R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

Of course, it was no big deal for him . Did he really think that, without the advantages of wealth, beauty, and supermodel parentage, the ten feet between me and the creative director of Régine was any less than a chasm of a thousand miles?

“Are you okay?” he asked. This was perceptive, for him.

“I’m stepping out,” I said. “Tell Sabrina that Clara sent me on a coffee run.” I rose toward the door without so much as my wallet or phone, and left Dorian dumbfounded behind me.

“Hey, wait a minute—” he started. The side of his chair cracked against the desktop as he trailed after me through the closet doors. “I didn’t mean to make you mad, I just—”

I pretended not to hear him as I marched with the leaden austerity of a soldier toward the foyer doors. It was the first time I’d traveled the halls of Régine like I truly belonged there, indifferent to everything but my own singular passage.

“Ethan, I’m sorry, I don’t want to upset you,” he said. I witnessed the rare appearance of several heads sticking out of cubicles in Editorial to frown at us.

The glass doors reflected us both with polished indifference as Dorian reached for my arm.

“I can’t have this conversation with you right now,” I said. I opened the door, somehow expecting him to stay on the other side of it — but of course, he followed me into the elevator lobby.

“I’m sorry, I just — I thought you’d want to go to the shoot, and—”

The veins in my neck bulged as I spun around, and spat, “ I do want to go! ”

He leaned back a little. “So if you want to go, what’s the problem?”

I slammed the Down button on the elevator. “Nothing, Dorian — you don’t get it.”

“Yeah, I guess I don’t.”

“Nothing is fair , Dorian!” I half-shouted. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go! I’m supposed to show up,”—I slapped my hand into my palm—“and work hard,”— slap! — “then things are supposed to happen for me!”— slap! — “When is my life going to start? It’s like — nobody cares one bit about me, and then you show up, and—” I threw my hands up “—you don’t even care about this job! You don’t care about — anything! — but you still get every thing!”

“Well. Jane just knows me, so you shouldn’t take it personally that she asked me—”

“It’s not about Jane! It’s not even about you, it’s just—” I pressed my palms to my temples and walked away.

“I don’t know what you want from me. I was just trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Well,” Dorian shrugged, “it looks like you kind of do.”

I spun around—“Just shut up! ” If anybody could hear me through the glass, I didn’t care. “Don’t you get it? I can’t just waltz into her office and say, ‘Hey Jane, I love your work, want to take me on set with you?’”

“Why not?” he asked.

The elevator arrived.

“Can you just — leave?” I pointed in the other direction. “Sabrina is going to—”

He clip-clopped into the elevator after me while I crossed my arms against my chest and glared at the small television. At Hoffman-Lynch, they had been embedded in all the elevators to inform everyone of the company’s newest programs and awards and million-dollar acquisitions.

“Did you know Hoffman-Lynch Publications recently won number one—?”

I was grateful for someone else stepping in the elevator with us, a tight-lipped woman I had never seen before. As I had come to expect at Régine , she didn’t acknowledge our presence — although the pinch around her lips softened considerably at the sight of Dorian.

I thought her presence had finally silenced Dorian, but he prodded, “Where are you going anyway?”

The elevator doors closed. “I don’t know,” I snapped.

“You don’t know where you’re going?”

“ No. ”

He laughed. “Well, I guess, now that we’re already out of the office — let’s go get falafels.”

I gaped at him openly. “Are you playing with me right now?”

The woman in the corner glared, the lines around her mouth hardening once more, like a lattice crust on an apple pie. I leaned toward her to glare back. “ What are you looking at? ” I demanded.

With a suddenly fearful glance, she turned to her phone while I devoted myself to mentally destroying her outfit — stupid black blouse! stupid black skirt! stupid black heels! How dare she disapprove of me , while she stood there in her sickening Régine uniform — unoriginal and colorless, probably purchased at too high a price tag for the sake of blending seamlessly into this ugly place, this bulwark of adulthood and dullness and routine— How dare she?

The elevator arrived at the ground floor with a ping! and the woman escaped before the doors had separated all the way.

“So are we getting off? Seriously, I’m kind of hungry.” He took one step over the threshold of the elevator and looked back at me. “If you don’t want to, then I’ll just go. I can bring you a grape soda.”

He knew I liked grape soda.

A small crowd of people peered expectantly into the elevator — holding sushi containers and organic juices and low-calorie snacks — eyebrows raised, as if I was wasting their precious time. Stupid faces. Stupid clothes. They were all so stupid .

Dorian pulled me out by the hand while they poured in like ants filling a colony. “They’re all so stupid, aren’t they?” he said, echoing the voice inside my own head.

I snorted, and let out a slightly hysterical laugh.

“What? It’s true,” he said.

I walked over to my proverbial racket, which in the wake of my tantrum lay sad and splintering on the tennis court; picked it up; and with a whoosh, returned the ball into the hopeful air.

Ping! I said, “You’re going to be the end of me, you know.”

Ping! “I know.”

I LIFTED MY BAG ONTO MY CHEST, RIFLING FOR THE ADDRESS that I had nearly committed to memory the night before. It was six and there was an early morning chill, the sun lingering sleepily behind the cover of a hundred skyscrapers, a teenager beneath an impenetrable fortress of parent-hindering bedsheets.

“The fashion team is the first to arrive and the last to leave,” Jane had said to me and Dorian. “There may be glamour in the pictures, but never in the call time.” She had warned us both not to sleep in, although more useful advice would have been about getting any sleep at all. Like a piece of wood, I had lain petrified all night with my eyes open, afraid that if I fell into a slumber it would be too deep, and then when I opened my eyes it would be noon, and I would be late for the shoot and Jane would never ask me to come on set again and I would get cast out from Régine before I ever got to the good part. In between periods of anxious bed-rumpling I’d mapped out the journey from my apartment to the photoshoot location not once or twice but five times, each time recalculating the time to get there so that I was sure to give myself enough leeway. Now it seemed that, despite all this, I was at the wrong address.

Jane had said it was a theater, but this didn’t look like any theater I’d ever seen. There was no marquee, no ticket booth, not even a sign — just a stronghold of plywood boards hedging the entire structure like brambles around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. My fingers combed through a jumble of pens and crumbled receipts at the bottom of my bag until finally I found the address on a little note that had got stuck in the pages of The Stranger , which I had been trying to read in short bursts on the subway with limited progress.