Tess in Boots Read Free

You'll find something incredible. You have your whole career ahead of you. Go be amazing.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Go be Tess.”
     
    ***
     
    Two hours later I sat at my kitchen table staring at the cardboard box which contained my life at Stevenson. I considered burying it, like a time capsule. Perhaps someday, someone would dig it up and it would end up in a museum somewhere.
    “ And here we have the remains of an eternally single girl’s tanked career,” the curator would say. “Our records indicate she died alone in a tiny apartment in Hoboken. Poor girl. She was going to get married. She was going to be director of marketing, you know. Such a shame.”
    Better to save myself the embarrassment and burn it, I decided.
    I pulled a stack of business cards out of the box, shuffling them like a poker deck and thinking about what Jim said: “Go be Tess.”
    The Tess he was referring to had a great job. She had a boyfriend she was hoping to marry. This Tess had a cardboard box and a phone that hadn’t rung all morning.
    Go be Tess. It sounded simple enough. But I wasn't even sure where to start.
    Sitting in my kitchen, staring at my sad little box of a career and remembering the awful events of the night before, I was at an all-time low.
    I hadn’t prayed in ages, but I was desperate enough to give it a shot. I folded my hands and closed my eyes. The room was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming.
    “What do I do now, God?” The question came out a clumsy whisper. I fumbled around for something more eloquent to add, but I couldn’t think of anything.
    I opened my eyes and sighed. It was no use. I didn’t deserve an answer to that pathetic excuse for a prayer.
    But I did get an answer. Or at least, it sure seemed that way.
    In a matter of seconds, as if the Almighty Himself had me on speed dial for such an o ccasion, my phone rang.

CHAPTER 3
     
    The twin thing is real .
    At least, that's what my twin brother, Jake, always said. He claimed to have an instinct for knowing whenever something was wrong with me. And he did have a knack for always showing up in my hour of need, so maybe there was something to it, after all. I wouldn't know because I’d never had such an intuition.
    Of course, nothing was ever wrong with Jake. He lived a worry-free, permanent vacation sort of lifestyle. This in itself worried me. Almost everything about Jake worried me. Besides having shared a womb, the only commonalities between Jake and I were double-jointed thumbs and a susceptibility to burn after too much time in the sun.
    But different as we were, I loved my free-spirited brother. And the timing of his call was too strange to ignore. So, although I was in no mood to speak to anyone, I picked up the phone on the third ring.
    “ Hi, Jake.”
    “ Tessy!” There was a loud whooshing sound on his end of the line.
    “ Jake, where are you?”
    “ I'm on top of the world!” He echoed the last word several times, like an announcer at a wrestling match.
    I rolled my eyes. “Be serious. Where are you?”
    “ I'm on a mountain, Tessy. I'm on my mountain.”
    “ Your mountain?”
    “ Yep, I own a mountain. Well, I own the land on the mountain. We own it.”
    “ We who?”
    “ Me and Sara.”
    Jake and his wife of five years, Sara, met on spring break during his third senior year of college. This time he was majoring in hospitality and tourism, mainly because he thought it would land him a job at a luxury hotel on a beach somewhere. He claimed the spring-break trip was a hands-on educational experience. Jake and Sara went to Vegas and got married on a whim two months after they met. I was alerted via text message at four in the morning on a Tuesday. When I got the news, I shook my head and went back to sleep. Jake had long since stopped surprising me with his impulsive antics.
    The marriage itself did surprise me, though. Despite its spontaneous beginning, the relationship seemed to be flourishing, and I had to