Chapter 5 THE COMPETITION

THE COMPETITION

JOANNA

THIS TIME, AS I WALKED into the office, I felt a little more confident than I had before. Because this time I was on a callback. A callback! And that meant I had earned my place here, and I wasn't about to let anyone take that away from me. That was for damn sure.

It had taken a few days for me to hear back from the interview that I'd had with Melanie the week before, but when I did, it was good news for a change. I put the phone on speaker so that Violet could hear it when I got the call late in the afternoon, and the two of us had listened to my new instructions, hunched over the call together.

"So if you could come in again next Wednesday," the receptionist on the other end of the line told me, "Melanie wishes to meet with you and a few other candidates before making her final decision."

"Yes!" I exclaimed at once, and Violet pinched my arm excitedly and mimed clapping her hands together in front of me.

"I mean, yes, of course I'll be there," I replied, catching myself before I started sounding too excited. "What time precisely?"

Once I had established the time for my appointment, I managed to gather myself a little, and Violet and I high-fived before she started schooling me on everything I was meant to say and do once I got in there.

I was so glad that I had someone like Violet around to keep me on the straight and narrow because sometimes, it felt like I would have gone spinning off the rails without her. She was about the only friend I had from before-from before my entire life went to shit and everyone around me seemed to drop away just like that.

I had been crashing couch to couch for a while until Violet basically told me I was going to move in with her and like it. I wasn't going to argue with someone like that. She wasn't the kind of girl you put up a fight against anyway.

Besides, she had been there for me this whole time, she had seen the chaos that I had gone through, and I was so grateful that she was actually willing to stand there and make my life a little easier. Friends like her, I had discovered, were hard to come by. Plus, she had all the actual life experience that I had missed out on while I had been stuck with Jarrod and his family trying to tell me how I should do everything.

And now, I was feeling borderline confident as I walked into the building to meet with Melanie for the second time. I had made sure to get there a few minutes early, and I signed in at reception and took my seat on the edge of a chair in the waiting area.

My hands itched to play with my phone, but Violet had told me to avoid looking at it while I was waiting. It made me look less approachable, and that was the last thing I needed right then. I wanted to be the very picture of light, bright, and brilliant, and that wasn't going to happen if I was slumped over my phone, staring at the screen as I waited for my interview to start.

"Joanna?"

As soon as I heard Melanie's warm voice saying my name, I leapt to my feet and put a big smile on my face. I felt a little hyper and did my best to calm that side of my head. The last thing I needed was to scare her off by being a little too much for her to handle.

"Melanie, it's great to see you again," I told her. "Thanks so much for inviting me back."

"Thank you for meeting with me," she replied, and she guided me back through to the small room we had been in for the first interview. I felt a little wobbly on my feet as I followed her, but that might have been because I was trying to break in a stiff pair of work shoes I had purchased for this round of interviews.

I sat down at the desk once more and clasped my hands in front of me. Then on my lap. Then in front of me again. Again, I tried to calm myself down and picked up a pen that was sitting on the table as Melanie took a brief call on her phone.

The pen was embossed with the name of the company, Cross Industries. And who was this Cross person? I would probably never get a chance to meet them. Though maybe one day, my name would be embossed on a pen like this, announcing to anyone who would listen that I had been the one to make it and that nobody could take that away from me.

"Sorry about that," Melanie said as she tucked her phone away once more. "Now, where were we?"

The interview picked up where it had left off, and I felt like I was actually doing a pretty solid job. Violet had told me to just be myself and that they would be looking less for some specific experience than the promise of a strong personality and the conviction that they could fit this person into their business at large. So that was what I tried to do.

I knew that I had a lot of personality, sometimes a bit too much for people to handle. That was what Jarrod had often told me, particularly when I had made one joke too many at a family gathering and people had started getting all uptight about it.

But her phone kept on going off over the course of the interview, and every time we started talking, it felt like my flow was interrupted by the sound of that thing angrily ringing in her pocket. She apologized the first couple of times and ignored the calls, but eventually, she started taking them, and she sounded seriously pissed at whoever was on the other end of that line.

"Look, I'll call you back when I'm done, all right?" she told them, sounding irritated that she was even having the conversation. "Just stop calling me."

But every time she hung up, they would call back again a few minutes later. I could hear a man's voice and assumed it had to be one of the people applying for this position, the same way I was. Well, he was just going to have to wait his turn.