R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

“Hey, George!” I panted. I had just raced from the subway station at 42nd Street. “How are you?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “Start time around here is nine o’clock,” he replied.

“It’s nine now.”

“Which means if you’re not here by eight forty-five—” he continued, swiping his ID card with a fling of the glass door “—you’re late.”

I shook away the mild feeling of dread shivering across my skin as I entered Régine at George’s heels. Despite him, it was going to be a good day — a great day. I had made it in one piece to my dream job, and had even managed to match my jacket to my socks. I checked my breath: Before fumbling for my apartment door I had even washed my liquor-saturated mouth. I was already a raving success.

George and I passed through the same hallway as the day before — cubicles buzzing, cover girls smoldering — then the enormous-seeming white door loomed before us and we entered the fashion closet. Even though it was only Day Two, for some strange reason I already felt like I was “back” at Régine , as though I’d been coming to work here for years.

“What did you do last night?” I asked George, still hoping to establish a friendly rapport.

He turned to me as Sabrina’s head came into view, and replied with undisguised irritation, “Why do you dress this way?”

“What way?” I laughed. My royal blue blazer was covered with small pink polka dots.

“Seriously, your clothes — they give me a headache,” George said, shaking his head as we took our seats. “Are you planning to dress this way every day?”

“Are you?” I responded, before I could help myself.

He rolled his eyes and started checking his favorite blog. “Whatever, it’s you they’re going to talk about. And not in the way that you want.”

Still clouded by the haze of alcoholic stupor, I couldn’t figure out how George presumed to know what I wanted. In lieu of a response, my eyes absently followed the cursor across his screen as he scrolled around over a series of attractive faces from some party the night before.

A face appeared just long enough for the memory of last night to jab me in the stomach. “Dorian,” I blurted with a start, and leaned instinctively toward him.

“Who?” George scrolled back to Dorian’s white smile. “Oh, Dorian,” he said knowingly. “He’s a model — Edie Belgraves’s son. He walked a ton of shows last season in Paris, and I hear he’ll probably get offered a Burberry campaign.”

I almost choked with laughter: that George was telling me about Dorian Belgraves. To everyone else he was the Dorian who had just “walked a ton of shows,” but to me he was the Dorian who had ruined everything. He had ruined Madeline, and senior year, and the worst part was — it had all been my fault. I slowly fell back into my chair, and let the reality swoop over me like a crumpling funerary shroud: Dorian was back from Paris.

Last night, Blake had helped me stop the bleeding in the bathroom. There had been only one men’s bathroom in the nightclub, and even though I was able to spit out most of the glass it took about thirty minutes just to get one piece out from the corner of my lip. By the time we were finished there was a line and the only reason nobody said anything to us was because I was still bleeding, and holding a bunch of paper towels to my face like a pulverized bouquet of white and red flowers.

It was pretty much over after that. When Blake and I returned to the table, I had expected to find Madeline and Dorian intertwined like lovers in a Fragonard painting — as rose-cheeked as ever, without sin or common sense.

It was much worse than that.

Madeline and Dorian were gone, and I knew that could only mean one thing: She had left with him. Stupid, pathetic, lovesick Madeline, who spent all of senior year pining over the loss of Dorian, had — after only thirty minutes in his exulting presence — gone home with him , the truest bane of her existence, her one true love, and the greatest tragedy of her young life. Now the priceless thing that was already teetering on a ledge had been shoved over, and the only hope was that it might fall through the air forever, instead of shattering. Blake knew it as well as I did, even though he had never been as close to Dorian as me and Madeline. He offered me a gin and tonic as a consolation, and a second, and soon, well—

This was the bad thing about Madeline, that for all her declarations of rebellion, she was (and this was why we were so compatible) just a girl who had read too much Jane Austen — a dreamer. A romantic. A fool like me. She would easily give everything up for a marriage certificate, for a life with Darcy in a renovated Victorian house, and children with golden hair to brush, and who was I to deny her that? To feel jealousy or despair that she would choose this over me, and in signing her name on the dream document, steal Dorian, my other truest and most cherished love in the world?

“ Boys! ” Sabrina’s voice startled me from the other side of her cubicle wall. “They’re shooting in-house in the small studio next door today, so we are going to have to move all the trunks we’re storing there into the photo closet.”

I was vaguely amused at her use of the word we , wondering if she aimed to aid the cause by moving an empty hatbox.

She stood up for a brief second to glare at us over the cubicle wall — qualifying her instructions with, “ Now .” She wore a black headband, and a black pleated dress with silver buttons and a white pointed collar. I met her blue eyes as she lowered herself back into her seat, then popped back up like an ember. She smoldered there, tight-lipped; her eyes narrowed, and she began conspicuously eyeing my outfit up and down, so that I would have no doubt that she was doing it — and even though I barely knew Sabrina Walker, I could hear the rattle of a hundred insults tumbling, like the numbered white balls in a Powerball lottery, in her shiny glass brain.

“How bright ,” she spat at last, and I’d never known such a wonderful word could sound so much like a curse.

Ten minutes later, while I was pushing the trunks around, a similar thing happened with Clara, the senior fashion editor. “ Clooooset! ” she sang, in what I came to learn was her preferred method of greeting us all at once. “I need someone to prepare all of Edmund’s inspiration boards for the white-theme shoot.” She was daintily kicking a white Roger Vivier pony-hair pump with the side of her black Manolo when she noticed me.

She betrayed her own politeness with a sudden cock of her head toward me, twitching like a platinum-blonde bird on a telephone wire. Her erratic movement culminated in a stare, and her eyes seemed to fill up with the polka dots on my suit. She nudged herself back, and visibly swallowing a comment, struggled to disguise her gawk with a justifiable pretense. With an effort, she addressed me, “ Ee -than? It’s Ethan, right?. Can you please bring me a hard copy of Edmund’s references on eleven-by-seventeen paper, with six images per page, and captions numbered from beginning to end?” She sounded a little winded.

I guess that’s when I realized George was right: With all of my bright patterns, I looked a little out of place.

I had very little time to reflect on this, however, as I was rushed onto the next thing following the disappearance of Clara’s heel through the closet door.

“Okay, so yesterday was nothing compared to what we have to do today. All that stuff we checked in — that was just the half of it,” George said.

Squeezing through a barely navigable channel between the tightly crowded garment racks, I wasn’t sure where the other “half” of the clothes was supposed to go.