Adults dressed in Elmo costumes, doing the Hustle?
There was nothing evil or sacrilegious about this parade. I had always felt closest to God during moments of jubilation such as this; when the Diamondbacks made it to the play-offs, and at my cousin Deborah’s wedding reception when my father had the entire extended family in stitches doing the bunny hop. How could God not be totally in support of dancing in the streets?
“Can we go yet?” Aaron asked, clearly unnerved by all of the girls in over-sexed costumes, drunken yelling, loud music and bone-chilling cold.
It was ten o’clock, hardly late by New York standards, but it had been an overwhelming day. I was reluctant to leave the parade still in full swing, to abandon all of these sideways glances from boys, but I assured myself that I would still look the same the next morning. For me, being out late at night in New York was like being invited to a party for the first time and never wanting it to end; only I had never been invited to a real party. Seriously, who in their right mind would invite the daughter of a minster to their dorm party? No one at Treadwell except possibly Juliette, and I was definitely starting to think that maybe I had overestimated the value of our friendship to her.
That night in our hotel room as I tried to sleep, I was so caught up in my new identity that my heart rate simply refused to slow down. I couldn’t wait for dawn, for us to check out of our hotel, carry our suitcases downtown and take up residence in our new apartment. Subconsciously I think I knew that the more I concentrated on the fun and exciting elements of our new lives, the less free space in my brain there would be for thoughts about how completely destroyed my old life was, how much I missed True Heart, and how terrified I was.
In the bed next to mine, my brother tossed and turned, kicked off his sheets and talked in his sleep. I wondered if Heather knew how much he was suffering through all of this mess. My mind wandered further, across the country again toward my parents. Even though I was starting to grow accustomed to the nonstop noise and hustle of New York, I was still kind of expecting a knock on our hotel room door to interrupt this adventure. Or rather, I was still surprised that the knock hadn’t come yet.
Chapter 8
Eight days after moving into our apartment on Baxter St., we ran out of money.
Quite literally.
Aaron had begrudgingly handed over four hundred dollars to buy a couch that was reduced in price because it had been a floor display at a furniture store. We took turns on alternating nights sleeping on it, with the unlucky person whose night it wasn’t sleeping on the floor in their respective bedroom. My back ached incessantly. Never before in my whole fifteen years of life had I ever appreciated a simple luxury like a mattress until I didn’t have one anymore. We spent forty dollars on two cheap cotton blankets but decided that washing them at the Laundromat was an expense we couldn't afford. No one would ever have to know how unspeakably gross we were being. The blankets smelled faintly like cough medicine and had fold-creases in them from their plastic packaging.
We hadn’t taken into consideration that due to both of us being under the age of twenty-one, we would be required to put down deposits on our electricity and gas accounts. Thankfully, John had left us a handwritten note with all of the utility service providers’ contact information to initiate service, or we never would have figured out where to call on our own. We had to put down a social security number to open both accounts, and Aaron took a huge chance and listed his own, but with the last number changed. By some miracle, the accounts were opened despite the fraudulent information.
A heated argument we had over wireless internet service resulted in Aaron storming out of the apartment with my laptop and disposing of it somewhere outdoors in the maze of Chinatown where I would never find it. All I had wanted to do was check e-mail to see if Juliette had reached out, but he had flipped his lid and said that not only was it unsafe for me to check my old Grace e-mail accounts, but I could also be giving away our location if I used the wireless modem at all. This had been my own reason for suggesting that we only use computers at internet cafes when we were looking for an apartment, but I never would have suggested actually throwing the laptop away. He had used my own logic against me, which sucked.
I sulked for a while. I had a ton of scanned sketches and design doodles saved to that laptop hard drive and my brother hadn’t given me time to back them up on my little zip drive. I knew precious little about modems and IP addresses and stuff of that nature; so I figured after stewing in angry silence for a few hours that he had probably been right.
Without my laptop, life became infinitely more difficult. Buying a television and hooking it up with cable was not an option until one of us, or both of us, found jobs. Within the first two days of our occupancy of the new apartment, we completely lost track of current events. If our parents were looking for us, or if anyone was looking for us, we would have had no way of knowing unless they wrote us a message in the sky over Manhattan with jet emissions.
We were no longer able to look for jobs in an organized fashion. Aaron made a resume of fake but reasonable-sounding experience waiting tables at a pay-by-the-minute copy shop, but he had no choice but to pound the pavement since prowling Craig’s List and e-mailing restaurant managers from the copy shop would have been exorbitantly expensive. Seven evenings in a row, he came home defeated and threw himself down on the couch.
“Come back in the morning, come back after the lunch shift, come back tomorrow,” he complained. “Everyone claims they’re hiring, but the person who can do the hiring is never around. Everyone says they want experience, but only New York experience. And I can’t make up New York restaurant experience, because everyone knows everyone.”
His ambition waned from finding a job at high-end restaurants to mid-ranged restaurants to diners… and by our second Monday in New York, he was attending a hiring open house to try to get a job at Starbucks, preferably not one in an outer borough that would have required him to get on the subway at insanely early hours.
Getting our lives set up had cost over three hundred dollars, and we hadn’t even filled our fridge and cabinets with goodies from the bulk aisle at the health food store, which had been my dream.
“It’s expensive being poor,” Aaron griped.
We had soaked up the city during our first week in the apartment, and we were both obsessive about frugality. We ate five-dollar falafel sandwiches and Chinese restaurant lunch specials. I looked for inspiration in the messages baked into my complimentary fortune cookies while I chewed them slowly, trying to savor them.
You will face many challenges, one cookie told me at lunch time.
Yeah, tell me something I don’t know already, Confucius, I thought grimly.
We limited ourselves to bowls of cereal for dinner and we carefully rinsed plastic utensils from our take-out meals to re-use them. During the hours we were awake, we roamed the city without any destination in mind, marveling at buildings and stretching out on park benches. Everything we consumed was either take-out or pre-packaged; we had a stove with working burners but no pots and pans, and a microwave was way out of our budget. Somehow we thought that denying ourselves a thorough trip to the grocery store would make our paltry runaway budget last longer.
We were wrong.
We were down to quarters, nickels, and dimes and we didn’t even have a loaf of bread in our fridge.
It was becoming alarmingly evident that we needed to find a source of income immediately, and that we hadn’t really thought through realistic job opportunities for young people such as ourselves before hopping on a train to New York. This wasn’t Phoenix; I couldn’t just apply for a part-time job at an ice cream store and assume I could work as many hours as I wanted. There were adults – grown adults with job experience – some with associate and bachelor degrees, filling out applications and waiting in lines for jobs at retail stores and restaurants. The flyers taped around the NYU area by parents seeking babysitters didn’t even want regular babysitters; they wanted graduate
students earning PhD’s in child psychology. I snorted at those; as if I would babysit kids for cash if I had a psychiatric degree.
But babysitting wasn’t an option for me anyway; I didn’t have any references, had only held babies in front of cameras for cable network specials, and besides, I had purple hair. I didn’t exactly look like the picture of domestic responsibility.
During our first week in New York, Aaron hadn’t urged me to find a job. I had never worked before other than helping out around the production office at The Spirit Channel. It would have been naïve and foolish to think that the handful of days I had spent filing and answering phones at my own father’s cable network qualified me to do any kind of entertainment production work in New York. I definitely wasn’t so presumptuous as to think I could have landed a real job like that on my own. As our funds began running low and I weighed my options, working in some kind of retail environment or coffee shop seemed to be my best shot.
As Aaron roamed the streets of Tribeca and Soho hopeful about finding a job at a restaurant, I explored the Upper East and West Sides on my own. My plan was to apply for jobs at all the retail store chains where I shopped in Massachusetts near school. As Grace Mathison, I might not have had a problem getting a job selling sweaters and khakis at stores like Eagle Ridge or Baywater, but as lavender-haired Gigi Martin, there was no way I was getting hired by such preppy establishments.
Having purplish, bleached-out hair and chipped black fingernail polish revealed a whole new world to me of being a teenager of whom adults were suspicious. I was watched more closely by security guards in boutiques. I was asked to check my bag the second I entered Baywater to request a job application, and I lost my nerve. I rushed out with red cheeks after browsing around the sweater racks knowing all too well that I didn’t have any money in my wallet to buy anything in the store. I’d never steal anything, but the guards were right to be watching me. I didn’t have any honest intention to shop. It was kind of mortifying, having an empty wallet. I felt like a criminal even though I wasn’t planning on breaking the law.
I took a deep breath at the end of a fruitless afternoon outside of an Eagle Ridge location on Fifth Avenue and asked the girl with long, chestnut-colored hair behind the counter for a job application. Her name tag said, “Candace.” She smiled patronizingly at me and told me in an apologetic tone that they were all out of copies of the application and encouraged me to apply online. I was pretty sure that she was lying through her teeth to me just to get me out of the store as fast as possible.
“Thanks,” I muttered, thinking very un-Christian thoughts in her general direction.
I sat in Bryant Park drinking a hot chocolate (which cost more than I should have spent), so deeply moved by the transformation in how the world perceived me that I didn’t even have the energy to walk the fifty blocks back to the apartment. Nothing about me, I mean, the real me, had changed in the last few days. My hair color and less boarding school-ish outfit had completely altered how I was treated by everyone I met. I was accustomed to being treated by new acquaintances with respect and enthusiasm (of course, much of that may have been due to my father’s reputation in addition to my mousy appearance). Adults usually recognized immediately that I was the kind of teenager who returned library books on time and revered my elders. I could quote Bible verses, for Pete’s sake. I could recite the Beatitudes in my sleep.
Sure, boys were looking at me more. But getting attention from boys at the expense of being considered trustworthy and capable was not really an upgrade that was going to work in my favor. I was hungry. My stomach was rumbling. I hadn’t had a hot meal large enough to actually satisfy my hunger in over a week. When I walked past restaurants and smelled savory Indian food or greasy hamburgers cooking, I felt like I was going to faint. Not one of the boys who had winked at me on the sidewalk had offered to buy me dinner.
Being judged as irresponsible or questionable just because of my appearance seemed outrageously unfair to me. Sitting in the park that blustery cold day the first week of November, I couldn’t help but recall with shame every single time I had recently made a snap assumption about someone I didn’t know very well based on their appearance. My first day at Treadwell as a freshman, I had assumed Juliette was going to be a megabitch because she was so pretty and had not one but three vintage Louis Vuitton bags in her closet. I had assumed that our music teacher, Mr. Ferris, was gay just because he was outrageously handsome and made a big deal about referring to us as “ladies” in class. In Colombia, I had taken one look at Tim and Chris and had summed them both up as cute Ivy League guys who were way out of my league, who lived charmed, one-dimensional lives. I had confined them both in my mind to the same stereotype: affluent white guys from impressive families, hell-bent on high-paying careers in law.
Heck, it made my head hurt to admit it, but I had even assumed when I had first seen Jacinda that she was probably not well-educated. At first glance, I had considered myself superior to her because she was working at a beauty supply store and I had a giant mansion and a horse stable back in Arizona.
But that mansion and horse stable were things of the past; they weren’t mine anymore.
And owning them didn’t make me a better or smarter person than anyone else.
What kind of a jerk had I been raised to be?
I was a total snob and had been entirely ignorant of it until I was almost sixteen years old.
If my possessions and my father’s wealth were what had defined me as respectable before in my old life, I resolved to be conscious at all times in New York that I was going to have to earn people’s respect. I felt like this was probably an important lesson that I would never have had an opportunity to learn back at Treadwell. But the realization that it was always going to be an uphill battle for me in New York without expensive clothes and credit cards brought a lump to my throat. I kind of wished I had brought fancier clothes with me, at least a few outfits so that I could get a job. A little bit of an advantage wouldn’t have hurt.
As the sun began setting, I embarked on the long walk home through Midtown, longing to spend the two dollars and twenty-five cents on a subway ride home but knowing I’d regret that splurge. That subway fare would buy three bagels some other time. During my afternoon in the park, I had accepted I wasn’t going to get a fancy job. I was going to have to take a more practical approach to this whole situation of being broke. There was a pretty good chance that my brother was going to be in a sullen mood when I got back to the apartment, and it wasn’t appealing to think that we would spend the entire night in silence, doing little more than looking at the walls. We didn’t even so much as own a deck of cards for entertainment.
“Any luck?” Aaron asked me as soon as he heard my key in the lock of our door.
I set my canvas bag down against the wall in our otherwise empty kitchen, imagining how nice it would be if we had a real table and chairs, or even a pot or pan in which we might boil water. From where I stood in the doorway of our kitchen, overlooking the rest of our apartment, our living situation was so desperate I almost felt like crying. I could see directly into Aaron’s room, where his balled-up jacket was tossed on the floor. It would serve as his pillow in a few short hours. Similarly, I could see my suitcase in my bedroom, left open from earlier that day when I had dressed in my new jeans, which were pretty dirty at that point. My one and only blanket was in a sloppy pile next to my suitcase. Drippy steam lined our windows facing the brick courtyard, and our radiators wheezed out heat. Aaron was lying on his stomach on the floor, flipping through a newspaper in our living room, the tiny space that connected our bedrooms.
Surely John could not have known when he agreed to rent us this place that we would be moving in with no furniture whatsoever, unable to even purchase paper towels and cleaning supplies. It would have been clear to any stranger – the landlord, a visiting friend, anyone – that we were runaways or in some kind of trouble. Our plight was so pathetic that my ability to tell Aaron the truth abo
ut my day completely abandoned me. I wanted to give him hope. It’s funny how when you love someone you want things for them more than you have the energy to want them for yourself.
“I filled out an application at Eagle Ridge,” I lied. “The manager was there and she said they’re staffing up for Christmas, so I should hear back within a week.”
The lie tasted bitter on my tongue. The mistruth made Aaron so happy that he sat upright on the floor and stretched.
“Well, that’s great news!” he exclaimed. “What do you say we go look for some dinner?”
I remained quiet as we poked around the deli that sold fresh fruit and vegetables down the block. We had seven dollars left of Aaron’s summer money, and I hadn’t told him but I still had a few bucks left over from the currency exchange in Colombia, hidden in my wallet. I was saving those for an emergency but was all too aware that within a day or two, everything was going to be an emergency. We decided on sweet potatoes, which we would bake in our oven without wrapping them in foil because aluminum foil cost almost five dollars. We stopped at another deli before climbing the stairs back up to our apartment to buy a roll of toilet paper, which cost us another precious dollar.
With the money that remained, I was pretty sure Aaron wouldn’t be able to eat any more than a bagel or two and maybe a can of soda the next day. It would be painfully evident soon enough that I hadn’t gotten any fancy job at Eagle Ridge; Aaron carried our mobile phone, and no one from any stores would be calling to ask for me.
That night, I stretched out on the floor and stared at the ceiling in my room. I could hear Aaron in the room next door to mine, sniffling and coughing. A cold would be tragic for either of us. It was time for me to get realistic about finding a job. How did grown-ups look for jobs? I had a thousand blurry flashbacks in my head about motivational speakers at Treadwell leading us through exercises to determine what color our parachutes were. I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what questions the cheesy leader of the seminar had asked me to determine my future career path. All I could remember was that it had been determined I was artistic and would be much better off finding a creative profession than trying to squeeze myself into a restrictive field like law or medicine. At the time, I had been happy that someone who was an authority had recognized my artistic inclination; it hadn’t occurred to me to be worried that no one wants to hire a great artist to sell shoes or make lattes.
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