stopped playing around. You’ve been back from school for almost a year. You can’t be surprised he and your mother pulled this card on you.”
Huffing my disgust at that little nugget of truth coming from Alex, of all people, I head over to the refrigerator and grab the two of us beers. I hand him his and push past him on my way to the living room.
At least I can enjoy a couple more days of freedom before I get chained to the workaday world. Leaning back, I close my eyes and take a sip of ice cold beer while the realization that I haven’t even had breakfast yet runs through my head.
Oh well. Forget doughnuts. Beer is now the breakfast of champions.
“Come on, Cade. It’s not so bad. I work, and it hasn’t made me some uptight pain in the ass who doesn’t have fun. As my father likes to say, the world is your oyster. You can work at any number of jobs. Just find something you like and do it.”
I look across the room to see he’s serious about this. “The world is my oyster? Dude. And you’ve always been a pain in the ass. You working at your job has nothing to do with that.”
“Fuck you too,” he says with a chuckle, lifting his beer in the air. “To Cade finally joining the ranks of us working stiffs.”
That toast sucks, but I take a drink of my beer anyway. “What kills me is he was even worse than me at this age. Remember hearing the stories your father and Kane were telling a few summers ago at the Fourth of July party about my father? To hear them talk, Stefan March spent all his days sleeping and all his nights partying. So that was okay for him, but now he’s older so he wants to make sure I don’t have any fun? He acts like responsibility is some wonderful thing and having a job is the mark of a good person. What a fraud he is.”
Alex nods, even though I have a feeling he agrees with my father at least a little. “By the way they were talking, all three of them were living the life. I guess time changes you, though. We’ll probably be that way when we get to be their age.”
I couldn’t be more horrified at that prospect than if he had the power to show me the future himself. “No. Fucking. Way. I’m not going to turn into that. No, thanks.”
“So what kind of job are you thinking you might want? You have a degree in business from a good school, so it’s not like you’re not qualified for a lot.”
Just the thought of what job I might want to get makes my head hurt. If I knew what I wanted to do this past year, I would have done it. While I make it seem like I’m all about living the life of leisure and enjoying myself, even to my best friend, the truth is I don’t want to do any job.
Not because I don’t want to work. Work is work. If you hate what you’re doing, it feels like a jail sentence. If you love what you’re doing, time flies. I got through four years of school just fine, so it’s not that I can’t handle work.
I just have no idea what I want to do.
“No clue,” I say shaking my head. “How did you know you wanted to be a chef?” I ask, wondering if hearing this story again might help me figure out what I should do.
Alex thinks about it for a few moments before taking a drink of his beer. “I just always did. I grew up hearing all about what was happening at the restaurant and I thought it sounded great. I found out when I started working at CK when I was a teenager that it wasn’t as fun as I’d made it out to be, but I knew I wanted to be a chef.”
“I have no idea how you work with your father. I spent last summer working at the club with my father, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it again now. I told him I’d do some shifts, but I swear to God I hate the idea more than I can put into words.”
My misery makes Alex laugh. “It’s not that bad for me, actually. My father and Kane don’t really hang out in my kitchen, so I only