We Were So Yesterday

Chapter 17 of Welcome to Envy Park

This is from chapter 17 of my novella Welcome to Envy Park, released in 2013. This scene is set a little more than two years AFTER Roxie's first letter was sent, and is in the POV of Moira, Roxie's best friend.

The book is actually about Moira. Posting this so you don't have to read the book, in case you would check it out just for the Roxie parts. :) Thank you for reading WE WERE SO YESTERDAY part one. :)

The girl in the ad looked much younger than me, but she was wearing a blazer and high heels and her hair was tied back, so that probably meant she was my age. Or what stylists imagined people my age looked like.

She was pushing a shopping cart along an animated road and she was putting colorful boxes of different sizes in her cart. A small box labeled "food." A slightly larger one labeled "clothes." A huge one labeled "house." And then a not so large but not so small one, "insurance."

A smartly-dressed lady who reminded me of my mom facilitated the discussion, asking the eight of us fellow twenty-something females in the room certain questions about the ad, if it appealed to us, if we at all related to it.

"My box for food would be bigger," Roxie said.

It wasn’t the only thing she said. Roxie had an opinion on everything from the model’s hair to her shade of lipstick to the font face used for the slogan. She did disclose that she worked in marketing, and these things mattered to her.

As for me, my contribution was pretty much just one thing.

"It doesn’t address to me why someone my age would buy insurance, the real reason," I said, when asked directly, given I had been so quiet throughout. "Fear."

 ***

"So how was it?"

"Fine, excellent, until Moira here made it morbid. I’m Roxie, by the way."

"Ashley. Thank you for coming, both of you. You really did me a favor. As I said, coffee’s on me."

Yes it made sense that Ashley, as in Ashley Lorenzo, as in Ethan’s sister, would invite me to that focus group discussion. It was being organized by her ad agency and they needed "women in their late twenties who were starting to make big purchases and investments" and that was me, exactly. Also it was happening at three p.m. on a random Friday and not many of Ashley’s employed friends could make it. She encouraged me to bring a friend, and Roxie was always up for this.

"Morbid how?" Ashley asked as we settled into the coffee shop at the ground floor of her office building.

Roxie laughed, setting her bag down on an empty chair. "She started going on about how the only reason that a young woman thinks of buying insurance is because of fear. Of not having enough, of leaving people behind without enough, blah blah blah."

I sighed. "I don’t know how helpful that’s going to be, but they did ask my opinion."

"Oh I hope it wasn’t a waste of time for you, Moira," Ashley said.

"Not at all. My unemployment hours are infinitely more useless," I joked.

"And I welcome any opportunity to get out in the afternoon and hang out with you, because you have not been updating me lately," Roxie said, and that should have been my cue to kick her under the table, but I wasn’t fast enough. "Are you really done with kissing the guy?"

"Excuse me?" Ashley’s eyes lit up.

"Roxie," I groaned, which was also the wrong thing to do.

"Is this my brother?" Ashley squealed, nearly.