Box Girl Read Free Page A

Ann Taylor Loft.
    Late that summer, I went to Los Angeles with Heather, my best friend from college, to visit our other best friend, Rachel. Heather and Rachel were also living with their parents, looking for jobs: Heather in the suburbs of Chicago, Rachel in a suburb of LA. Frustrated by the incessant refreshing of our Hotmail inboxes and the waiting helplessly to hear from jobs we’d applied to on Monster.com , Heather and I had decided a weeklong vacation in LA was just what the therapist ordered.
    Everything about Los Angeles was intoxicating on that inaugural trip. The whole place seemed dream-like, foreign, and fabulous, if not a little bit filthy. I was certain I was going to see a celebrity as soon as I got off the plane. Rachel was our tour guide, and she took us to the Santa Monica Pier, the Venice Boardwalk, the Sky Bar on Sunset Boulevard. As the week went on, an idea began brewing: Why did Heather and I have to get a job in our hometowns’ neighboring metropolises? Why would we split up when we could cling to each other while entering adulthood? “Let’s just move here!” We threw it out there, but we knew we never would. We were too scared—to tell our parents, to leave the boyfriends and lives and expectations that were waiting for us back home.
    Yet, on the penultimate day of our trip, during a late lunch at The Farm in Beverly Hills, something shifted. Maybe it was the sunshine, maybe it was the Sauvignon Blanc, but giddy and high on friendship and wine, the decision was made: “Let’s move here. Let’s really move here.” The three of us could get a place together. We decided we had to call our parents immediately, before we changed our minds. I walked to the corner of Beverly and Santa Monica Boulevards—an intersection I cannot pass without remembering this excruciating conversation—and told my parents I was moving three time zones and 2,963 miles west; as far from Connecticut as I possibly could without wading into the Pacific.
    Within three weeks, Heather and I had moved across the country, with no jobs, no cars, and no place to live. This nearly broke my sweet, Southern mother’s heart. (Both my parents are originally from Georgia, with the accents to prove it.) She had assumed I would get a job in Manhattan, of course. California might as well have been another country in my parents’ minds. And Los Angeles, oh the horror. At least San Francisco was tolerable , they’d say. Soon after I moved, my mom called to tell me she had to close the door to my bedroom. “I just couldn’t bear to look at it, knowing you are so far away.”
    The first few weeks we lived in LA, we didn’t really live in LA at all, but rather with Rachel’s parents in a San Fernando Valley suburb called Encino. We were familiar with Brendan Fraser in Encino Man , but not this city where Michael Jackson grew up. We quickly learned that it was not such a bad spot to be stuck in late summer while looking for a job. Rachel’s parents’ house was a sprawling, contemporary take on the Southern California ranch house. It had a large, slate-tile hot tub, an eco-friendly saltwater pool, and a variety of California vegetables growing in the yard, not to mention all the home-cooked food and expensive wine we could consume.
    Most of our job-search period was spent in the pool. Once or twice a day, I’d flutter-kick to the shallow end, peel my waterlogged limbs off my inflatable raft, twist a towel under my arms, and shuffle inside to refresh my email on their boxy, beige desktop, my hair dripping onto the keyboard. (This was 2004, when checking your email enlisted more physical labor than just rolling over on a chaise lounge and shading your iPhone’s screen from the sun.) Realizing I’d gotten no responses to my job inquiries, I’d grab an organic Popsicle from the freezer and hurry back poolside to avoid getting chilled from the air