Regardless, no matter what her mood, it was made better by a trip to Sephora. Worries dissolved when she crossed the threshold. Anxiety went down; creativity went up. She could think more clearly in the scented air and fluorescent lights.
If she were ever elected president, she’d have all her meetings with foreign dignitaries in Sephora.
The black-and-white office.
Things were different now. She’d gone to a career planner online and found some tips for finding the perfect career. The key seemed to be to find what you know and love and find a way to make money at that.
She knew and loved Sephora.
It was, to her, what Tiffany had been to her mother.
So she went to Montgomery Mall, that beacon of shopping delight that had warmed her soul ever since she was a teenager shopping at Casual Corner and Merry-Go-Round for leggings, scrunchy socks, and oversized tunic sweaters.
She pulled up to the garage in front of Nordstrom (no matter where she was going in the mall, she liked to enter through Nordstrom) and parked. Then she took a moment to psych herself into the confidence that was necessary when asking for a job. She needed to look like she didn’t need it.
She got out of the car and walked through the familiar double doors of Nordstrom. The smell of fabric and leather greeted her. It was comforting in its familiarity, despite the fact that she was no longer able to stop and pick things she wanted to buy.
That wasn’t to say she’d never be able to again. Once she had a job, she’d probably be able to get most of the stuff she wanted. Or at least the stuff she needed.
Walking through the store and out into the mall, Lexi felt a little better with every step. Because the mall, she realized, was always in the same mood, no matter what her mood was. There was something very reassuring about the beautiful clothes hanging there, one identical item after another, and the plastic mannequins, with their facial expressions frozen somewhere between nothing and mirth. The lights were flattering, the floors were gleaming, the music was soothing, and for just a few moments, all seemed right with the world.
Even more so when she entered Sephora. The glass case in front contained a new collection from Lorac and a set of new colors from Bare Escentuals.
This was the right thing. It would be the perfect job for her, and they would be fools not to hire her. She knew the product lines probably better than 99 percent of the customers. (There was always the chance that someone out there was an even bigger product freak than she was.)
“Hi, can I help you find something today?”
Lexi looked up to see a sales associate dressed in black and wearing a headset looking at her expectantly.
“Yes.” Lexi took a steadying breath. “I was wondering . . . are you hiring?”
Getting the job was easy, as it turned out.
Finding a place to live, which she’d thought would be the easy part, turned out to be a lot more challenging than she’d anticipated, despite the fact that she found ten places on Craigslist that looked worth visiting.
Time was running out, but she decided to move into an extended-stay place she’d found in Bethesda for a week or two if she absolutely had to in order to get out of Michelle’s house on time.
It bought her more time to see the prospective places.
First, there was the town house share in Bethesda. She would get a room and full bath on the ground level, and share the laundry room on the same level and the kitchen upstairs. It was $850 a month, and the circumstances were, of course, horrible. However, it hadn’t taken her long to realize that her budgeted eight hundred a month wasn’t going to take her very far.
“So what do you do?” one of the girls who lived there asked Lexi. Her name was Rachel, and she looked like she was about twenty-three. From what Lexi gathered, she owned the house.
So even though she was blond and vapid and wore the blue eyeshadow that some magazines were trying to contend was in right now (though as far as Lexi was concerned, it would never be back in), she was still more successful than Lexi.
Smarter, one might argue. She owned property.
“I work at Sephora,” Lexi answered. The words sounded strange to her own ears. Let’s go to Sephora—sure. I need to pick something up at Sephora, she’d said a thousand times.
I work at Sephora sounded like she was trying on a Halloween costume that didn’t quite fit.
Rachel nodded. “So are you, like, a manager?”
“No.” The temptation to embellish was great, but Lexi had found that the truth was working pretty well for her lately. It was certainly easier to keep track of. “I just started.”
“What did you do before that?” the other girl, Debbie, asked. She was about the same age as Rachel, with deep auburn hair and the kind of tall, willowy figure that would have made her a great model in the sixties.
Nothing. The answer to the question Debbie was asking was nothing. But that was one truth that was just a little too hard to cop to with these two. So, rather than lie, Lexi hedged. After all, it was none of their business. “Before that, I shopped at Sephora.” She gave a laugh.
But Debbie and Rachel just exchanged a puzzled look.
“I’m looking for someone with a really solid work history,” Rachel said. “Because I need to be sure the rent’s coming in.”
Lexi was taken aback. Was this kid looking at her and accusing her of being a bad risk? “Of course.” She waited a beat. “Obviously that’s not going to be a problem with me.”
“Good.”
There was a short, uncomfortable silence.
“So can you tell me about the space?” She’d had only a minute or two to look at what she’d be renting. What Rachel called “ground floor” was, to Lexi, the basement. There was no door, although Rachel called the large square window with a window well an “evacuation window,” which apparently made it legal for her to rent the space as a bedroom. The bathroom was not attached; she’d have to walk out her bedroom door and into the bathroom, potentially running into someone who was down there doing laundry, though it was unlikely that anyone would be doing laundry late at night, and that would have been the most awkward time to see anyone.
“You just saw it,” Debbie chirped.
Lexi was beginning to hope this didn’t work out. She needed it to, of course. There was barely any time for her to move: just three days. So it wouldn’t be reasonable for her to turn it down, but the whole prospect of moving in here was depressing.
“What I mean is, how is the climate control down there? It can be hard to heat a basement in cold weather.”
“There are vents down there,” Rachel said, pointing out the obvious while obviously not answering the question.
Which might have been an answer right there.
Lexi eyed her. “Are you at all flexible about the rent?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean is eight fifty firm, or would you be willing to go to”—she was winging it; she had to think fast while not pricing herself out of the game—“seven seventy-five?”
Rachel gave a short, hard spike of laughter. “No.”
Lexi recoiled inwardly at the harshness of her response. Surely it was normal to try to negotiate the rent.
“So,” Rachel went on, exchanging another look with Debbie, “we’re going to take a minute to talk about this. We have other applicants, too, so could you excuse us for a minute?”
“Sure.” The air was stifling. “I’ll step outside.” She didn’t wait for an answer. If she was this desperate to get out now, when she’d been there for only half an hour, how on earth was she going to live there?
Rachel and Debbie were just the kind of girls and women that had been a thorn in Lexi’s side all her life. The way they’d met her at the door, a wall of two people, had put her off immediately. Then there were the looks they’d kept sharing. Conspiratorial. What did you think of that answer? and Sephora? and Ummm . . . we’ll talk about whether or not we think we can tolerate you.
; Well, Lexi wasn’t going to do it.
She had nine more places to look at, and odds were good that they’d be better than this. She made a deal with herself: If she let herself off the hook with this one, just got in the car and drove away, she’d try that much harder to make one of them work, even if she had to compromise her ideals.
She went to her car and got in. The digital clock showed she had fifteen minutes until her next appointment five minutes away. It seemed like a good omen.
As she was reversing out of the parking space, the front door opened, and—surprise!—Rachel and Debbie both poked their confused faces out.
Lexi lowered the window. “I don’t think it’s going to work out!” she called, then made a broad shrug.
Of course, the two looked at each other.
And smiled.
They hadn’t been about to accept her application anyway.
Two blocks from the next appointment, Lexi’s phone rang and the landlord told her the room had been rented. Daunted but not discouraged, Lexi went to her next appointment.
Fifteen minutes later, she left in a fit of sneezing and with burning, watery eyes. She wasn’t sure if she was allergic to cats, or if this was the kind of reaction anyone would have upon being faced with so many of them in one small space, but she crossed that apartment off her list.
Likewise, she ended up eliminating the group house on Georgia Avenue, which smelled like pot and looked like a bus terminal; the apartment on University Boulevard that was full of mouse droppings; and the converted motel in Rockville that looked like a halfway home.
That left all Lexi’s eggs in the basket of Pamela, who lived in the Waterford condos on Connecticut Avenue in Kensington. She didn’t know the neighborhood very well, but it was close enough to her job, and as she drove through, she could see that it appeared to have all the amenities she could want close by.
The lobby was nice, although Lexi wasn’t crazy about taking an elevator to and from the ninth floor every day. She’d gotten stuck on an elevator alone at a hotel in New York once, and it took a lot longer for help to come than it should have. She wasn’t sure if she’d become claustrophobic at that moment, or simply realized she already was, but she never got on an elevator these days without wondering what would happen if it stopped.
But maybe this would cure her of that, she thought optimistically.
When the doors didn’t open immediately upon the elevator stopping on the ninth floor, her optimism wavered a little, but they opened a second later, and Lexi breathed a sigh of relief and made her way down the hall, looking for 915.
Pamela Bersoff was a small fretful-looking woman in her mid-thirties. When Lexi knocked, she answered the door so fast that Lexi wondered if she’d been peering out the peephole, waiting for her.
“Are you Alexis?” she asked in the tone of one trying to “catch” someone in a lie.
“Yes.” Lexi put out her hand, and Pamela flinched, then shook it. “So I guess I should show you around.”
“Okay.”
Pamela closed the door, turned the dead bolt, and ran a chain across it.
“Is this . . . an unsafe neighborhood?” Lexi asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because that’s a lot of locking you’re doing.” The thought that she might be locking Lexi in rather than locking the rest of the world out crossed Lexi’s mind.
“Single women can never be too careful,” Pamela said. “If you’re going to live here, that’s one thing we absolutely have to agree on.”
“Right.” Lexi supposed she could live with that. She wasn’t usually paranoid about her safety, but she wasn’t an advocate for danger, either. “I agree.”
“This is my room.” Pamela gestured toward a meticulously clean bedroom with simple mission-style furniture and a long balcony overlooking Connecticut Avenue. The sliding glass doors had multiple locks.
Would it even be possible for a bad guy to get up to the ninth floor to break in if he didn’t have superpowers?
“And this is my bathroom.” Not surprisingly, the bathroom she pointed to was gleaming and sparse. If Dateline came in with their black lights and bacteria cultures, they’d probably find nothing.
“It’s very nice,” Lexi commented, and it was. The bathroom wasn’t very modern; the bathtub and shower were one unit, the sink had a built-in cabinet below it but no extras. The mirror was the door to a medicine cabinet. Convenient but old-fashioned.
Lexi was irked with herself for feeling like it wasn’t good enough, but it was quite different from the house she’d grown up in. The lifestyle she’d gotten used to.
“This would be your room.” Pamela opened the door on a room that was considerably smaller than the master. It would have been a nice den, with its sliding glass door to the balcony, but Lexi had never even been in a hotel room that was this small.
“Hm.” Lexi stepped in. She had to consider it. She couldn’t be a chooser. She opened the accordion doors to the closet. It was small, too. She’d have to keep her off-season wardrobes in storage.
“And the bathroom is here, right across the hall.” Pamela gestured toward a bathroom that was identical to the one she used, only empty, except for a bamboo-print shower curtain.
Lexi stepped out of the room and tried to assess the space between the two bedrooms. There wasn’t much. This would have been a perfect space for one person who had an occasional guest, but it was going to be a bit of a squeeze for two.
But, again, Lexi couldn’t be a chooser.
She was a beggar.
“Can I see the kitchen?”
“Sure. It’s right here next to your room, actually.” She led Lexi to a narrow galley kitchen. It had a tiny table, better sized for two children than for two adults, a telephone on the wall, and . . . a cat box.
“You have a cat?”
“Yes, I do. Pooka. I hope that’s not a problem.”
“I’m a little bit allergic.”
Pamela looked concerned. “He doesn’t like sneezing.”
Lexi laughed. “I don’t either, but I can put up with a little bit.”
“No, I mean really, he gets very agitated from sneezes.” Pamela was looking agitated herself. “They give him seizures.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Pamela shook her head. “I’m sorry, but if there’s a chance that you will have chronic sinus problems while living here, I just can’t approve you.”
Lexi’s nose began to feel runny. Oh, for God’s sake. “I’m fine. Really. It’s not a problem.”
Pamela frowned. “Well . . . if you’re sure . . .”
“Absolutely.”
“All right. Then if you want to fill out the reference sheet, that would be good. It’s right over here. You can sit at the table.”
Lexi sat, feeling like a student about to take the SATs.
Pamela handed her a printout and a pen. “Three landlord references, three verifiable job references, past or present, and two personal references, please.”
“I don’t have all of those.”
“What?”
“I’ve never had a landlord before.” Or a job. “And I’ve just started my new job, though I’m sure they would let you know I’ve been showing up. And obviously I can do the personal references.”
“What do you mean you’ve never had a landlord before?”
“I’ve lived in the same house for years,” Lexi explained, but she didn’t want to confess the circumstances. “You know, it was mine, but now I don’t want to buy again until the market stabilizes a little and starts to go up.” She was parroting what she’d heard on TV; she actually had no idea if the market was stabilizing or going up or down at the moment. It seemed to change by the minute.
“Oh.” Pamela looked dubious. “I guess I can take your Realtor’s name.”
Ordinarily, Lexi would have written down names with absolute confidence that no one ever really checked references.
But she was 100 percent sure that P
amela would.
Before she could formulate an adequate response, a big beige long-haired cat propelled himself from the floor to her lap to the table, throwing up tons of hair and dander into her face.
“This is Pooka.”
The thing weighed almost as much as Pamela, Lexi guessed. And was even more skittish.
“He’s cute,” Lexi said, and the cat leapt away, turning his face to her with an unmistakable warning in his eye.
“He’s my widdle baby,” Pamela cooed. “Yes, he is.”
Words failed Lexi.
Which was convenient, since she had to sneeze.
Perhaps no one is ever completely ready for an animal attack, but Lexi, in the midst of a sneezing fit, was utterly unprepared to have her hands and face attacked by what felt like fifty paws with claws extended.
“Get him off me!” she cried as she felt a nail snag its way down her cheek.
“He’s frightened!” Pamela’s voice came from somewhere. “Stop sneezing.”
“I—” She sneezed. “Can’t. He’s right”—she sneezed again and was blessed by another paw full of claws dragging its way down her temple, perilously close to her eye—“on top of me!”
Finally she grabbed the large, hot mound of living fur and hurled it away from her. She heard it make contact with the wall several feet away, a thump and a simultaneous squall.
“You can’t do that to Pooka!” Pamela shrieked from somewhere in the watery blur Lexi couldn’t see through.
“He attacked me.” Lexi reached around on the table for a napkin to blot her eyes and the wounds she was certain were bleeding down her face.
“You sneezed,” Pamela returned, in a voice twice as accusatory as anything Lexi could have mustered. “I told you not to sneeze.”
“You didn’t tell me I’d be attacked if I sneezed one time.”
“I told you not to sneeze.” Pamela was resolute. “You need to go now.”
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