Not My Type

Cover images: Colorful Socks © 2009 Nika Fadul; Getty Images.

Cover design copyright © 2011 by Covenant Communications, Inc.

Published by Covenant Communications, Inc.

American Fork, Utah

Copyright © 2011 by Melanie Jacobson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any format or in any medium without the written permission of the publisher, Covenant Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 416, American Fork, UT 84003. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect
the position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Covenant Communications, Inc., or any other entity.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are either products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real, or are used fictitiously.

First Printing: September 2011

978-1-60861-794-4

To James

I am grateful for you every day

Acknowledgments

Always and first, I could never do this without my husband, Kenny, who supports me with his enthusiasm, his unwavering belief in me, and his willingness to overlook a messy house when I’m in the middle of storytelling. I also want to thank Amy Lou Bennett, sister and beta reader extraordinaire; my kindest critic, Aubrey Mace; my thoughtful and encouraging critique partner, Kristine Tate; and two other readers who are so generous with their time, Sue Marchant and Jaymee O’Rafferty. A special thank you to Josi Kilpack, Susan Auten, and Rachel Gillie for their honest and incisive feedback and for helping me grow as a writer by using the markup option generously. The same must be said for my editor, Samantha Van Walraven. Thank you to Joan Jacobson, who brags about me like I’m her own child, and to my father-in-law, Skip, for saying he’s proud of me. Thank you to Jill Peterson and her magical camera for making me look good. Finally, thank you to the friends and family who continue to believe that I can do this.

Dear Ginger,

Thanks for the encouragement. Some people say it’s wrong to kick someone when they’re down—but not you. YOU march to the tune of your own demented drum. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Love always,

Your older, wiser, and far-better-looking sister

Chapter 1

A fistful of mayonnaise makes a decent projectile when you’re in a pinch. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I would have grabbed a handful of jalapeños instead, but my vision did this red, blurry-anger thing, and when I ran after Brady Willardson’s black Jeep, what I threw was . . . mayo. It’s probably harder to clean up, and it’s better that way, really. Less damage, bigger mess. Dumb kid. I owed him worse for the way he’d trashed Handy’s.

I trudged back inside the sandwich shop, and the door swept aside approximately a thousand of the napkins Brady and his lame friends had strewn all over the floor. I scooped a few up and wiped the mayo off my hand. Katie and Tara huddled behind the sandwich bar like the sneeze guard was their last line of defense against me. Which it was.

I said nothing, just stared. Katie cracked first, like I knew she would.

“I’m so sorry, Pepper,” she said, verging on a blubber. “I don’t know what happened!”

I lifted one eyebrow slowly—the way my mom did when I was little, and I knew the longer it took to reach its full arch, the more trouble I was in. Even mouthy Tara shifted nervously now. I slowly scanned the wreckage inside Handy’s Dandy Sandwiches and then eyeballed them again. “How do you not see this coming?”

A high-pitched seal bark escaped Katie. It was her nervous laugh, an involuntary reflex that I hoped, for the sake of her future social life, she would outgrow soon. Her laugh had summoned me from the back office to catch Brady Willardson’s Band of Merry Teenage Idiots wreaking their usual havoc in the dining area.

A visit from Brady goes like this: He shows up, flanked by at least two of his wing men, and proceeds to put on a show to impress the girls. This involves flinging packets of condiments, punching each other, littering, and otherwise ignoring the counter girls they’re there to impress. I guess not much has changed in the five years since I graduated from high school.

This afternoon’s special performance reached new heights—make that lows—when one of Brady’s atrophied brain synapses fired off what his underworked neural receptors interpreted as a “good idea.” The ensuing napkin fight resulted in shrieking, giggling, and Katie’s panicked seal barking. I walked out to discover her and Tara hiding behind the storage room door while one of the teenage terrorists lay pinned to the floor by a larger tribe mate, who was brandishing a squeeze bottle of ranch sauce over his head. All this while Brady tried to breach the storage room in search of . . . who knows what. More projectiles for lame teenage boys to throw when their hormones suffer a sun flare, I guess.

Don’t judge me for chasing them out and lobbing a chunk of fatty mayo at their car. It was the least violent of all the impulses I entertained when I saw the napkins they had flung all over the floor. They didn’t quite cover the few dozen smooshed mustard and ketchup packets that lay there as well. Worse, scads of busted salt and pepper packets formed a fine grit over the whole stupid mess. No, don’t judge me. The only shock should be that Brady and his stupid lift-kitted Jeep didn’t get what was coming to them months ago. Maybe I should keep an extra dozen eggs and a slingshot on hand as Brady repellent.

Tears formed in Katie’s eyes. Knowing that a sobbing high school sophomore was not going to help my mood, I sighed. “All right. Here’s the lecture. They can’t eat here anymore. Call me out if they come back in. Clean up. If you want a paycheck next week, don’t distract me again until payroll is finished.”

The tears quivered and then rolled down Katie’s cheeks, but she looked surprised and then thankful when she realized I was done.

“That’s it?” she squeaked. Tara elbowed her, and Katie bit her lip while I glared once more for good measure then headed back toward the office. I could hear them scrambling behind me to clean up. Satisfied that they would have things righted within the hour, I settled down to make sense of the Payroll and Asset Manager program still open on the computer screen. Stupid PAM. I think she had it in worse for me than Brady and his army of condiment hurlers.
Awesome.
I still had a long afternoon to go at my dead-end sandwich job, with only a creeping tension headache to keep me company.

What a way to spend my birthday.

* * *

“Happy Birthday!”

A chorus of five chipper voices greeted me when I walked in the front door. I stopped short, sure that the small surprise party waiting for me was a figment of my imagination. It had to be because I had given my family strict orders to ignore my birthday. I planned to spend the evening wallowing in the room I shared with my seven-year-old sister, moping over the extreme loserdom I had achieved in my twenty-three years. I intended to bounce around my friends’ Facebook pages and envy their cool trips and great jobs while I tried to figure out how my life had become an epic fail. My evening definitely did
not
involve a cheesy family birthday party that I’d forbidden several times. Loudly.

But no, when Rosemary detonated a party cracker near my ear and Ginger sprayed me down with enough silly string to soak up even the most aggressive BP oil spill, I had to concede that my family had, in fact, thrown me the world’s weakest surprise party.

My mom’s smile told me she knew they were on thin ice.

“What is this?” I asked, my head pounding worse than ever.

“A surprise party, duh.” Ah, Ginger, an enemy of the obvious.

“Mom, I told you I don’t want to do anything for my birthday.”

“And I think that’s ridiculous,” she said. “Twenty-three is a big deal, and at the very least, you deserve cake with your family.”

“Twenty-three is not a big deal,” I said. “It’s boring. There’s no milestone. There’s nothing I can do today that I couldn’t do yesterday.”

My brother Mace tore himself away from picking at the frosting long enough to say, “Twenty-three is a prime number. You can’t even divide it by anything. It’s totally lame.”

I glared at him.

“What?” he said. “I’m backing you up.”

“I’m with Mace,” Ginger chimed in. She’s halfway through her senior year and the resident pain in the neck. “I can totally see why you’re depressed. I mean, your age is lame, your job is lame.” She swiped her finger through some icing and took a little cake with it. “I’m sad for you,” she said, her mouth full.

“Ginger!” Mom was struggling to hold on to her temper. Ginger has that effect on people.

“Forget it,” I said. “She’s right. There’s nothing to celebrate, which is why I said I didn’t want a cake or a party.”

“But it’s good!” Rosemary shouted. “I picked chocolate.”

My jaw dropped, and my mom flushed. I like chocolate everything—except cake and ice cream.

“Rosemary really wanted it . . . and I got you butter pecan ice cream.” My dad looked both sheepish and hopeful as he added the last part, as if it would compensate for once again indulging one of Rosemary’s whims. She’s hard to resist, and the fact that she’s a surprise baby, eight years younger than fifteen-year-old Mace, doesn’t make it easier.

“But it’s
my
birthday cake!”

“That you didn’t even want,” Ginger pointed out. “You should chillax. You’re getting older now. You could have a stroke or something.”

That was it. Remembering the satisfaction of watching the mayo drip down Brady’s car, I stalked to the counter where Mace had tugged the cake to the edge so he could sneak the frosting more easily. I reached out a finger like I was going to swipe some too, but instead, I flipped the whole thing over, pleased when it crashed to the floor and splattered chocolate chunks on Ginger’s shoes.

“These are new!” she yelped. “I just got them! Mom!”

That got no reaction because Mom was busy trying to comfort a wailing Rosemary, and Mace was trying to get to the cake board to see what he could scavenge.

My dad stared at me, one eyebrow inching its way skyward, and then he pointed at Rosemary. “Apologize,” he said, his voice calm.

I ignored the tiny pang of guilt somewhere around my appendix or some other useless organ and headed up the stairs. “I said I didn’t want a party!” I yelled over my shoulder.

“You get back down here
right now
,” my mom hollered up the stairs.

I slammed my bedroom door.

My room didn’t improve my mood. A room shared with a seven-year-old rarely does. The Strawberry Shortcake on Rosemary’s comforter mocked me with a serene, blank-eyed smile, and the bare walls on my side of the room didn’t offer a better distraction.

Flinging myself onto my bed didn’t help because I knew Rosemary would be crashing my pity party any minute. Seven-year-olds don’t understand boundaries. I lay there for all of three minutes, staring at the opposite wall where her collection of American Girl dolls stared creepily back, before the door flew open. Rosemary stood there, fists on hips, looking cute, tear-streaked, and mad.

“You ruined my cake!”

The seed of guilt my dad’s look had planted blossomed into an acknowledgment that I was possibly a horrible human being if I had it in me to make Rosemary cry. I clung to surliness to save me. “It was
my
cake,” I said. “It’s
my
birthday, remember?”

“But I picked my favorite flavor for you, and me and Olivia worked on it so hard this afternoon! She’s going to think you’re so mean,” she said, as if I cared about her best friend’s opinion.

Which, okay, I did. It’s not like I plotted ways to hurt seven-year-olds’ feelings. “Rosemary, I hate chocolate cake. Didn’t Mom or Dad tell you that?” I asked instead, determined to rationalize my poor behavior.

“Yes, but I made yours special with chocolate chips. I even had to find them in the cabinet all by myself because they didn’t come in the box, and you
ruined
it.” More tears welled. I felt some of my own pricking my eyeballs. I hate being a sympathetic crier.

I pulled my pillow over my head, clinging to righteous indignation so she couldn’t guilt me into feeling worse. Or crying. “Go away, Rosie.”

“It’s my room too. You can’t make me leave.”

“I need some time to myself,” I said. “Why don’t you go to Olivia’s and complain about how awful I am?”

“You’re rude!” she yelled, but the idea of relaying all the drama to Olivia must have appealed to her because I heard the door shut behind her. I enjoyed about thirty more seconds of blank-brained quiet before a sharp knock sounded. I peered from under my protective pillow to find my dad poking his head in.

He waved at the foot of my bed. “Is that seat taken?”

I shoved the pillow behind me then shook my head and stifled a sigh, knowing I was in for it.

He sat for a moment and studied me with a half smile. My dad has mad skills that are like Dr. Phil level. Except my dad is nice. Which makes it hard to kick him out of my pity parties. “So when you say you don’t like chocolate cake, what you really mean is you hate chocolate cake’s guts?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Hey,” he said, giving my foot a gentle shake. “Where did your sense of humor go?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Probably down the same black hole that sucked all the other good things out of my life.”

He sighed. “Do you think that’s an overstatement?”

Ah, the joys of having a marriage and family therapist for a dad. They’re obnoxiously reasonable and hard to ruffle.

“No. I don’t.” I punched my pillow, trying to shove it into a more comfortable lump.

He didn’t say anything else, just watched me with his patient therapist gaze.

I groaned. He still stared.

“Fine, I’ll talk,” I said, struggling to sit up straight.

“Resistance is futile,” he intoned in his best robot voice.

“Let’s start with the fact that I’m not overstating what a disaster my life is,” I said. I crossed my arms tightly across my chest to communicate that I was totally not playing.

“Okay. That’s as good a place as any.”

“I have the worst job, I live at home and share a room with my kid sister, I have no social life, and I’m still nursing a broken heart.”

“That’s quite a list,” my dad said. “Let’s take them one at a time. The
worst
job? Really?”

“Yes. I have teenage customers all day long. I have teenage employees all day long. And even the nonteenage customers are cranky all the time. I have a college degree, for Pete’s sake. Why am I managing a dumb sandwich shop?”

“Yes. Why are you managing a sandwich shop?” my dad echoed. His tone was neutral, but I wasn’t fooled. He was using what he likes to call “reflective listening,” a therapist term for spending an hour saying, “How do you feel about that?”

“Don’t you do your counseling voodoo on me,” I warned. “I’m on to your tricks.”

He smiled. “This is dad voodoo. I’m in here right now because I love you and I’m worried about you. You flipped over the birthday cake that Rosemary worked on all afternoon. I thought I’d better find out if there was a good reason for that. It’s not the action of a happy daughter.”

“It was chocolate,” I muttered under my breath.

Dad let that pass because he’s smart. “So, your job. Maybe it’s not the job you want, but it pays the bills, right?”

“Not fast enough,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t still be living here and sharing a room with Rosemary. And before you say it—yes, I understand the law of natural consequences. It still stinks. ”

“Natural consequences” was another one of his favorite expressions. He and my mom loved to throw that out anytime one of us kids was verging on or recovering from a disastrous choice—the perfect way to describe my broken engagement and the mountains of resulting debt. No doubt we’d be analyzing
that
soon. It was a perfect example of their mantra. “You’re free to make your own choices, and you’re free to pay the consequences.”

The payment of my consequences turned out to be super literal when my ex-fiancé, Landon, forced me to call off our wedding a week before the date. I had paid for everything myself, and I had a massive credit card bill to prove it. That’s because it was the second time in two years that we’d called our wedding off. The first time, my parents had footed the bill. They loved me, but not enough to do it twice. Even though my sandwich wages would (barely) cover rent in a borderline apartment somewhere in Salt Lake City, I’d had to move back home so I could pay my credit card off faster—a credit card my parents had advised me not to get in the first place. Right after they’d advised me not to marry Landon. In the gentlest terms, of course.