Emmaline Waters, This Is Your Life

  Emmaline Waters,

  THIS IS YOUR

  Life

  Maggie Bloom

  First ElkNewt Press Edition

  EMMALINE WATERS, THIS IS YOUR LIFE

  Copyright © 2014 by Tara Nelsen-Yeackel

  Cover Design © 2014 by Karri Klawiter [http://artbykarri.com]

  Cover Images © Can Stock Photo Inc. / crspix and

  © Can Stock Photo Inc. / Andres

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author. [www.maggiebloomwrites.wordpress.com]

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is coincidental and unintended.

  For Pete

  (again)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  “Okay . . . begin,” instructs the human-resources assistant—a clever-looking brunette with sculpted calves and a knee-strangling pencil skirt—a stopwatch the size of Manhattan cupped in her palm. With a click of her thumb, she gets the meter running.

  Fifteen minutes. This is how much time my fellow applicants and I have to devour a mystery meal, judge its palatability, and draft a thoughtful critique worthy of printing in the Arts & Leisure section of the Boston Sunday Times. In my case, the task must be accomplished while holding my breath to the point of asphyxiation, thanks to the (very) little black dress I’ve worn for the occasion.

  Before putting fork to plate, I scan the competition. There are six of us hunched around a conference table in a sterile, windowless room. We are the cream of the crop, the last men (four) and women (two) standing, the swimsuit portion of the competition complete, our fates resting on the interview.

  Good thing this isn’t a beauty pageant, I think. Or we’d be in a shitload of trouble.

  As a newly minted graduate of Boston University, I am the youngest contender by far. The other woman is midfortyish, with an I’ve-given-up-caring aura. The men have outlasted my father by a solid decade, at minimum.

  I draw the deepest breath I can manage and concentrate on the plate in front of me, silverware clanging as my competitors get to work.

  Hmm . . . which of the three gummy masses shall I sample first?

  The greenish yellow lump looks interesting, in a regurgitated baby food sort of way. Or maybe the neon orange glob would taste better. I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve ingested nuclear waste.

  In the end, the beige mound prevails, its neutrality screaming: I will not send you to the emergency room at 3 a.m. with gut-twisting stomach pains.

  The assistant excuses herself, leaving the stopwatch faceup on the table, the seconds sneering as they zoom by. Focus, Em, I tell myself, dipping the tines of the fork into a foodstuff (suddenly, I understand that word: foodstuff equals not quite food) resembling chunky wallpaper paste. You’ve got this. I mean, sure, you’re no gourmet connoisseur. Heck, you’re a New York mile away from being a foodie, even. Come to think of it, your favorite meal is SpaghettiOs with hot dogs and, to jazz things up, extra hot dogs. But at least you’ve got that English degree to fall back on, and—

  Shut the fuck up, self! I must taste! Think! Write!

  The fork is halfway to my lips when, out of the corner of my eye, I spot the spindly guy next to me fiddling with something under the table. Please, God, don’t let him be a sex pervert who gets aroused by pureed squash (I’m guessing that’s what the neon orange glob is) and creamed spinach.

  He is not a sex pervert, however—as far as I can tell, anyway. He’s something worse. Much worse.

  “Ahem,” I say out of the side of my mouth, shocked at what is going on in the man’s lap, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  Unbelievably, he doesn’t look up.

  “Psst,” I try, drawing a hairy eyeball from the woman, who is slumped in the uncomfortable plastic chair across from me, “we’re not allowed to . . .”

  The leggy assistant was quite clear on this point: no electronic devices, i.e. NO CHEATING!!!

  The man pulls a confused face. “Huh?”

  He’s kidding, right? I can clearly see that he’s accessed the New York Times’ restaurant reviews on his phone. It can only be a matter of moments before he starts lifting passages verbatim, in an attempt to steal this job out from under my inexperienced fingertips.

  I seethe with rage, but a glance at the stopwatch throws a wet blanket over me. I shake my head and, after a mouth-readying gulp, insert the first forkful of . . .

  Mmm.

  Beige is delicious, as it turns out. Much tastier than greenish yellow (or so I suspect). Delicious what, though? I can hardly pontificate on the merits of beige without specifying the food source from whence it sprang.

  Chicken, I think. Or duck. Maybe rabbit. Whatever it is, it’s bathed in the most heavenly gravy ever to grace a ladle.

  Aha! I’ll use that in the critique: the succulent chicken/duck/rabbit was bathed in the most heavenly gravy ever to grace a ladle! If I do say so myself, it’s a good enough line to leave Cheater Dude’s New York Times drivel in the dust.

  Okay, back to work.

  As much as I’d like another taste of the beige chicken (I’m now convinced it is chicken and not duck or rabbit), I have no choice but to forge ahead. And with only eleven minutes left on the clock, I’m going to have to move quickly.

  The youngest of the four men—a stalker type with a crudely dyed beard, severe corrective lenses, and a concave chin—picks up his pencil and starts scribbling away. Of course, Cheater Dude is right behind him.

  A huff/sigh squeezes out of my pursed lips. With effort, I refocus, giving both the greenish yellow and neon orange blobs a chance to wow me.

  They don’t.

  Nine and a half minutes to go.

  IneedthisjobIneedthisjobIneedthisjob. I mean, otherwise, what am I going to do? Sprout roots in Aunt GiGi’s shagarific basement? The offer’s always there, Mom tells me once a week, to ease her guilt over the fact that she and Dad can’t put me up anymore, what would’ve been my room in their new brownstone occupied by my baby sister, Angeline. Mom’s own baby sister, GiGi, lives twenty miles outside the city in a decrepit little bungalow she pried away from her ex-con husband in their rancorous divorce.

  Ooh, rancorous! There must be a way to squeeze that into a sentence: the creamed spinach was a rancorous addition to the otherwise sublime mélange of earthy butternut squash and drool-inducing chicken piccata.

  The stopwatch ticks below the eight-minute mark, and someone—the woman, I’m guessing, or maybe No-Chin Man—begins tapping their foot in a distracting fashion. “Do you mind?” I mumble, glaring across the table. “People are trying to think here.” I wait for someone to back me up, but instead I
get shushed—SHUSHED!!!—by the cheater beside me.

  Brilliant.

  The rat-a-tat-tat continues like some sort of Chinese water torture. What I wouldn’t give for the grungy pink earbuds that are rolling around under the passenger seat of my new boyfriend Trent’s Lexus.

  I bet he’ll dump me if I don’t get this job, I think. Not because he’s an asshole (I’m almost sure he isn’t), but because a hotshot real estate mogul—which he’s on track to becoming in the next few years, thanks to a generous five-million-dollar investment (ahem, gift) from his billionaire grandfather—cannot, in good conscience, hitch his star to the wagon of a woman who doesn’t own so much as a matching pair of socks.

  Cheater Dude gulps down the last of the water in his Dixie cup and promptly goes into a coughing fit. If he turns blue, I’ll intervene—or at least get someone else to, my emergency medical skills a bit on the rusty side. Otherwise, I must concentrate.

  And concentrate, I do. In the sevenish minutes remaining, I hammer out the first few paragraphs—they can’t expect the critique to be finished, can they?—of what is sure to be the winning submission. I mean, I used the words lugubrious, quiescent, feckless, and jejune! All in the same sentence! Surely, no one has managed that before!

  The woman, who has beaten me to the finish line by a mere thirty seconds (I know this because she slammed her pencil down to emphasize her temporal superiority), eyes me with contempt while I carefully—and quietly, like a normal person—place my No. 2 on the table, parallel to the junior-size legal pad on which I’ve recorded my masterpiece. I give her a smile that, I hope, conveys the message: I am sorry that you are alone. Disappointed. A mere feline or two away from full-blown cat-lady nirvana. But don’t expect me to roll over and hand you this job, because I am a human being too, and I have needs, and my needs are as valid as yours, and . . .

  The door swings open and in struts the human-resources assistant, a minute past “time.” Luckily, Cheater Dude has failed to disgorge a lung, and everyone else is on their night-before-Christmas behavior. “So,” the assistant says, already scooping up the notepads, “how was it?”

  “Great!” I blurt, getting the jump on the competition where it counts: with the secretarial staff. “Was that food from Utopia? It tasted very familiar.” Dropping the name of Boston’s trendiest restaurant can’t hurt, I figure, even if I’d have to add a few zeroes to my net worth to afford a meal there.

  Cat Lady rolls her eyes.

  “I couldn’t tell you if it was,” the assistant says with a laugh, “but the budget for all of this”—she flails an arm through the air—“was a hundred bucks. Take from that what you will.”

  One of the two quiet guys—who look enough alike in their plaid button-downs and wire-rimmed glasses to be brothers—asks, “When will we hear back?”

  The assistant tucks the notepads under her arm and cradles the dishes unevenly to her chest. “Oh, we’re not done yet,” she says gleefully. “There are two more screenings: a language-mechanics test and a personality inventory. The editors should be done with your critiques by then.”

  They’re going to put us out of our misery today? “You mean, we’ll know before we leave?” I ask, trying to tamp down the jitter in my voice.

  She stops dead to inspect me, her pupils cutting through my sixty-dollar haircut (thanks, Mom), the fancy makeup job I’ve cribbed off YouTube, and, of course, the aforementioned little black dress. “The column’s due Friday,” she explains, “so the opening really is as ‘immediate’ as the ad professed.”

  Today is Wednesday. If my mouth weren’t as dry as the Mojave Desert, I’d gulp.

  With a perky shrug, the assistant exits to deliver our creative lambs to the editorial slaughter. While she’s gone, I think about using a Jedi mind trick to encourage my competitors to au revoir right along with her.

  Instead, I settle on a different tack.

  “This is such an amazing opportunity!” I gush to no one in particular. “I mean, can you imagine? Being the food critic for the Boston Sunday Times? I’ve dreamed of this job since I was five years old.” I scan the faces around me for evidence of pity but find only steely masks of indifference. “And it would mean so much—so much—to Uncle Phil, if he could live long enough to see me make it.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “He’s being eaten alive by a blood-borne pathogen. Ridiculosis, it’s called. Nasty stuff.”

  Of course, there is no Uncle Phil. And ridiculosis is as dire as it sounds. But I’m feeling so upbeat about my fabrications—you have quite the imagination, Em, I hear my father’s proud voice exclaiming—that, should the food-critic job fall through, I might just dust off that novel I’ve been penning since the seventh grade.

  “She’s coming,” Cheater Dude warns.

  My heart leaps into my throat.

  The assistant bounces back through the doorway. “Here we go,” she says, her voice competing with the muffled clack of her high heels on the carpet. She hands out the tests and, without bothering to go over the instructions, abandons us once again.

  The six of us hunker down, the language-mechanics exam a pleasant surprise with its fill-in-the-blank homonyms, multiple-choice vocabulary, and open-ended sentence corrections. I am elated to be the first one done.

  The personality inventory is another story, however. I mean, how should I know which adjectives people would use to describe me? And should I really run screaming to the nearest loony bin with a toothbrush in one hand and a comb in the other, just because I see myself as shy while others might label me as outgoing?

  Pull it together, Em, I think, hoping to coach myself out of a panic attack that is poised to turn me into the puddle of crazy the personality inventory wants me to be.

  I power through the last few questions and, with a literal sigh of relief, drop my head in my hands. What happens next is . . .

  Idiotic.

  And terrifying.

  “Emmaline Waters?” a disembodied man’s voice calls from the hallway.

  For no explicable reason, it escapes me that I am Emmaline Waters and, as such, I should respond.

  I don’t.

  “Emmaline?” the voice tries again, starting to sound stressed. “Miss Waters?”

  A confused look volleys around the conference table. “What?” I say, feeling the heat of five simultaneous stare downs.

  “Isn’t that you?” asks Plaid #1.

  How would he know?

  In a last-ditch-effort tone, the hallway voice pleads, “Miss Emmaline Waters?”

  I spring to my feet and rush the door, coming out of a shoe in the process. A flash of uncertainty freezes me: should I backtrack and retrieve my footwear or press on uni-shoed? “Coming!” I yell, opting to salvage what remains of my dignity. When they inform me later that they’ve “chosen to go in another direction” with the food-critic position, at least I’ll be able to walk out of here fully shoed, with my head held high.

  I grab the shoe out of Plaid #2’s hand (thank you very much, kind sir), pop it on, and lurch for the hallway, where I encounter the owner of the voice, an attractive male specimen with dark, brooding eyes, the physique of a gladiator, and the fashion sense of . . . well, whoever is considered fashionable nowadays. “Emmaline?” he says one last time, his eyes landing bracingly on mine.

  What is it with this place and the penetrating peepers? “Uh, yeah.” I extend a hand. “I’m Em. Nice to meet you.”

  His grip is firm. “So you prefer Em?” he asks, jotting a note on his legal pad.

  “Yes,” I answer. “No one calls me Emmaline—except, well, my aunt GiGi.” I laugh nervously. “She never got the memo, I guess.”

  “I’m Lance,” he says, taking off down the dingy corridor.

  Of course, he is. “Hi, Lance,” I reply, hurrying after him. But even with two shoes, I struggle to keep up as he snakes around one corner, then another, and another still. Finally, he rears to a stop outside a glass-doored office. On the face of the door, in bold black letters with a hi
nt of gold outlining, are decaled the words Mitchell Heywood, Editor-in-Chief.

  Is this where dreams go to die? “Excuse me, but . . .” I say as Lance twists the knob and pushes the door open.

  He motions at an enormous antique desk. “Have a seat. Mr. Heywood wants to meet you.” I’m about to register a weak protest when he adds, “Thanks for coming in today.”

  Thanks for coming in today? If that isn’t the kiss of death, I don’t know what is. “Sure” is all I get out before Lance does an about-face and marches off, leaving me loitering hesitantly at the cusp of Mr. Heywood’s office.

  Now what?

  Within a second or two, a booming voice orders, “Come in! Come in!”

  Apparently, Mr. Heywood is concealed somewhere in this mysterious lair, which, I note as I proceed cautiously inside, is adjoined by two other rooms—one on each end—to form a commanding editorial suite.

  Nice.

  The main office is empty, so I take a seat in an emerald-green leather armchair and wait with my back strait, my hair meticulously smoothed—well done, Pantene!—and my eyes . . . ready to fall out of my head over what I see teetering across the keyboard of an open laptop computer: my critique, zealously marked up with red pen, including several spots where the underlining—or crossing out, it’s hard to tell—has gone so awry it’s torn through the page, leaving feathery-looking holes behind. And don’t get me started on the exclamation points! Even the second coming of Christ wouldn’t elicit this many!

  I push aside a mountain of disorganized paperwork and grab the critique, which I’m about to shove into my purse, when . . .

  The unmistakable sound of footsteps.

  I hasten the critique back into place and brace myself for humiliation. I mean, what made me think I was qualified—much less skilled enough—for a job like this? I should be happy to sling rum shooters (in another life, I’m a bartender), scribble down a bad poem every now and then, and pray that news of my incompetence falls short of reaching BU, lest they repossess the English degree that swelled my head in the first place.