Georgie, All Along (11)

A willing puppet.

The problem with this, though, is that I know I can’t blame Nadia. I got hired by her because I was suited to withstanding hurricanes of her type, had built a reputation for my total unflappability in the face of chaos. I’d learned it first in the trenches of restaurant work, had honed it on those early sets I worked on, had perfected it in my first gig as a full-time personal assistant, a six-month temporary gig for a French director who was in LA for meetings. I spoke no French and he spoke hardly any English, and yet I showed up every day and made it happen. I’d get his Google-translated texts and then I’d get to work. Meal delivery, dry cleaning pickup. Scheduling massages. Replacing cell phones dropped in the tub. Sending thoughtful gifts to his girlfriend. When he went back to Paris, he cried when he said goodbye to me. Every once in a while, I get a random email from him, asking how I am.

And before all that? Before all that, there was this house, with its gutters that’ll get fixed someday, with its maybe-we’ll-clean-before-our-trip and maybe-we-won’t vibe. Before that, there was Harris County High School, where I got teachers off my back by saying things like, Maybe I could be a flight attendant, or Maybe I’ll be a nurse. I said those things the same way I’ve said to casual acquaintances that I’d like to backpack around the world, or the way I’ve said, to my two long-term boyfriends over the years, that I maybe want to have kids someday. Placating, offhand. Conversation pieces at best, conversation stoppers at worst. No real intention behind any of it. For as long as I can remember, my own future has been blurry and indistinct to me.

But I’d forgotten about the fic.

I flip a few pages, end up at the entry I wrote about the Buzzard’s Neck dock, a secluded spot between Darentville and Blue Stone that had a sort of mystical reputation among teenagers in town. I read over it again, excited anew by this other me—this me who saw things with clarity. I’ve written with such detail—everything from clothes Bel and I are wearing to the sensation of hitting the warm, brackish water off the dock.

It’s such a small idea.

But it represents something big.

Years ago, when I lived here in this house, when I rattled around this town with Bel on the cusp of what was then a big transition, when I had time to dream of these tiny imagined futures, I was a person who made plans for me. It sounds strange, contradictory to say it, but I hadn’t calcified my way into the kind of flexibility that became my most defining feature to the people I worked for. I hadn’t yet become a person who never thought about the next day, the next week, the next month for myself at all.

I don’t know how long I read, but it’s long enough that the sun is nearly set, the rustle of crickets and cicadas rising outside. I didn’t even finish my toast, but it doesn’t matter. I am absorbed. At one point, I almost get derailed by a painful realization: For all the work I put into these scenarios, I didn’t end up actually doing most of them, or at least not in the way I envisioned them. Probably it was too expensive to get clothes in Sott’s Mill, and The Bend ended up closing for three years because of a fire. I don’t know why we never made it to Buzzard’s Neck, but I do know I never wrote a wish in Sharpie and jumped off the dock there. I went to prom, but of course not with Evan Fanning; in fact, not with a date at all—instead with a group of girls who weren’t coupled up at the time. The first time I tried alcohol, it was a beer that Chad Pulhacki gave me at his parents’ annual fall bonfire, and it tasted like socks and anxiety. Bel’s mom never relented in her ban on horror movies, and I never wanted to get her in trouble.

But I don’t let that trip me up. In fact, I let it light me up—I’m half on fire with the fact that so much of this is unfulfilled.

It’s given me an idea.

The first idea that doesn’t have something to do with someone I work for in ages.

I stand from the couch with the notebook in my hands, flipping back to the first page, excitement buzzing in my fingertips. How We Conquer High School, it reads, which is funny and sweet and silly, the most low-stakes strategic plan in history. But when Nadia had told me this was the time for me to do all things I want to do; when Mrs. Michaels had looked at me with knowing pity; when Bel had offered me time to think, I’d felt the leaden weight of my blankness every time, and I still feel it now. I don’t know yet what I want for my life, don’t know whether I want to simply take on another PA gig, or figure out whether I could do a different sort of job altogether. I don’t know if I want a family someday or to travel the world on my own; I don’t even know if I want some combination of all of these things. I need time to figure it out, to fulfill the promise I made to myself in Nickel’s, and I need the confidence to believe I can.

This friend fic? It feels like that confidence. Once upon a time, I told a story about myself. And maybe if I can make some of that story come true—Buzzard’s Neck, The Bend, whatever—I’ll be closer to writing a new one. Maybe spending the next two months in the same town as my favorite person, the first and only person who ever read these plans, the person who sometimes wrote smiley faces and exclamations and OMGs above my prose . . . well.

Well, maybe then I can finally make a version of them come true. Follow through with these plans while I figure out my next ones.

I pace across the worn, faded carpet, mostly avoiding the piles of hastily unpacked stuff from my duffel, flipping through the pages with a quickness now. I count ideas off as I go, and what’s funny is that even though a young me wrote these, a lot of them still appeal to me now. They’re manageable and fun and relaxing; they’ll loosen me up for the bigger stuff. I’ll have to do some tiptoeing to avoid the extreme amount of context that involves Evan Fanning, but that seems easy enough, since I haven’t thought about him in probably a decade. I’ll focus on the parts of this that are about me, and me and Bel. I’ll start by making a list—