❝I know it's hard for you to be friends with a girl without objectifying her - but lucky me, not everyone's you!❞
❝Oh yeah. 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨. The lady goth protest too much.❞
❝𝘿𝙤𝙩𝙝, Gavin. Doth.❞
→ From Van Zandt family disappointment and Grade 8...
A/N: This chapter was particularly hard to edit, and I ended up changing almost the whole thing. We definitely delving more into Audrey's life outside of the canon characters, but this whole thing kind of gives me Perks of Being a Wallflower vibes.
Also, this is vaguely based on real experiences, just like everything that came before, so it was kinda wild to explore.
Also, the end is just too good.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The co-op was great. The co-op was interesting. And maybe Ms. Campanelli had a little bit of a point — my logic brain for once felt as engaged as my writer's brain. She'd give me prompts — "Can you find the hook? At what point do you feel like putting the story down? Why?" — and it immediately made me want to write. My video and music editing even made more sense — but I left my computer in Joey's garage weeks ago and had too much pride to grab it or ask anyone else to.
Shelly, who rapidly became my favorite co-worker, would've psyched me up to march in there and grab it. She would've probably driven me there if she knew. It only took a few weeks and she became a sort of life coach. She was a senior entering her final semester at Earl Grey while interning. Even crazier, she won an award for a short story and took a college-level English course — and she was only seventeen! Writing was something I liked before but it felt like a tangible goal here. It felt like something I could enjoy forever.
That was the thing. The co-op was everything to me, and everything else in my life seemed to matter less. Or I didn't matter to the rest of my life.
I finished reading that book in a week, the Carla Ford one. I started getting rides home from Shelly on the days we both worked and we roasted the lamest parts of the novel as she blasted Nine Inch Nails at the same volume as cheesy 90s pop.
I read another Carla Ford novel, a contemporary crime thriller called The Price of Her Sins, and Shelly was right. She wasn't terrible, but 'not terrible' wasn't a glowing endorsement. Still, she was their top seller and that meant she was succeeding at the thing I wanted to do.
