"Mom, I really need to talk to you."
"Yes, yes, Matt. Relax," Erin said.
Julie grabbed her other bags and trailed after Erin, while Matt stood seemingly frozen in place. She turned her head back. "Thanks again for picking me up."
Matt nodded and rocked back on his heels, his hands in his pockets. "Sure thing."
Matt seemed nice enough. He was easy to talk to, if not terribly easy on the eyes, and he was certainly smart and had a sense of humor. He was a bit quirky, she supposed, but Julie was pretty good at handling quirky.
Julie made her way up the airy staircase to the second floor. The landing was a roomy open square with four doors that presumably led to bedrooms, and a short hallway off one of side. More bright-white walls and expensive looking artwork.
"You're right here," Erin said as she pushed open a door with her shoulder.
The bedroom had a definite masculine feel to it, with dark bedding and wooden shelves and a few books, pictures, stereo equipment, and DVDs. A small flat-screen TV hung across from the bed, and an empty spot on the desk had just enough room for a laptop.
"Make yourself comfortable. The bathroom is right down the hall. I'll put some fresh towels out for you, and... Oh, this must be Roger calling." Erin turned her head toward a phone ringing from another room. "Do you like Thai?"
"That's great. Thank you."
"Take your time getting settled. There are empty drawers if you want to unpack," Erin said, backing out of the room to take the call.
Julie sat down on the bed and scanned the room. Yup, this had boy written all over it. Not that she minded. She liked boys after all. But she was looking forward to making a run to Target and picking out her own girlie room accessories with some of the money she had left over from the summer. Thank God she'd won that essay contest the school district had run, or she would have had to use all her savings on a computer. It'd taken her weeks to write her piece on the United States' responses to natural disasters, but it was not a bad trade for a new Mac laptop. It was a good thing that her friends didn't follow high school news - unless it had to do with sports, dances, or a battle of the bands - because she would have been teased mercilessly for having participated in such a socially warped endeavor.
The truth was that her friends didn't entirely get her. Her mom didn't get her either, although she was certainly proud of how well Julie did in her classes. In fact, her mom had kept secret the fact that Julie had stayed after school to do extra-credit work for her English class. Her friends would have snorted with laughter. And while Julie had been happy to sacrifice time after school to hear her teacher's thoughts on Graham Greene, she hadn't been willing to try to explain to her less academic friends why she had done so. They just didn't care about school the way she did and half the time didn't seem to understand what she was talking about. Jared, her ex, would have rolled his eyes at the notion of volunteering to spend more time studying.
Speaking of Jared, Julie wondered what he was doing right now. Probably sporting a toga and doing keg stands at the miserable state university he was attending. Asshole. She hoped he was lost in a crowd of dumb jocks and getting rejected by every busty, tank-top-wearing, fake-tanned airhead he hit on. Arizona could have him. And yet, Julie couldn't resist seeing if he'd commented on her Facebook status.
She set her laptop on the desk and turned it on. Yes, she had her fancy phone; she just wasn't a big fan of typing on the miniature keyboard if she didn't have to. She liked capital letters and some semblance of punctuation, and the margin for error on the handheld device was too great. Julie was a traditional typist.
She realized that she needed a password to access the Watkins' network. Great. She'd intruded on their house and now needed to ask for this. Internet access came before pride. Julie caught Erin as she was getting off the phone.
"Mrs. Watkins? I hate to bother you, but I was wondering if I could get the password to go online?"
"Call me Erin. Please. And of course you can. Let me get it from Matthew. He generated a random, meaningless code so that none of the neighbors would be able to pilfer our service. He is our own private securities expert. Hold on." Erin disappeared for a moment and returned holding a scrap of paper.
"Thank you." Julie took the paper and looked at the fifteen-digit password. Paranoid much? No one could remember this. Except, it seems, Matthew.
"I'll let you know when dinner is here." Erin shut the door.
Julie opened her Facebook profile page and frowned. Already eight comments under her status from concerned friends who actually gave a damn about her ("What happened????" "What R U going to do?" "Ack! Call me!"), but nothing from Jared. She clicked on his page. Huh. Well, it was nice that he had the time to post pictures of himself from his first days at college, yet hadn't bothered to call or email her since he'd dumped her a month before they'd both left for college.
Jared had up and announced that they shouldn't even attempt to maintain a long-distance relationship, and so he was preemptively breaking up with her. Not that it really mattered. Julie had no doubt that Jared was the classic case of a boy satisfying his homosexual impulses by participating in close-contact sports. God, how many times had she sat on the sidelines of one of his wrestling matches, applauding wildly while he ground his body against another spandex-wearing wrestler, a look of glee plastered across his face? No wonder he'd earned a wrestling scholarship. Some other girl could put up with his fumbling attempts to appear heterosexual, his big tongue pulsing disgustingly in her mouth, and his overly enthusiastic murmuring as he groped under her shirt. Good riddance. Julie may have been dumb enough to go out with him, but at least she'd never been dumb enough to sleep with him. Had he even been able to fake his way through it.