Chapter 1: My Stupid Decision
Living in a small town has never been my cup of tea.
Maybe some people like the appeal of a small town, being able to turn a corner and head to that small bakery that every local knows about - “the macaroons are to DIE for,” a quote from the basic rich white mom that visits the bakery once a week- and running into approximately twenty people while doing so. However, I am not one of those people who desires to see the rich white moms or the psychotic bully from first grade on a daily basis; you know, the girl that cut your hair with a pair of baby scissors while you were taking a nap in first grade and you woke up sobbing your eyes out at the chunk of your hair on the floor, the hair that had trailed down your back and hit the top of your waist but now hung dully at your shoulders?
Yeah I’m still not happy about that, Sadie. You and the other crazies of our small town of Brevard are part of the reason I got into this mess.
Anyhow, my story starts like any other nineteen year old girl who has completed a year in college and gotten away from her small town for the past year only to return to her chaotic life here: I wanted out.
To be fair to Sadie, (I still don’t like you though) she wasn’t the actual reason I decided to apply to that random summer internship that popped up in a sketchy ad on my laptop as I was lazily scrolling through Netflix during my first cooped up day back home in May. The real reason that happened is due to the fact that my own family was psychotic.
Psychotic might not be the right word. Perhaps dysfunctional is better…
Nah. Psychotic is right.
I was home for a day and I had already cried twice thanks to my mom. To give background, I am the oldest child of five and my mom is a single mom. You would think that with being a single mom of five children - her own flesh and blood - that she would want to ya know, have a job and work hard to help better our lives, since she brought us into this world after all. It seems like common courtesy to take care of the kids you bring into the world.
But NO.
My mom had me when she was a mere child herself; eighteen years old to be exact and to the disdain of my grandparents, who had raised her with strict Christian values typical of small town North Carolinians in the Bible Belt, with one of the “values” being no sex before marriage.
I think whenever my grandparents found out my mom was going to have me, they were full of disdain and disappointment but at the same time, they had probably found a silver lining from the situation, such as my mother bettering her crazy ways (spoiler alert: she didn’t). To their disappointment, it worsened over the years. I was born, she neglected me so that she could go “be young and have fun” with other men that were not my father (they didn’t stay together after I was born but that’s okay because he was also pure trash and wanted nothing to do with me) and boom: my grandparents were left to raise me.
Unluckily for them, my mom had another child two years later with a new man… then another child with a DIFFERENT man… and then two more, shockingly with the same man!
Guess who raised all those children? Not my mom.
Anyhow, during all these child bearing crazed years, my mom was in and out of our lives like the town druggie (we all have one) who disappears on a daily basis only to show up a few weeks later alive and not too well. She would come in for two reasons only: she wanted to ramble on about how she was the “perfect mother,”most likely to make herself feel better about leaving all of us behind, and in the process, was horrific to my grandparents, accusing them of “taking her children away” when in reality, she made the decision to leave us. These instances of her popping in randomly consisted of her screaming at not only them, but us because evidently we were “ungrateful for all that she did for us” while even today, I’m not quite sure what she’s done for us.
So how did she end up being in my life permanently the summer that I made my idiotic decision to leave the country?
Well, she made what she likes to call “a mistake,” with her mistake being the fact that the dad of my two youngest siblings, Laura and Jarrett, is a violent drug addict that she chose to stay with for three years for whatever reason (I say “for whatever reason,” but I know the reason; she wanted to get child support money out of him) and he finally had enough of her like the rest of us had. However, my grandparents being the saints that they are, chose to let her come back and live with us, in hopes that this would improve her life and she would get on a better path.
That was a year ago this summer. And what has she done since then to “improve her life?” Sat on the couch and collected money from the government while shrieking at everyone in our house about how miserable she is while she does nothing to fix her situation.
Pitiful.
Needless to say, I was away from her most of the time during my first year at college at Rockfell University, a prestigious university about three hours from home, and this was quite the detox from my mother. However thanks to this, coming home for breaks and holidays was absolutely depressing, consisting of nothing but hours of being screamed at over nothing and being preached at by my mother who felt I wouldn’t be at this good place in life without her (ha).
So as the school year passed by and summer crept closer, I grew more and more desperate to find a way to get out of my home because besides my mother being a main cause of my unhappiness at home, the consequences of her behavior were negative on my grandparents as well.
My grandparents had grown tired of her bad habits, claiming she was acting like a “teenager,” yet they never did anything to fix the situation. Not that one of them didn’t want to; my grandpa had grown extremely sick of it. He worked the graveyard shift at work, leading to him sleeping during the day and being up all night, and my mother loved to throw fits about random “issues” during the day with my grandmother, leading to screaming matches between the two of them. My grandpa wanted to kick her out, but my grandma has a softer side, claiming my mom “needs help” when in reality, I know she just wants her daughter back, even if the good days with her daughter were years ago.
She had managed to make a sort of anxiety manifest in my grandmother, causing her to always think she was doing something wrong. Many of the problems my mom claimed were my grandmother’s fault (when in reality they weren’t) were things my grandma chose to believe were actually her fault. In turn, she chose to be overprotective to the rest of the family, eyeing each and every move we made and if we did something bad or something she didn’t like, we would get a guilt trip about what decisions we were making in life or she would cry and blame herself for our own actions.
It was a lot on a person, to say the least.
Anyhow, I returned home on the dreaded day of May fifthteenth to my chaotic home after a peaceful semester at college.
Ten minutes after entering the house, my mom screamed at me from her designated spot on the couch, mad that I seemed unhappy to be home because of her, and that’s when I decided to escape to my room and watch Netflix after a screaming and crying match with her over what I could do to better my life according to her.
Which is when the ad popped up on my laptop; the ad that would change my pathway in life for what now seems like the worst, but at the time, it seemed like for the better.
Now that you have a little bit more of a background as to what caused me to entangle myself into this shit show, let’s travel back in time for a bit and go through what exactly happened from there on out. Don’t worry; I’ll be sure to answer any and all questions that I can, but I might be just as confused as you are… Enjoy.
~~~~~~~
The theme song from a random sitcom my friend had suggested was blaring from my laptop, introducing the fantasy characters that had become a slight comfort to me in my chaotic home while allowing me to enjoy their funnier, idiotic lives in the midst of my screaming mother in the background. The laptop was placed on the untidy desk in the corner of my room, surrounded by college essays from my first year writing seminar, dried out ink pens, and what now seemed to be my dried out and shriveled dreams of getting out of Brevard for the summer: a denied application to an internship in Colorado for writing.
The internship in Colorado had been a final hope of mine, my last chance to escape the screams and torture that awaited me this summer. As an aspiring author, it had seemed like the internship was tailor made for all of my wants and needs; I would have earned fifteen dollars an hour for ten hours, five days a week (suck it North Carolina minimum wage) all while sipping on the locally brewed coffee from the endearing coffee shop next door and working on my work-in-process novel that if the company liked, they would have helped me publish!
I mean, of course there would have been other responsibilities; I would have been an intern and subject to the annoying duties of paperwork, filing, and more, but it would have all been worth it to be in a new state with a fresh start and a chance to further my own dreams.
So you can imagine the disappointment coursing through my veins when I opened the manilla envelope that appeared in my student mailbox a month after applying and saw the “we reject to inform you” letter waiting for my tear filled eyes to read.
Sighing, I reached for the letter and tossed it into the overflowing garbage bin next to my desk with the rest of the stuff I was trashing from my first year in college. I carefully organized things I wanted to keep on my bed, such as the Polaroids with my best friends Claire and Emma from drunken and hazy nights in our dorms, and the essays I worked so hard to get A’s on despite the difficult-to-please teacher in charge of grading. Within the next thirty minutes with the continuous noise from the sitcom in the background, my room was unpacked and slightly more organized than before.
My phone buzzed, lighting up with a notification of a group chat with Claire and Emma. I opened it and read Claire’s message to us.
“Hate to be back home without you guys! Em, good luck with your first day at work tomorrow! Ads, if you ever need to escape, I’m a flight away babe xoxo.”
Emma responded almost immediately with a gushy message back about how thankful she was for us and how she already missed us. In a frightful mood and not wanting to ruin their cheery moment, I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” and threw it to the side of my bed, snatching my laptop from its place on my desk and nestling under my fuzzy blanket on my bed. The messages were connected to my laptop and I had to silence them there as well while rolling my eyes at the excessive use of heart emojis that had popped up on my screen. Once finally settled in, I focused on the characters on screen, hoping that their antics would unsour my mood.
~~~
“AHHHHH!”
The scream from my show jolted me from my state of slumber. Yawning, I checked the time on my laptop, shocked to see that it was now eleven o’clock at night. Shaking the sleep from my system, I paused the show and got up, grabbing my makeup wipes and face wash from my dresser and heading to the bathroom to get ready for bed.
After scrubbing my face and avoiding making too much noise that would inevitably wake up my sleeping family, I tucked my toiletries into their places in the bathroom and made my way back to my room, tiptoeing as quietly as possible.
That’s when I noticed the beeping noise.
My heart started pounding when the noise first made its way into my eardrums; it was loud enough that it would wake my mom up and that was the absolute last thing I wanted or needed. She would rant about it for days and use it as an excuse to keep me up at night. Where was it coming from?
Following the beeping sounds that obnoxiously seemed to be growing louder as the seconds ticked by, I pushed the door open to my room and saw flashing lights accompanying the beeping noise, all seemingly manifesting from my laptop with the sounds of Netflix now drowned out.
I shut the door quickly, praying that the sounds were drowned out by the door from my mom’s room, and then made my way to the laptop, slamming my finger forcefully on the mute button. The noise didn’t stop! Heart racing, I gazed at the screen and saw a new tab opened on my laptop.
The screen contained a red background accompanied by bold words flashing in silver that advertised what appeared to be an internship. Rolling my eyes, I moved the mouse to the red x button, about to close this obnoxiously vibrant ad that seemed to be catered to my previous search history when I actually noticed what the internship was for: “WRITING INTERNSHIP IN VENICE, ITALY.”
Maybe this was another bullshit advertisement. But maybe it wasn’t.
Reading the rest of the screen, my eyes took in the words like a little kid takes in the view of their presents stacked under the Christmas tree.
“Writers needed for this opportunity in Venice, Italy. Requirements: at least one year of college, a writing major or minor, 18+, must be able to communicate well with people, and must be able to be in Italy until August 10th.”
The beeping suddenly halted upon my finishing of reading the words and the webpage changed to another, showing an application for the internship along with a few more details, such as the internship start date (at the end of this week) and that there were limited seats left that they were eager to fill.
Sighing, I settled back into my bed and eyed the laptop screen. It seemed too good to be true; I had never been out of the country. Not once in my life, unless you count the twenty-four hours I crossed the border into Canada with some friends only to get drunk for a night in Quebec and come back with the world’s worst hangover the next day.
The appeal of Venice had always been there for me; it was part of the reason I had applied to Rockfell University and chose to go there, given that they have a massive house on the Grand Canal where students can live for a semester and take classes with a resident professor that lives with them in the house. The resident teacher teaches them during the day along with professors from Venice that teach other classes such as history and Italian, and the students get two long travel breaks and weekends to explore not only Venice, but anywhere they wish to go.
I had actually recently applied to the program but gotten waitlisted, told that if a spot opened up I would be the absolute first person they called to take the spot. Needless to say, my luck hadn’t been the best recently. My hopes of going abroad for a semester crushed, my internship dreams shriveled up like a dead bug, and I was home for the summer.
Unless this internship could be it.
It was a paid internship, and on top of that, they funded the interns for large things, like a roundtrip ticket to Venice and a place to stay in an apartment complex near Piazzale Roma, a bustling square where the only cars and buses in Venice were at. The pay was enticing and way more than I would make on minimum wage in North Carolina and probably way more than I would make if I managed to score a job that pays more than minimum wage here. Hands hovering over the keyboard, I began to type in my personal information, from my full name to my birthday, and more.
What harm could come out of it? They didn’t want my social security number or credit card information, and what would they do with minor details about my personal life if they didn’t have either of those things? All that could come out of this is either a fake internship offer, in which case, I would just continue my hopeless job search in Brevard and ignore the spam they would send to my email, or a real internship, one that would fulfill so many of my wants and needs that weren’t going to be satisfied otherwise.
With a final click and insertion of my cell phone number two hours later, I submitted the application, which had been simple enough: my personal details, a few short essays, and a few agreements that I would have to be okay with upon the possibility of obtaining the internship. Writing had always been a passion of mine, and filling out applications involving short writing portions had always been natural to me; people complimented my writing style all the time for it.
My eyes ached, sleep trying to take over my body at this point in the night, and I shut my laptop, slipped it back into its case, and laid my head down on my pillow, eager to sleep at this point.
Life didn’t seem to want me to sleep though because as soon as my eyes shut and I felt myself drifting away from reality, my phone blasted its annoying little ringtone, a rendition of the Spicegirls song “Wannabe” that had been my ringtone since my first phone in eighth grade due to my laziness to change it.
Jerking myself up out of bed and searching blindly in the dark for my phone, my hand finally grazed it and I snatched it up, irritably looking at the screen expecting it to be one of my best friends having a mental breakdown in the middle of the night, which was quite typical of their hectic, boy filled lives.
Instead and to my annoyance, it was an unknown number that must have called more than once in order to breakthrough the “Do Not Disturb” mode that my phone tended to be on except for the lucky people on my favorites list.
“Hello?” I muttered, my voice cracking from not speaking much in the last few hours.
“Adalyn Fray?”
Sleep suddenly left my body as this anonymous voice spoke; I had no idea who they were. “Yes? This is she.”
“Hello Adalyn. My name is Connor Mabe, and I believe you just applied to the internship through the Skye Love’s Writing Company application, whose headquarters are in New York City. You applied to the internship located at our base in Venice, Italy though, correct?”
I looked at the time on my alarm clock, whose numbers glowed 3:30 am. Why on Earth would they call at this time and how did they get through my application so fast? At least this answered my more important question: it was a real internship indeed. No robots on the internet for me! “Hi, yes. I did. I actually applied about an hour ago, and wasn’t expecting a reply this soon.”
“Is that a problem, Miss Fray? I can call at a later time if you want, but I can’t promise you a spot then like I can at this moment,” Connor’s voice said, his tone a little rushed but kind.
“You’re offering me a spot?” I questioned, surprise coloring my voice. This soon?
“Yes, Miss Fray. Your application was flawless and met all of our needs. We only have one spot left, and your application arrived before a few of the other applications. The others also qualify for the spot, but your writing was superb in the short essay portion of the application. Not to mention, the credentials mentioned in your resume relating to former writing competitions and positions further qualifies you for this position. Before accepting, I’m sure you’d like a few more details. Are there any questions you have for me?”
Cocky of him to assume that I would accept the internship, but also fairly spot on; I couldn’t think of many reasons as to why I wouldn’t accept the internship. “Yes actually. The base is in Venice, Italy, which is amazing, but I was wondering if this means that I will be writing about local events and news in Venice, or what exact type of writing you need me for. I lean more towards the creative writing end of the spectrum, but if what you need me for is reports, I am very capab-”
“Stop right there, Adalyn,” Connor interrupted, slightly chuckling. “The good news about this internship is the most work that you would do involves weekly reports of local news in Venice. We have a huge focus currently on Venice’s issue of tourism, specifically centered around how the locals are leaving the city and Venice losing its originality and local Venetians due to tourism. However, besides that, which will involve interviewing locals and in depth research, visiting the touristy places such as Saint Mark’s Basilica, and a few other things, you will be given free reign to work on any personal projects you have in mind, if any. Our goal here at Skye Love in Venice is to give our interns the chance to prove their work ethic to us through tasks we give them that provide our company with a good reputation and help get the word out about local issues in Venice.
“But our other goal is to give interns a chance to prove their creativity and abilities to us through their own personal work that flows without structure and from their own mind. This can include short stories, rough drafts of novels, and many other things. Skye Love has been known to publish pieces from their interns in the past.”
I grinned, semi shocked at what I was hearing. This internship sounded similar to the previous one I had applied to, though it was better: a new country and a chance to prove my work as a writer and a worker. I had a few more questions before I could simply agree to this though, and a few more details that I needed that I didn’t necessarily want to ask this stranger; I had always been taught to never question the reputation of the company head on, but to research for information needed myself.
I opened my laptop and opened a new tab with a search bar as I continued my conversation with Connor. “That all sounds amazing. Wow. I do have a few more questions though.” I typed in the name of the company and hit enter as I talked. The results popped up immediately, including their homepage which I clicked first. “I noticed you had a few agreements that I had to agree to before even applying. One of them stood out a bit to me, the one dealing with confidentiality.”
“Ah yes. Many of the interns that recently accepted their spots had questions about that.” I heard Connor rustling through papers in the background. “You see, at Skye Love, we don’t speak of our work in the company to anybody outside of the company, including to our families and friends. It might seem like a strange request, but we’ve found companies avoid scandals and misunderstandings better this way. Feel free to speak of your personal work to people, but anything involving the company otherwise can’t be mentioned unless it involves vague details.”
“Interesting,” I replied, scrolling through their homepage. Many people through the company had won various awards, including Pulitzer Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and many others. True to what Connor was saying, there wasn’t much of anything on the website besides glowing recommendations to use the company for publishing purposes and articles that the company posted online, in magazines, and in what appeared to be a global newspaper.
“That is our strictest agreement. If not followed, your internship will be terminated among other consequences to follow that appear fitting as a punishment,” Connor stated, now seeming bored with our conversation.
“The other rules are quite straight forward: comply with the company’s agreements and standards, which will be in the handbook you will receive if you choose to accept the position. You will be paid bi weekly, your rent and flight will be paid for, and for five days each month, you have the chance to travel outside of Venice with lodging and travel fees covered by the company. Here at Skye Love, we believe that traveling urges creativity, which is why we are willing to help with travel costs.
“Miss Fray, we would love for you to accept this position. I unfortunately cannot given you any time to think about it. The internship starts on Saturday, meaning we would want you to fly out on Thursday so you can have Thursday night and all of Friday to get settled in. I already have a flight ready to book right here on my laptop, leaving from Charlotte on Thursday at six o'clock, along with lodging in Charlotte so you can avoid a long drive at two am. I just need a verbal agreement to the position.”
I pause, letting all of his words sink in. This was actually happening. Faster than expected, but regardless, I didn’t see how I couldn’t accept this.
The company was legit; I had seen enough of that online through their homepage and flawless reviews and thoughts by people who had dealt with the company, stating how much they adored Skye Love.
All I had to do was say yes.
And that’s exactly what I did while on the phone with Connor Mabe. I said yes.
Little did I know where that yes would take me, and how much I would come to regret that tiny three letter word.