first hint that I was passing the ridiculous interview. The deal was sealed five minutes later, when they passed me the keys, along with a three-page list of rules for tenants.
I would move in on the fifteenth. And even though it was my third apartment since moving from Miami, it felt like the first time I’d really be living here. Maybe it was my name on the lease. Or the hours of work behind my deposit. But I knew one thing: it felt good. Scratch that. It felt great.
New York City better get used to my face. I was here to stay.
I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t call. At the very least, parents should call on a girl’s birthday. She shouldn’t spend it huddled in a corner of a crowded bar, pretending to be happy. She should be able to have one real conversation with someone who understood the pain of losing everything. She shouldn’t have to smile over cashmere gloves from her best friends when all she really wanted was her cell phone bill to be paid.
The man bent over, a loop in hand, and peered down at the earrings. He nodded, pushing them aside, and reached for my watch, a sixteenth birthday present from my father. I chewed on the edge of my pinky, my nails nude for the first time in years. I’d tried to paint them myself, the result a disaster—dark purple polish that looked like it’d been applied by a child, as much off my nails as on.
“You have a receipt for any of this stuff?” The man peered at me, suspicion in the worn lines of his face, the contents of my jewelry box dotting the velvet surface before him.
“No.” I raised an eyebrow, my look daring the man to accuse me of theft. The man was selling Casio watches, for God’s sake. He should be tripping over himself for my pieces.
I hadn’t brought everything. I’d keep a pair of diamond studs that my parents had given me for my high school graduation. Kept an emerald pendant that had been my grandmother’s, along with a handful of other sentimentals. But everything else, sadly, was here. In this dimly lit pawnshop in Midtown, one with a huge sign screaming their inventory of jewelry. An upscale jeweler had been my first stop. But they only sold on consignment, wanting a hefty sixty percent cut, and I had needed cash now. So there I was, in my first visit to a pawnshop, and hopefully, my last.
“I’ll give you four thousand.” The man rested his hands on the glass display case, leaning over my things.
“What?” I stared down at my pieces, several of them worth that alone. “That’s ridiculous.” Panic welled in my chest and I swallowed hard, vowing not to lose my cool. I pointed to Vic’s earrings. “Those earrings were easily ten grand, and I just got them last month.”
“This is a pawn shop.” He looked at me as if I were mental. “This ain’t Tiffany’s. I got to make a profit, and price things low enough to sell.” He lifted up my watch, a diamond-studded Tag. “Not many of my clients are looking for pieces like this.”
Glancing at his other inventory, I believed the man. I held out my hand, asking for the watch, and he handed it back. I studied the face of it, thinking of the day I received it, then glanced back up at him. “Five thousand,” I said, sliding the watch on my wrist and fastening it. “Without the watch. That’s more than fair.”
“Forty-five hundred. Cash.”
“Okay.” I nodded without looking at him, thinking of the apartment I so desperately wanted. I didn’t have to sell these to make the deposit, but doing so would mean the difference between bare bones living and some security.
With a price agreed upon, the rest was quick. He inventoried my items, wrote out a receipt, and counted out a stack of hundreds. I pulled my wallet out and passed over my license, then returned it to my jacket pocket. Watching him count out the bills, my chest loosened. He put it all neatly in an envelope, one too thick to fit in my other jacket pocket. I stuffed it in my purse, carefully zipped it shut, and was out the front door, steps quick and happy, feeling rich for the first time in months.
The wind howled through the early night and I stopped in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, ready to splurge, pulling out my