Job interview
Chapter 16
SOPHIA
"Job interview." I stand, pulling my jacket from the back of the chair. "I completely forgot — it's in twenty minutes."
"A job?" She looks genuinely surprised. "Where?"
"It's a secret." I sling my bag over my shoulder and leave enough cash on the table to cover both of us. "Don't argue about the money."
"I wasn't going to," she says, which is a lie and we both understand it perfectly.
"Text me," she calls after me.
"Okay."
"And think about tonight—"
"Goodbye, Maria."
I hear her laugh as the door swings shut behind me.
Outside, the evening has arrived while I wasn't looking soft and gold and salt-smelling, the kind of evening that makes you understand, briefly and completely, why people come to this city and then find they can't leave.
The boardwalk stretches out to my left, the pier to my right, the ocean running along all of it like something that has been there long before any of this and is quietly waiting for everyone else to finish.
I walk fast.
Think about the interview. Think, briefly and without permission, about midnight.
I walk faster.
I am going to make it.
Barely but barely counts. I have eleven minutes and five blocks, and when I need to I can cover ground quickly. I cut left at the boardwalk, right at the intersection after that, already calculating the fastest route, checking my phone, navigating.
Thanks to Google Maps confidently directing me down a street that no longer technically exists, I arrive at the building four minutes later than I have planned, slightly breathless and considerably less composed than I have intended to be.
The lobby is enormous. Modern. Black elevators, a chandelier that scatters light in every direction, the particular hush of a space designed to communicate something about the people who work inside it before anyone has said a word.
What catches my attention, though — what stops me for a moment I cannot afford — are the artworks.
Every surface holds something: modern pieces alongside older ones, each lit carefully, each placed with the deliberate attention of someone who genuinely cares what hangs on the walls.
The receptionist has the expression of someone who finds my arrival mildly inconvenient but is professionally committed to not showing it.
"Can I help you, miss?"
"Miller," I manage, still slightly out of breath. "Sophia Miller."
"Of course. Follow me, please."
We take a black elevator to the eighth floor. I am shown to a small waiting room and invited, politely, to sit. I go through my portfolio one more time — rearranging things I have already arranged, checking the order, confirming that everything is there.
When a woman in her mid-thirties appears and tells me Mr. Janson is ready, I stand up so fast I nearly knock over the chair.
On the way in, I pass someone coming . suited, expensive portfolio under one arm. I glance down at my own outfit and think, briefly, that perhaps I should have dressed differently. Then I decide there is nothing to be done about it, take a breath, and go through the door.
*Just be yourself, Shopi.*
The studio is not what the rest of the building has prepared me for.
I stop in the doorway.
The room is enormous — floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, natural light coming through at the kind of angle that makes everything glow slightly at the edges.
Canvases everywhere: leaning against walls, suspended on thin cables from the ceiling, stacked in long rows along the far end.
Paint on the floor in accumulated layers, each colour underneath a record of a different day.
The whole room smells of paint and turpentine and something underneath both — the particular atmosphere of a space where someone has spent years making things and has never once considered cleaning the evidence away.
Standing near the windows, his back partially to me and his attention on a large unfinished canvas propped against the wall, is a man I recognize immediately — not from having met him, but from years of looking at his work.
Alejandro Janson. His hair has gone grey at the temples since the last photograph I have seen, and there is paint on his forearms and on the edge of his collar,
and he has the quality of someone who has spent so much of himself on his work that the distinction between the two has long since stopped being relevant.
He turns.
Looks at medirectly, without the social layer, the way you look at something when you are actually seeing it rather than processing it for later reference.
"You can come in," he says calmly, not minding that I am a bit late.
He gestures to two chairs near the window. I sit. He sits across from me, one arm resting on his knee, completely unhurried, and says: "So. Why do you want this?"
I have prepared for this. I have prepared for every version of this. I have run through answers in my head the night before until I was certain I could produce something coherent under pressure.
Every word is gone.
I look at the unfinished canvas behind him. Large, mostly undecided, a landscape that has stopped being a landscape somewhere in the middle and become something else that hasn't yet determined what it is.
"Can I ask what you're doing with that one?" I say.
He glances back at it. "I don't know yet," he says.
"That's what I want," I say. "That — the not knowing yet. The part before the thing becomes what it's going to be."
I stop, trying to find the right shape for it.
"I've been drawing since before I have clear memories of anything else. My mother gave me my first sketchbook when I was five and I filled it in three days and cried when it was done because I didn't understand that there would be more."
Something shifts in his expression attentive, present.
"I'm not interested in art as a product. I'm interested in it as a way of actually seeing of looking at something long enough to understand what it really is, rather than what you assumed when you first glanced at it."
The studio is quiet around us.
"Show me," he says.
I open the portfolio.
I lay out what I have brought not all of it, just the pieces that say what I can't say in sentences.
The charcoal study of my aunt's hands while she works.
The ink drawing of a street corner from the city I have left, done entirely from memory three weeks after leaving it.
The recent sketchbook pages — Prince asleep with his paw over his face, the olive tree in the school courtyard, the warehouse from the night of the party, rendered from memory in pencil, the smoke and the red light and the crowd reduced to line and shadow.
Janson looks at each one.
He does not rush.
He picks up the warehouse sketch. Turns it slightly. Sets it back down.
"This is recent," he says.
"Two days ago."
"From memory?"
"Yes."
He nods. "You draw what you're trying to process," he says.
It isn't a question.
"Yes," I say.
He looks at me. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Was there ever a moment — in all of this — where you lost it? The reason you started?"
He is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means he is genuinely considering rather than reaching for the prepared answer. "You don't lose it," he says finally. "You just let other things get too loud. The reason is always there. You have to keep everything else quiet enough to hear it."
I look at the unfinished canvas behind him.
"Is that what that is?" I ask. "Keeping things quiet?"
Something moves in his expression.
"Maybe," he says. He looks back at the work on the table between us.
"The internship is three days a week. You would be working with the team on the preparation for the November exhibition — framing, installation, documentation."
A pause. "And two hours a week in the studio. Your own work. Whatever you want to do with the time."
I look at him.
"The other candidates brought printed CVs and digital portfolios," he says. Not unkindly. Factually. "You brought a sketchbook."
"I wasn't sure if that was the right call," I say honestly.
"It was," he says.
He stands. Holds out his hand. I stand and shake it.
"We will call you," he says. "If you don't get a call by the end of next week—"
"Okay yes, of course, thank you so much." I am too excited to let him finish and almost drop my things when he brings me back to the elevators.
The elevator back down feels different from the one going up.
I stand in it alone, portfolio under my arm, and look at my reflection in the dark mirrored wall ,slightly windswept, the wrong outfit for a professional interview, charcoal still on my left hand from the morning.
I smile at myself anyway.
The doors open onto the lobby.
I walk out into the evening the gold and the salt and the sound of the ocean that is always there in this part of the city if you listen for it — and I think about *you don't lose it, you just let other things get too loud*,
and I hold the sentence for a moment the way you hold something that has settled somewhere real.
Then I think about my aunt.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I have forgotten to give her the measurements. And my phone dies the second I try to take a picture.
I hail a taxi, get in, and hope my aunt is too busy to notice. I have told her about my interview, but I have completely forgotten to send her the details.