Lost Along the Way Read Online Free Page A

phone back on its base and stretched out on the duvet covering her bunk bed. Cara was right. She didn’t want her to transfer, and she was angry that she felt like she needed to apologize for it. These years at college were supposed to be her time. All she had ever wanted was to get out of the suburbs and into the city and be able to experience life outside the stupid small town they’d grown up in. She wanted to do something else, she wanted to be someone else, and she couldn’t possibly do that with her past sitting right next to her in art history class. Wasn’t college supposed to be about self-exploration and reinvention? Why didn’t Cara want to do that for herself? Why didn’t she get it?
    Jane thought about that conversation often, wondering if she should’ve said something different. So what that she wanted to build her own life in college? While Meg went to school at Vanderbilt and Cara decided to brave the frigid winters in Maine, Jane had tried really hard to build her career as an actress. She’d wanted excitement and adrenaline and adventure. She’d wanted new experiences with new people.
    Was that really a horrible thing for her to have thought? Did that really qualify as a friendship-altering event? Cara didn’t end up transferring, and as far as Jane was concerned, things worked out for the best. Cara had met her husband (whom Jane hated with a passion) at college, and that never would’ve happened if she’d left and come to New York. After graduation, when Cara and Meg moved back home to look for jobs and save money, Jane decided to stay in the city so that she could continue to pursue her acting career. Plus, at that point, Meg and Cara both had serious boyfriends, and neither of them could have a conversation that didn’t revolve around them. Once they got married, it only got worse.
    Friendships shift and change and roll along as you move through life, and Jane was fine with all of that, but she always felt that really good friendships should be elastic—they should stretch at times but always snap back to a familiar shape and place.
    She hadn’t expected her friends’ marriages to change anything between them, but somehow they had. All of a sudden Cara and Meg no longer had time for her or any of the things they all usedto do together. Jane felt like a little kid sitting at the adult table any time they had lunch, having to listen to Cara drone on and on about the wallpaper she’d chosen to hang in the powder room of her new house in the suburbs, or Meg talk about what great meal she’d whipped up for Steve the night before. They’d been through every milestone together until then—sweet sixteens, junior proms, drivers’ licenses, college graduations—but now they’d left Jane behind. Without warning, when they hit their midtwenties, the two of them set off on their own little married ladies’ adventure while she was stuck on the wait list. She felt like they found her life silly or selfish or unimportant on some level. Is there anything more infuriating than your closest friends taking pity on you and your life choices because you don’t have a man yet? Being single and poor in your late twenties is hard enough without having to withstand that kind of judgment over breakfast. She really didn’t need it, and eventually she got tired of feeling like the odd man out. People grow up and change, and the pressure to keep up with Cara and Meg got the better of her. So she gradually decided to back out of the race entirely.
    Instead, she got a little apartment down in the grimy East Village. From the beginning, though, life in Manhattan was never as grand or as shiny as Jane had imagined it to be. She’d always had such big plans, for a big life that she knew she was meant to live, but it was harder to reach than she’d originally allowed herself to believe. She was one of a million girls trying to be