I wrapped myself up like a little burrito in my blankets, and I buried my face in my pillow.
I had five more days here before my jet came back for me. Captain Harris could take me home, and I could forget about smoking hot blonde men who just wanted to tease city girls with their muscular bodies.
Maybe I could just stay here in my bed until the snow was gone, then ask Jimmy to drive me back into Madison and leave me at some hotel near the airport.
I stopped crying. That was a good plan. I was sure that he would be happy to see the back of me. And I definitely did not want to stay with him here, but I could not call the jet back to fly straight into the polar vortex.
I felt more cheerful with a plan and a little more control over the situation. I could run away, maybe not immediately, but a little differently than planned.
I looked at the wet splotches on my pillow. I could have had the jet wait for me at the MSN airport. Captain Harris wouldn't have minded. We paid for all of his time, not just the flight time. I could have made my dad happy without getting stuck here with one guy in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a heavy blizzard in the barbaric north of Middle America.
I stared at the ceiling. I needed to get a job. A real one, not the painting that I did that cluttered up the house with all of my artwork. Daddy seemed to like it being around. People liked the paintings, and I’d had a gallery showing, but that didn't mean anything when it came to making money off of them.
I had two choices: either I could start taking painting commissions where I painted what they wanted me to paint, or I could find a real job.
Laying in my bed, staring at that uneven ceiling, I decided that I wanted to get a day job more than I ever wanted to paint based on commissions. My painting was a hobby, for sure, and it was something that I did for love. I could make a living off of it, but I did not want to. I needed to find something that would not eat my soul and still leave me time for painting.
I stared at the ceiling. I had a double major in Fine Arts and Spanish in school, but I just didn't think that there was very much that I could do with that. Sure, I liked people like Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, but beyond being in love with a few Catalonian artists and running around the Reina Sofia and El Prado, there wasn't much overlap between those two lives.
When I got out of school, I constantly got emails asking me to become a Spanish teacher. Even if I had gone to become a teacher and get certified to teach little ones, would I have been happy?
What I lacked the most was a sense of purpose in my life. I didn't know where I was going at all. I had lived a low-key, low-commitment life for a long time. I loved my father, for sure, but that wasn't a purpose in life. He spoiled me and indulged my every whim, and I think that the only thing saving me from becoming Veruca Salt was my mother being a sane woman. When she died, those checks and balances fell away.
I made a decision. I would send my resume out to all of those teacher-training programs when I got home and had working Wi-Fi again.
I opened up my laptop. I might be at the end of the Earth and stranded in this snowstorm, but I could poke my resume a little bit. I would show it to my dad when I got home. He hired and fired plenty of people. Even though he had no experience in the education sector, he surely knew someone who did. He would be proud of me for getting a job, even one as simple as working from 9-3 every day in a school with a ton of little kids. I grimaced. I liked kids, but probably I would go insane if I was trapped with them for a straight 6-hour period. Maybe I would try to apply as some kind of assistant for English Language Learners.
When I opened up my Macbook, something popped up on my screen. "Join Wi-Fi network?"
There was Internet in this house? I saw that it was a secured network. I only had the tiniest of the bars in terms of connectivity, but it was there.
I put Visine in my eyes, and I went downstairs to talk to Jimmy. If there was Wi-Fi here, I definitely could overcome my humiliation to get connected back to the real world. Unplugged time was over.
Snowballs
Amelia
I walked downstairs with my MacBook Pro in one hand.
"Hey Jimmy."
He jumped to his feet. “Amelia...I just want to say that I'm so sorry..."
I waved away his apology for teasing me earlier. "It's fine. Why didn't you tell me that this house had Wi-Fi? I don't care that the signal is so weak. I'd just love to get back online and reconnect, you know? Could you give me the password?"
"This house doesn't have Wi-Fi. You must be picking up the neighbor's network, but they live a half mile away down the road. That must be a pretty powerful computer to catch something as tiny as that."
I was a little bit crushed. I thought that I had found a virtual escape from this house and the tantalizing man inside of it. Instead, I was right where I started, only worse, because my hope had been easily stomped by Jimmy. It seemed like that was my theme for the day. I knew it wasn't fair, but I wasn't in the mood for news like this.
"Okay." I turned around to walk up the stairs. Don’t cry, Mel.
"Wait!"
I spun around. I crossed my arms and glared at him. I wanted to be alone to sulk a little more.
"Do you want to have a snowball fight?"
I blinked. "You do that?" That might be a good way to release all the frustration.