SOS by Glory, Girl Writer.pdf - Dawson's Creek Fandom Wiki

The West coast had the sand and the waves and the sun beating down on you, and the
Southwest of course offered canyons and cliffs and red dirt roads, and the Midwest had
all those broad, green swaths of farmland, but for pure, unadulterated climatological
bliss, Joey remained convinced you couldn't beat October in New England. It was fortyfive
degrees, overcast and breezy, as she walked home toward her apartment with a
bag of groceries clutched against her right side. Dry leaves crunched under her feet and
she kicked an acorn with her toe, watching it bounce ahead of her and then off the
sidewalk. Red and orange leaves were everywhere, and seemed to cast a fiery orange
eye on everything below. She stopped to hitch the bag a little higher on her hip, pulled
her purse strap up on her other shoulder, and kept going.
She hadn't seen Pacey in two months. They hadn't spoken on the phone. They hadn't
e-mailed, they hadn't written letters, they hadn't spoken through intermediaries or
communed in a séance. Every once in a while, Jen or Dawson or Jack would mention
something about him -- he's doing well in school, the proofessors really like him, it turns
out he's a writer -- but mostly, there was nothing but empty space where he'd been. It
wasn't like the last time they'd gone without speaking. She knew they weren't waiting,
weren't trying to accommodate strange timing, weren't putting off the inevitable. They
had said goodbye, and they'd meant it, and whatever else she knew for sure, Joey knew
that if she talked to him or saw him or especially touched him, it would only make it
harder.
She stopped at an intersection, staring blankly at the red illuminated hand across the
street. Don't walk. She rolled her eyes. "Don't tell me what to do," she muttered under
her breath. When the light changed and the strangely posed white stick figure lit up, she
strolled across the street, stepping onto the opposite curb and continuing toward her
building. She passed a guy and a girl, both in Harvard sweatshirts, and she couldn't
help smiling. Maybe that would be her next year.
Chris had finally given her a talk that was somewhere between an embrace and an
eviction notice. In September, he'd called her into the office to fire her, telling her he was
only giving her twelve months' notice. In a year, he expected her to be on to bigger and
better things. "You're canned, Joey," he'd told her, shrugging his shoulders. "You're
bounced, you're history, you're fired. You've got fifty-two weeks to clean out your desk."
Everything since then had opened up. Maybe she'd give one of the Ivies a try. Maybe
she'd go to some enormous, swarming sea of undergraduates and wade directly into the
seamiest underbelly of arrested adolescence. Maybe she'd find a bohemian paradise
where she could resist the patriarchy and drink four-dollar cups of coffee with the rest of
the suburban exiles.
And one day, she really would meet someone.
***
Jen's phone rang while she was walking from psychology to French, although of course,
like all good cellular phones, it didn't just ring. It didn't just make an undistinguished
tootling electronic melody, either. Jen's phone played "Take The A-Train."