Chapter 1
Above all things, I will not doubt my pencil skirt.
It has too many good qualities to be doubted.
First, it was vintage Christian Dior in excellent condition when I bought it, and it remains in excellent condition.
Second, I found it stuck between a pair of pants from The Row—I bought those too, and they look great on me—and a sweater that’s really a hundred percent cashmere, and all three items cost me thirty-two dollars.
That single find had to be a blessing. It had to be a good omen.
What Tori at the temp agency is telling me can’t be the fault of the skirt.
My heels, maybe.
“—nothing else for you right now, Audrey, but I’ll shoot you an email the second there’s a good fit.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed!” God. Why do I say that? I never say that in real life. Only when I’m talking to people at the temp agency.
“Me, too,” says Tori. She sounds like she means it. “Talk to you soon.”
So that’s that.
New York City Fashion Week is over, I have no new temp job on the horizon, and I did not secure a position at the fashion house I briefly worked for.
The paycheck—when it comes—won’t be enough to cover what I owe.
And of course, I owe.
Mainly rent.
Because mainly, making it in New York City means I have to live in New York City.
I didn’t start out this way, and I don’t mean working as a temp. I wasn’t always a small-town girl with a dream of making it in the big city.
Then my rough-around-the-edges father—most people would call him an asshole—told me it would be a miracle if I lasted a month on the East Coast, much less in New York City.
He didn’t say it exactly like that. He was drunk at the time, so I couldn’t understand half of what he slurred, but I got the gist.
There’s no better fuel than spite, so I packed up my stuff and left.
I had a scholarship at NYU, and I worked whenever I could, which got me through to my degree. It was in marketing, but that wasn’t supposed to matter. I was supposed to be able to get a job with any degree, and then I’d climb the ladder to owning a brownstone in Park Slope.
The Lower East Side is just another rung on the ladder, right?
I tuck the cardboard sign from today’s final temp job under my arm and step out of the way of a bike courier just before he veers into me.
Not getting hit by a bike is a good omen.
The street is busy on a Tuesday evening. Traffic. A family with three kids, one in a stroller, heading to dinner, judging by the mom saying we are almost there, and then we will eat dinner in a tersely chipper voice. Two guys in a heated discussion that might be fighting and might be flirting.
The fact that I missed my train stop and ended up on Broadway is…
Something.
What’s another fifteen minutes to exist in the big city?
I cut across a park, cross again, and try not to blame my pencil skirt, which is twists around my legs. My clutch patpatpats against my hip. It’s heavy enough to be annoying when my phone’s in it.
Not too much farther. Two more blocks and a turn, and I’m on my street, just four blocks lower than I should be.
There are other temp agencies. I can apply for lots of other places online, just like I have been. The only…challenge is that everyone in the city is also applying, and despite my perfect pencil skirt, I keep getting edged out.
I’ll never doubt my pencil skirt, but I will doubt tech startups. A job offer two weeks out from graduation at NYU was a dream, by which I mean…it felt so unreal it could’ve been a hallucination.
But no, the job was real, and the company even had office space in Midtown.
It had everything you’re supposed to be able to say about a startup: almost a billion dollars in funding, a founder with a cool, friendly vibe, an idea that was going to revolutionize friendship back to how it used to be before smartphones, only with smartphones.
And then, two months ago, I walked into work one morning and found a team of movers hoisting the founder’s top-of-the-line gamer chair into the elevator.
So I guess people don’t want to revolutionize tossing a bouncy ball at their friends from virtually any distance in order to deliver a message read—and even written, if you want—by a robot.
I didn’t believe in the product, okay? But I believed in its marketing, which was awesome. I even got an email from one of my old professors saying so.
All those skills were supposed to be able to keep me afloat while I found a new job.
A truck pulls up to the curb beside me, and two delivery guys hop out, jog around the back, and fling open the doors.
“Tell me it’s not the seventh floor,” one says.
“Eighth,” the other answers.
I give them what I hope is a sympathetic, commiserating nod as I go by. They nod back, grinning.
I could deliver things.
For an hour, maybe. I haven’t been up on my strength training.
I’m on the next block when I step into a patch of silence.
Not real silence. There are too many people and too many cars for true silence. But it’s pretty close. Nobody’s on this stretch of walk. There’s a waist-high brick wall with a hedge on top. The wall leads to two stone pillars with a gate in the middle. Behind the gate is…
A rowhouse.
It reminds me of other rowhouses and townhouses I’ve seen in the city, but this one’s different.
It’s a rowhouse without a row, and it’s dying.
Obviously, not everywhere is open and inhabited all the time.
This rowhouse-without-a-row is supposed to be inhabited and isn’t.
People should be resting their hands on the wrought-iron railings on either side of brownstone steps—I think they’re brownstone—that match the red brick.
There shouldn’t be bricks coming loose from the facade.
The black front door shouldn’t be faded to gray.
Every window on all four stories that I can see is dark, and they should be full of light.
One of them, on the top floor, is boarded up.
The summer breeze wafts across the back of my neck. A shiver trips down my spine in spite of the warmth. I have the sudden sense that if I touch the iron gate, I’ll freeze to death. The grass on either side of the walkway is neatly mown, but it feels completely overgrown.
More prickles rise on the back of my neck.
This time, though? No breeze. The traffic is stopped behind me, rolling forward a few feet at a time, and there’s not so much as a bike courier to narrowly miss me.
I put my hand on the back of my neck and peek out the corners of my eyes without turning my head. There’s nobody creepy. Just regular people up and down the block. None of them are paying attention to me.
Is it the rowhouse without its row?
Am I cracking up under the stress of temporary employment? Or maybe under the imminent threat of losing my apartment?
If a light comes on in the rowhouse right now, I’ll scream.
I take my phone out of my clutch and dial my best friend in the world.
“Hello, fashion week consultant Audrey Morgan.”
“Not anymore.”
“What?” There’s shuffling and clicking on the other end of the line while Liz puts down whatever she’s making. It’ll be something involving yarn. “I thought fashion week wasn’t over yet.”
“It’s over for me,” I say, trying to project stoicism. “There’s one more show tonight, but I’m done.”
“Nobody snapped you up?”
“Shockingly, no. And I networked my ass off. As much as I could while I was being a sign-holder.”
“Oh, Audrey,” says Liz. “A sign-holder?”
“For the last two days.”
“What sign did you have to hold?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Footsteps. Liz will be pacing around her living room.
She went to the state school closest to where we grew up in Indiana and still lives the college town life, just in a less student-focused building.
I’m not jealous of her family, which includes siblings and two parents who haven’t ever been assholes, but only because I was basically part of it while we were growing up.
“So, what’s next? Are you going to take a sabbatical? ”
My laugh echoes off the brick facade of the abandoned-but-not brownstone. “I have to make rent.”
“If you can make it there…”
“Stop!”
“…you can make it anywhere,” Liz says in a rush. “But seriously. Sublet your place and come stay with me. Regroup. Start your own fashion house.”
“I don’t know anything about fashion houses.”
“You were just an executive assistant at New York Fashion Week.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Wow,” says Liz, meaning not with that attitude.
“I found this weird brownstone. Or, like, rowhouse.” I tell her. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“Weird?”
“It doesn’t have a row.”
“Oooh. It’s all by itself?”
“Yeah. And abandoned. But…not? I don’t know. The vibes are extremely weird. We’re locked in a standoff.”
“You and the brownstone?”
“Yes. I’m watching it, daring it to tell me why it’s just sitting here and not my home, and it’s watching me, I think.”
“Are you going to move in?”
“I’d have to climb over a gate.”
“I believe in you.”
“I’m in a pencil skirt.”
“I believe in you slightly less. Maybe go get some pants first.”
“Probably for the best.” A car honks somewhere down the block.
Shouting echoes along the street. Frustration skims across my chest like a papercut.
“I might get evicted, you know? I’m already behind on rent, and fashion week isn’t going to cover it.
The temp agency doesn’t have anything else.
So I might have to leave my place, and this brownstone is just… sitting here. Empty.”
“Unfair. Unconscionable.”
“Un…bearable.”
We both laugh at that.
I wasn’t really kidding.
It’s feeling more unbearable by the second. I know it is bearable, all things considered, but it’s been a long day, and a long two months since I lost the safety net of college, and I’m already on the brink of…
Not failure. But not success, either.
“You want to call me when you get home?” Liz asks. “Are you far?”
“Yes and no.”
Silence.
“Yes, I want to call you. No, I’m not far.”
“Let me know if that brownstone goes up for sale, okay?”