Letting Loose. Joanne Skerrett

don’t do this to me, okay? I just need a twenty. Something to buy the girls a beer tonight.”

      “Ma! I’m not giving you money to go out drinking. How many times do I have to…”

      My in-box loaded and the first unread e-mail message was from a [email protected]. My heart skipped a beat. What a time to be having a fight with her.

      “You’re not GIVING me anything, Amelia!” she snapped. “I’m your mother, don’t you forget that. If it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t be where you are today.”

      “That doesn’t work on me anymore, Grace,” I said.

      “You know what? You know what? You probably just gonna stay home and stuff your face tonight and it’s making you sick that I’m having fun! You’re an ungrateful little witch,” she snarled. “Ungrateful!” She slammed down the phone. I gently pressed the end button on my cell phone. Funny how my family always resorts to calling me ungrateful any time I don’t give them what they want. Moving on. I had an e-mail to read.

      Hello, Amelia, or is it Amy? I hope James and Kelly told you about me by now else you must think I’m some kind of lunatic. Anyway, I was kind of intrigued by what I heard about you. As you may have heard, I’m a former math teacher and I’m truly committed to improving the education system in my country and I’m always interested in talking to other educators. Drop me a line if you can. If not, please look me up if you ever find yourself at 15 25N 61 20W.

      I didn’t do that well in geography! Thank God for Google. Oh, those coordinates would point to Dominica.

      Funny how corny his e-mail came off, I thought. As if he’d written and rewritten it, and then gotten so frustrated that he’d just latched on to the last thing he could come up with. I could tell because that was the M.O. for most of my students. Speaking of which…I had a Steinbeck quiz to prepare for Monday, and if those little urchins weren’t prepared they’d feel my wrath…

      Should I write him back? And if so, what should I say? How should I sound? What did I want him to think of me? Well, I was a smart, independent, curvy…Oh, help me somebody. I need to just be interesting. That’s all there was to it. So, since he used to be a teacher, I’d have to come up with some math joke or some math line to reel him in. That sort of thing worked in Nora Ephron movies all the time.

      Then the phone rang, breaking my concentration.

      It was Whitney. “Girl, what you doing?” She almost always had a conspiratorial tone to her voice, and that was for a good reason. She was always up to something or about to be up to something.

      I’ve known Whitney since Latin. She was the smartest girl in the class, also the nerdiest, and she made me feel good about myself—being the fattest. While I cried about my mother’s meanness, she complained about being placed with yet another greedy foster family that was only “in it for the money.” While I complained about being fat, Whitney blocked me out by talking to herself about math equations and wishing for cuter glasses. MIT had been a good place for her until she fell for that Korean guy who later killed himself. I don’t think he killed himself because of her; kids kill themselves at MIT all the time. But she sure thought that. That had brought a breakdown and a short stay at McLean Hospital, but she was all over it now. So she says.

      “Oh, you can probably help me,” I said. If anyone would know math nerd jokes, Whitney would.

      When I told her about Ramses, er Drew, she sighed.

      “Listen, don’t screw with this bull, okay? The guy’s probably just trying to get his green card off you.”

      “Whitney, he’s not trying to get his green card! He lived in the U.S. for ten years before he went back to his country.”

      “That doesn’t mean anything. He’s probably some drug dealer or something. What are you going to do? Have a long distance relationship with him?”

      It was my turn to sigh. “You sound like my mother. Listen, I’m just making a new friend, is that wrong?”

      “It’s not wrong. I just don’t see the point. Those roommates of yours are turning you into freaking Bridget Jones.”

      “Gimme some credit, Whitney. I’m home. I’m bored. Can’t I indulge my little tropical fantasy?”

      “Go ahead and indulge. Just don’t forget to join the rest of us in reality when you’re done. So what’re you doing tonight?”

      “Me? Nothing. I’ve gotta make up a pop quiz for Monday.”

      “You’re so mean.”

      “It’s the only way I’ll know they’re doing the reading assignment.”

      Whitney snorted. “You know they’re not doing the assignment.”

      I knew she was right but still…I didn’t mind ragging on my kids, but it bothered me when other people did.

      “Screw the quiz. Let’s go to Milky Way. It’s salsa night,” she said.

      “Salsa as in dip?”

      “No, Amelia, salsa as in dance.”

      I groaned. “I dunno, Whitney. What kind of people are gonna be there?”

      “What do you mean, what kind of people are gonna be there? You live with two stoner hippies and you’re worried about the crowd at the Milky Way?”

      “At least they’re familiar stoner hippies.”

      “Come on, let’s go out. You’ll probably meet a cute guy. Either way, it’s better than staying inside.”

      “Where’s Big D?”

      “Ugh. I think he’s starting to catch feelings. He asked me to go away with him for a weekend.”

      “Really? That was fast.”

      “I’m, like, a whole weekend? With you?”

      “What’s wrong with him?”

      “Too smooth. Too clean-cut. Not spontaneous enough.”

      “Oh,” I said, “no edge.” That was the next requisite to breathing when it came to Whitney’s taste in men: lots of edge, meaning a bad boy.

      “Right. So, you coming or what? I can almost hear the music; I gotta shake something tonight.”

      “Fine. Fine. I’m coming.”

      I couldn’t say no to her. Whitney and I were practically sisters. She’d spent her childhood being shuffled from foster home to foster home and had been through so much family psychodrama it was a miracle that she’d ended up so successful. She was a scrapper, unafraid of anything or anybody. I couldn’t imagine my life without her. I saw her living out all the things that I was afraid to do, and most times all I could do was shake my head in wonder. She was the big sister who I was always trying to keep up with. So I almost always found myself going along with her. Even now when I’d much rather stay in my warm room and reread Drew’s e-mail again and again. I wondered what the temperature was on Dominica. Probably a balmy eighty-five degrees, the moon was probably full, stars big in the sky, and waves lapping at the shore…

      Chapter 5

      A couple of hours later, I was in my Beetle, the gauge read thirty-two degrees; so much for the temporary warm-up. My tires swished over the slushy side streets that led to Whitney’s house.

      Whitney worked for Microsoft, but she hardly ever left her apartment. She telecommuted to Redmond, Washington, and traveled there a few times a year. Her life, when she was deeply involved in a project at work, was actually quite stable. It was when she was in love that things went haywire. I was praying that she would not meet anyone new tonight. There hadn’t been anyone to speak of for about a year and things had been relatively calm. Somehow, she’d vowed to be celibate for a year, and miraculously she’d almost pulled it off. Then that Duncan guy