Nicole hadn’t slept the night before. Instead, she’d spent hours laying out different outfits, going through possible interview questions. Her stomach churning, she’d taken six or eight Tums, read article after article about Jameson International on the Internet, and of course, she’d also researched Red Jameson, the high profile CEO and founder of the advertising agency. At only age thirty-two, the man was already a legend in the advertising world and a heartthrob in the rest of the world.
While playing around online, she’d even run across a web forum seemingly devoted to discussing Red’s every relationship, both real and imagined. The forum participants gossiped endlessly about celebrity women he’d been spotted with, and then discussed (in great detail) what they would do if they had five minutes alone with him.
Red Jameson had been featured on the cover of both Forbes and Rolling Stone. He was just that cool.
Finally, around five-thirty a.m., when the darkness was starting to give way to a gray and foggy morning, Nicole began drifting to sleep.
Her alarm woke her just half an hour later. She groaned and sat up, feeling like she’d spent the previous night drinking tequila. Or maybe bashing herself in the head with a hammer.
Either way, she had to pull herself together. She ran to the bathroom and started the lengthy process of getting ready for the day. Shaving her legs in the bath, washing and conditioning her hair. As she rinsed the soap out of her eyes, images of Red Jameson flashed in her mind. He was staring at her and his expression was one of disapproval. He shook his head.
No. You can’t have the internship, Nicole. You aren’t ready for the real world. Maybe you should have gone to grad school instead.
When she opened her eyes, her heart was pounding. Think positive thoughts, she admonished herself.
This interview is going to go wonderfully. I deserve this internship. I’ve got all the skills they require and that’s why I’ve made it this far.
Nicole nodded, heartened by her own propaganda, and applied moisturizer to her skin. Her skin was smooth, silky, and pale. It was one of her attributes that seemed to get the most comments from men and women alike. She rarely had a blemish on her face, or any kind of acne.
Other than her nearly perfect skin, Nicole had always considered herself rather average. She wasn’t too tall or too short. She wasn’t too skinny or too fat. She had breasts but not the kind that men tended to stare at like salivating dogs. She liked to run two or three times a week, so she had some muscle tone, but wasn’t ripped like some of the girls around town.
Her hair was brown and she usually wore it back in a simple ponytail.
Today Nicole needed to be sophisticated, though. Jameson International was a cutting-edge ad agency, and she couldn’t come in like some hick with hay in her teeth.
So she was dressing up way beyond anything she felt comfortable in.
She’d even gone into credit card debt yesterday at Prada, buying a full ensemble: high heels, skirt, blouse, purse. The entire thing had come to just under two thousand dollars. She’d spread it across two cards.
TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS.
More than she’d spent on clothes all of last year.
But this wasn’t for just any old internship. Nicole had beaten the odds just getting this interview, and now she needed to knock it out of the park. She needed to look global, she needed to look rich and worldly or she didn’t stand a chance.
Out the door and on the train, she tried to stay calm. Focused on a little breathing meditation she’d learned from a hippie ex-boyfriend. He’d taught her to meditate and he’d also tried to convince her to give him a rim job, which Nicole had politely declined.
They’d ended soon after that.
A short walk from the train to midtown and she was suddenly there. The large glass building that stretched almost to the sky. Jameson International. It looked like a block of onyx.
Nicole’s breath caught in her chest.
She shook in her heels for a moment.
And then she went inside.
The main entrance was huge, with immense marble floors and a fountain. Men and women in suits with perfect hair were filing through the doors and waiting for elevators. At the large security desk in the center of the room, three black men were checking in guests.
Nicole approached them with a smile. None of them smiled back.
“Name please?” One bald man asked. He glared at her like she might be a potential terrorist.
Her voice came out so low that she needed to start over. Nicole cleared her throat. “I’m Nicole Masters? Here for an interview at eight-thirty?”
The man nodded and turned to his computer. He typed quickly. Nodded. “Sign in please.” He tapped a clipboard next to her on the desk and she quickly wrote her name and the time and date.
“Look over here please,” he said, and when she looked at him, there was a sudden flash in her eyes.
“Just a moment.” Seconds later he’d printed out a picture of her and made a laminated badge, which he handed to her. “Please wear this at all times while you’re in the building, Ms. Masters.”
She glanced at the badge. In the picture, she looked like a cross-eyed Japanese woman. “I wish you’d at least told me to smile,” she joked.
He reacted as if she’d never spoken. “Take the elevators on your left up to the fifteenth floor. You’ll be meeting with Glen Goldman.”