Lock and Key(31)
Author: Sarah Dessen

It wasn’t like I could have fit in at Perkins on my budget, even if I wanted to. Which, of course, I didn’t. Still, in the time I’d been there, I’d noticed the irony in what all the girls were wearing, which was basically expensive clothes made to look cheap. Two-hundred-dollar jeans with rips and patches, Lanoler cashmere sweaters tied sloppily around their waists, high-end T-shirts specifically weathered and faded to look old and worn. My old stuff at the yellow house, mildew aside, would have been perfect; as it was, I was forced to buy not only new stuff but cheap new stuff, and the difference was obvious. Clearly, you had to spend a lot of money to properly look like you were slumming.

Still, after an hour and a half, I’d vastly increased my working wardrobe, buying two new pairs of jeans, a sweater, a hoodie, and some actual cheap T-shirts that, mercifully, were five for twenty bucks. Still, seeing my cash dwindle made me very nervous. In fact, I felt slightly sick as I started down the airy center of the mall toward the exit, which was probably why I noticed the HELP WANTED sign ahead right away. Stuck to the side of one of the many merchandise carts arranged to be unavoidable, it was like a beacon, pulling me toward it, step-by-step.

As I got closer, I saw it was on a jewelry stall, which appeared to be unmanned, although there were signs of someone having just left: a Jumbo Smoothie cup sweating with condensation was sitting on the register, and there was a stick of incense burning, the smoke wafting in long curlicues up toward the high, bright glass atrium-like ceiling above. The jewelry itself was basic but pretty, with rows and rows of silver-and-turquoise earrings, a large display of beaded necklaces, and several square boxes filled with rings of all sizes. I reached forward, drawing out a thick one with a red stone, holding it up in front of me and turning it in the light.

“Oh! Wait! Hello!”

I jumped, startled, then immediately put the ring back just as the redheaded woman from whom Nate had been picking up the boxes that day—Harriet—came bustling up, a Jump Java cup in one hand, out of breath but talking anyway.

“Sorry!” she gasped, planting it beside the smoothie cup on the register. “I’ve been trying to kick my caffeine habit—” here she paused, sucking in a big, and much needed, by the sound of it, breath—“by switching to smoothies. Healthy, right? But then the headache hit and I could feel myself crashing and I just had to run down for a fix.” She took another big breath, now fanning her flushed face with one hand. “But I’m here now. Finally.”

I just looked at her, not exactly sure what to say, especially considering she was still kind of wheezing. Now that I was seeing her up close, I figured she was in her mid-thirties, maybe a little older, although her freckles, hair, and outfit—low-slung jeans, suede clogs, and Namaste T-SHIRT—MADE it hard to pinpoint exactly.

“Wait,” she said, putting her coffee on the register and pointing at me, a bunch of bangles sliding down her hand. “Do I know you? Have you bought stuff here before?”

I shook my head. “I was with Nate the other day,” I said. “When he came to pick up those things from you.”

She snapped her fingers, the bangles clanging again. “Right. With the beeping. God! I’m still recovering from that.”

I smiled, then looked down at the display again. “Do you make all this yourself?”

“Yep, I’m a one-woman operation. To my detriment, at times.” She hopped up on a stool by the register, picking up her coffee again. “I just made those ones with the red stones, on the second row. People think redheads can’t wear red, but they’re wrong. One of the first fallacies of my life. And I believed it for years. Sad, right?”

I glanced over at her, wondering if she’d been able to tell from a distance that this, in fact, was the one I’d been looking at. I nodded, peering down at it again.

“I love your necklace,” she said suddenly. When I glanced over to see her leaning forward slightly, studying it, instinctively my hand rose to touch it.

“It’s just a key,” I said.

“Maybe.” She took another sip of her coffee. “But it’s the contrast that’s interesting. Hard copper key, paired with such a delicate chain. You’d think it would be awkward or bulky. But it’s not. It works.”

I looked down at my necklace, remembering the day that—fed up with always losing my house key in a pocket or my backpack—I’d gone looking for a chain thin enough to thread through the top hole but still strong enough to hold it. At the time, I hadn’t been thinking about anything but managing to keep it close to me, although now, looking in one of the mirrors opposite, I could see what she was talking about. It was kind of pretty and unusual, after all.

“Excuse me,” a guy with a beard and sandals standing behind a nearby vitamin kiosk called out to her. “But is that a coffee you’re drinking?”

Harriet widened her eyes at me. “No,” she called out over her shoulder cheerily. “It’s herbal tea.”

“Are you lying?”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Yes,” he said.

She sighed. “Fine, fine. It’s coffee. But organic free-trade coffee.”

“The bet,” he said, “was to give up all caffeine. You owe me ten bucks.”

“Fine. Add it to my tab,” she replied. To me she added, “God, I always lose. You’d think I’d learn to stop betting.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to this, so I looked over the necklaces for another moment before saying, “So . . . are you still hiring?”

“No,” she replied. “Sorry.”

I glanced at the sign. “But—”

“Okay, maybe I am,” she said. Behind her, the vitamin guy coughed loudly. She looked at him, then said reluctantly, “Yes. I’m hiring.”

“All right,” I said slowly.

“But the thing is,” she said, picking up a nearby feather duster and busily running it across a display of bracelets, “I hardly have any hours to offer. And what I can give you is erratic, because you’d have to work around my schedule, which varies wildly. Some times I might need you a lot, others hardly at all.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

She put the duster down, narrowing her eyes at me. “This is boring work,” she warned me. “Lots of sitting in one place while everyone passes you by. It’s like solitary confinement. ”