Scot on the Rocks Read Online Free PDF Page B

to find my best friend eating like she’s going to the electric chair, I figure she needs to talk about it,” she explained. Electric chair? Governor calling…Clever.
    I suppose to some people, that sort of behavior screams “cry for help.” To me, it screams “typical Monday night at home.”
    “No, Vanessa. I’m okay,” I said, slowly backing away from the refrigerator. The truth is that I
did
want to talk about it. It was the only thing that I wanted to talk about, but it seemed as if all I did all day was talk about it, so at night, I would be better off doing more productive things with my time. Like standing in front of the refrigerator in my bathrobe eating raw cookie dough from the tube.
    You see, Vanessa never had to worry about the things that I worry about on a daily basis. Will I ever find someone? Will I ever get married? Will I ever have children? Or am I destined to end up like Old Mrs. White, the lady who lived next door to me growing up? I used to pass by her house every day on my walk home from elementary school. She always seemed like such a kind woman, tending to her garden and waving hello to every neighbor who passed by. There was always the faint smell of vanilla on her hands, as if she had been baking cookies all day. Some days, she would even bring out chocolate chip cookies to the neighborhood kids when she saw us playing kickball out on the street (store bought — go figure). One day, she told me that she recently became a grandmother and wanted to show me pictures. I was delighted! After all, what eight-year-old girl doesn’t love babies? She pulled out the photos, and I was so excited to see them that I could barely get my hands around the pictures fast enough. Holding the photos by their edges, ever so carefully, I took a peek. To my horror, they were photos of kittens. Kittens! As in: baby cats. Basically, her kittens had been more successful at finding a mate and reproducing than she had. I was scarred for life. I went home that very night and threw out all of my Hello Kitty stickers. The sight of a cat still makes me cringe.
    Vanessa, on the other hand, met her husband Marcus on her very first day at Howard University. How’s that for luck? He spotted her attempting to pull her suitcase up a flight of stairs, and, ever the gentleman, offered to help. The rest is history. They got married exactly one year after graduation. Isn’t that so cute you could die? I think that the story of the day they met also involved him inviting her to a fraternity party that same evening, and then making out with her shamelessly at said party, but that part of the story usually gets edited out in polite company. There’s a rumor among people who have known her from her Howard days that one groomsman alluded to the alleged make-out incident at Vanessa and Marcus’s rehearsal dinner. As the story goes, that man never made it down the aisle.
    The first man that I met on my first day of college asked me who the “hot blonde” helping me move in was. It was my mother. I told him so. He asked if she was single. When I told him that she was not single, and in fact, was very much married, he asked, “Happily?”
    And he didn’t even offer to help me with my bags.
    I met Vanessa at a law school event being cosponsored by the Black Law Students Association and the Jewish Law Students Association. We gravitated toward each other, seemingly the only two people there solely for the free pizza and beer. We spent most of our free time from then on out together, studying and just generally trying to make it through law school as a team. Marcus was rarely at home, since he was first in medical school and then starting out his residency in surgery. Trip, who became the third in our study group after we met him at a Student Bar Association happy hour, used to accuse Vanessa of making up Marcus entirely so that no one would ask her out, thus leaving her more time to study (logic that completely escapes