How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg Donohue Read Free Book Online Page A

I thought only of hospital beds and a suddenly, heartbreakingly unknowable future. So where, exactly, had “my style” gotten me after all these years? And, really, what harm could there be in having one drink with Jake? I was supposed to meet my mother at the florist’s in an hour, but she could handle that appointment in her sleep, couldn’t she?
    â€œI’ll be there in thirty,” I said, feeling the flutter of—what, exactly? Relief? Trepidation?—well, something other than sadness in my chest.
    I walked down the long, steep slope from our house in Pacific Heights toward the flat stretch of the Marina neighborhood that housed the Balboa Café and many of the other bars that I had frequented on my trips to the city during college at Stanford. I’d never been much of a drinker and usually nursed one vodka-soda over the course of a night, taking tiny sips until I was left with only melted ice and a vaguely metallic lime taste. Lately, though, I’d started to enjoy drinking more and more. The first couple of drinks tended to make me feel morose and self-pitying, but the third? The third made me feel suddenly lighter, as though nothing that had happened over the previous couple of months was really worth worrying about at all.
    Even with the panoramic view of city carved into steeped slopes and shining bay and green expanse of hills to the north, the walk made me miss Manhattan. When I first moved to New York, I’d been surprised to find that despite what everyone said, the city was cleaner and had fewer scary homeless people than my hometown. In San Francisco, sidewalks and streets appeared messy and leaf-blown all year long and buildings needed to be painted annually to combat the damage of salty winds and months of dust. There were entire neighborhoods that seemed in perpetual need of a hose-down. Still, there was something undeniably magical about this city by the bay. It was, and always would be, my home. Annie and I had that much in common, at the very least: we were San Francisco girls, born and raised.
    Jake was sitting at the dark wood bar with his back to me when I entered Balboa Café. A girl a few stools down leaned toward him, her blond ponytail dangling over her shoulder as she laughed at something he said. Her friends exchanged knowing glances at the sound of her flirtatious laughter, and soon the whole group had burst into a fit of giggles. I paused in the doorway, watching them. Why do women with muffin tops insist on wearing low-slung jeans? I wondered, irritated. Is it really too much to ask for a couple extra inches of fabric to protect the innocent public’s eyes from their unsightly bulges? I sighed, reminding myself I didn’t care one bit if Jake flirted with a girl who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one and whose pale pink Hanky Panky thong was pulled above the layer of fat on her lower back. And yet, gazing at the two of them, I felt a territorial buzz start up behind my eyes. It was a feeling I’d had before.
    By the time I entered my senior year at Devon, I had long established myself as the school’s queen bee in every respect. Of course, I didn’t think of myself that way at the time, but looking back, it’s easy to see that’s who I was. I had the best grades, led a pack of pretty, popular friends, and had a closetful of clothes any girl would have killed for. When I noticed Jake Logan of the shipping Logans, captain of the football, swim, and baseball teams, and most certainly headed to Dartmouth in the fall, flirting with Annie in the hall—Annie, whose social circle at that point consisted of two pimply, tweezers- and sunshine-adverse girls whose names I always confused—I know I should have been happy for her. Instead, almost without thinking, I turned on the charm. Okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely without thinking. In any event, Jake and I were officially dating by the end of the