I eased the BMW down the dirt road, keeping my eyes peeled for a nudist welcoming committee or rogue shamans. It was tempting to turn around and blaze out of here, hit the highway back to Silicon Valley and pretend I was just out for a long scenic drive. Charlotte would kill me if I did that. We’d promised each other we would check into the Daydream Retreat for few days, take some time off, lose some weight, meditate, all that jazz. It was supposed to be a hippie-type place with crystals and hot tubs, which sounded fun…at the time. “We’re adults, Alanna,” my best friend had said, slurring a bit after her fourth beer. “We graduated, baby! We’ve got nine-to-fives and the next step is to embrace our quarter-life crisis.” Crisis? More like quarter-life slump. “Have another beer,” Charlotte had said when I’d questioned her about the exact definition of quarter-life. “We’re close enough to twenty-five. Mid-life crisis has a huge age window, so why can’t we start ours right after graduation?”
