know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
“And I cannot go through an embarrassing interview again, you know,” Melissa added. Melissa had once gone for an interview that had actually gone incredibly well until the boss started saying that he was sure he knew her from somewhere. She had, of course, denied it and said that she just had one of those familiar faces. But as she had gotten up to leave, he had remembered.
After that, he had said that she could get the job as long as she didn’t mind doing special favors for him. She’d walked out in so much anger that she hadn’t gone to another interview for months. To this day, she still freaked out every time she had to talk to someone who wasn’t from work, in case they recognized her.
“I know,” Delilah said.
They both went silent for a while. Most of the time when they got together before work they spoke about trivial things – movies, music, the other girls at Betsy’s. They never really spoke about anything of importance. And they certainly never spoke about their life situation.
It was just so much easier to pretend. But lately it was all that Delilah could think about, and now that she had spoken to Melissa, she knew that it was probably all that Melissa could think about too. But they both had no idea what to do about it.
“So… should we lighten the mood? Have you watched any good movies lately? I saw such a good one last night, and I’ve been dying to tell you about it.”
Delilah sat back and let Melissa talk. It was easier this way. It was just too hard to think about anything else, especially when they felt this trapped. Delilah knew that they had gotten themselves into this situation – whether they had needed to or not. She knew that there was nobody to blame but herself.
Delilah hadn’t exactly planned to become a stripper. That wasn’t quite the biggest dream of her life. Her dream had always been to become a novelist. She had novels in her head that were bursting to come out.
But first she wanted to go to college. She wanted a degree to fall back on, in case she didn’t make it as a novelist. Although if she didn’t make it, she knew she still wanted to do something with the English language. She used to live and breathe words.
If she wasn’t writing in her journal, she was reading, and her room used to have more books than clothes when she was growing up. She’d even applied to get into college and had been accepted. For a time, she’d thought that nothing was going to get in the way of her dreams.
Soon, she even wondered if perhaps becoming an English professor was even better than becoming a novelist herself. The thought of teaching others the English language thrilled her. She’d decided that she’d do both. Nothing was going to stop her.
Her parents had also been so supportive of her. They’d been struggling financially, so she’d taken a part-time job as a waitress to help pay toward her college tuition, but they had insisted that they would still be paying for her.
She wasn’t sure how they were going to ever afford to do so, but she supposed it was something that they had been planning for. She knew that things weren’t easy for them, but they were good parents, so she wasn’t surprised that they would put her first.
But on April 1 st – an April Fool’s Day that she would never forget and a holiday that she would never again find funny – everything changed. Delilah had been out with her friends – spending frivolous time at the mall – when she received a phone call from the police. Her parents had been in a car accident.
They told her to stay where she was and said that they would be there to fetch her. She couldn’t understand why they were coming to pick her up. . She kept telling herself that it was just protocol. That everything was going to be fine.
She
Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson