Kiss Her Once for Me (18)

“Let me get this straight,” Meredith says in her lawyer voice. “A man wants to pay you two hundred thousand dollars to be engaged to him for two weeks, marry him, and then divorce him a few months later, and you’re going to say no? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“As my unofficial lawyer, I don’t think you should be advising me to commit fraud.”

“As your official best friend, I am advising you to not be a fool. You desperately need this money, especially since you refuse to tell Linds where she can shove her credit card debt.”

I make a sound oddly reminiscent of a dying raccoon.

“Plus, this will get you out of your apartment for a change. Wouldn’t it be nice not to spend your Christmas eating a rotisserie chicken alone over your kitchen sink?”

“That… wasn’t my plan.”

“Yes, it was.”

I groan again.

“I love you, Ellie, but this past year has been rough. You experienced a few setbacks, and you just froze. You are frozen, like a microwavable burrito pre-microwave. You need a little shock to your system. And two hundred thousand dollars? You can’t walk away from that kind of money.”

“I can admit that I’ve… stagnated a bit.” I can also admit this is a total understatement. “But does that shock to my system really need to be a fake engagement to a handsome millionaire?”

“Honestly? Maybe it does. Nothing else has managed to shake you from this hibernation. You’ll be like Sandy B, and he’ll be your Colin Firth. You’ll pretend to be in love, and then you’ll fall in love for real.”

“What movie is that?”

“I don’t know… all of them?”

“But I don’t want to real-date Andrew. I’m not looking for a relationship right now?” I can’t even stop myself from inserting a question mark at the end of that pathetically declarative sentence.

“Fine. Then don’t do it for a chance at romance with Andrew. Do it for the money.” When Meredith makes declarative statements, there is never a misplaced question mark. You can almost feel the universe bending to her will.

Two hundred thousand dollars. I grew up in a world of Goodwill bargain bins and living paycheck to paycheck, and I’ve never even let myself imagine the life that kind of money could buy.

“I—I need to shower.”

“Classic Ellie avoidance pivot.”

“Yes, but Ellie has vomit in her hair, so you should allow it.”

“Okay, but what are you going to do about these engagement photos? They’re out in the world now.”

As always, Meredith is right. The photos are out there, and when I walk into Roastlandia (five minutes early), Ari squeals a congratulations at me. “Holy shit! You took my advice and got engaged to Andrew! Kind of extra, but I love it!”

“Last Christmas” is playing again, the Taylor Swift version this time, and Ari is wearing a feathered headband and star stickers beneath her eyes, like a human Snapchat filter. She grills me about my supposed engagement, and since it feels wrong to tell her about Andrew’s inheritance, my silence seems to confirm what she already believes. Greg appears from the back to lecture me on “professional conduct in online spaces” as overhead, Taylor laments—once bitten, twice shy.

After my eight-hour shift, I return to my tiny, subterranean studio apartment, like always.

I heat up a frozen burrito for dinner, like always.

I sit on my futon, reach for my iPad, and open up the Clip Studio program, like always.

Frozen like a microwave burrito.

Gripping my Apple pen, I begin to draw rough panel sketches of yesterday for the newest episode of The Perpetual Suck.

Art is the only thing I’ve ever been good at, until I guess I sort of stopped being good at it. This—creating webcomics—started as a way to process what happened with Jack. I’d always done my own passion projects alongside my animation classes, drawing fanart of my favorite ships and posting it to my anonymous art Instagram. I built a small but loyal fan following who showed up in the comments whenever I posted original character art. I’d toyed with the idea of a webcomic or a graphic novel, but it was too time-consuming when I was in school, and focusing on it fully was too much of a risk.

A master’s in animation would allow me the opportunity to do art with a steady paycheck. Webcomics would not.

But then Jack happened. She stomped into my life in thick-soled work boots and a Carhartt jacket and she shook up all my carefully crafted plans and ideas about what my life should be, and then she left me alone to figure it all out in her wake.

So I drew our story, or something that vaguely resembled it. Instead of posting it to Instagram, I uploaded the comic to Drawn2, the online community for web-published comics. Within a week, the first episode had twenty thousand reads. My small fan base exploded into a hungry mass of readers who wanted to know what would happen between the two girls at the center of Snow Day.

And then fans did find out what happened, and they were disappointed.

And then I lost my job.

And then I started a new series loosely based on my life in Portland, and I called it The Perpetual Suck. Some readers followed me to that story. Most didn’t. It doesn’t really matter to me either way. I don’t post my webcomics for the likes or the followers or the praise. I post it because even if I’m not good enough to do art professionally, I don’t quite know how to stop processing the world this way. Drawn2 is the one place my art doesn’t have to be perfect, because no one knows it’s mine. It’s the one place my work is allowed to be a draft instead of a finished product.