Anyway, everything else looked the same, down to the desks and posters on the walls. After wrapping me in a huge hug, she waved me into a seat and settled back in her chair. “What brings you in, Pepper?”
I leaned forward, feeling a little self-conscious. I overcompensated with enthusiasm. “I graduated from BYU—”
“Congratulations.”
“Yeah, so. Um, I’m done at BYU, and it took me a few months after graduation, but now I know what I want to be when I grow up.”
“Congratulations again,” she said, amused. “Do tell.”
“I want to be a reporter!” I felt stupid saying it out loud to someone else, but I hoped I’d said it cheerfully enough for her not to notice.
She didn’t laugh, which was nice, but she did look confused. “That’s great. You did an excellent job with features. But—”
“But you’re wondering why I’m here, right?” I asked, and she nodded. “The thing is, I didn’t major in journalism, so I don’t really have any contacts. I was sort of hoping you might have some and that you could point me in the right direction.”
Her brow smoothed, and she sighed. “I see. I wish I did, Pepper. My contacts are pretty limited though. I know the woman at the Utah Valley Times who coordinates our annual tour of their office, but that’s about it. My only other ‘connection’—and I use that term as loosely as possible—is the chair of the journalism program at the U. I’m sorry,” she added when she saw my crestfallen face. “I wish I could help.”
I nodded, unsurprised. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. If life were easy, I wouldn’t be working my loser job at the sandwich shop.
“I feel bad,” she said. “But most of the students who work on the Gazette aren’t like you. It’s something nice for their extracurricular activities, but they’re not planning on careers in journalism. I don’t really need contacts at the major papers.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I knew it was a long shot. Thanks for letting me drop in. It was nice to see you again.” I slid out of the desk and turned toward the door, ready to leave, when she stopped me.
“Wait,” she said. “This might be a total long shot too, and not at all what you’re looking for, but one of my former students, Ellie Peters, has an online magazine she’s starting up in Salt Lake. She graduated a few years ahead of you, so you may not know her, but she’s pretty awesome. I could put in a good word for you.”
“I know her name,” I said. “Spencer Betham was obsessed with her and said she was ruining his legacy.”
Mrs. Mayers laughed. Spencer had been the Gazette editor when I was on staff, and he was always claiming that Ellie had set an impossible standard for circulation during her tenure as editor-in-chief three years before because she had turned the paper into “a fashion bible with token sports reports.”
“It might not have been the most insightful reporting,” Mrs. Mayers admitted, “but Ellie had a knack for generating readers. Her magazine has potential, I think. Do you want her contact information?”
“Sure,” I said. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, but it was a start. At worst, maybe Ellie could help me make some other journalism contacts.
She wrote down some information on a neon green sticky note and handed it to me. “Give me a few days to let her know you’ll be getting in touch.”
“I appreciate it, Mrs. Mayers.”
“Call me Anna,” she said. “You’re not a student anymore. And good luck.”
“Thanks . . . uh, Anna.” It felt awkward, like I was a pretend adult talking to a pseudo-colleague, and I slipped out on her knowing smile.
My car was an unlovely green 1997 Camry, semi-affectionately nicknamed The Zuke—as in zucchini. I climbed in and stared at the sticky note with a grimace. I’m more “indie” than trendy. I doubted I would be hip enough to write for Ellie’s magazine. I’d give her a call if I couldn’t find anything more conventional, but I wanted to exhaust my other options. After all, the Advocate still deserved a chance to reject me first.
* * *
“Ta da!” I said, waving my fresh-off-the printer résumé under my dad’s nose while he sat at the kitchen table reading the Bee. “I’m conforming to your ridiculous stipulations. Are you proud of yourself for stifling my natural evolution?” I ruffled his hair to show him I was teasing.
“Absolutely not,” he said, deadpan. “I’ve been wracked with guilt over wrenching you out of your deep, deep trench of self-pity and wasted potential. How could I do that to you?”
My mom snorted from her post behind the kitchen counter, where she was kneading bread dough. She plucked the résumé from my hand with flour-coated fingers.
“Hey! You’re going to get it all dirty!” I protested.
“Doesn’t matter. You have to reprint it anyway,” she said. “It smells like raw onions.”
Ginger, drifting by on her way to the fridge, sniffed as she passed me. “So does your hair. Seriously, your job stinks.” She laughed at her own joke while she foraged for an after-dinner snack.
I made a halfhearted lunge in her direction, but she danced out of reach and pawed through the crisper drawer. “I did this right after work. I didn’t have time to shower,” I said. I had endured another night of thankless sandwich making, plus a minidrama over who had let the avocados go bad, by mentally composing my résumé for the Advocate. The worse the night got, the greater the urge to work on my résumé grew until I could barely wait to draft it when I got home.
“We’ve been learning how to do résumés in my English class,” Ginger said. “Let me look at it. I bet I can fix it.”
“You don’t even know if it needs fixing,” I said but cut off the rest of my complaint when my mom shot me a warning look. A couple of adamant jerks of her head in Ginger’s direction were enough to communicate that she wanted me to humor my sister’s offer of “help.” I rolled my eyes and nodded that I had gotten the message.
“All right, Ginger. Do your worst.” I snatched the résumé back from my mom and thrust it at Ginger. “But you’re going to have to quit stuffing your face if you want to see it.” Ginger, like all the Spicer kids, eats nonstop because we inherited my skinny parents’ super-high metabolisms. We burn calories as fast as we consume them, and we’re always hungry. My mom says that’s half the reason she had to start substitute teaching, to pay the grocery bill. I think it probably has more to do with my brother being out on a mission, but I don’t know. I looked at the heaping bowl of edamame Ginger had grabbed for herself and considered that maybe my mom wasn’t joking about the food budget.
“I’ll look this over in my room while you take a shower. Because you stink,” she added, in case I’d forgotten. Nice. A double dig.
I didn’t bother answering, instead heading for the stairs. A shower sounded great. Thirty minutes later, I walked back into Ginger’s room to find her curled up in an overstuffed beanbag in the corner where I used to keep my desk. I flopped onto her bed and stared at the ceiling where she had pinned up a poster of the Glee cast. “It doesn’t bother you that these people stare at you while you sleep?”
“It’s not your room anymore, so mind your own business,” she muttered, absorbed in my résumé.
“I thought you were going to look that over while I showered,” I said.
She didn’t look up. “I had to do my nails first.”
I amused myself while I waited by judging all the choices she had made in decorating “the room that used to be mine.” A mirror sat atop my old pine dresser, now painted a soft pink. Ticket stubs and wallet-sized pictures of her friends were tucked into the mirror’s frame, and a souvenir pompom in NVHS blue and white hung off the corner. A pleasant pastel jumble of nail polishes in light pink, medium pink, and every shade in between covered one edge of the dresser top, and the rest was covered with bottles of body sprays, hair products, half-used lipsticks, and several folded notes.
“I thought texting destroyed the art of passing notes,” I said.
“I
t depends on whether your teacher will confiscate your cell phone if they catch you. Or if you have friends whose lame parents won’t let them have cell phones.” She didn’t look up from my résumé.
“Ah.” The wall the bed rested against used to host a collage of my snapshots from happier days, pre-breakup. Now it held two shelves of Ginger’s dance trophies, plus a pair of battered, bedazzled jazz shoes.
I shook my head, wondering how we could be so different. I owned exactly three bottles of nail polish, all from the OPI Rocker Chick line. I figured a bar of Dove soap and a ninety-two-cent tube of Wet-n-Wild Cinnamon Spice lipstick, with a little mascara thrown on for special occasions, constituted a reasonable beauty routine. My guilty pleasure is funky jewelry. It used to clutter the space now full of Ginger’s hair products. I can’t resist handmade pieces, and the Circus Cookie box that holds mine runneth over on the much smaller dresser in my shared room.
The wall behind Ginger illustrated the biggest difference of all. When it was mine, it had held my growing collection of used paperbacks I’d picked up from secondhand bookstores and yard sales. But I’d boxed them up months ago and put them in the garage in anticipation of the post-marriage move that never happened. Ginger, who was amazing with anything involving her hands, had taken down my shelves and painted a really cool stylized mural of Rapunzel letting down locks of rich brown hair. As much as I missed seeing my old friends lined up, waiting to be read, I kind of loved the mural, a fact I would never, ever share with her. She already had an inflated ego.
“I’m done,” she said.
“And? Do I pass?”
“You got all the formatting right,” she admitted. I could tell she was bummed that she didn’t have anything to criticize, but I can use a Word template with the best of them.
“Thanks. I know how to write a résumé,” I said. “You can give it back now.”
“You don’t know how to write a good résumé,” she corrected me.
“You just said yourself that I got it right.” I stretched out on her bed and smacked her with my foot in the process. Accidentally, of course.
“I said you got the formatting right, but the stuff in it is pretty lame.”
“Sorry I haven’t lived a more fascinating life so I could write a more interesting résumé for you.”
She thumped her head on the wall behind her. “You are so oblivious. You’d think an English major would be a little more creative and descriptive than this.”
“I can only write down the stuff I’ve done, Ginger. What do you want me to do? Add my four years in the White House that never happened?”
She rose to her knees and shuffled over to the bed. “Look at this,” she said, pointing at my entry for the two years I’d spent on the North Valley Gazette. “You really think some big-shot Salt Lake paper is going to care that you wrote for a high school newspaper in Pleasant Grove? No, they’re not.”
“If I take that off, then I don’t have anything journalism related.”
“You don’t have to take it off. You have to make it sound better.” She held her hand out like a surgeon requesting a scalpel. “Pen!”
I slapped one from her nightstand into her outstretched palm. “You’re ridiculous,” I said.
“Shut up,” she said. “I’m trying to prove to Mom that I really do have nice bonding moments with you.”
“Nice bonding moments? Does she want me to mentor you to improve your attitude or something?” It sounded like something my parents would dream up.
“If she did, would she tell me that? No. I’m supposed to be, like, helping you or something so you’re not a total recluse. It’s lame, but you know how Mom is when she wants you to do something. It’s easier to pretend you agree than to listen to the nagging.” She grumbled the last part with an air of distraction as her pen scribbled furiously across the page. Geez. My one-page résumé was turning into a novel because I knew when she handed it back I’d be staring at some pretty spectacular fiction.
“Wait, Mom thinks you need to fix me?”
Ginger glanced up. “What? You don’t think you need fixing?”
“I know I do, but why on earth would they think you could do it?” And I fell back on her bed, laughing.
Ginger glared at me and waved my résumé. “I have written proof of exactly how little you’ve accomplished in your life up to this point. Do you really think you have more going on than I do?”
I sighed. “No. But if I don’t laugh that my seventeen-year-old sister has more going on than I do, I will cry. Big, fat, bitter tears.” How lame is my life that my mom thinks Ginger has something to teach me? I decided not to digest that on account of how the idea would probably choke me.
“So you admit that I’m as qualified as anyone to help you with this sorry glimpse into your life?” She crumbled it, eyeing me defiantly. I said nothing until she was done and it rested in her palm, a pitiful white wad of paper.
“I can just reprint it, you know.”
She chucked it at me. “I was being dramatic.”
“No!”
“You could use a little more drama,” she said. “Part of the reason your life is so lame is you’re pouty all the time. Nobody likes a moper, Pepper.” She scooted over and snatched the paper wad back. “Flipping the cake over was the most interesting thing you’ve done since Lan—”
“Don’t say it!” I snapped.
“Whatever. But you should totally take my advice since I’ve pretty much got my whole future figured out and you don’t.”
The sad thing is that while anyone else who said that would sound like they were bragging, Ginger was right. She’d taken every business-related class North Valley High offers, not to mention her part-time job at the salon. Given her natural sense of style and unflappable self-confidence, she was well on her way to making her future happen sooner than later.
Which was nice for her but depressing for me.
“Fine. What do you suggest I do with this résumé, then?”
“You have to tweak it. I read your blog sometimes,” she admitted grudgingly. “You can be creative when you want to. Like here,” she pointed to the crumpled résumé where I had entered my experience as a features writer. “It doesn’t have to say North Valley High School student newspaper. It can say you wrote for a Utah Valley regional newspaper.”
“I’m not going to lie, Ginger. You better not be doing this kind of thing on your résumé either. Is that the kind of stuff your teacher has been instructing you to do?”
She stared at me, unmoved. “What’s the lie? I’m just suggesting you be less specific than ‘student newspaper.’ Or you can be all uptight and precise and never get a job. I guess you have to decide how much you love Handy’s.”
Ouch. I cleared my throat. “Any suggestions for how to spin managing a sandwich shop?”
She grinned. “A few . . .”
Forty minutes later, I plucked a fresh copy of my résumé off the printer in my dad’s office. The professional-looking document bordered on fiction, but it contained no actual lies, and in this job market, I knew I would need every edge I could get. Time to send it out and see whether my pessimism or my parents’ optimism would triumph.
For once, I wouldn’t mind being wrong.
* * *
I sat in my office at the back of the store and stared at the wall, willing the curling sticky notes left by managers past to rearrange themselves in a way that would suddenly clarify how to handle the food orders for Handy’s. I had just spent a half hour placating a customer who was irate that there weren’t any sprouts available for her sandwich. Who knew we’d have a run on sprouts during the lunch rush? I hated ordering for the store almost as much as I hated trying to figure out payroll. Maybe more since I couldn’t ever get the food orders exactly right. Payroll eventually added up after much weeping and wailing and smacking the computer monitor. Ordering was more like playing darts blindfolded.
I desperately wanted to be done with Handy’s, now more than ever
, since all of this job searching had planted the seed of escape. I’d barely begun submitting my résumé three days ago, and I knew it would take time for it to get into the right hands, but as I agonized over how many tomatoes we really needed for the next week, I wondered how I could stand the wait. I’d sent it to every single paper I could Google in a fifty-mile radius, including the Advocate and the Bee, much to my mother’s delight.
I stared down at the order sheet in front of me. How much mayonnaise did I need? Probably extra in case Brady and friends showed up again. What about bell peppers? And mustard packets? And toilet paper for the restroom?
Kill me now.
My cell phone rang in the middle of a desperate attempt to forecast our sliced turkey needs using the quadratic equation and a rain dance. I didn’t recognize the phone number but would probably accept a collect call from the state prison if it got me out of ordering for a few minutes.
“This is Pepper,” I said into the phone.
“Pepper, this is Tanner Graham from the Bee. I received your resumé and wondered if you would be available to come in for an interview this week.”
I hopped up and did a three-second jig before I said calmly, “Sure. When should I come in?”
“I know it’s short notice, but could you make it in tomorrow?”
“I can do that. When should I be there?”
He gave me the details, and I scrawled them down on a scrap piece of paper, my fingers tingling with excitement. It wasn’t the Advocate, but it was light-years better than Handy’s Dandy Sandwiches. When I hung up after the most professional good-bye I could muster, I squealed. It didn’t matter that I sounded like a nine-year-old Justin Bieber groupie; only the forlorn papers tacked haphazardly all over the office walls were there to witness my happy dance.
Then I began the freak out: what to wear, what to wear, what to wear?
Not My Type Page 3