Read Online Citizen Girl by Emma McLaughlin - Free Book Online Page A

how you spend your days here?’ I ask hopefully.
    Directing her attention to her watch, Monica begins to talk. And talk. And talk. About markets, numbers, teams and an inordinate amount of leveraging. Tons of leveraging. Leveraging is the sole verb in her presentation. Stu nods, tossing in statistics and acronyms here and there while I become enthralled by their enthusiasm, verbosity, and prodigious intake of Diet Coke, their watches that most definitely did not come from Chinatown. I marvel that we’re the same age, yet they’re going to jump in their all-terrain vehicles after work, park them in their two-car garages, and feed their big dogs. I plummet into wondering what, exactly, I’ve been doing these last two and a half years, farting around with public policy and thinking this sufficient. Just what has been so important that it’s kept me from the vital work of learning how to leverage a single fucking thing?!
    ‘I’m up.’ A woman peeks around the side before stepping in. ‘Whitney.’ She shakes my hand in one up-and-down move, light caroming off her four-carat emerald-cut diamond splaying the drab space.
    ‘All right.’ Her pink cashmere cable cardigan draped just so, she studies my résumé. ‘Girl.’ She eyes my handsclutched in my lap. ‘I see you haven’t taken any notes. Do you have this completely memorized already?’
    My face beats. ‘I was so absorbed by what Monica was saying.’
    ‘Right.’ She trades glances with her colleagues. ‘We’re going to converse for a moment.’ They get up and stand just outside the cubicle, discussing me in hushed tones. Stepford employees, these people even know how to whisper perfectly.
    ‘Girl.’ Whitney returns alone, folding her hands delicately in front of her chin as she sits across from me. ‘Here’s the thing. We’re just not getting from you that you’re looking to make money. Money. As much as you possibly can. For yourself. Our clients. Us. We just don’t see it.’ She leans in. ‘ Do you want to make as much money as you possibly can? Do you really want to and we’re just not reading you right?’ She stares at me and I detest her and every last thing about this whole event. I am, however, still sickeningly dazzled by her ring, proving that I’m officially going to end up as a starving forty-five-year-old Greenpeace petitioner drooling her days away outside Tiffany’s. I take a deep breath.
    ‘I want to make money – as much as I, um, can. You know, for you and me and the clients, and whoever. I just haven’t really been able to get a sense of how you would like me to do that.’
    ‘Exactly.’ Whitney stands. ‘Okay!’ she calls over the cubicle walls to Stu. ‘Who’s next?’
*
    I roll over to check the clock on the milk crate doubling as a nightstand, nudging aside the tiny stack of business cards I garnered at the ‘job fair’. Eleven fifty-three. I inhale deeply, trying to slow my buzzing brain from replaying the phone calls I’ve put in to every half-baked Remy-stained lead. I exhale as I flick on the lamp and realize that my breath is coming out in steamy puffs. The pipes must be freezing up again. ‘I NEED A JOB,’ I yell at the water bug making a relaxed trek across my floor. It skitters back into the shadows over a white card that’s fallen between the wooden slats. Hunching the blanket around me, I reach over and jimmy it out, the thermographed women’s symbol slick under my thumb. My Company.
    Debating the air-of-desperation factor, I decide it’s worth the risk in order to go to sleep feeling like I’ve made any headway. ‘Getting on with it’, I clear my throat and dial, preparing to leave a message that has the sound of a dynamic team player who’s not even remotely desperate. I picture myself as Whitney. Whitney at eight o’clock in the morning, a flamethrower on her finger, and a smile on her money-grubbing face.
    ‘Yeah,’ a man’s voice answers expectantly, catching me by surprise. I bite