“I know you will, baby girl. I have faith in you,” her dad said. He’d heard all this before, and Deja didn’t know if he believed her or not, but she did know that he was always in her corner, and that mattered a whole hell of a lot.

“Open your present,” Deja’s mom called. “Franklin, turn the computer toward the tree. Let Deja see what we got the baby.”

Deja’s dad grumbled and started turning the monitor. Deja swiped at her eyes while no one else could see, and then she put on her biggest smile to watch her nephew open the zombie Lego set the entire family had pitched in to get him, even though Deja’s sister still wasn’t sure if it was smart to encourage his zombie obsession.

When she closed her computer a few hours later, she saw a text message from Alejandro wishing her Merry Christmas with a picture of him in the corniest Christmas sweater she’d ever seen. She smiled at her phone and texted him back.

She waited a few minutes for a reply, but it didn’t come, and that was okay, she told herself. He was with his family, getting the break she’d denied herself, and she wouldn’t begrudge him that.

She padded into her kitchen and found a frozen meatloaf dinner. She popped it in the microwave, opened a bottle of wine, and sank deeper into a depression because this was her life.

Seventeen

Week Three

Three pages!

Deja had written three new pages on an article she’d dug out of her files, and she felt like a rock star. The article wasn’t anywhere near complete. Actually, chances were high that when she looked at it in a few days, she might decide that she hated those three new pages and delete them and more, but she’d worry about that another day. Right now, she just wanted to be happy that those three pages existed. It was New Year’s Eve, and she wished she was doing something more interesting than saving and backing up the latest version of an article she’d been writing for almost a year, but she wasn’t, and a lesson she really wanted to learn next year was how to be grateful for where she was and what she’d accomplished instead of always only focusing on the things she still needed to do.