Josephine if she’d like to take my place, but it was my sister’s first night back in the real world and I thought it’d be best to stick by her side. She’d been invited to sit in the front row and I’d be sitting there right there beside her.
I smiled. “It still counts. Now, c’mon. Let’s load this stuff up. The car is waiting and if I’m your date you at least owe me dinner first.”
“And here I thought you were easy,” she quipped with a smile.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Josephine
My final night of working at NYFW had finally arrived and I walked in the back entrance of Lincoln Center with mixed emotions. The job had definitely had its rough moments, but I loved being behind the scenes of fashion shows and I was really going to miss the extra income.
With Lily moving to New York soon, I’d be able to make ends meet with just one job, but I still had to help her out until she found a job of her own. She’d been working in restaurants her whole life and had started a food blog a while back. She wasn’t so much a chef as she was a critic. She loved eating good food and prided herself on knowing which restaurants were the best ones in town. New York would be the perfect city for her if only she’d just hurry up and arrive.
I stepped into the dressing room for the final show of the season. Marc Jacobs. Everyone who was anyone would be sitting in the audience and I was backstage working as a glorified janitor. A janitor surrounded by couture wearing black pants, a t-shirt, and a black baseball hat with “NYFW STAFF” stretched across the front. God, why have you forsaken me?
Models, hair stylists, makeup artists, stylists, and designers were running around like worker bees in the center of a hive. Elbows, knees, arms, fists—at any given moment, various body parts were colliding with me as people rushed to finish their jobs. I went back to emptying the trashcan in the corner of the room just as I heard someone start to yell at the front of the room.
“Where the hell is Gillian Grace?” a man spat, spinning in a circle and flailing his arms wildly. “Do these models think contracts are a joke?!”
He was short and completely bald with circular framed glasses perched on his nose. He was dressed in all black, like me, except his clothing probably cost more than all of my organs combined would go for on the black market.
He clapped his hands and started yelling again.
“So help me god, if she doesn’t arrive in three seconds, I will murder her entire family.”
I reached for my broom and took a step back, lest he catch sight of me and direct his anger at me.
Wrong move.
He whipped around and narrowed his eyes on me. I froze as if I were trying to fend off a bear. Don’t let him smell your fear! He scanned over me once, all the way up and all the way down, and then he took a step closer.
“You,” he yelled, pointing in my direction.
Every single person in the area paused and turned toward me. I whipped around to see if there was someone behind me; there wasn’t, only a black concrete wall and craft food services. (Which I’d been sneaking food from for the last ten days. What? It’s not like the models ever touched it.)
“Don’t play dumb. I’m talking to you,” he said, stepping another foot closer.
I gripped my broom tighter and smiled tentatively.
“Uh, yes?”
“Who are you?”
His question felt philosophical, like I was supposed to respond with a treatise on existentialism. Instead, I just replied with my name.
“Josephine.”
He waved his hand with impatience. Clearly my name wasn’t what he was looking for.
“What are your measurements?”
I glanced from him to all the other people watching me and waiting for my reply. I was supposed to say my size in front of a room full of models? I should not have eaten that Chipotle burrito last night.
“Uhh—it depends on what I’m wearing. Usually I can pull off a smaller size in pants—”
His patience wore out somewhere between the “u” and the first “h” in “uhh”.
“You’re literally boring me to death. Enough. I need you to model. Take off that heinous uniform and see Nikki for sizing. Tell her you’re filling in for Gillian Grace.”
I laughed. Cracked up, in fact. Wow, this was a really bad reality show. He wanted me