Read Online Room for Love by Andrea Meyer - Free Book Online

or inside my skull. I’m wondering if someone might have launched a car alarm through my bedroom window when reality clanks me hard around the head and I grab the offending clock to turn it off. The ensuing silence soothes me until the sensation that someone used my head as a bowling ball takes its place. I groan and drag myself into the bathroom to find pain relief.
    Without getting dressed, I creep into the kitchen to put water on for green tea, rip off the end of the stale baguette on top of the fridge, and sit down at my desk to check e-mail. There’s nothing good except a belated e-card from Brad, Courtney’s husband, apologetic about missing my party. I am relieved that he stayed away, because I hate it when he witnesses my shame. Brad and I have been close since college, and he plays the protective big brother I never had. Unfortunately, all his friends are either married professors, twenty-something musicians who smoke too much pot, or residents of Seattle, his hometown. I have had drunken escapades with many of them and we don’t mention most of their names anymore. I tell Brad that I wish technology would advance to the point where he could clone himself. He tells me I’d make Brad-clone love me and dump him, because he’s a nice, normal guy and I only fall for dickheads. He’s probably right.
    Brad teaches music composition at NYU and plays in a band. An amazing thing happened a few months back: He self-produced a solo album of ballads that he’d written through the years, and it took off like a rocket. There’s this one song, “Still in It,” about him just kind of watching Courtney piddling around the kitchen and making coffee and watering a plant. He describes how she gasps when the cat jumps onto the counter and glances at him, embarrassed, and it makes him fall in love all over again, even though they’ve spent every minute together for the last twelve years. It’s not corny at all. It has a rock ’n’ roll beat and avoids love-song clichés. I’m not exactly objective, but the song brings tears to my eyes every time and I feel honored to know the guy who wrote it. Some DJ in Portland heard it and next thing, it was being played in dorm rooms nationwide and turning up on celebrity playlists and Brad was being compared to Jeff Buckley and the Coldplay singer who knocked up Gwyneth Paltrow, and we were like, “Our little Brad?” He got a record deal, took a sabbatical, and tomorrow he starts a tour of the whole friggin’ planet (or at least the North American part). Needless to say, with all the organizing, rehearsing, and stressing out, he doesn’t have much time to attend the birthday parties of mere mortals like me. The e-card’s a funny one, with a monkey playing “Happy Birthday” on the banjo. It sticks its big, pink tongue out at the end.
    When my kettle squeals, my sister, whom I hadn’t noticed sacked out on the couch, bolts upright. She’s wearing her bra and underwear and is wrapped up in one of the curtains that are eventually supposed to adorn my living room windows.
    â€œJesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me,” I say, pulling myself out of my chair and into the kitchen, shoving a heap of Alicia’s clothes on the floor with my foot as I go.
    â€œYou’re always naked,” she says. “It’s kind of gross.”
    â€œI was hammered when I got home last night.”
    She grunts and goes back to sleep. It will be nice when my sister finds a place to sleep that is not in my apartment.
    A half an hour later, I walk very slowly out my door, past the woman who sits on a white, padded stool on my block advocating Bible studies, and notice tiny green buds just beginning to peek through the tips of the branches on a skinny tree behind her. In spite of my throbbing head, I feel relieved. There is still a chill in the air, but at least spring is on its way. Summer is my favorite