Steamed

was happening to my life?
    I found my car in the lot and felt grateful that I’d had the foresight to park in a garage. Even though Friday afternoon | traffic in Boston was going to be rough and I probably could * have made it home faster on the T, this way I could be alone in the car rather then pushed up against some smelly frat boy starting his night early. I pulled up to the parking booth and handed over my ticket. “Fourteen dollars,” the burly woman in the booth called out.
    “That can’t be right. I was only here for, like, an hour?”
    “Fourteen dollars,” she repeated sternly.
    I sighed and reached inside my purse for my wallet, where I found nine dollars. It’d been a while since I’d parked downtown, but it didn’t seem possible that it could cost this much. I leaned out the window. “Um, I only have nine dollars in cash. Can I use a credit card?”
    “Cash only.” She laughed and shook her head at my naïveté about the big city.
    “Okay, well, let me just pull back into one of those spaces, and I’ll go to an ATM.” What a nuisance.
    “Sorry. Those spaces are reserved. And this ramp is a oneway, anyhow.” She was having more fun by the minute.
    “I can’t just pull into one of those spots for five minutes while I get some money?”
    She shook her head firmly. I looked at her in disbelief. What was she going to do? Keep me hostage here in the garage until money magically appeared in my purse?
    “Should I just leave my car here then?”
    “If you’d like me to have you towed, sure, go ahead.”
    I should’ve strangled her, but I’d seen enough murder for one week. Dammit. I started rummaging around my car looking for change. I finally pulled together another two dollars and forty cents and offered up my findings in the hope of release.
    “Honey, you’re still short over two bucks. Can’t let you go.” I snarled at her and continued ripping apart my car for money. I even climbed into the backseat, pulled up the floor mats, and dug in between the seats, where, to my delight, I uncovered some additional change, including a couple of quarters covered with a revolting semisoft crud. Still, money was money, and I’d found enough to get me out of there. Smiling smugly, I handed my encrusted findings to the beast in the booth.
    She peered at the coins and looked up at me with satisfaction. “I can’t take two of these quarters. They’re Canadian.” For a few seconds, I hated Canada. Then I revved my engine and shot the woman a menacing glare that apparently persuaded her to end the battle. She let me go.
    I wormed my way out into the downtown traffic and poked through it feeling sorry for myself. On the radio, horrible Mariah Carey shrilled the message that love takes time, and I felt myself drift back into that teenage stage of dreaming about young love and first kisses, and dancing in the school gym to Jamie Walters, Color Me Badd, and other musical mistakes of the early nineties. Had the dreams been mistakes, too? If not, when was I going to meet my true love? Where was my sweaty hunk? When was I going to make out to “Stairway to Heaven”? It was probably going to be a high school dance song until the next millennium, so even now, long after high school, there was still time, wasn’t there? Okay, I did dance to that song once in tenth grade with Billy Lajewski, but that damn Billy warned me at the beginning of the song that because it was really long , he wouldn’t be able to dance with me through its entirety. And even with only half a song, he’d had plenty of time to kiss me, which he hadn’t, so “Stairway to Heaven” didn’t count at all. I’d been so hopeful back then that I’d find a perfect love or that I’d at least tumble so quickly from one passionate relationship to another that I’d barely have time to catch my breath. So far, I was not living up to my high-school expectations. And that just about defines failure, doesn’t it?
     

EIGHT
     
    SATURDAY morning marked the one-week anniversary of Noah’s philandering and my Internet dating error. The one-week anniversary of my enrollment in nightmarish social work school was approaching. Yay. And I had Eric’s funeral today. Yay, again.
    I called up Adrianna to find out what to wear. “If I were you, I’d wear something loud and obnoxious, gobs of makeup, and big hair. Don’t play into their impression of you as the grieving girlfriend.”
    Ade could’ve pulled it off, but I went ahead and