he can’t even remember. It has to have been a month, at the very least.
A feeling of cold, sickening dread slowly crawls through him.
If something ever happened to her, he would never know. Things would go on without him. Her mom didn’t really know him, not well enough to have his number and let him know if anything was wrong. She had no other family that he knew, and her friends certainly wouldn’t think to tell him anything.
He has to remind himself that they’re broken up, so no one would think to tell him anything in the first place.
He snaps out of it and realizes he has been standing here for a while and that Tori has walked up beside him and is looking at him with extreme concern.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, quickly trying to shake himself out of it. “I just… I thought I saw someone I knew.”
Before they can head back to the stairwell, his head turns back down the hallway, gazing down to where Liza’s apartment is.
He has to tell Tori he’s feeling sick and exhausted all of a sudden in order to explain his strange behavior. He feels like an asshole worrying so much about his ex-girlfriend and thinks it’s probably not a great idea to share it with Tori just now. He’s not really sure what they are, but they are definitely at a point where he shouldn’t be thinking about his ex when he’s with her.
Glen waits until Tori heads home before going back up to Liza’s.
He shouldn’t have left Jazzy like he did. He should have eased her into it more, eased both of them into it more. He should have said something earlier before just… leaving.
But would that not have hurt her even more, just more slowly? He doesn’t know.
He realizes it’s late and very improper to be knocking at yet another ex’s door at this time, but he knows this won’t be able to wait through a whole twelve hours.
Liza answers looking confused at first, and then astounded when she sees who is bothering her at this time of night, just as he had expected.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asks slowly and dangerously.
After standing there awkwardly and realizing how weird and possibly slightly pathetic this sounds, he asks her if she knows what happened to Jazzy.
“There are other people living in her apartment,” he tells her after she asks what he means. “I just wanted to know if she moved out, or if something happened to—”
“Oh what, are you stalking her now?” Liza scoffs, shifting her grip on the doorframe to cross her arms over her chest. “It’s over, Glen. You need to move on; she doesn’t want you anymore.”
“Yeah, I know that Liza; I’m the one who broke up with her.”
This seems to take her completely off guard.
“What?” she asks him with squinted eyes. He just stares at her, wondering what she had thought happened. “Look, I have no idea what happened,” she says sharply after not saying anything for a moment, throwing her arms out in annoyance. “She just up and took off one day I guess, without saying anything to anybody, and then I get a message from her about a week ago saying she’s back in Washington for the rest of the summer.”
Glen is completely dumbfounded as he unravels her explanation. Washington? Why would she go back there? And without telling any of her friends for weeks?
Liza obviously isn’t in the mood for talking with him anymore because she turns back into her apartment and closes the door loudly behind her.
Going back to his floor, he thinks about Liza’s attitude when telling him what happened. She seemed very bitter at the whole thing, and he knows how upset she gets when she doesn’t know everything that is going on. How she likes to jump to conclusions when she’s mad. It’s reasonable to guess that Jazzy’s words could have been easily misconstrued.
But then what’s really going on? Why did she move out? Where did she go?
And why does he care so much?
***
“This is where you work?”
“Now do you see why she chose to stay and not go to college?”
Jazzy had been in awe on the drive up by the stunning landscapes of grandiose valleys that had suddenly been sprawling out at every turn, but as they walk across the courtyard to the gray-and-red stone building that looks like a nineteenth century mansion amidst the stunning backdrop, her jaw drops heavily at the towering majestic-ness before them.
“They let you work in a winery before you could even drink?”
“Marketing advisors aren’t required to taste the product,” Dina answers as they all walk up the pathway leading beneath the overhang along the side of the building. They go inside to the tasting room that looks to Jazzy like a large cafeteria furnished with fine dark wood that reflects the soft, white lights from the small chandeliers sprinkled about the ceiling up above. It’s empty aside from an employee cleaning the dozens of circular tables scattered all about the polished gray floor.
“All right, well, I’ll be down here,” Zoey announces, sitting herself at one of the tables, kicking back as if she intends to stay for a while. “I’m utilizing my free monthly tasting today.”
“Don’t embarrass me.”
“Would never.”
Jazzy follows Dina up a staircase in the back of the room that opens into a room styled with the same dark planks of wood and lighting along the ceiling, only this one is filled with rows of stylish empty office cubicles.
“So no one’s gonna be in this room for a couple of days,” Dina tells her, leading her over to a cubicle in the middle of the room that looks busy, but not with the personalized decor of the others. “Everyone in this section is either on vacation or working from home right now. So I hope you don’t mind working alone.”
“No, I think it should be all right,” Jazzy says as she sits down at the desk, looking around at the stacks of folders and paper. “Looks like there’s a lot to keep me busy.”
“No kidding. So basically, all this stuff needs to be filed, and we’ve been having a hell of a time finding someone who has time to input everything into this new digital database we got. Does it look familiar?”
“We used a different one at work, but this looks pretty much the same,” Jazzy tells her once the computer has booted up and she’s clicked through the software. “Yeah… this should be no problem.”
“God, thank you so much for helping with this. If you need me, my office is just down the hall, the door right next to the break room. Or you could always just text me.”
Jazzy nods, and Dina thanks her again before heading back out into the hallway and down toward her own office, her low black heels thumping softly against the carpet before clicking against the tile floor outside.
Jazzy turns back to the large task before her, her eyes anxious to scan over the mountains of files before her until each is perfectly logged and organized.
She falls into it easily, the quiet stillness of the office becoming completely unknown to her as she scans through page after page, labeling and filling them away first digitally and then manually, just as she used to do throughout almost every day at work. It becomes simple after a while, enough that she hardly has to think about it, enjoying the flow of the process until she happens to glance at a nearby clock and see that almost four hours have gone by.
Dina had reminded her to take breaks so the company wouldn’t get in trouble, so she wanders out into the hallway, glancing down the dimly-lit sitting area in the middle of the floor, but instead deciding to turn and head down the opposite direction, to where she sees a pair of glass doors leading out to a small balcony.
She’s not entirely sure if she’s allowed to sit here, but the doors are unlocked, and there are two small metal tables and a couple of matching chairs, so she takes a seat, looking out over the backyard of the winery that is made up of another large courtyard with rows of white tables that look to be intended for big events.
It is almost overwhelming to look out at the grand expanse of hills and valleys and fields decorated with the crisp brown and green of summer when it feels she has been surrounded by nothing but honking cars and buildings shoved in too close together for the past two years. She never considered where she might want to live, permanently. She knew relatively small things, like she would prefer a house to an apartment, and would want somewhere that is decently nearby wherever she is working. But never anything beyond that.
But the solitude she feels isn’t awful, like it has been feeling every other day. Instead, she feels rather at ease with it today.
Jazzy returns to help out at the winery for the rest of the week. They have enough work for her for at least a couple weeks, given the massive number of files they need to transfer to the new database. Jazzy is more than happy to help. Not only does it give her something useful to do, but it is a nice change of atmosphere to say the least. She even gets a free meal every day off the restaurant menu, and Dina is able to recommend a wine to her that she doesn’t want to spit out seconds after tasting. Though she still maintains that wine isn’t for her.
“You don’t mind that I’m working this much, do you?” she asks her mom tonight as they both finish cleaning the kitchen after dinner. “If you need me to help out with anything, or just want me at home more, it’s really no problem.”
“No, don’t worry,” her mom insists in her usual quiet tone as they finish loading the dishwasher. “It’s good that you found something to do.”
“I just feel kinda bad. I know you’re not used to having me around again, and I kind of feel like a burden on you since I’m not really helping out around the house that much or anything.”
“You have never been a burden, Jazmine.”
Jazzy pauses, her fingers gripping the wet dinner plate so that it doesn’t slip out of her hands as she waits for her mom to finish organizing the bowls in the racks.
“Really? I’m sure I must have been at some point.”
“No. Never.”
They are quiet again until the hum of the dishwasher starts, and Jazzy stands back against the fridge as she watches her mom begin to wipe down the counter.
“So, you know that group therapy thing I’ve been going to?”
“Yes?”
Jazzy braces herself, as she has been whenever bringing up the topic, for her mom to question her more about it. She doesn’t want her to. She doesn’t want to have to explain to yet another person how horrible of a time she has been having. But at the same time, she wishes she could talk about it with someone she knows. Someone who might be concerned, or elated that she is going. But her mom seems to react to it as if it is merely another activity she engages in now and then. And Jazzy is reluctant to volunteer any more information than that.
“Well, I’ve… it’s kind of got me thinking about how I want to move forward, I guess. And I just… I don’t really know if I like the city all that much.”
Her mom seems to subtly slow her scrubbing. Jazzy knows that means she’s listening.
“It’s just, every time I think about having to go back, I feel kinda sick,” she admits. “And, I mean, it seems kinda silly for me to go back after I’ve moved out of the apartment and everything.”
“The landlord said you’d be able to rent a different one,” her mom reminds her. “They still have all the paperwork.”
“I know, but… I could always finish school online. From here.”
She could just stay here. Never have to go back and be alone like she was. She can stay in this place she knows, that she seems to see more of every day with Zoey and Dina’s help. She could get a job; there are tons of libraries around. Surely she could get hired somewhere with a degree.
Then she could stay…
Her mom turns to face her, walking back over to put the spray bottle underneath the sink, closing the cabinet with a slow, muted thunk. And then she asks a similar question she had posed when Jazzy first told her of her brilliant plan to move and go to school in San Francisco.
“Why did you want to go in the first place?”
The answer felt clear, for a while. It was a good school. It had the program she wanted. It was close enough to feel somewhat safe, and yet far enough to feel like she was doing something on her own. That she was starting her own life, proving she could do it without anyone’s help.
But can she not be her own person here? Is staying somewhere familiar really so bad?
“I don’t know.”
