Читать книгу Transit Girl - Jamie Shupak - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

Am I ever going to see Zelda again?

Her desperate whimpers for help from that cold, sterile cage are still ringing in my ears. My nine hours in the holding cell of the Sixth Precinct are up, but I wish they’d have let her go free instead. She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t ask for this.

Right now I feel almost as innocent as Zelda. Then again, she’s a twenty-two-pound French bulldog and I’m the girl who tore off her shirt in the middle of a spontaneous “Blurred Lines” karaoke session at Tortilla Flats. Did I mention there was a video camera?

I feel like such a failure, and I’m still not even sure how all of this happened. I wish everything could go back to the way it was just a week ago. I had a ring on my finger from a man I’ve loved for a decade, a dog, and an apartment we all shared in the West Village. But the damage is irreversible, and all of that is now gone, stripped from me by a twenty-two-year-old who I thought was my friend. Nothing makes sense anymore.

I’m ashamed, and I don’t even recognize myself. I thought I was doing everything right. I thought I had it all figured out. I met the man of my dreams in college, then we moved to New York and got great jobs. I adopted Zelda for us for his twenty-fifth birthday, and with her, we became a family. Then he asked me to marry him, and we started planning our dream life together. And then I find out he was sleeping with his assistant.

Wouldn’t you fight for the dog too?

It felt like she was the only thing I had left. And now that she’s gone, and my fiancé is gone too, the only people waiting for me out here are my viewers.

I have to be on air in exactly fifty-seven minutes.

People always ask me, “How on earth do you wake up at 3:30 every morning to do the traffic?” I laugh, because to me, it’s simple: I roll out of bed. I throw on Spanx. I dry my hair. I apply my makeup. Then, I deliver the news to all of New York.

The question people should ask me would be much more revealing: “When you wake up at 3:30 in the morning to do the traffic, what on earth is your fiancé doing?”