She's All That (2 page)

I hang up and shift on my lumpy futon. Who invented this trash piece of furniture anyway? It's so college years. So I-can't- afford-life. Yet I have an MBA from Stanford—granted, it's a degree currently gathering dust since I chucked finance for fashion three years ago. I bet you I'm the only MBA from Stanford sleeping on a futon! Can you spell L-O-S-E-R?

I imagine that if I'd had two parents, or even if I grew up in a mansion like Morgan with only
one
doting parent, I wouldn't still be sleeping on a futon. Life is full of inequity, I suppose.

I dial up our other friend from college and Spa Girl extra-ordinaire, Poppy Clayton.

“Dr. Poppy's office.”

Poppy, a chiropractor, won't let people call her Doctor Clayton. She always was an open book. At Stanford, they called her “Granola Girl.” She was the Birkenstock-clad, tie-dye- wearing freak show who seemed entirely too flaky for her biology major. Poppy was the girl who missed the turnoff for Berkeley and ended up on Stanford's campus by mistake. After college, the medical community and its lack of heart soon broke Poppy's, and she ended up in alternative medicine. I can't imagine her really doing anything else. She thinks pharmaceuticals are of the devil.

“Hi, Emma,” I say to her front desk gal. “Is Poppy there? It's Lilly.”

“Yeah, hang on.” Emma is munching some kind of food in my ear. That woman, while lithe as a bean pole, never stops eating. She'd make a great model, but alas, she doesn't believe in the false Hollywood image. Neither do I, but I'm not averse to simple vanity. If I ate nothing but sawdust so I could somehow end up looking like Emma, I'd at least use it to my advantage. Emma is thin, yet she actually has a figure. I admit it; I covet the image. I'm thin, but in a lanky, childlike way, definitely not an Uma Thurman/Jennifer Aniston way. More like a “Have you entered puberty yet?” sort of way.

Poppy comes on the line with her deep, breathy voice. “Lilly? Is everything all right?”

“Spa weekend,” I croak dramatically, in the kind of voice you use when you call in fake-sick. Not that I've ever done that, mind you.

“Oh, no. What's happened?” Poppy immediately goes into doctor mode, ready to cure my ails with some sort of foul-tasting herb.

“Shane got my job, and Robert has another girlfriend—a
Katrina
,” I add for emphasis. I'm hoping giving her a name will allow Poppy to ignore my soon-to-be-confessed need for pickles and diet soda.

“Robert had extremely bad energy. You didn't want to marry him, so I'm glad to hear this. He would have sucked the life right out of you. He was an energy vacuum, utterly ruthless, like one of those new Dyson versions with the continuous suction. He would have removed everything.”

“Whatever,” I say, not willing to listen to her “light is energy” mantra. “It's my hair. It's all because of my hair. I was getting it straightened when the promotion happened.”
Why
did God bless me with this “crown of glory” anyway?

Poppy's voice is low and calm. “I imagine they took advantage of your being gone, not that you lost the job because you were gone. And, Lilly, your hair is a gift. Remember, God made you special,” she says, sounding remarkably like Bob the Tomato. “Your designs are fabulous, Lilly. I think God's just giving you a place of rest before He launches you, so you're ready to take off. He wants you to stay humble.”

See? This is why my Spa Girls are my best friends. With Poppy and Morgan, I am already Vera Wang. It's just a matter of proving it to the rest of the world. They were like that in college, too, when they thought I'd be the next Greenspan or Forbes, trumping those men in the finance world. You know, with friends like this, I've slowly begun to forget all the ugly names I was called in my childhood, the taunting for my outof-control hair piled atop my lanky frame. Names like “Q-tip” and “Don King” and, my least favorite, “Einstein.” I'm mostly over it now, but I have to admit, one look in the mirror on a bad hair day, and I still hear the echoes of those kids calling me those names. And I feel like an awkward fourth grader again.

“I've got four patients right now; can we talk later?” Poppy asks peacefully. Poppy doesn't know stress. She's probably got four people freaking out, waiting to get back to work while she calmly moves about her office at the approximate speed of those last five minutes of winding down in yoga class. She is
shavasana
personified.

“You go, Poppy,” I say, out of mercy for her patients. “Will we see you tomorrow afternoon?”

“Count me in for the spa. It's time we all detoxed together.” She hangs up on me, and I'm deliriously happy for the moment. I didn't even have to start the Diet Pepsi excuses, and I'm going to smuggle in chocolate truffles on my Spa Girl getaway while I drink green tea with a smile on my face.

So here I am. Three years have passed me by since I left a “real job” to start at the bottom of the fashion world, and so far my name—well, my designs—are not up in lights. I am alone in a dingy apartment with only the roar of the nearby freeway and the musty stench of the moist San Francisco air to keep me company. I grab my ever-present can of Lysol and spray with vengeance. The antiseptic smell soon stings my nose, and I can breathe again. I wonder if you can get addicted to Lysol.

I look at the fabrics splayed all over my cement-block, fashion district loft/warehouse. Remember how in old schools, the windows were up where you couldn't actually see out of them? You got it. That's my loft. Cement. Ugly. Windowless. Well, not windowless if you're willing to climb a twenty-foot ladder for just the freeway view.

The colorful fabrics—scraps from work—almost make the place livable. They remind me I am at least working in my dream industry. The dream job will come. My big break is just around the bend. It has to be. See, there's an ugly little secret in the couture industry: the geeks of the world rule the runways. And I, most certainly, am a geek. I did not live firmly planted in the world of dweeb in high school for nothing. My fame awaits me. I am getting closer. All the snickering laughter from the homecoming princesses, and now—although they don't know it yet—I am telling
them
what to wear. Chock it up to all those days spent drawing, creating the magical outfit that would make the doofs of the world, like me, suddenly acceptable.

Sophisticated. Elegant. Flawless. Best of the Season.

These are the words used to describe the gowns in my employer's current collection. Actually, the gowns
I
created under her name, Sara Lang.
Lilly Jacobs
. Doesn't it just sound like a Saks Fifth Avenue Collection? Then the loft door jingles, and my passionate daydream is cut short.

Kim Robinson, my roommate and fellow grunt at Sara Lang Couture, comes in and tosses her keys on one of our lone pieces of furniture: an old sewing table retrieved one time from near the dumpster. “Are you all right?” she asks.

“I'm fine,” I say, thinking,
How fine can I be? I'm the most
overeducated, underemployed person on Sara Lang's payroll.
“Did anyone say anything about me not getting the job?” I ask.

“Just murmurs. No more than normal when someone gets promoted. We meowed and then cleared out.”

“I have to leave Sara Lang, don't I? I mean, it's now or never.”

“It's obvious what Sara thinks, Lilly. You'll find something else. Maybe under someone else's wing, you'll find more options. Or you can always go back to fi—”

“Don't even utter the word!”

I start pacing the whole twelve-hundred square feet of our loft—my high-heeled feet clacking on the cement floor with an eerie echo. “Nana's gonna pass out when she finds out I didn't get the promotion. I've been telling her this is it for us.” My Nana sold her house to pay for my education. She put up with my little design stint, thinking I'd be over it by now and back to finance—and good shoes. Alas, I'm a stubborn thing, and I really thought this dream was what I was meant to do. Nana, who raised me since I was a baby, seems to take a more practical view of God at work. “What does Sara Lang know anyhow? I can do this.”

“
Please
, Lilly. Spare me the
Evita
speech. You're best friends with Morgan Malliard. Let her wear your stuff, for crying out loud! Then, you'll
know
if you have the talent or not, 'cause you'll read about it on the society pages the very next day.” Kim's got her head in the fridge, looking for a nonexistent snack. “That ridiculous pride of yours is going to keep Nana in a rental the rest of her life! If I had a friendship like yours, I'd use it! I sure wouldn't let Sara Lang get any more of the credit. The last time that woman touched a sewing machine, it had foot pedals! She couldn't use a computerized model if you locked her away with it for a year.”

I sigh. “You're probably right.” Of course she's right. No one likes a whiner, and I'm sort of dwelling in that place right now. I'm the antithesis of yoga-calm Poppy. I'm Jazzercise on steroids.

I just can't use Morgan, though. Not after watching her own father toss her out into society to be devoured like she was a piece of meat thrown to lions. Morgan has been used enough. Her father actually asks her to preen when dirty old men salivate over her—thinking perhaps the additional testosterone will pry open their moth-ridden wallets.
Ick! No,
I just can't do that to Morgan.
If anything, I need to help her escape her gilded cage. Not add padding to the nest.

Morgan is so beautiful, so put-together that when she befriended me in college, it made me forget I was an object of scorn, laughed at for my hair. Hanging around Morgan Malliard made me feel like the princess she is. She made me feel important. Naturally, I knew Jesus loves me for who I am, but in college, having Morgan and Poppy as friends was like having Jesus in the flesh, right in the dorm. They made me feel loved and accepted more than anyone ever had. They still do.

“She'd put a sack on for you, Lilly,” Kim says of Morgan, and I know it's true, which is the exact reason I won't ask. Kim always seems like she doesn't pay attention to anything going on around her, but she sees a lot more than she lets on. She's the first to claim ignorance in any given situation and go on about her GED or lack of good breeding, but she's got more sense than half the men in the Financial District, generally speaking. That's not to say she doesn't have her issues.

My Spa Girls seem to inhabit a different universe from Kim and me. Morgan Malliard lives in a mansion on Nob Hill, wearing her father's jewelry for a living at different social events. Poppy Clayton heals people by cracking their bones and doling out sage biblical wisdom, along with botanical herbs. I live a different existence, with debt the size of California itself, a futon, and an expensive education—that's doing
what
for me again?

My Nana, who raised me, is living in a six-hundred-square-foot attached studio, for which I feel fully responsible. She sold her house when my undergraduate scholarship ran out—never even told me she was selling, though it had been my childhood residence and the only place I knew as home. She didn't put a sign out or anything. Just one day she had her crumbling foundation, Formica-countered house, and the next day she had a cashier's check for $375,000 after taxes and mortgages. Welcome to the Bay Area. Doesn't that sound like a mint? Yeah, it did to us too. Once upon a time, before I slept on a futon.

I grab my bag, a freebie that has Sara Lang written across it.
Ugh, like I needed that.
I spray it with Lysol just to show Sara what I actually think of her. “I'm going to the spa this weekend,” I say to Kim.
Translation: Don't get drunk. I won't be here
to drive you home.
“Morgan's paying for it yet again. You'd think with all the spa dates I need, God would have seen fit to provide me a better income.”

Kim is moving around the room with an iPod bud in one ear. “Quite frankly, if I had a friend like Morgan, I'd harass her to no end until she wore my designs. What would I have to lose?”

This from the woman who thinks being the designated driver is
the job description for roommate. And I don't even have a car!

“Is this what you planned for your life? Living in an airplane that never leaves the runway? That's what it sounds like.” Kim yanks her hair up into a ponytail, pulls out the earbud, and changes the now-heated subject. “What are you doing
until
this weekend? Are you showing up at work tomorrow? What are you going to wear?”

“Of course I'm showing up. I can't pay for all this luxury,” I sweep my hands around the dumpy room, “without a job.”

“I'm going out with the gang tonight,” Kim explains. “We're going to diss Shane at Happy Hour. Want to come? Free food.”

“No thanks.” I look down at my Bible and a twinge of guilt suddenly explodes within. “Maybe Shane deserved that promotion.”

She lifts an eyebrow. “Being a Christian doesn't mean you should lie just to be nice. Am I right? Besides, he'll be worried about our opinions tomorrow, so I figure that gives us this one day to vent, but good. And what better way than over cosmopolitans and free food?”

I toss the Sara Lang bag on the bed and grab some microwave popcorn while Kim gets dressed in her “bedroom,” better known as behind the Chinese silk screen partition—a Poppy hand-me-down. I chug my first Diet Pepsi of the binge. My eye wanders to a picture next to the fridge: Poppy, Morgan, and me in Stanford sweatshirts with mud packs on our faces.

What a weird threesome: Morgan, the aloof, nearly friendless princess everyone loved to hate; Poppy, the flaky, hemp-wearing Stevie Nicks of the late 1990s; and me, at Stanford on a government grant, meeting their “affordable-education” quota. Three misfits brought together out of sheer necessity (no one else wanted anything to do with us). It's amazing what social ineptitude can do for female bonding.