She rolls her eyes. “Such a drama queen. You get that from overreading.”
I bristle. “You can’t overread.”
She ignores my rebuttal. “This is for my work, Mia,” Jess scolds. “It’s for me.”
I press my lips together and pick up the phone, logging in to the app and immediately eyeing my photo. It’s a shot of me she took one night when the lighting was perfect. It might as well have been one of those old glamour shots. It looks nothing like me. In fact, if I saw this photo, I wouldn’t even think it was me, and I know myself pretty darn well. I’d think I was a gorgeous brunette with long silky dark hair, perfect skin, and brown eyes. The girl who wore glasses like a boss, not a geek.
Not the girl who woke up this morning with unruly hair, sensitive skin, and a round face that my limited makeup skills couldn’t hide. I’d tied my hair at my nape, done my makeup the best I know how, which is not all that well, and finished the look off with the dark-rimmed glasses that allow me to see clearly. I’d forgotten the photo of the girl who might have been me.
Until now.
“This photo does not look like me,” I argue, pointing at my face. “This is me.”
“Oh, whatever, Mia.” She gives me a little elbow nudge. “You already have three messages.” She points at the little icon. “See? You are not invisible.”
Good Lord, what has she put on my profile? I glance down and quickly scan the details:
Thirty-two
115 pounds
Only child
Addicted to books
Well, I’m 125, but I’ll take it as a compliment that she put 115—unless she’s trying to create one big fake Mia Anderson. Because the real Mia isn’t good enough. That idea stabs like one of the forks in our place settings.
She waggles a finger at the screen. “Three messages and I just set-up the account.”
“All of which are most likely new-account-setup messages.”
“Only one is a new-account-setup message.”
“You read my messages?” I challenge.
“Of course not, but I know what I got when I set mine up. One setup message. Just one. You have three messages, and two are the real deal.”
I hate the funny little flutter of anticipation in my belly that will lead nowhere but a steep drop off a cliff named disappointment. “If they’re like the ones I had with that other app, most of them resemble closet serial killers.”
“That was years ago. The police have already caught all those people.”
I smirk. “Not funny.”
Thankfully the food arrives, another bartender setting our plates in front of us and briefly asking us about condiments and such. I think maybe I’ve escaped this conversation, but no such luck. Apparently I’m the one not ready to end it. “How many messages do you have?” Translated to: How badly do I stack up?
She unrolls her silverware. “None. I haven’t gone live yet. I plan to after my meeting. Read your messages.”
“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.” I shove my phone into my purse. “You have a meeting, remember?”
“Fine, yes,” she concedes. “I do have a meeting, but are you going to help me with my article? And before you answer, I won’t use your name.”
“You already said that.”
“I know you. You need to hear that promise more than once. Come on, Mia. It will be fun, just you and me.”
Easy words spoken casually but with a big impact.
My entire adult life and hers, too, we’ve leaned on each other.
Jess’s parents died in a car accident a month after she was hired at the magazine. She hadn’t talked to either of them in over a year. They’d disowned her. Turns out, she still inherited everything. And yet, despite this, and her instant success at her new job, we were in the same understated apartment.
Flash forward three months later, despite her already proving to be a shining star at her new job, and me working part-time at a small library branch while working on my master’s, we were still in that tiny apartment. We lived there until I graduated and I insisted she buy a place of her own. She resisted, but I knew it was time for me to go and for her to stop babysitting her college friend.
“Mia,” Jess presses.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, because as much as I want to say no, this is Jess. I’m always there for her, and she’s always there for me. As if I just said yes, she says, “I’ll be over tonight, and we can read the messages together.”
I set my fork down. “I do this alone or not at all.”
“Then you agree?”
“I’ll think about it.”
And that’s just what I do. I think about those messages through the rest of lunch, and even as I walk back to the library. I decide there’s no harm in just reading a few messages. What could go wrong?
Chapter Three
My mother was the first person to take me to a library. I was two, and the influence of that trip on my life was captured in a Polaroid photograph of me and my mother. Me, looking cute as a button back then, in pigtails, holding a couple of books that were as large as me, with a grin on my face. The joy I’d felt inside a circle of books radiates through that image. Beside me, my mother’s face had glowed. On that day, in that photo, we’d seemed the enchanted fairy-tale story of a mother and daughter destined to become best friends. As an adult I see that moment as one of my mother’s early attempts to mold my views to her own.
She’d sought to create a mini-me daughter addicted to knowledge. Instead, she’d gifted me with my addiction to the written word. Some might argue knowledge and the written word are the same thing, but I would disagree quite dogmatically. When one hunts for knowledge, it’s generally with a narrow agenda, such as my mother’s infatuation with statistics. With the written word, the view is unlimited, our dreams often stirred, our lives influenced by perhaps only one turned page that opens our minds to new possibilities.
As for me and my mother, I’d wanted to read a book. She’d wanted to play a game that focused on problem-solving. I’d done as she wished to please her, but the joy I’d felt in that library wasn’t present in those moments. That’s really where our divide began, in those joyless moments, and so I’d faded into the background of her number-chalked school boards in academia. The day I told her I was going to focus on attaining a master’s in library science, she cried. The day I got a job in a small corner library, she bit back scorn. The day I was promoted to the main library, I didn’t bother to tell her, despite being a kid rewarded with the biggest piece of candy in the candy store.