Serving the Billionaire(2)

Thank God. I scrambled to clean up a little: toss my vibrator in the nightstand, wash a few dishes, scrape the moldy Chinese food into the garbage. Not that Sadie would judge me, but I didn’t want her to see the squalor I’d been living in recently. She would worry.

By the time the door buzzed, I had managed to get things more or less in order. My building wasn’t classy enough to have an actual intercom, so I ran down the six flights of stairs to let Sadie in.

She was standing in the vestibule, holding a huge duffel bag full of who knew what. I opened the door and she came inside along with a blast of cold air. “God, it’s freezing out there,” she said.

“It’s the worst,” I said. “Thanks for coming. I’m freaking out.”

I told her about the job interview as we climbed the stairs to my apartment. “So I guess I have to dress up, but I don’t really know what to wear,” I said. “But I have to get this job, Sadie.”

“I know, baby girl,” she said, pushing open the door to my apartment. She dropped her bag on the bed and turned to look at me, hands on her hips. “Cocktail waitressing, huh? Let’s do some research. If this place is in the Meatpacking District, I’m not sure the hoochie look is going to fly.”

I sat on the sofa and gratefully let Sadie take over. She always knew exactly what to do in any situation, whereas I usually felt helpless and confused. It was probably why we were such good friends: she was the leader, and I happily followed along behind.

She hunched over my laptop and clicked around for a few minutes. “Okay,” she said. “This is a classy joint. You really didn’t even look it up? This is, like, where the Wall Street guys go to cut loose. You need to look sophisticated as fuck.”

“How do I do that?” I asked. I usually wore jeans and a t-shirt when I wasn’t at work, and when I was at work I could get away with black pants and a cardigan. “Sophisticated” was as far out of my reach as Mars.

“I’ve got you taken care of, doll-face,” Sadie said. She abandoned my computer and went over to the bed, and started pulling clothes out of the duffel. “If this doesn’t get you the job, I’ll eat my phone.”

“I can’t wear your clothes,” I said. Sadie liked to insist that we were the same size and could share clothing, but she was definitely smaller than me.

She rolled her eyes at me. “This stuff will fit you, okay? It should be a little tight. You don’t want to look unattainable.” She shoved an indeterminate mass of fabric into my arms. “Try this on. Do you have any heels?”

“Like, one pair,” I said. “I think they’re buried in the back of the closet.”

“I’ll dig them out,” Sadie said, and got down on her knees to rummage around in my apartment’s single, over-stuffed closet.

I stripped down to my underwear and tried on the clothes she’d given me: a fitted black pencil skirt and a silky white blouse. The skirt hit right below my knees, and it was pretty snug, but I was able to zip it up. The blouse fit loosely. I tucked it in to the skirt and wiggled to make it lie flat.

“Found your shoes,” Sadie said behind me. I turned around and took them from her. They were your standard black pumps, nothing exciting—nothing like the dangerous-looking platform stilettos I’d seen on the internet.

Whatever. It wasn’t like I had any other options. “You’re sure this is cocktail-y enough?” I asked.

Sadie pursed her lips. “Well, not yet. But it will be. Let me do you hair and makeup.”

She steered me into the bathroom and had me sit down on the closed lid of the toilet. I waited while she rummaged around in her makeup bag. She pulled out eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, something I vaguely identified as an eyelash curler—all the things that most women learned how to use in middle school, and that I had never quite figured out. Lip gloss was pretty much the limit of what I could handle.

“Are you really going to use all of that on me?” I asked, a little concerned.

“Yeah, probably,” Sadie said. “Pay close attention, you’re going to have to do this on yourself on Friday.”

“Can’t you come over and do it for me?” I whined.

Sadie grinned. “I’ll be at work, baby girl. It’s just going to be you and the internet. Maybe if you spent less time reading those boring books...”#p#分页标题#e#

“I’m trying to educate myself,” I said, annoyed, and Sadie laughed at me.

The thing about Sadie was that she always made things look so easy. She explained what she was doing as she went, but I could only follow about half of what she was saying. Hold down my eyelashes so the liquid liner didn’t make them all clumpy, sure. Contour with taupe shadow along the underside of my cheekbones... what? I decided I would stick with the basics when I had to do it myself. Maybe, over time, I could work my way up to what Sadie was doing.