A Bridge of Her Own by Carey Heywood

had nothing on Wyatt. He asked what she and Lacey were doing later and mentioned that he and his friends were having a barbeque if they would like to come. Jane told him she would check with Lacey and let him know. With that, he swam back over to his friends, and Jane got up to go lay back down.
    “Hey, I saw that guy talking to you,” Lacey said as she opened her book. “What’d he want?”
    “We have been invited to a barbeque they are having tonight,” Jane replied.
    “Do you want to go?” Lacey inquired excitedly.
    Jane gave her a look like “What do you think?”
    Lacey shrugged. “Come on. I think it would be good for you."
    “I’ll think about it,” was the best Jane could do. “Can we please go inside now? I think I might melt." Jane moaned.
    “Fine, but first let me go find out a little bit more about this shin-dig,” Lacey said, sashaying back over to the guys.
    Jane packed her and Lacey’s stuff up then walked over and waited for her by the exit. Lacey, seeing her, headed over and gave her the details on the way back up to her apartment. Jane really wasn’t interested in going but could acknowledge staying in and obsessing about what went wrong would not assist her in moving on. She didn’t want to admit to Lacey that she did not want to move on. She was at least able to recognize how desperate or sad that made her appear. Lacey had absolutely seen her at her worst, but even then, Jane was too embarrassed to say that out loud.
    Lacey and Jane took turns showering and then shared a bag salad with roasted chicken morsels for lunch. After that, Lacey took a nap feeling very drained from the sun. Jane, taking advantage of time when she was not being watched, went to check her email. She was secretly hoping to have some sort of communication from Wyatt. Unfortunately, the only new email was from her mother. It mentioned trying to get a hold of her via cell phone multiple times.
    It made Jane realize she had not even seen her phone since she got to Lacey’s. She tore through her bags and it was nowhere to be found. She raced out of the apartment down to her car, and when she opened the driver’s side door, she spied her phone in the door well. When she went to check it, she groaned, realizing it was dead. Shutting her door and beeping her car, she raced back up to Lacey’s apartment and attached her phone to its charger.
    It was so drained it would not even turn on. It just gave her a message that, once there was enough of charge, it would automatically turn on. She sat on the sofa switching off from watching Lacey’s bedroom door to see if she was awake to checking her phone to see if it had turned on yet. She remembered a saying about a watched pot never boiling, so she went back to the computer to finish reading the email her mother had written.
    It went on to say that Wyatt had been trying to reach her and had actually even called her parents trying to track her down. Her mother was dumbstruck that Jane would treat Wyatt this way, as he was trying to fix whatever had happened at the beach. Jane was in agony. Her phone was still charging and finding out that Wyatt had tried to reach her and she had been unavailable to him killed her inside.
    He would never believe that her phone was in her car this whole time. He might not forgive her now that he had to think she was ignoring him. Her manic pacing must have woken Lacey up because she was now coming out of her room rubbing her eyes.
    “What is all this noise?” She was struck by the look of sheer distress on Jane’s face. “Jane, what’s wrong?” she asked, concerned.
    Jane pointed to the email from her mother, still open on the computer. Reading it, Lacey felt her shoulders sag. So Wyatt was trying to get Jane back, she thought mentally preparing herself for her friend to once again be removed from her.
    “Where was your phone?” she asked.
    “In my car,” Jane replied. “It’s charging right now, but it was so dead that it still will