Chapter 2 The English Opening #2
I’m glooping pink goop onto the highlight we’d spontaneously decided she’d needed, and wipe her forehead with a latex thumb.
“Not this time. She has finals next month, and she was already trying to tell me that she doesn’t have to do that internship next fall.
Which”—I flick a pink glob back into the plastic bowl—“is stupid.”
Renata falls silent for a beat. “Why not let her skip it?”
“Skip interning for a real designer? In Paris?”
“Maybe she could find someone who wants to pay her.”
“It isn’t like that,” I say quietly.
She rolls her lips together. “Bryce’s aunt offered to list this place if we wanted to downsize. I could talk to him about if we could help—”
“No, Ren. I’m fine, I promise. Maisie just worries too much.”
Always has. I have three younger sisters.
There are the twins, Samantha and Bailey, from a very short-lived relationship Dad had after Mom passed.
And I know I’m not their de facto mom because their actual mom split to become an army wife and I’m almost thirty—but it’s hard to accept that they’re both eighteen and legal adults.
Samantha is the Sporty Spice of our quadrangle; her life is volleyball, her phone, and her friends, who she’s either playing volleyball with or texting at any given moment.
I try to tell Dad not to get too annoyed at her for it.
I’d be goofing off in Calculus, too, if I was about to be a Division I athlete at freaking Harvard. Well, I wouldn’t, but I get it.
Bailey is our painter. Beautifully tender-hearted, quietly hilarious, she only just plucked up the courage to apply for art school this year.
I think it sank in that she’s a senior and the people in her Dungeons I’d just moved to New York City with a thousand dollars in cash, a backpack stuffed with Walmart’s finest fashions, and my grandma’s words twisting around my head: Go be a model.
Get out of Waterfield. Drive past Chicago, past New Jersey, and go live the life I know you can live.
Don’t die in this town like I am.
“Have you ever shoplifted?” Renata had asked me at the dive bar we went to later that night, her pupils wide and face serious.
“Um. No?”
“You could.”
“Oh.”
“You want to try?”
“What?”
“Right now. Want to try stealing something?”
“No?” I’d whispered, thoroughly spooked by the calm confidence rolling off this woman I’d just met. She was a new archetype for me. The Poised New Yorker. “I’m not, I, I can’t do that. I can’t.”
“Really? You should test that hypothesis before you decide—with him.” She pointed at a finance bro.
Black slacks, painfully crisp white shirt, pale scalp glistening between the buzzed darts of his spiky, too-short haircut.
“Come on, you can see his wallet in his back pocket. Show me that you’re better than Indiana—”
“Illinois, actually—”
“That’s what I said.”
But I couldn’t do it, not right then. Even after he locked his lasers on me, the “little redhead” he “found.” He lectured me about the importance of getting a real job—like he had, at his dad’s firm, easy!
—and investing in mutual funds, and then he stepped outside to make a call.
“Order whatever you want on my tab,” he’d said.
And after ten minutes without him showing back up, I did.
A Diet Coke. Then, after thirty minutes, and the bartender asking if I knew how to get his card back to him, and Renata watching me swivel my ice cubes around and around, I got us shots and three orders of cheesy bacon fries.
That’s how it was for the longest time. Renata, me, open tabs, smiling.
The bills were mostly paid, either by the opportunistic patronage of Manhattan’s richest men (who love to slip you a hundred if they think your phone’s getting turned off), modeling work (abysmal for non–nepo babies), or brand deals (I started documenting my outfits online right when fashion content shifted from blogs to social media; lucky me).
But then a friend’s momager approached me—offering to pay a month of rent if I asked this ancient stockbroker out who’d been creeping on her daughter.
Help me prove to her that he’s a fifty-one-year-old man who’d date any twenty-one-year-old girl.
She knows I’m asking you and thinks he’s going to say no.
Just one text, with a link to my old headshots.
Secretly, I’d thought he was going to say no, too.