The Teddy Bear Agreement | Updating

10 - the first night

The nice part about working at a coffee shop is that you smell of coffee for the rest of the day, the downside of it is that you don't smell it, but everyone else will point it out to you throughout the day. The day goes by slowly today, and by the time I'm out of work Michelle is waiting for me outside of the café, her hair in majestic curls all around her that cast a halo over her whenever she's in front of the sun.

"You smell like a latte." She says. It was one of the things she used to tell me a lot when I worked at Starbucks.

I pass her the drink I made for her, my version of an iced caramel macchiato from The Midnight Bean. It's just an upside-down vanilla latte with caramel drizzle, but she's well aware of this. There's no real caramel syrup in it, which surprises some folks but is now more common knowledge.

"I spilled something today," at the very least I didn't spill it on myself, as I oftentimes did before, "but the shift was super nice about it, even though I forgot their name already?"

"It happens, I have an interview with Sephora tomorrow." She beams.

My eyes go wide.

"Congrats! You're going back?"

Michelle sticks out her bottom lip before taking a drink from her coffee.

"I mean I gotta pay the bills, even if Ray does well off commissions. I feel guilty he's taking most of the burden and my parents in no way have money to send me for college so there's nowhere to run besides back, and I mean you went back to a coffee shop so why not?"

Michelle and April both worked at Sephora their senior year in high school, cashier mostly, both of them are really good with their makeup skills and while they are no Beauty Advisors, especially not licensed ones, they are well beyond what I can achieve if left to my own devices. Her previous experience with the company will probably get her in if her old boss's recommendation doesn't. Like Starbucks, it's not a livable wage on its own, but it'll get things paid if you're sharing the cost of living with someone else.

Michelle is in a different spot from mine, and while I know she holds no judgment I do feel guilty from time to time. Here I am denying my father's optional help, the monetary help I could use to easily get my way through college, even though mom never offered, I know my grandmother would also be disappointed that I didn't try to do more with my life. Like William's friend, Daniel, there were certain expectations of me from the moment I was a little girl. Holly went into business school, and I wonder where she would have gone next had she not disappeared off my grid.

I wonder where she is now.

Pausing our walk, I take a look at my phone, no missed calls no messages. Sometimes I answer calls whenever they enter my phone, even if they are a number I don't recognize only to realize they are spam calls. It's silly to think my sister could be going out of her way to reach out to me when she has my number, but there's that shred of hope that she's been silent because she is finding out more about what happened and will one day reach out with all the new things. Fight aside I'm hoping my sister still is there for me at the end of the path.

"Everything alright?" Michelle asks.

"Yeah," I put my phone back in my pocket, "just thinking about Holly."

"Nothing yet?" She fully knows that she hasn't reached back, but unlike April who is a single child, Michelle is an older sister and usually threads more carefully when the topic of Holly turns up.

"Not since three months ago, no." While everything happened last October, Holly had kept contact with me one way or another up until May, and then the radio silence had begun. It wasn't completely out of nowhere, we had a fight about dad the last day we saw each other and she told me that while I was listening to her I couldn't understand where she was coming from and left.