Girls Who Travel (4 page)

6

S
EVERAL
HOURS
LATER
,
I crammed a fluffy Cronut glaze-first into my mouth and chewed without taking any pleasure in it. To me, it tasted like tragedy.

(Okay, fine, it didn't
really
taste like tragedy—it still tasted awesome—but it didn't make me any less depressed.)

Beside me, a man in a suit discreetly shifted his eyes in my direction. I blatantly stared back without bothering to wipe off the glaze from the sides of my mouth.

“Vont von?” I asked him, my teeth caked with masticated dough. I held up the box and accidentally spat a few gooey crumbs onto his shoulder. He shook his head with disgust.

By the time the Long Island Rail Road train pulled into the Plandome station, there'd only be one Cronut left. I glumly licked a fleck of sugar off my fingernail and replayed the scene with Holland from earlier:

“Kika, where the he-ll” (he pronounced it with two syllables: ha-elle) “have you been?”

I would never be able to forget the appalled expression on his face when he caught me passing the packed conference room with my hands full of Cronuts, sex toys, and disgrace.

“Umm, delivery?” I croaked, as Holland stared murderously and I turned fifty shades of red.

“Let me say this to you so you can see it from my perspective: You messed up my meeting with Richie Rich, which means I won't have advance notice for any changes to the Dubai schedule. And then, instead of coming clean about it, you make me waste my morning going all the way across town so I have to hear it from that self-satisfied gold digger, Bae Yoon.

“‘But Mr. Holland,'” he mimicked Bae's condescending voice, “‘Kika
never
scheduled a
meeting
for you and Mr. Richmond. I haven't
heard
from her
all
day.'”

I nearly bit off my bottom lip at Bae's backstabbing, but Holland's rant wasn't done, so I let him continue.

“Then when I get back to the office you're not here and unreachable for the next hour. And when you do finally show up, I find out that you were out getting Cronuts and God knows what else, dressed like a college kid who just came home from ‘finding herself' at a semester at sea!”

I didn't dare tell him that the dessert and dildo outing was Bae's doing, an obvious fool's errand in retrospect. It would just make it worse if I admitted to being so gullible.

His vibrating wrath was one thing, but then his shoulders drooped with disappointment.

“Your heart is not in this, Kika. I know you're not stupid,
but I also know that you're not taking this seriously, and that isn't fair to VoyageCorp. Or to me.”

“You're right,” I acknowledged to both him and myself. “I'm sorry. I'm not normally like this—” I began to protest, just to clear my reputation, but once I heard the puny words scrabbling from my mouth, I caught them and swallowed them back down. I had no good explanation. Holland knew that I knew. This wasn't the first time I had messed up.

“I'm going to have to let you go, Kika.”

“Got it,” I said softly. So I left my damn big-girl job, thinking:
If this job didn't mean anything to me, why does it sting so much to lose it?

The one condolence was before I left I managed to schedule a messenger for a special delivery: The adult toy store bag would be arriving at Bae Yoon's front desk tomorrow at precisely 8:20
A.M.
—the exact time that Richie Rich arrived in his office every day. At least I would get to embarrass Bae and eat Cronuts out of the whole debacle.

My train reached the station, jolting me back into the present. I looked out of the window as idyllic suburbia, wrapped in a hushed wintertime blanket, came into view. The grit and noise and drama of the city seemed far away now. A quiet snowfall swirled in the floor-length skirts of amber light dropping down from the lampposts.

I recognized Lynn's tan (or as she called it, “champagne”) Mercedes. She flickered the headlights while hooting my name. I headed toward her with my face down, away from the blustering snowflakes.

7

A
NY
NORMAL
GIRL
who just lost her job would get to bond with Bravo TV and butter. But not me; I still had to hang out with a five-year-old. Not that I had any right to complain. I needed the money more than ever now.

“I don't fink I'm awowed to watch dis,” said Madison.

I set down the box of Lucky Charms cereal (I had extracted most of the marshmallows, anyway) and quickly changed the channel as some freakishly young, dead-eyed pop star humped across the stage while her backup dancers shook what their plastic surgeons gave them. Wasn't this the Disney Channel?

“Shit,” I mumbled to myself. At this rate, I was gunning to get fired from both jobs today.

“Can I bwaid your hair?” Madison asked me.

“Sure you can. I'm sorry I'm being such a crappy babysitter today. I just had a horrible day; I got fired from my job.”

Madison brought over a comb that smelled like synthetic cherry doll hair. “What job?” she asked.

“Exactly. You are one smart cookie.”

Madison's eyes widened at the mention of a cookie—a girl after my own heart.

“Sure, I didn't like it there, but it was at least a way to make money for traveling. It's not that I want to be a backpacking bum; I
want
to work while I'm traveling. I need to acquire more merchandise for my website, you know? It was really starting to take off when I was last on the road, and I want to get back there so I can work on it full-time.”

“Oh,” said Madison looking thoughtful. “I can comb now?”

She reached up and promptly tangled the comb into my hair. (Side note: When did naming little girls after dead presidents become trendy? This weekend, I was scheduled to babysit a seven-year-old girl named “Kennedy” who, upon questioning, told me her favorite color was “glitter.”)

“I knew you would get it, Madison. The worst part is that it's my fault that I got fired,” I confessed. “Holland was right. I didn't apply myself. And, and, and . . . I just keep thinking about Lochlon, you know?” I sputtered.

“Yes, I know,” said Madison, her sticky hands holding my head steady with toddler concentration. “Who's Lockin? Your boyfwiend?”

“Not really anymore, but he was for a while there,” I said, knowing Madison wouldn't understand enough to judge me or pry for more info.

“Diego is
my
boyfwiend.”

I turned and squared off with Madison. “Diego? Is that a boy from preschool?”

“Noooooo! He's from
Dowa de Explower
,” she moaned impatiently. “Stop wiggling. Have you got ants in your pants, lady?”

“Christ. You sound just like Holland during the weekly status meetings, you know that?”

8

“M
OM
,
WHAT
ARE
you still doing up?” I slung my bag slick with frost onto the kitchen floor and flicked on the overhead light. “And why are you sitting in the dark?” I glanced at the clock, which read 12:15
A.M.

“Kika, I called your work,” my mom said over a steaming cup of calming honey lavender tea. She fingered the tea box, which featured one of those trendy pen drawings of a lady in Warrior II all Zen or stoned or whatever.

“Mom, I told you not to call that number.”

“Well, I guess it doesn't matter anymore,” she said carefully. “I made you a cup of tea.”

I sighed. “Mom, it's fine. I'll get another job.” I sat down next to her at the breakfast bar. She was in her pajamas, which actually looked no different from her yoga clothes, but I had a trained eye.

My mom nodded mutely, but I saw her recalling the three
months that it took me to get the job in the first place. Three more months of résumés, interviews, and desperation stretched ahead of me now as unpromising as a desert. No job. No money. No website. No Lochlon.

It was doomed to be one of those sad public defeats where I'd keep running into high school peers coming home from their Murray Hill apartments to visit their parents with their dry-clean-only blouses (who even says “blouses” anymore?) and jobs in finance. (Always, finance!)

“So what happened?” my mom finally asked.

“I'm a spectacular screwup.”

“No, Kika. You weren't meant to be there.” She tried to cup my hand, but I pulled away.

“Oh, cut the New Age bullshit for a minute.
I
messed up, Mom. Sure, I wasn't emotionally fulfilled there, but I should know how to suck it up in order to get to where I'm ‘meant to be.'” I reeled in my tone. “Sorry. I'm not mad at you. I'm just really mad at myself right now. I'm actually shocked I lasted a year there.” I laughed weakly.

My mom didn't laugh along. “It's really been that long?”

“Yup. And it's pretty sad that after a whole year of working in that office, I still have a pathetic bank balance hovering dangerously close to the negative. I mean, you'd think they would have paid me better.”

My mom toyed with her bracelet and sighed. It was made of the mala beads I had bought her in Montreal last weekend. Suddenly, it was a lot harder to remember why I
had
to take all those weekend trips—using up every last vacation and sick day and spending all that money. Now, they didn't seem worth it.
I did this to myself, didn't I?
some voice of truth gulped.

I did a gusty yogi exhale for my mom's benefit. “Thanks for waiting up. I'm sorry I'm so cranky. I should go to bed.”

“Okay. I'm teaching a power flow vinyasa class tomorrow at 9
A.M.
, if you want to join.”

“At Heart 'n Ohm?” (Also known as our living room, which doubled as a yoga studio.)

She nodded. “You're going to be okay, Kika. Maybe this was a lesson you needed to learn the hard way, you know?”

“When I took this job I had this whole plan to save money and get back on the road to continue with the website. I don't know how I let myself drift so far from that goal . . .” I felt dangerously close to tearing up.

My mom's eyes twinkled with sympathy in the dim kitchen light. “Best-laid plans are always the ones that go to shit first. You'll figure it out.”

I smiled at my mom's custom blend of earthy yoga jargon and sailor swearwords, and then I went upstairs trying to believe that she was right.