Time of My Life Read Free Page A

and go get her.
    Breakfast. The thought makes my stomach leap, and I feel like I might vomit. I raise my seemingly steel-weighted arm to my forehead and run my fingers along my hairline, pulling off a film of old sweat.
    Get up. Get up.
I repeat to myself again.
    With my eyeshade still in place, I swing my knees up and over the side of the bed.
    “Ow, crap!” I yell, and frantically fling my sleep mask off my face. My knees have hit a wall, a literal wall, not the type of wall that my spinning instructor refers to when we have ten minutes left in class. I’m now left curled up in the fetal position facing a white plaster wall to which my bed is firmly pressed.
    I spin my head to the side.
    This is not my room. This is clearly not my room. Yet it’s inherently familiar. I know it somehow.
    I push myself up and my insides lurch. I’m hungover. Yes, I’m very clearly and certainly hungover. I try to scan my mind for hints of the night before. I can’t. I can’t remember anything other than my blocked chi and Garland’s elbows and how I felt like my body exploded when he pressed me with them.
    I propel off the full-sized bed, with its red plaid sheets and the pine headboard that is definitely from IKEA. A memory washes over me of the trip to the store, of bobbing and weaving in the bedding department until we settled on this one.
We.
I’m stricken. I’m ill. I rush toward the bathroom, which I instinctively know is just off to the right of the bedroom. I purge my insides.
    We. Jackson and me.
    Not possible.
    I close my eyes again and reach for the toilet paper to wipe my mouth, then pull up and trip my way to the sink. Under the soft glare of the mirror lights, one of which is burned out, I peer at myself. I pull back my highlighted brown hair that cascades down to the break below my shoulder blades—hair that the last I’d seen had been chopped into a bob that hung just above the nape of my neck and, surely, was at least two shades darker—and I stare. The slight wrinkles around my eyes have yet to seep in; the mole, the one I had removed because it was beginning to bulge, still resides just to the right of my nose; my double ear-pierce, which Jack’s mom deemed “slightly déclassé” the last time we had dinner, remains intact.
    I am a younger version of myself. Only not.
    I spin around, now frantic, and race to the living room, flinging open the walk-in closet door and planting myself inside. It is filled, packed, overloaded with my clothes, my student clothes, not the clothes of my mommy life that conceal the clothes from my business life that are now tucked and organized neatly by color scheme and necessity in my closet in the suburbs of my life.
    I stumble into the living room, first stopping to vomit again in the toilet, and see, perched above the fireplace mantel, a picture of Jackson and me celebrating my twenty-seventh birthday—it’s nearly impossible to make out the decorations on the cake due to the two dozen plus candles that illuminate it. Another frame holds a shot of Ainsley; Megan, my best friend from high school; and me ringing in the New Year in 1999. Prince instantly fills my head, a flashback to the song that played on a loop in the days leading up to the milestone night, as we ushered in the next decade.
    The phone rings, and I jump at least a good two feet in the air. It’s only then I notice that I’m naked.
I never sleep naked,
I think. At least not anymore. Now I sleep in silk pajamas that I buy at the Nordstrom half-yearly sale. I stock up on undies and jammies every July. I stopped sleeping naked when Henry and I moved in together because Henry never slept naked, and, well, it just seemed weird to sleep naked by myself.
    The machine clicks on.
    “Hi, you’ve reached Jillian and Jackson,” I hear myself say. “We can’t get to the phone right now, but we’ll call you back as soon as we can! Have a good one!”
    There’s a long beep.
    “Jill, it’s me. I tried you at work,