Rock My World (11 page)

Chapter 18

Back at the
cabin Jenna started her homework. She looked for paper but couldn’t find any,
eventually coming across an old diary in the spare room. She scribbled on a
blank page near the back:

Looking over the list she’d made felt productive.
She’d feared she wouldn’t be able to come up with anything and now she had four
legitimate possibilities. Ideas anyway. Discovering her employment ineptitude
was disconcerting, especially in such a fragile emotional state. Most people
went through this process at eighteen when they left home to go to college.
Here she was, a thirty four-year old freshman in The University of Life. Pick a
major.

In an
attempt to procrastinate, she flipped through the pages of her old diary. She
came across an entry from the summer before sophomore year. She read the words
of her former self:

Dear Diary,

Today we went to Virginia City to
watch the camel races. It was fun except that the camels were really gross.
They spit!
Eww
!!!! But then we walked around downtown
and tasted the fudge (yum!) and went on a tour of an old mine. I
’
m not normally interested in
history but I was 200 feet below the earth, standing on a tiny elevator with my
crush and his hand kept brushing up against mine. I don
’
t know if it was on purpose or not,
but maybe when we go to the movies later I can find out. I mean, even if he is
interested it
’
s
not like he can be too obvious about it. Not with his sister around.

Jenna slammed the book shut in an attempt to stop
the stream of suppressed memories flooding in. A photo slipped out, landing
face down on the floor. She didn’t want to, but couldn’t help it. She picked it
up. The three smiling faces, posing behind bars, belonged to none other than
herself,
Airika
and Zach. She had forgotten how much
of a crush she used to have on him. She’d liked him for forever.
Until Alex.
Nothing ever happened, of course. Their two-year
age difference, insignificant now, was a gaping chasm then. When they were a
little older, Jenna knew
Airika
would never have
allowed it to happen so she kept it to herself.

She blushed,
suddenly self-conscious he might find out about her crush, ancient history
though it was. At least they didn’t have his sister as a third wheel. “No!” she
said out loud, hoping it would force her mind to stop wandering further down
that path. The last thing she needed now was to add another layer of
complication to an already convoluted Jerry Springer-
esque
problem.
Focus Jenna.
She shoved both
hands in her pockets to keep them from delving further into the diary.

Inside her
pocket, she found a piece of paper and remembered that her photos should be
ready for pickup by now. They couldn’t call her since she smashed her phone and
didn’t know the number to the cabin. Plus, she could get a better look at the
shopping center now that it was light outside.

Her favorite
skinny jeans were the only trendy item she could add to her otherwise hideous
outfit if she didn’t want to freeze to death. She dug in the second bag Zach
had packed for her for something warm to put on. Unzipping it, she nearly
keeled over from humiliation.

As he’d done with the other drawers in her
bedroom, he dumped the contents of her nightstand drawer out on top of
everything else. While she appreciated that he hadn’t spent time going through
her underwear drawer, she wanted to crawl in a hole when, glinting up at her,
she saw the pink Rabbit vibrator she’d gotten in a gift basket from the Sex in
the City party she’d gone to last year.
And
it’s not even in its packaging
, she thought, wondering if that made any
difference at all.

She screwed her eyes up to try to banish the
visual of Zach’s reaction to seeing it and chucked on an unflattering puffy
jacket, knit beanie (with tassel) and clunky snow boots. Not cute, but
practical for walking around town and avoiding frostbite (and an excellent
disguise when not wanting to be recognized by well-meaning friends).

“May I help
you?” asked a perky salesgirl working the camera counter. Jenna smiled.

“Yeah, I had
a roll of film developed. And an enlargement.”

“Name or
ticket?”

Jenna took
the ticket out of her pocket, handing it over. The girl did a quick double take
when she read the name, but was gracious enough not to say anything.

“Just a sec.
The
enlargement’s
in the back.”

“Thanks.”

While she
waited, Jenna looked around. The grocery store was much larger than she
remembered, not quaint at all. It was fully modern and she could see an aisle
selling books, another section for movies to rent or buy, and, on the other
side, a sit-down bakery/café. It’s funny how different a memory of a place
could be.

“Here it
is!” The salesgirl said. “Would you like to pay here or up front?”

“Can I pay
at the bakery?” Jenna wanted to sit down with a cup of coffee to look through
the photos.

“Sure!”

She took the
photos and headed over to the café.

Cappuccino
in hand, she sat at a corner table and opened the envelope. Nostalgia gave way
to trepidation, remembering the diary entry. Who knew what might be lurking on
this roll of film.

Chapter
19

The photos
turned out to be mostly of them out on a ski boat. There were shots of she and
Airika
together, arms draped over each other’s shoulders,
making faces,
Airika
pushing Jenna off the boat where
Zach swam around grinning, Jenna getting up on a wakeboard, and one of Jenna
and
Airika
floating on a big inner-tube, their cheesy
grins aimed right at the camera. Then there was a series of shots of the lake.
An artistic close-up of the water after a pebble fell in, rippling the glassy
surface. Another shot of a dock Jenna recognized from nearby the boat beach.
The sun sank down below the mountainous horizon through the legs of the dock. It
was striking—clean lines, good perspective and depth.
Did I take that?
She wondered.

The next
series revealed sunsets full of pinks, oranges, reds, purples and a velvety
navy sky taken from different parts of the beach.
A sort of
time-lapse panorama.

Finally, she
got to the last shot, the one she’d had enlarged without seeing (against the
sales girl’s recommendation). It was different than the image she’d had in her
head, but effective nonetheless. She was mostly in silhouette, exposing the
sapphire blue of the sky and lake outside, but the little crystals glowed like
the embers of a campfire, throwing light haphazardly around the room. The
effect was half fashion editorial (maybe she still had some modeling chops,
after all) and half horror film, with irregular
up-lighting
on her face and neck.

The longer she stared, the less she recognized
herself. The image took on a life of
its own
. Her pose
was angular and imposing. Her expression looked intimidating, even sinister in
the harsh lighting—a look unseen in her daily repertoire. It frightened
her to have that kind of anger lurking just below the surface. She was terrified
she might be angry forever.

She quickly
repacked the photos into the envelope and braced herself for the cold walk back
to the cabin. Big white flakes fell from the sky as soon as she stepped
outside. She gave herself a mental pat on the back for dressing
appropriately—the right choice in the battle of fashion versus function.

On the
ground in front of her, littered by some rude passerby, lay a tabloid photo of
her husband sitting at a table on a hotel balcony across from a woman with
sharply layered blonde hair, exactly like
Airika’s
,
and a caption that read “Finding Love in Spain: Alex Anders out with another
woman? Does Jenna know?” She stuffed it in her pocket, hating herself for not
leaving it there on the ground where it belonged. She told herself not to give
it credence.
 
Most stories are contrived and planted for publicity
; she heard her
voice repeating the same monologue she’d often recited to Felicity, finding it
wholly unconvincing. The snow whipped around, biting the skin of her exposed
cheeks, thankfully giving her somewhere else to direct attention.

As she made
her way toward the lake, the wind at full gale turned the blowing snow into a
whiteout. It was like navigating a thick white maze, guided more by gravity
than sight.
 
She stuffed the photos
inside her jacket to keep them dry. After a few slips and a close call with a
snowplow barreling up the road, she made it back to the cabin, kicking the
accumulated snow off her boots, jacket and hat.

Inside it was freezing. She flipped the light
switch on to read the thermostat, only to realize the power was out. She
couldn’t bear the thought of freezing to death in this cabin, that tabloid
being her last visual.

Flashlight
, she thought, scavenging
drawers and cupboards to no avail. She looked at the fireplace and noticed that
there was wood already in it. She didn’t know the first thing about lighting
fires, but what better time to learn? Next to the fireplace was a pile of extra
logs and butane lighter.

On TV they always lit some sort of newspaper or
something first. She looked around. Nothing. A smile spread across her face as
she pulled the tabloid out of her pocket, relishing each crumpling sound,
placing it neatly between the logs. She took a deep breath and pulled the
trigger. A small flame shot from the lighter and … Poof! The paper caught fire
quickly, black smoke filling the small fireplace. A few loud crackle pops
followed as the flame spread across the ready-to-burn logs, stretching upward.

It seemed
apropos that the tabloid smoke was black, but there was an awful lot of it. Was
it supposed to fill the room? She spluttered a cough, covering her mouth with
her sleeve.
Probably
not
.
She looked around for some sort of vent. A black wrought iron
handle protruding from the rock seemed her best bet. She jiggled it until it
moved, immediately sucking the smoke up through the chimney. “I did it!”

Jenna
Jax
-Anders—the girl who’d never been camping, whose
idea of roughing it involved room service and down pillows—lit a fire to
save her life
.
She assumed it was cold enough to
freeze to death without one. Beaming, she rubbed her hands together, body and
soul warmed by the fire.

The camera,
still sitting on the coffee table, reflected orange light off its lens,
grabbing her attention. She put in a new roll of film. This was worth
recording. She took a couple shots of the flames in the logs and then set up
the self timer, as though she were taking a silly tourist shot of herself in
front of some famous monument, posing in front of her very first fire.

Her spirits
weren’t even dampened by the realization that all the other appliances were
electric, and she had no way of cooking for herself. There was only one thing
she could think to make, though she’d never done it before, but always wanted
to. She found the ingredients needed (having conveniently shoved them into her
basket on her earlier shopping expedition at Zach’s insistence), including the
wire hanger for optimal marshmallow roasting. Carefully laying out the graham
crackers and chocolate on a plate, she speared a big fluffy marshmallow and
stuck it right into the thick of the flames. It caught fire quicker than she
expected and she extinguished it, the thin black skin sliding off its gooey
flesh. Her second attempt was more of a golden brown bubbly effect: the perfect
S’more
.

With a belly
full of the most delicious dessert of all time, and a roaring fire of her own
making, she curled up on the couch, settled in for the night. Aside from
paranoia about burning the house down if she left the room, there wasn’t
another heat source, making the couch the best spot in the house.