Arrogant Bastard - Julie Capulet Page 0,1
limo driver drove me to my private school each morning. We had chefs and housekeepers, an indoor pool and gym, even a helicopter pad on the roof. My mother thought she’d died and gone to heaven. Me, not so much.
I discovered I’m not cut out to be super-rich. Maybe that sounds strange since so many people seem to crave it or aspire to it, but I just don’t happen to be one of them. I spent three years living someone else’s warped fantasy, which to me felt more like a gilded prison. Like being forced to wear a diamond-studded suit that didn’t fit.
I prefer the simple things in life. A good friend to laugh with. A late-summer field of wheat to walk through. A beach at sunset. A cold beer after a hard day’s work. People sometimes call me a hippie or a free spirit. I’m not sure if I’m either of those things. I am what I am, and it’s … unique, so I’m told.
In Iowa, with its rolling hills and big blue skies, I finally felt free. I could get dirty and ride a bike and play flashlight tag in the dark. I could see the stars.
And Josie was there for all of it. Her family was everything mine wasn’t. Big and loud and fun and close-knit. I found out what it feels like to laugh and to feel loved. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t my own family loving me. Josie’s family felt more like mine than my own family ever has. So when my mother’s second marriage fizzled out a few years later and she decided to move to Los Angeles for husband number three, I stayed with Josie.
The next two years ended up being a time of my life when I could have used a mother, as it turned out.
No one ever tells you the hard stuff can be harder than you ever imagined. No one tells you that some of that hard stuff is going to cut you down until you know for a fact you’ll never be quite the same. Or that you’re going to need more courage than you ever knew you had.
Somehow, I survived those two years.
The day after we graduated from high school, we jumped into Josie’s beat-up old van and headed for Florida. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. For her, it was her one chance to get out of the town she’d been born in and had never left. For me, it was a form of recovery. I needed to get out of that town like a drowning man in shark-infested waters needs a lifeboat.
We decided on Key West for no other reason except that we liked the sound of it.
And after three days of travel, as we drove through the tiny, sun-charmed, character-laden town, I knew I’d found the place I wanted to stay. Forever is a long time, but for me, something about the lazy heat that oozes out of this place answered a craving in my soul that was hard to explain. I still can’t see myself ever leaving.
We got jobs as waitresses. We found a run-down one-room apartment, swam in the ocean and saved all our money. Turns out waitresses can earn good tips in Key West.
Three years later, when Josie’s father died and left her a small inheritance (her mother had died years earlier, before I met her), we pooled all the savings we had, I sold an emerald bracelet Stepfather Number One had given me for my eighth birthday, and we somehow managed to scrape together enough money to put a down payment on a business that had just come up for sale. Our bar, where we’d worked all along.
It’s a business that could do with a few upgrades. Okay, more than a few. It costs a lot of money to run—more than we ever anticipated, and exactly as much as it earns, barely—but I like a challenge. We jumped in at the deep end and we’re trying like hell to learn how to swim. That was exactly ten months ago. “We’re going to have to get this deck repaired by someone who actually knows what they’re doing, Luna.”
“I know. We will. But we can’t afford to right now,” I say cheerfully. I climb back over the railing. I’m wearing a cut-off pair of jean shorts and a fitted pink t-shirt with our bar’s logo on the front. Sea Breeze. Which is now very dirty from my handywoman failure. The