Riches to Rags
Cordy always wore a blazer to work, to cover up the name tag. She didn't want to be a name tag person, a shop girl. And if anyone saw her in there, she didn't want them to know she was working. She wanted to be able to pretend she was shopping. To pretend she still had the money to go shopping. Having money. Having nice things - that seemed like a lifetime ago already.
They'd moved out of the house a couple of days after the repo men had come and taken everything. In a matter of hours she'd gone from being daddy's little princess to homeless and destitute, and daddy was in jail.
Her and her mom had gone to the Sunlodge motor inn - the cruddy, skeavy motel on the edge of town. There was nowhere else for them to go, nowhere else they could afford. Their bank accounts had been frozen. All they had left was what was in Cordy's trust fund - and that was going to have to last her a long, long time.
She'd worried at first that she might bump into Faith at the motel; worried about how she would explain what she was doing there. But it seemed that Faith had turned evil and had moved out, was being put up somewhere by the mayor - so that was something at least. She wished she had someone who could put her up somewhere better than the motel; where the sheets were thin, the walls were damp, the water cold and the whole place infested with creepy crawlies.
Plus all the screwing. Guys would pick up cheap girls and come and rent a room by the hour - and sometimes they would leer at Cordy, if she passed them in the hallway - make suggestions, grope at her, treat her like she was as cheap as the women they brought to the rooms here … this was so far from what her life was supposed to be. This was some other girl's life. It had to be.
At night, she would lie on her cold, hard bed, huddled under her thin sheets - hearing the screaming and banging through the paper thin walls, listening to her mom drinking herself into a stupor in the next bed … and she knew there was no hope, no end in sight.
She wouldn't be going to college in the fall. They didn't have the money to send her, so that was that - it just wasn't going to happen. She was too poor. She was too poor. And she'd got into some great schools: Duke, Columbia, Colorado State - they'd all clamoured to have her. Well, she would be graduating in the top ten percent of her class. She had a stellar GPA and between pep squad and cheerleading had ticked enough extracurricular boxes. But it was all for nothing - her future was now a blank space. She didn't have one.
She was having to try and hide that from everybody. Which was practically impossible: college talk was everywhere - teachers wanted to know where you were headed, give out unasked for advice and all the other seniors were excitedly swapping plans and having discussions about futures that she could no longer join in with, as she no longer had one.
Harmony was going to France in the summer. Cordy remembered the summer she went to France - she hadn't enjoyed it at the time, she had gone for the shopping and got stuck in museums. Then she had to pretend that the new clothes she had bought from the mall were high end Parisian fashion.
Well, at least that white lie those four years ago now stood her in good stead for hiding how few clothes she still had left. Once she had stood in front of her mirror in her own bedroom and worked long and hard to find a way to make her high street clothes look designer, and conceal the fact that she was not wearing anything different to anyone else. Now, she had to spend her mornings, in the one room which made up her home, finding ways to disguise the fact that she was wearing the same couple of outfits over and over - putting her clothes together in different ways and hoping no one would notice how often the same items kept appearing.
And there was more than that she had to conceal. She had to hide the fact that she no longer had a car, and that she was no longer living at home, that she lived in a motel now, that she had no money and that her dad was in jail. She couldn't bear it if anyone ever found out. What would they think?
A part of her knew what they would think, and it scared her more than anything. They would think it was what she deserved. A part of her believed it was what she deserved, she couldn't stand the shame if anyone else found out and agreed with her, laughed at her. She didn't know what would be worse, when someone found out - their pleasure in her misfortune, or their pity. So she hid it all and told no one - not that she had anybody left to tell. Not since Xander...
And she hid the fact she had gone out and got a job. She needed to - somehow they needed to pay their motel bills, or else they wouldn't even have that crappy roof over their heads. And her mom didn't do anything but drink. But she didn't want anybody knowing that she went out to work now, to the extent that she even hid her name tag when she was in the shop - so the customers wouldn't realise she wasn't one of them.
At least it was a nice shop. A high end one. April Fools. When she was in there, she could pretend she was back in the world she belonged to, that her whole life hadn't come crashing down around her ears. And she got a staff discount on their clothes. Which was all to the good, because between trying to keep her and her mom afloat, she was also saving up for a prom dress - and it didn't come cheap, and she didn't earn much.
But she counted and saved every penny, something she'd never had to do before, and knew at all times just how much she had left to pay for it. And every time she got a break, she would take the dress off its hanger and hold it up against herself and just let herself pretend that everything was still the way it had always been...
...Which is how Xander Harris came to be the person who discovered her secret. Of course it was Xander - out of everyone in the whole world - of course it was Xander who found out what had happened to her.
He saw her with the dress and came in to make his snide comments. She'd got rid of him easily enough the first time. But then he saw her in there again - and came back in, wanting to know just how many dresses it was she needed? She tried to give him short shrift, get him to leave … but then one of the other shop girls had come over to find out if Cordy was dealing with a customer or chatting with a friend - and everything was exposed. Just like that. Her whole life in ruins, spread out for Xander to see.
Though he hadn't laughed. He hadn't seemed happy. And when the subject came up with the other scoobies, he'd covered for her - pretended everything was still OK. That was something.
And then, when the night of the prom came, and she hadn't paid off her dress and was facing a night in the motel room, missing this golden right of passage because she was too poor to experience it, it turned out that Harris had turned up and paid for it in secret. He must still be feeling bad about him and Willow.
And as much as she wasn't ever going to forgive him for what he had done, the betrayal, this one act of kindness - in a world gone so horribly wrong - touched her right to her core.
This was not going to be the end to her school career she had always imagined, she would not have bigger and brighter things to look forward to when it was done. She wasn't going to be crowned prom queen, or arrive in a limo, she didn't even have a date. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be and yet - for one final night, she could wear a pretty dress and dance and pretend everything was OK, and that would all be thanks to Xander Harris.
