Finding Joy (The Joy Series) Read online

  “Or a foosball table,” I said, nodding slowly. “What was I thinking?”

  “I dunno. Maybe you should tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. His gaze turned from the baby to me and bored into me. “Are we taking in a roommate?”

  The question seemed innocent on its face, but felt loaded instead. Was it possible that he knew what I had in mind? If so, how? I hadn’t brought it up, and Lizzie had never mentioned it when he was around. Was I that transparent? Maybe that’s what happened when you opened yourself up and allowed someone to truly love you. Maybe they became privy to all of your innermost thoughts.

  The tension caused by Adam’s tractor-beam gaze – and my sudden belief that it wasn’t merely my face that he was studying, but instead my soul – was almost unbearable. I looked around the table, sure that our friends could feel the tension, too.

  “I bet it was awesome,” Carly said quickly, changing the subject for me. She was a savior. “I wish I had your budget. Of course, if I’d gotten off my ass and done something with my life, maybe I would.”

  “Hey, our place is nice,” Jillian chimed in. “It has an elevator and minimal pests.” Jillian had become an almost-friend because of her status as Carly’s sister.

  “Riiiiight,” Carly strung out. “The elevator worked for one day last month, and it wasn’t even a day when I went grocery shopping. We sleep in damn bunk beds, Jillian. Whether I’m watching TV from my bed or the couch, it’s the same latitude and longitude.”

  “Yeah, well, the dining room is under my bed. It’s not like you really sleep there all that much anyway,” Jillian said.

  I laughed thinking about their comical apartment. It was possibly the most poorly decorated … and nastiest … apartment in Manhattan. But I had to give it to them because they had figured out how to maximize the space. Their beds were elevated, and they had placed furniture beneath them. They called it ‘double-decker living.’ But, as efficient as the arrangement was, nobody wanted to hang there. Maneuvering from the living room to the dining room could be hazardous to your health. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d gotten up from the couch and banged my head on the underside of Carly’s bed.

  And then there was the issue of Mr. Big. He was Carly’s ankle-biting, chirpy dog.

  “It’s a shithole, and you know it,” Carly said.

  “It’s your dog that has turned it into a shithole,” Jillian exclaimed, wagging a perfectly manicured finger at Carly. “A dog shouldn’t have a potty spot in the house. It’s unsanitary, and cleanliness is next to godliness, you know.”

  “It’s not unsanitary,” Carly said. “Allie’s cat has a litterbox. It’s really no different.”

  “No, it’s … ,” Jillian started.

  “I hate cats,” Burke interrupted with a mouth full of burger. He pointed a finger at Adam. “They’re evil. I don’t know how you can stay over there. Not me. I would have to sleep with one eye open.”

  Jillian rolled her eyes at him and continued like he hadn’t spoken. “No, it’s absolutely different. Cats bury their crap. Dogs don’t. Dogs go outside … not on miniature football fields next to the dining room table.”

  “You have a football field in your apartment?” Ethan asked, looking up. Clearly, he hadn’t been following the conversation. I’d noticed that he tended to space out sometimes when Jillian was talking, which made me wonder why he had stayed with her for this long.

  Ethan was a very intelligent guy, and Jillian … well, Jillian was pretty.

  When I’d first met her, I had been a little enamored by her. She had a super-model-esque look about her, and since she carried vodka in her purse, we had immediately hit it off. But since I’d gotten to know her, I had come to recognize that she came with limitations. Carly had clearly gotten the brains in the family. Regardless, for the most part, Ethan was still enamored with her … at least parts of her.

  “Yes,” his still-shiny new toy answered. “Except there’s poop all over it, and it’s next to our table, which is directly under my bed.”

  “So that’s why you’ve never invited me over,” Ethan murmured. “Why is the table under your bed?” He still hadn’t completely caught up with us.

  “I saw an infomercial the other day on how to train your cat to pee in the toilet. I have to admit I was tempted,” I said.

  “Like Jinxy, the cat from that movie,” Carly said, snapping her fingers as if this was a brilliant idea. “You know, ‘Meet the Fockers. I should try it. If you can teach a cat to poop in the toilet, I don’t know why I couldn’t teach Mr. Big.”

  “Dogs aren’t as smart as cats, Focker,” I said.

  “That’s not true,” Burke interrupted. “Dogs have a much larger vocabulary than cats. Cats understand two words – ‘Here, kitty, kitty.’ Wait. Is that two words or three?” It was possible that Burke was a better match for Jillian than he was Carly, but those were not words that I would ever utter aloud.

  “Ugh,” Carly said, rolling her eyes. “It’s three words, but only two are unique so it counts as two. And Rubber Cat is not smarter than Mr. Big. I will bet you that I can teach Mr. Big to use the toilet before you can teach Rubber Cat.”

  “That dog can’t even jump off the toilet without breaking his legs. I’ll take that bet,” Adam said. He had finally rejoined the conversation after several minutes of appearing to be lost in his own thoughts.

  “I’m in,” Burke said. “What’s the bet?”

  “Here we go,” Barnacle said, laughing. He looked toward me. “Their bets are legendary.”

  I smiled back at him. Barnacle was probably my favorite of Adam’s wayward friends. I mean, there was no doubt that Burke was Adam’s go-to man, and he was a good guy if you could overlook his cocky ‘I’m the Lead Singer of a Band’ behavior. I liked him a lot, but I actually loved Barnacle a little. He was big and burly, and, though he was a bit scary looking, he was just a teddy bear masked in tattoos and black rocker clothing. I didn’t know why, but from the very beginning, I felt a connection with him.

  Adam looked thoughtful for a few long seconds. “If I win, you have to wear a t-shirt of my choosing for three shows in a row.”

  Burke groaned. “You have terrible taste in clothes. Just look at you.”

  Adam looked down at his faded brown t-shirt. In fact, we all looked at his shirt. A piece of bacon was splayed across his chest. It was sandwiched between the phrase ‘Smoke Meat Everyday.’

  “What’s wrong with my shirt?” he asked with a shrug. “Who doesn’t like meat?”

  “Me,” Jillian said with a disgusted look on her face. All eyes flipped from Adam’s shirt to Jillian’s plate and her half-eaten tofu burger. The ‘meat’ portion of the burger was an odd color of grey and looked a little on the gelatinous side. I looked back at my bacon cheeseburger and sent up a little prayer to God in thanks for my love of meat.

  “Yeah, well, that’s just wrong,” Adam said unapologetically, still staring at her sandwich.

  “It does look a little disgusting, doesn’t it?” Jillian asked. She looked to Ethan. “Am I too high maintenance?” Her voice came out as a high pitched whine, and the whole table was reminded of how, at the most awkward of times, she could sound like a chirping monkey. The auditory resemblance was truly unfortunate.

  “No, Jill baby, you’re not too high maintenance,” he said, while contradictorily nodding his head. “Besides, I can think of a rare cut of meat that you never turn down.”

  “Stop,” I said, throwing a french fry at him.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll wear whatever you want.” Burke said, redirecting the conversation away from the sordid topic of Jillian’s secret meat fetish. “But it doesn’t matter because I’m going to win. And then I’m going to get to drive your car.”

  A collective gasp went around the table. “Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” Adam said, chuckling. “I’ve seen you drive, and, no offense, but you drive like a 16-year-old on a bender.”

  “And you drive like a …,” Burke stam
mered, unable to come up with anything to counter Adam’s insult. “Fine. Bet’s off. If a night with Eleanor isn’t the prize, I’m not playing.”

  I met Adam’s eyes and sent him a subliminal message that we had this in the bag. He nodded, indicating that he’d received my directive loud and clear. “Fine, but you have to wear chaps with whatever shirt I pick and talk in a Texas accent to even the field.”

  “You’re on. I’ve always wanted to wear chaps. I’m going to look and sound just like John Wayne.”

  With or without chaps, Burke was the farthest thing from John Wayne. His short dark hair stuck up from his head in an artfully arranged style that was intended to look maintenance-free though I knew that not to be the case. His uniform was head-to-toe black and reeked more of rocker than Old West. But it wasn’t the clothes that made the man. It was the colorful sleeve tattoos that covered each arm from shoulder to wrist that … regardless of clothing … would prevent anyone from ever mistaking him for a cowboy.

  As the guys continued to goad each other over the impending wager, I relaxed a bit. There was little chance that the topic of two-bedroom apartments would rear its ugly head again this evening.

  CHAPTER 2

  Adam

  “Let’s not go to bed yet,” Allie said as she tossed her purse and keys on the table just inside the door.

  “You’re scared aren’t you?” I asked laughing.

  She smiled weakly. “A little … I’ve always hated haunted houses. I mean really hated them. I can’t believe you made me do that tonight.” She bent down and scratched Rubber Cat on the back. He flipped over and threw back his head to expose his short, little neck. She giggled and sat down next to him on the floor in the entryway. As she scratched under his chin, he nuzzled into her thigh, and his trademark chainsaw purr filled the room.

  “Well, I didn’t hate it. You were hilarious. I’ve never seen anyone run so fast through a haunted house before.”

  As soon as we had entered the first room of the house, Allie had smashed herself up against my backside and wrapped her vise-like arms around my waist. Before the woman with the hatchet in her head had even started toward us, Allie’s head was buried in my back, and her feet were running. Using me as a human shield, she’d made it through in record time.

  I hadn’t minded, though. I’d learned in junior high that scared girls were affectionate girls. To this day, I’d never met a girl who didn’t climb me like a tree at the first sign of a little gore. Honestly, it was the only reason I ever spent any money on haunted houses and horror movies. Time after time, they had always proved to be a good return on my investment, and Allie had not disappointed tonight. Even at breakneck speed, I’d enjoyed every second of her sprint through the House of Horrors. And if she needed to sleep a little closer than normal tonight, that’d be all right.

  Alexis

  “Sorry about that, but I needed you to guide me and make sure I didn’t run into anything … like a decapitated zombie that wanted to eat my brains.”

  “You know it’s a whole lot worse when you close your eyes. Your imagination will conjure up something way more terrifying than what’s actually in front of you. That’s true of horror movies, too.”

  “It is!” I said. “When I was in the sixth grade, I went to a lock-in at my church. And somebody please explain to me why a group of middle schoolers at a church lock-in were allowed to watch Nightmare on Elm Street, but we were. I hunkered down in my sleeping bag and refused to watch. It was the longest, scariest two hours of my life.”

  “The original Nightmare on Elm Street from 1984 was only 91 minutes long, but I bet it felt like a decade,” he said with a laugh.

  “How do you do that?”

  “What?” he said, shrugging.

  “Remember the year that a movie from three decades ago was made? In 1984, you were, like, 1 year old or something,” I said, ticking off years on my fingers.

  Adam sat down on the couch and grabbed the remote. “I’m a wealth of superfluous information.”

  “But only if it involves numbers or movies. Or numbers and movies,” I said, shaking my head.

  It was true. I’d seen him spill out dates and sports statistics like it was nothing at all. At dinner with Ethan and Jillian a few weeks ago, he had recited Pi to 25 decimal places and only stopped because we made him. Of course, the rest of the table had to assume that he was right. Ethan and I only knew it to three decimal places, and Jillian didn’t understand why Adam was reciting numbers when we were talking about dessert. “How is it, that as good as you are at numbers, you decided you want to make movies?”

  “Well, I didn’t start out in film,” he said, still focused on flipping through channels on the TV. “When I was at UT, my major was accounting.” His face froze at the realization of what he had just said. It bordered on a topic that neither of us liked to delve into very often. It wasn’t that we couldn’t talk about it. It was just that we had already hashed through it, and neither of us liked to revisit the issue of why he had left school and had to take six years off. Since I’d been the cause of the hiatus that irrevocably altered his life, his words were like an arrow through my heart.

  “Adam …,” I started.

  “I didn’t want to spend my life crunching numbers anyway. This is a better fit,” he said, cutting off the apology that we both knew I would feel compelled to deliver. “And it’s a good thing you’re scared because we can’t go to bed yet. We have a project to work on.”

  I realized then that he was looking for infomercials. “What you are looking is called city kitty or something like that,” I said, scratching my city kitty’s head. “Do you really think we can make it work?”

  He gave me a sideways glance. “We are going to make it work,” he said, before pointing at the cat. “You are going to make it work. It will be a cold day in hell for you, cat, before Burke gets to drive my car.”

  I patted the cat reassuringly, stood up, and stretched. “It would probably be easier to find it online. You could watch infomercials all night and never see it.”

  “I’m not opposed to that. I’m surprised that you don’t want to watch infomercials all night.”

  “As riveting as that sounds, I need to get some sleep tonight. I have a date with Lizzie tomorrow. I just hope I can sleep. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have nightmares.”

  I sat down next to him on the couch and picked up the iPad from the coffee table. He absently patted his leg with one hand while typing with the other. Before I could get comfortable, Rubber Cat jumped up on the arm of the couch and strutted across it. After arching his back in a dramatic display, he hopped down and settled in on Adam’s other leg.

  “There are eight videos on here.” He pointed to the cat. “Rubber Cat, watch and learn. Watch and learn.”

  “Of course, you are going to watch them all,” I said, yawning.

  “Why don’t you go to bed,” he said with a sly smile.

  “I thought we already covered that. I’m just going to lay right here,” I said, resting my head on the only remaining real estate on his lap. “Wake me up when you’re ready for bed.”

  My eyes were already heavy and my brain foggy when he started the first of the videos. I drifted off to the sounds of cat tinkles, Adam chuckles, and Rubber Cat purrs. Despite my fear of monsters, ghouls, and ghosts, the bad dreams never came. And it had everything to do with the guy next to me.

  _________________________

  I zipped up the steps of Lizzie’s building. Fall might be all around me, but there was a spring in my step and, despite my light coat, I didn’t even feel the nip in the air. I threw open the door and flung myself up the stairs with an energy I hadn’t felt in a while.

  Today was going to be fun. Well, to be honest, I didn’t know how Lizzie was going to feel about the activity I had planned, but it was something different. And since I’d never get to do it for myself, I wanted to do it for her regardless of whether she got any pleasure out of it.

  Befo
re I could even rap on the door, Lizzie flung it open and threw herself into the opening, providing me with a full view of her. One look at her and I knew that today’s activity wasn’t just for shits and giggles. It was necessary. Despite its bulk and boxy shape, the heavy Columbia sweatshirt that I had given her last Christmas no longer adequately camouflaged her round tummy.

  “Wow. Look at you!” I said. “You really popped this week.” I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. After all, she was nearly six months pregnant.

  When she had first told me the news in August, she’d guessed that she was about six weeks along. So when the doctor had informed us that she was actually closer to 12 weeks, we had both been surprised. The lesson I’d learned was that you really couldn’t count on a 14-year-old to keep track of time or menstrual cycles.

  She rolled her eyes and looked down at her little bulging tummy with annoyance. “I really busted a gut, right? I just woke up one day, and, I swear, there it was. Ms. Walker, my biology teacher, made me go talk to the guidance counselor on Friday.”

  “How did that go?” I asked, covertly glancing around the apartment. This was our usual procedure when I picked her up. She allowed me to come in just long enough to take stock of the situation while she pretended not to notice. Part of my job as her big sister was making sure that her living conditions hadn’t degraded to a point that was intolerable. Unfortunately, my assessment of the apartment today raised more questions than it provided answers. The problem wasn’t that it was unlivable. In fact, it was the exact opposite. I’d never seen it look nicer.

  The piles of dirty clothing and empty food containers that usually littered the room were conspicuously absent. The stove, which was typically covered with dirty pots and pans, sparkled as if someone had just taken a paper towel and some Windex to it. The trash that was usually sprinkled across the countertops was right where it belonged: in the trashcan. The kitchen was immaculate. In fact, there was no sign of food having been prepared or consumed here, and that was what worried me the most.