How to Grow Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

course my friends let me come over and store my Thanksgiving dishes in their nice, clean fridge. They appreciated the outlandish gallows humor I had about the situation. But because they are true friends, they could also see how it was
not
funny to find your fridge teeming with flies that were perhaps literally born yesterday. “What are you going to do?” they asked. “Are you going to call the landlord? Is anyone going to clean it? Are you going to get one of those little dorm-room fridges to just keep in your bedroom?”
    That I was living in a home where I might be better off with a dorm-style mini-fridge in my bedroom revealed how bad my situation really was. I was by now thirty-nine years old, living with people under the age of twenty-five and a fridge full of maggots.
    If I turned forty while still living there, I was going to have really low self-esteem. My birthday is in February. I had two months to find a place to live.
    That night I hopped into bed and cuddled under my blankets. Sometimes my roomy room got so chilly that I piled all the pillows I had on top of me and tried to stay very, very still in my sleep so as not to send the jumble tumbling to the floor. My space heater looked like it was made in 1960, and Bernadette had found it on the street. She had passed it to me after upgrading. Itoccurred to me that I, too, could upgrade my space heater, buy one I could leave on overnight without fearing it would burst into flames. And I could buy a quilt, some cozier blankets. I know some people are born understanding things like this, or maybe they were raised with a solid quality of life that never wavered as they grew up. They know that the latest-model space heater and a high-quality comforter are their birthright.
    I am not one of those people, no matter how many designer purses I manage to swindle into my closet, no matter how many trips to Paris I finagle. I am someone whose path to adulthood is not a clear A to B, a straight line through life. My path is more like A, B, back to A, but it’s a different A this time, and now B looks so different from my time back at A—and whoa, here’s C, what a trip! I’m a grown-up!
    Unable to sleep, kept awake by the cold and the inspiration of my brand-new plan to finally move out, I climbed out of bed and went over to my window. Gazing out that back window at the persimmon tree in full fiery flare, I said a prayer.
Please, I know I can live better than this. Give me a chance, Universe. Hook me up. My time here is done. I’m ready for the next level—someplace clean, someplace adult. I deserve it. You know I do.

2.
    Fashion Victim
    D ear stranger, let me explain to you my love for fashion. I love fashion more than
anything
. If I have one regret in my life, it is not that I didn’t go to college or live in New York City; it is that I didn’t somehow claw my way into the fashion industry. I have loved style ever since I can remember, and I have paid dearly for it. From scream fights with my mom to having debris flung at me on the street, I learned very early that the whimsical dress-up box of childhood slams hard on the fingers of a person who wishes to maintain a sense of theater in her appearance well into her later years.
    My childhood memories seem organized around what I was wearing when: the white party dress covered with colorful balloons that I was wearing when I jumped into the hotel pool while on vacation with my grandparents. The pair of denim jeans with “The Best” embroidered on the hip pocket I wore to the library.The brown polyester and chiffon Easter dress I pitched a crying fit over: Really?
Brown
at Easter? I was
so upset
.
    Actually, lots of my fashion memories feature if not
me
being so upset, then some adult in my immediate vicinity feeling provoked by my choices. Around first grade I dressed myself in a colorful combination of clothing (a red skirt, a yellow shirt, some aqua sandals), only to be