BPOV
". . . Cullen spotted for the first time in weeks stumbling out the back of . . . over the shoulder of his publicist . . . sources say this last movie will be his last . . ."
The TV blares but I hardly hear it. I stuff the pillow over my head.
"Isabella Swan if you don't get the fuck off my couch I will fart in your face."
Emmett McCarty's boisterous voice boomed over all other noise in the living room.
Noises before: the television, the radio, and the muted honk of car horns through the living room window.
Noises after: the television, the radio, the muted honk of car horns through the living room window, and Emmett McCarty.
"I'm filling out applications. Jesus."
Current status of living room table: Half-empty coffee mug, cold. iPhone 4S, cracked. Pile of coffee shop and restaurant application forms, blank.
"I can see you're working really hard," he mutters, walking into the room and straightening the tie around his neck. When exactly Emmett McCarty became such a tight ass, I can't pinpoint. Before college he was just like me: somewhat gifted, somewhat driven, and somewhat stoned. Now he's just like the rest of them.
And I can't quite seem to catch up.
Four years of higher education seems to have prepared me for little to nothing in the real world.
Current visible pros of higher education: Dad seems proud, a framed diploma, a serious of drunken semi-sweet hookups with hipsterized Tom Waits enthusiasts.
Current visible cons of higher education: no money, no place to live, no job.
Hmm.
Emmett's disgustingly practical business administration major seemed laughable to me during our years at the University of Washington. After all, while he was spending his nights learning the various mathematical formulas associated with accounting for big business, I was reading Kerouac and Kinney and Kipling. When he was spending his summers interning in some cubicle, I was working part time at Starbucks and writing moody poetry in my backyard.
These are hard times for dreamers.
"At least fill them out," Emmett snaps, slamming the door behind him.
I can't blame him for being mad. Not now, anyway. Not after I've spent almost two full months mooching off of him, dirtying his living room and making his couch my permanent homestead.
I just couldn't go back to Forks.
I just couldn't admit that defeat.
I would not be another college grad going back to live with their parents after spending four years of borrowed money only to get a job waiting tables or maybe one as a receptionist for the local dentist. (If I'm lucky.)
I will use this English degree. For . . . something.
I was never one of those kids who knew what I wanted to be straight away. How do you decide that, anyway? One day you just sit down and say this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to spend every day, for the majority of the day, doing this. I want to think about this and have it motivate me and have it fulfill me.
It all just seems so monumentous. Too monumentous.
Especially for me. Hell, I can barely decide what to eat for lunch.
And now I'm here, sleeping on Emmett McCarty's couch in a shitty apartment somewhere just outside of Los Angeles.
I have no goals, no hopes, no job, no prospects, and no money.
And if there's one thing I've noticed, the world's not fucking waiting for me to start getting some.