Beloved Pet

Chapter 1

Jocelyn

As I walked up the stairs to the lobby of McKenzie and Smith Technologies, I didn’t think I’d ever been as nervous in my whole life. It was early February and the crisp winter wind bit at my cheeks, but I was feeling hot inside, due to anxiety.

I felt a bit light-headed and I had to remind myself to replay the Confidence Track over and over again in my mind, from the YouTube video I had been watching in preparation for today- what felt like the biggest day ever.

I can do anything set my mind to, I told myself mentally.

Sure, you would think the day I was sworn in as a lawyer would have been the happiest day of my whole life. And at the time, it was. But that was five months ago now, and I hadn’t been able to get a job.

That was a little embarrassing. But so were a lot of things about my life; for instance, the fact that I still lived with my older brother, Paul. The living arrangement helped us both save money on expensive New York City rent and provided me with good company- we’d been close ever since I was born 22 months after him.

But sometimes, it seemed a bit too close for comfort and I would start thinking about moving into my own place, only to remind myself that I had no job and was still living on leftover student loan money I’d saved up. There wasn’t much, and it was about to run out soon.

I am a strong and independent woman, I repeated my mantra.

Also, I was sometimes embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t have a lot of friends. Hannah was pretty much it. She and I went way back, too- we had met on our first day of middle school and bonded over being the only kids whose moms had packed us a lunch, instead of being able to buy cafeteria food like the other kids were able to do.

I guess I had always been socially awkward, and it had only gotten worse instead of getting better as I’d grown up and gotten older. I had found it hard to make new friends and trust people.

I can be whatever and whoever I want to be.

I said this to myself, but I didn’t know if I believed it. So far, I hadn’t been able to be a lawyer, for instance. I had very good references from my former professors and I got very good grades in law school.

I was even on the mock trial team for a semester, but I had mostly prepared briefs for the other students to argue. My oral argument skills left a lot to be desired, since I had always sucked at public speaking.

That was why I hadn’t managed to land a job. I always choked during the interview.

And here I was, going to a very important one, certain I was going to mess up again, no matter how many mantras from my Confidence Track I repeated to myself.

I exude confidence and pass through life with aplomb.

I remember when I first heard the woman with the British accent who reads the mantras on the track say “aplomb,” I had giggled a little. I could hardly say I did anything with aplomb. I wouldn’t exactly say I did much with confidence, either.

I always felt uncomfortable in my skin- not to mention my plus size clothing! Lots of people have said they admire my curves, but I’d always thought it was just their polite way of saying I’d be prettier if I lost a few pounds. At least, that was always what my mom had meant, when she’d said it just like that.

The reason she’d always pack my lunches was so that she could carefully select only nutritional, healthy food: salad, grill chicken, Greek yogurt. It was food that tasted bland and left me feeling so hungry.

Hannah and I would always spend our allowance- or, later, when we got older- our after-school job money, at Ricki’s, our favorite ice cream place, loading up our different flavored scoops of ice cream with a variety of different toppings.

My mom always wondered how I wasn’t losing weight, until she saw me there one day when she was in the parking lot for the health food store next door and she berated me for ruining all her efforts.

I went home and cried, even though I felt like an idiot for caring what my mom said, when I already knew she had the tendency to be mean. She worked long hours at two jobs to support us. One was an office job and the other was bartending at night, so she was often tired and cranky. I was always determined to not have to do that, so that was why I ended up going to law school.