After landing her first real job after college, Emmaline is surprised to find herself crossing paths with an amorous liaison from high school, from whom she's kept an adorable little secret for the past few years . . .
Excerpt from this hilarious romantic comedy:
Despite the dismal state of my postcollege existence, I got lucky with one thing: my apartment, the cozy space above a two-car garage in a leafy neighborhood of wide streets, joggers, and recycling bins. My landlord is a cardiac surgeon who adorns his lab coat with a sheriff's badge--he's some sort of eccentric genius, apparently--and works up the street at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The apartment I share with a grad student named Jung Lee, who spends twenty-four hours a day rotating among the various MIT libraries and/or slaving over research studies for her PhD.
I tuck my reliable little Chevy Prizm--twelve years old and still humming--into its spot between the garage and the stockade fence and, with my purse clamped under my elbow, shimmy out, my dress acquiring a lovely coat of grime as I hug the clapboard siding on my way to the mailbox.
It's not exactly true that I'm unemployed, though. In fact, I'm stuck in a spectacular state of being known as underemployment, loosely defined as working a shit job (at a dive bar, in my case) for peanuts, while the student-loan police billy club your door down for the five hundred bucks a month you must now bleed out of your eyeballs to pay off that sparkly new degree you just HAD TO HAVE TO GET A DECENT JOB NOWADAYS!!!
I unlock the garage and plod upstairs to the second-floor landing, a four-by-four alcove with a generous window and a scraggly geranium (thanks again, Mom) that I have resurrected from the dead too many times to count.
I nudge my way inside, drop the mail in our "incoming" basket, and kick off my shoes. I'm about to shuffle into the kitchen, when . . . Eeeek!!!