The Ongoing Quest for Happily Ever After

Julie E. Miller

2008

prologue.

For thousands of years, millions of people have been captivated by fairy tales. Beautiful peasant girls who spend years living in the shadow of her stepsisters only to wander to a ball thanks to some magic and well wishing where she meets her prince who can take her away from it all. Princesses who have their fingers pricked by magical needles and fall into tumultuous slumber for a hundred years, only to be awoken by their true love’s kiss. Frogs who turn into handsome princes and happily ever after.

As children, we’re raised to believe that in the worst of situations, if we battle through, what meets us at the end will more than make up for it. We’re taught about these princesses and princes and because they have these horrific things happen to them, then surely we can make it through everyday life.

But even fairytales have their dark moments. Cinderella’s stepsisters had their eyes pecked out by birds in the end. The princess threw her frog against the wall after being told she’d have to share a bed with the slimy creature the rest of her days. Another’s father upon hearing about the disappearance of his wealth, decided to marry his daughter.

These have been omitted in modern day fairy tales, however. Gone. Away. We don’t need to mar these wonderful stories with violence and perversion.

But everyday life isn’t like that.

You can’t just write out the bad things when they come your way. You can’t pretend as if these tribulations simply don’t exist.

Which is why, the reality of fairy tales is that one needs to know the whole encompassing story. The violence. The perversions. The truth.

For it is through these truths that one can fully appreciate what these fictional characters have faced and overcome.

Real life cannot be edited. It is what it is.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned while writing this, it’s exactly that.

The evil family. The one true love. The tests that have to be overcome.

You need every bit of that if you ever want your happy ending.

There’s a lot to be learned from fairy tales. All one has to do is open their eyes and accept what has become their fate…for overcoming these obstacles can lead to happiness one never truly expected.

One.

“I told you already. Part C is supposed to be screwed into Part A,” I said looking at the contraption in front of me. “But no…don’t listen to the female. What does she know about building things?”

My roommate Brent looked at me from across the various pieces littering his bedroom. The glare he gave me wasn’t too friendly. “Maybe if we had the directions, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” he said gruffly, picking up another piece and trying to figure out where it was supposed to go.

“Maybe if someone hadn’t gotten mad and thrown the directions out the window after ripping them into a million pieces we could actually do that.”

There was that glare again. Dropping the pieces he heaved a huge sigh. “I’ll look on Ikea’s Web site. Maybe they have directions there.” He walked past me, leaving the half constructed piece of furniture in his room.

I’d really lucked out finding Brent as a roommate. Before he’d moved in, I’d had this really awesome roommate. Then she moved out when she graduated from college. Due to my yearning for more knowledge, I trudged on after getting my Bachelor’s Degree and decided that I wanted my Master’s before joining the real world.

Which meant I needed a new roommate.

Before Brent had moved in, I’d had three or four other people living in the apartment with me. They all hadn’t lasted very long, however…and it was usually for the same reasons.

Seriously. Is it too much to ask for a roommate to do the dishes every now and then, doesn’t listen to music at four in the morning in the living room at full blast and have sex on the couch that I bought with my own hard earned money?

With one final posting on Craig’s list, I knew that this roommate had to stick around, so after getting e-mails in response to my posting, I sent out a lengthy questionnaire. Brent was the only one who’d passed and hadn’t thought I was insane.

We’d been living together for six months and it was working better than any other living situation I’d had before. Brent did the dishes. He listened to music at normal volumes at normal times of the day. And if he had sex, it was in his own room with the door shut and on the bed he bought with his own money.

Leaning against his bedroom doorway, I watched as he picked up his laptop and began his search. “You know,” I began, “I think it’s really sweet of you to tell your brother he can stay here, but don’t you think he can sleep on the couch until you two can figure this thing out together?”

Brent sighed. “I’m sure that would be fine. I just wanted the kid to have a bed.”

“A bunk bed?” I teased. “Are you trying to recreate your childhood?”

“Screw you,” he muttered, looking around Ikea’s site. “A HA!” he exclaimed as the directions for the difficult to build bunk bed appeared on his screen. “Now we can try this again.”

Shaking my head, I walked through the living area to my own bedroom door. “Rephrase that: You can try that again. I have to go to work.”

“Great…again? Do you ever get a night off?”

“Not really.” I started to walk in my room when a thought entered my head and I walked back into the living room. “One question, though. Aren’t the bunk beds going to kill the romance with Angela?”

I slammed my door shut quickly and heard a thump on the other side. Brent had obviously thrown the nearest object at my door. Smiling, I pulled out my work clothes.

Angela was Brent’s girlfriend of the past few months. She was a nice girl, but she didn’t have too much going on upstairs. One thing I couldn’t complain about, however, was her trust in Brent and I. He’d had other girlfriends who had hit the roof when they found out his roommate was a girl. Angela trusted Brent enough to know he’d never cheat on her, especially with me – the roommate he treated like a kid sister.

Not that Brent was my type anyway. I’d always gone for the tall, lanky dark haired guys. Brent was short, blonde and had been a wrestler in college.

It just wasn’t gonna happen.

When I finally looked presentable for work, I exited my room, only to trip over the pack of Post-It notes that rested near the foot of the door…apparently Post-Its were the nearest object of the day.

Grabbing up my keys, I went to leave, only popping my head into Brent’s room along the way. “Do you need me to get anything while I’m out?” I asked.

Once again engrossed in putting together the bunk bed, Brent looked up at me. “Nah. If I think of anything, I’ll just pick it up when I go to the airport to get the kid.”

“Alright. I’ll see you later.”

“Be careful.”

Nodding absentmindedly, I trudged down our stairs. Brent was the brother that…that I hadn’t had in the past few years. He worried about me. I guess I could understand his concern though. When I wasn’t working on my Master’s dissertation, I worked at a nearby bar that a lot of the college kids frequented. It wasn’t a particularly unsafe place to work, but I had to make sure that I was aware of my surroundings at all times. I can’t tell you the number of thefts I’d seen and the countless times that one of my fellow co-workers was touched inappropriately by some wasted frat boy.

Brent had completely lost it when I told him that I had gotten a job bartending. He thought I was going to get attacked every night by strange men. He couldn’t really do anything about it though. It paid too damn well.

But money was not something that I could live without.

Along with rent and utilities, I had loans to start paying off…and had a trip to London planned in a few weeks to talk to an old professor I’d had while studying abroad overseas about my dissertation. These things didn’t pay for themselves as much as I wish they would have.

Twenty-four wasn’t old, but I was starting to feel every year. Growing up in a small town, I knew that I needed out. Going to the city for college had only seemed logical at the time. It was time to grow in a new environment. When I’d been a junior, I’d spread those wings a little further and studied abroad. Upon graduation, I’d taken a few months off before deciding to further my education. With the completion of my Master’s, I knew that I’d be moving again.

This phase of my life was temporary.

And I couldn’t wait to just get out and move on.

Author’s Note: Yes. Believe your eyes. After a four year plus hiatus, I am back with a brand new story that is longer than your simple one shot (of which there have only been a few since the start of my college career). Four years has done a lot for me and a lot of things have changed…my love of writing apparently has not. It was dormant for awhile and thanks to countless term papers and news stories, my muse crawled away and suffered through a painful drought. But here I am…and hopefully some of you who supported me so strongly with ‘Rough Draft’ and my other stories will give this one a read. I’ve dusted off my keyboard…but that does not mean that I can pump chapters out the way I used to. While I have this entire story mapped out, I’m still working on perfecting it…and I am only twentysome pages into the thing. So be patient. Updates may be slow and sluggish, but I do plan on finishing this. Thank you all again. Your continued support (even in my hiatus) is the reason that I even got up the nerve to post this. –Julie