Her second night at Berkeley, Kirsten Nichol sat in the living room
of her new apartment with her new roommates and got stoned. Her friends
back in Newport smoked up on occasion, so the basic activity was nothing
new, but the surroundings were shabbier, the soundtrack was Elvis Costello
instead of Steve Miller, and the kids here used the word "fuck" an awful
lot. Kirsten got the feeling they were trying to impress each other, that
they were a bunch of suburban kids playing tough for each other's benefit.
Which was fine by her, because she was a suburban kid, and tough was not
really what she was after.
"Our generation is fucking lame, man," a guy called Ed slow-talked as the joint made its way around the room. "I mean, all the good stuff is over. Hippies were cool, but now they're just pathetic. Punk was cool, but New Wave is kind of lame. Disco was not cool, but at least it was fucking something. What do we have? The Preppy Handbook? There's no fucking rebellion any more."
Kirsten giggled at that. She'd never had any time for punk: she couldn't go for all that bad grooming and self-indulgent anger. At any rate, she couldn't agree that the era of rebellion was over. Because if that were true, there would be no way to explain how, at the age of 18, Kirsten Nichol, lead deb of the Newport Beach Cotillion, president of the Harbor School class of 1982, homecoming queen, straight-A student and heir apparent to the Nichol fortune and empire, had managed to get herself disowned.
It hadn't actually been getting caught having sex with Jimmy Cooper that did it. That had got the ball rolling, but her parents had been surprisingly mellow about the entire incident. She'd expected her father to be livid, and his anger was not to be trifled with. But after she and Jimmy got caught behind the bleachers at the football field during the Valentine's Day dance, Caleb Nichol had jumped to his daughter's defense. He actually told the dean that the Harbor School should worry a little bit more about the cheerleaders' cocaine habits and a bit less about hanky- panky during school dances. Her mother was embarrassed and disappointed, but if anything Caleb Nichol seemed amused. Sometimes Kirsten thought her father treated her like she was a boy, that she was a stand-in for the son her parents didn't have. He almost seemed more proud of her than ashamed of her unladylike conduct.
Kirsten's father had offered to her to make it all go away: he could donate a new library, and the dean would pretend the whole thing never happened. But Kirsten refused. She'd broken a rule, and she'd take her punishment like anyone else. She spent her suspension curled up in her room with her calculus book, and she returned to school with her head high to whispers and stares, as if there was a neon "slut" sign hanging permanently over her head. And while she'd never been the bra-burning sort, she couldn't help but notice that Jimmy's social stock seemed to have risen while hers had taken a nose-dive. It rankled all the more that, although Jimmy was sympathetic in private, she was pretty sure he didn't go out of his way to defend her in front of his friends. Jimmy, she realized, was not really the kind of guy who went against the crowd. She thought she might love Jimmy, and she certainly liked being his girlfriend, but seeing his weakness made her chill to him just a little bit.
So it wasn't the revelation that Kirsten was not pure as the driven snow that had set Caleb Nichol off, and it wasn't even her public disgrace. The thing that had done it was Harvard. The Ivy League had always been as much her father's dream as hers. Harvard had gone co-ed when she was 12, and ever since then her father had referred to her as "the first Ivy-bound Nichol." Caleb did not have an Ivy League degree. He didn't have any degree at all. He made it through eleventh grade before his father died, they lost the farm, and he had to get a job and support his mother and younger siblings. And no matter how successful he became, Kirsten knew his lack of formal education smarted. He brought up his humble origins all the time, used them as a weapon to suggest that people from more privileged backgrounds lacked his drive and killer instinct. But although he'd never admit it, Kirsten knew he was a little intimidated by people with fancy diplomas, that he worried they could see the ignorant hayseed lurking behind his polished exterior. Kirsten knew that every time a glowing profile in a business publication mentioned his lack of education, he felt a little diminished, a little humiliated. And she knew that a Harvard- educated daughter would salve that wound just a little bit. Kirsten was definitely Ivy material: she had the grades, she had the activities, she had the scores, she had a rich father with major donor potential. Only now she had a letter from the dean on its way to all of the colleges she'd applied to, explaining how she came to incur a two-week suspension.
In the end, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, Pomona and USC must have all agreed with her classmates that Kirsten Nichol was a slut, because only Berkeley, which clearly cared more about credentials than moral turpitude, offered Kirsten a place in the class of 1986. Her father got on the phone, offered some money, promised a building, and secured her a spot on the wait list at Harvard, with promises of special consideration when the final cut was made. But by then Kirsten had cast her lot with Berkeley.
"I can't go to a school that you bought my way into," she tried to explain to her father. "It wouldn't feel like I earned it. It would feel like your achievement, not mine."
"It would have been your achievement if you'd been able to keep your pants on, Kiki," her father had retorted dryly. "It's not my fault that I have to clean up your mess." And Kirsten, her pride injured, had sworn to herself that she would not be the kind of girl who allowed her daddy to clean up her messes.
Kirsten sent back her acceptance to Berkeley and assumed her father would come around. But after Kirsten was admitted off the waitlist to Harvard, he was resolute. "You'll go to Harvard or you'll pay your own way," he said. "I'm damn well not going to spend my hard-earned money so you can fraternize with a bunch of hippies and pinkos."
They spent the next few months in silent, barely-suppressed confrontation, both too proud to budge, neither willing to admit how much was really at stake. Until the week before classes started, Kirsten assumed her father was bluffing, but he wasn't, and she left for Berkeley with the contents of her personal bank account and a promise from her mother to send whatever she could siphon off from the household budget that Susan Nichol still kept out of habit. In-state tuition was low enough, but Kirsten would have to pay for room and board, and she wouldn't be eligible for financial aid until she'd been out of her parents' house for a year. Which is how the Princess of Newport Beach came to be sharing a fleabag apartment with three roommates rather than living in the dorms, and also how she found herself at the annual student job fair the next morning.
Kirsten couldn't help but feel a little overwhelmed as she and a couple thousand of her classmates made their way around the mammoth Harmon Gym, picking up applications from cafeteria tables marked "library" or "food services." She must have looked a bit shell-shocked, too, because a girl with an asymmetrical haircut smiled at her and said, "if you think this is chaos, just wait for registration."
"Crap," thought Kirsten. "I must just scream 'freshman.'" It was a little annoying: after spending 13 years thoroughly mastering the intricacies of the Harbor School and the attendant junior Newport social scene, she was going to have to start all over again. And as she scanned the gym, passing over thousands of anonymous faces, it hit her that if she was a little scared, she was also a little exhilarated. Nobody here knew her. Nobody knew that she was lead deb or the second richest kid in Orange County or the girl who got caught with Jimmy Cooper at a school dance. For the first time in her life, she had a chance to be something other than "Caleb Nichol's daughter." For the fist time, she'd sink or swim on her own. If she screwed up, it wouldn't be the talk of the school, because really, all these people had better stuff to talk and think about than the latest exploits of any given freshman. And if she swam, she'd never have to worry that it was just because someone was hoping her father would donate a gym. She wasn't sure she could make it on her own, but Kirsten Nichol was not the type to back down from a challenge. When he'd refused to pay for Berkeley, Caleb had offered her the dare of a lifetime. And she was going to show him that she could rise to the occasion.
But first she had to get a job. All of the decent ones seemed to be reserved for students who qualified for work-study, and she wouldn't be eligible for that until she could get financial aid in a year. "Non-work- study" seemed to be a synonym for "terrible hours, awful working conditions, and minimum wage." But she picked up a bunch of applications, wrote down the particulars of each job in a notebook, and sat down on a bench to start filling out forms. She could feel herself deflate as she read through the details of each miserable job.
"Is it even legal to ask someone to work eight hours without a lunch break?" she asked no one in particular.
"I don't know. I don't start law school for a week," she heard someone say. "I'll be sure to tell you when I find out." She looked up to find out who was talking. He had some sort of East Coast accent that she couldn't place: it was like someone on a T.V. cop show. She hadn't realized that people actually talked like that. The accent belonged to a slightly unkempt guy with black hair that her dad would say needed to be cut, unfashionably baggy jeans and a Yankees t-shirt that looked like it had been through the wash a few too many times. He was old, she thought; you had to be at least 22 to be in law school. He was old enough so that, unlike Jimmy and his friends, he looked like a man, not a boy. And he had nice eyes underneath those thick black brows. She couldn't believe she was thinking that.
"You know, you shouldn't apply for a job that doesn't give you a lunch break," he said. "There are thousands of jobs here. You don't have to work in a sweatshop."
"All those jobs are for people with work-study," she sighed. "I think I might be stuck in a sweatshop." What a funny phrase, "sweatshop", she thought. It sounded like something from A.P. U.S. history. Did they even have sweatshops anymore?
"Well, why didn't you apply for work study?" he asked, and she sensed that she was on dangerous ground here.
"I don't really qualify," she said carefully. "My parents could pay for college. They're just. not. paying."
The guy looked curious now. "Why not? They have religious objections to educating women or something?"
What a weird idea, Kirsten thought. "No. They wanted me to go to Harvard."
"And you didn't get in," he offered.
"No, I did. I just. didn't want to go there."
He shot her that curious look again. "Don't get me wrong: I got a fine education at CCNY," he said. "But I don't think I would have turned down Harvard."
To change the subject, Kirsten asked "CCNY?"
"City College of New York," he explained. "Its kind of like Berkeley, but in Harlem, and with open admissions." he smiled "I guess it's actually not very much like Berkeley."
"Are you from New York?" Kirsten asked, finally placing the accent. "I've always wanted to go there." Kirsten had always wanted to go pretty much anywhere. Her father said he'd seen enough of the world in the navy to know that he never wanted to leave Southern California again. Once a year, Kirsten and her mother would go skiing in Vail, and he'd stay home and work. Kirsten loved skiing: she was proud of her graceful, athletic mother, and she adored the sensation she got flying down the slopes. But she dreamed of Paris and Budapest and Katmandu. Kirsten thought Newport was great, but she wanted to see what else was out there.
"Born and bred in the Bronx," he said, "and lived there until exactly two weeks ago. You didn't think I picked up this accent in L.A., did you?"
"No," she said, laughing. "I'm not very good at placing accents. People here don't really have them."
"You come to my neighborhood and you'll be the one with an accent," he said, sounding like a tough in a gangster movie. Was he doing an impression, or did he just talk like that?
She stared back down at her applications and winced. She didn't know what to put in the space for "work experience." She'd never actually had a job. Could she put down volunteer stuff and extracurricular activities? Or should she just leave the space blank?
"Having trouble?" the guy asked.
"Oh. No. It's just, do you know if work experience has to be paid work?"
"What other kind of work is there?" he asked.
"Well, like volunteering. Or organizing things."
"What kind of things have you organized?" he asked. "You weren't the one behind that sit-in in the administration building last year, were you?"
She laughed, despite herself. "Hardly. Things for school, I guess. I was in charge of our senior class gift. I was lead deb at my cotillion."
Kirsten hadn't realized she had the power to inspire the kind of incredulity that was evident on the guy's face. "You were lead deb at your cotillion?" he asked, the laugh in his voice turning just a little bit mean. "Isn't that a little Age of Innocence or something?"
She shot him a withering look. "So is that a yes, I can put it, or a no I can't?"
"I wouldn't tell anyone that you had anything to do with a cotillion if I were you, but that's just me," he said. "You've really never had a job? What do you do with yourself over summer vacation if you don't have a job?"
The truth was that you went to parties and took tennis lessons and basked in the sun and fooled around with Jimmy Cooper. But she couldn't exactly say that. So instead she glared at him again.
"Hey, sorry. I think you should give up on this scene."
Now she was really pissed. "Look, my father is not going to budge on this, and I have to support myself. So you might think I'm a stupid rich girl who doesn't need a job, but if I'm going to make the rent next month, I need to find something now."
He looked amused. "I was just going to suggest that you'd do better looking off campus. Nobody should have to work eight hours without a lunch break. Not even rich girls."
"Seriously?" she asked. "You think I should look off campus?" He might be a jerk, but she'd defer to his expertise, since he'd apparently been job-hunting before.
"Yeah," he said. "Here you're at a disadvantage. Anywhere else, you're in the same boat as everyone else. Or everyone else who's never had a job."
Kirsten felt a surge of relief as she folded the applications in half and looked around for a trash can. She tried to think of off-campus jobs she could do: she could work at a clothes store, she thought, or maybe a bookstore. She would find the Yellow Pages, write down all the book or clothing stores in a three-mile radius of her apartment, and systematically visit every one, asking if they had any jobs. Having a plan energized her. She gathered herself to leave.
"Hey," the guy next to her said, and she thought she heard slight hesitation beneath his surface confidence. "A bunch of us are going out for drinks at Finnegan's tonight at about 8. It's kind of a dive, but the drinks are cold and the food's pretty good. I don't think they card. You should come. Find out how the other half lives."
"I think I have plans tonight," she said, although she was pretty sure that her plans amounted to sitting around with her roommates and a joint. She tried not to sound like she was blowing him off: he was self- righteous and maybe an asshole, but he'd been helpful. "But thanks."
"Ok," he said, sounding just a little disappointed. "Maybe I'll see you around. I'm Sandy Cohen, by the way."
"Kirsten," she said by way of an introduction, thinking that if she didn't give him a last name, he couldn't look her up.
"Our generation is fucking lame, man," a guy called Ed slow-talked as the joint made its way around the room. "I mean, all the good stuff is over. Hippies were cool, but now they're just pathetic. Punk was cool, but New Wave is kind of lame. Disco was not cool, but at least it was fucking something. What do we have? The Preppy Handbook? There's no fucking rebellion any more."
Kirsten giggled at that. She'd never had any time for punk: she couldn't go for all that bad grooming and self-indulgent anger. At any rate, she couldn't agree that the era of rebellion was over. Because if that were true, there would be no way to explain how, at the age of 18, Kirsten Nichol, lead deb of the Newport Beach Cotillion, president of the Harbor School class of 1982, homecoming queen, straight-A student and heir apparent to the Nichol fortune and empire, had managed to get herself disowned.
It hadn't actually been getting caught having sex with Jimmy Cooper that did it. That had got the ball rolling, but her parents had been surprisingly mellow about the entire incident. She'd expected her father to be livid, and his anger was not to be trifled with. But after she and Jimmy got caught behind the bleachers at the football field during the Valentine's Day dance, Caleb Nichol had jumped to his daughter's defense. He actually told the dean that the Harbor School should worry a little bit more about the cheerleaders' cocaine habits and a bit less about hanky- panky during school dances. Her mother was embarrassed and disappointed, but if anything Caleb Nichol seemed amused. Sometimes Kirsten thought her father treated her like she was a boy, that she was a stand-in for the son her parents didn't have. He almost seemed more proud of her than ashamed of her unladylike conduct.
Kirsten's father had offered to her to make it all go away: he could donate a new library, and the dean would pretend the whole thing never happened. But Kirsten refused. She'd broken a rule, and she'd take her punishment like anyone else. She spent her suspension curled up in her room with her calculus book, and she returned to school with her head high to whispers and stares, as if there was a neon "slut" sign hanging permanently over her head. And while she'd never been the bra-burning sort, she couldn't help but notice that Jimmy's social stock seemed to have risen while hers had taken a nose-dive. It rankled all the more that, although Jimmy was sympathetic in private, she was pretty sure he didn't go out of his way to defend her in front of his friends. Jimmy, she realized, was not really the kind of guy who went against the crowd. She thought she might love Jimmy, and she certainly liked being his girlfriend, but seeing his weakness made her chill to him just a little bit.
So it wasn't the revelation that Kirsten was not pure as the driven snow that had set Caleb Nichol off, and it wasn't even her public disgrace. The thing that had done it was Harvard. The Ivy League had always been as much her father's dream as hers. Harvard had gone co-ed when she was 12, and ever since then her father had referred to her as "the first Ivy-bound Nichol." Caleb did not have an Ivy League degree. He didn't have any degree at all. He made it through eleventh grade before his father died, they lost the farm, and he had to get a job and support his mother and younger siblings. And no matter how successful he became, Kirsten knew his lack of formal education smarted. He brought up his humble origins all the time, used them as a weapon to suggest that people from more privileged backgrounds lacked his drive and killer instinct. But although he'd never admit it, Kirsten knew he was a little intimidated by people with fancy diplomas, that he worried they could see the ignorant hayseed lurking behind his polished exterior. Kirsten knew that every time a glowing profile in a business publication mentioned his lack of education, he felt a little diminished, a little humiliated. And she knew that a Harvard- educated daughter would salve that wound just a little bit. Kirsten was definitely Ivy material: she had the grades, she had the activities, she had the scores, she had a rich father with major donor potential. Only now she had a letter from the dean on its way to all of the colleges she'd applied to, explaining how she came to incur a two-week suspension.
In the end, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, Pomona and USC must have all agreed with her classmates that Kirsten Nichol was a slut, because only Berkeley, which clearly cared more about credentials than moral turpitude, offered Kirsten a place in the class of 1986. Her father got on the phone, offered some money, promised a building, and secured her a spot on the wait list at Harvard, with promises of special consideration when the final cut was made. But by then Kirsten had cast her lot with Berkeley.
"I can't go to a school that you bought my way into," she tried to explain to her father. "It wouldn't feel like I earned it. It would feel like your achievement, not mine."
"It would have been your achievement if you'd been able to keep your pants on, Kiki," her father had retorted dryly. "It's not my fault that I have to clean up your mess." And Kirsten, her pride injured, had sworn to herself that she would not be the kind of girl who allowed her daddy to clean up her messes.
Kirsten sent back her acceptance to Berkeley and assumed her father would come around. But after Kirsten was admitted off the waitlist to Harvard, he was resolute. "You'll go to Harvard or you'll pay your own way," he said. "I'm damn well not going to spend my hard-earned money so you can fraternize with a bunch of hippies and pinkos."
They spent the next few months in silent, barely-suppressed confrontation, both too proud to budge, neither willing to admit how much was really at stake. Until the week before classes started, Kirsten assumed her father was bluffing, but he wasn't, and she left for Berkeley with the contents of her personal bank account and a promise from her mother to send whatever she could siphon off from the household budget that Susan Nichol still kept out of habit. In-state tuition was low enough, but Kirsten would have to pay for room and board, and she wouldn't be eligible for financial aid until she'd been out of her parents' house for a year. Which is how the Princess of Newport Beach came to be sharing a fleabag apartment with three roommates rather than living in the dorms, and also how she found herself at the annual student job fair the next morning.
Kirsten couldn't help but feel a little overwhelmed as she and a couple thousand of her classmates made their way around the mammoth Harmon Gym, picking up applications from cafeteria tables marked "library" or "food services." She must have looked a bit shell-shocked, too, because a girl with an asymmetrical haircut smiled at her and said, "if you think this is chaos, just wait for registration."
"Crap," thought Kirsten. "I must just scream 'freshman.'" It was a little annoying: after spending 13 years thoroughly mastering the intricacies of the Harbor School and the attendant junior Newport social scene, she was going to have to start all over again. And as she scanned the gym, passing over thousands of anonymous faces, it hit her that if she was a little scared, she was also a little exhilarated. Nobody here knew her. Nobody knew that she was lead deb or the second richest kid in Orange County or the girl who got caught with Jimmy Cooper at a school dance. For the first time in her life, she had a chance to be something other than "Caleb Nichol's daughter." For the fist time, she'd sink or swim on her own. If she screwed up, it wouldn't be the talk of the school, because really, all these people had better stuff to talk and think about than the latest exploits of any given freshman. And if she swam, she'd never have to worry that it was just because someone was hoping her father would donate a gym. She wasn't sure she could make it on her own, but Kirsten Nichol was not the type to back down from a challenge. When he'd refused to pay for Berkeley, Caleb had offered her the dare of a lifetime. And she was going to show him that she could rise to the occasion.
But first she had to get a job. All of the decent ones seemed to be reserved for students who qualified for work-study, and she wouldn't be eligible for that until she could get financial aid in a year. "Non-work- study" seemed to be a synonym for "terrible hours, awful working conditions, and minimum wage." But she picked up a bunch of applications, wrote down the particulars of each job in a notebook, and sat down on a bench to start filling out forms. She could feel herself deflate as she read through the details of each miserable job.
"Is it even legal to ask someone to work eight hours without a lunch break?" she asked no one in particular.
"I don't know. I don't start law school for a week," she heard someone say. "I'll be sure to tell you when I find out." She looked up to find out who was talking. He had some sort of East Coast accent that she couldn't place: it was like someone on a T.V. cop show. She hadn't realized that people actually talked like that. The accent belonged to a slightly unkempt guy with black hair that her dad would say needed to be cut, unfashionably baggy jeans and a Yankees t-shirt that looked like it had been through the wash a few too many times. He was old, she thought; you had to be at least 22 to be in law school. He was old enough so that, unlike Jimmy and his friends, he looked like a man, not a boy. And he had nice eyes underneath those thick black brows. She couldn't believe she was thinking that.
"You know, you shouldn't apply for a job that doesn't give you a lunch break," he said. "There are thousands of jobs here. You don't have to work in a sweatshop."
"All those jobs are for people with work-study," she sighed. "I think I might be stuck in a sweatshop." What a funny phrase, "sweatshop", she thought. It sounded like something from A.P. U.S. history. Did they even have sweatshops anymore?
"Well, why didn't you apply for work study?" he asked, and she sensed that she was on dangerous ground here.
"I don't really qualify," she said carefully. "My parents could pay for college. They're just. not. paying."
The guy looked curious now. "Why not? They have religious objections to educating women or something?"
What a weird idea, Kirsten thought. "No. They wanted me to go to Harvard."
"And you didn't get in," he offered.
"No, I did. I just. didn't want to go there."
He shot her that curious look again. "Don't get me wrong: I got a fine education at CCNY," he said. "But I don't think I would have turned down Harvard."
To change the subject, Kirsten asked "CCNY?"
"City College of New York," he explained. "Its kind of like Berkeley, but in Harlem, and with open admissions." he smiled "I guess it's actually not very much like Berkeley."
"Are you from New York?" Kirsten asked, finally placing the accent. "I've always wanted to go there." Kirsten had always wanted to go pretty much anywhere. Her father said he'd seen enough of the world in the navy to know that he never wanted to leave Southern California again. Once a year, Kirsten and her mother would go skiing in Vail, and he'd stay home and work. Kirsten loved skiing: she was proud of her graceful, athletic mother, and she adored the sensation she got flying down the slopes. But she dreamed of Paris and Budapest and Katmandu. Kirsten thought Newport was great, but she wanted to see what else was out there.
"Born and bred in the Bronx," he said, "and lived there until exactly two weeks ago. You didn't think I picked up this accent in L.A., did you?"
"No," she said, laughing. "I'm not very good at placing accents. People here don't really have them."
"You come to my neighborhood and you'll be the one with an accent," he said, sounding like a tough in a gangster movie. Was he doing an impression, or did he just talk like that?
She stared back down at her applications and winced. She didn't know what to put in the space for "work experience." She'd never actually had a job. Could she put down volunteer stuff and extracurricular activities? Or should she just leave the space blank?
"Having trouble?" the guy asked.
"Oh. No. It's just, do you know if work experience has to be paid work?"
"What other kind of work is there?" he asked.
"Well, like volunteering. Or organizing things."
"What kind of things have you organized?" he asked. "You weren't the one behind that sit-in in the administration building last year, were you?"
She laughed, despite herself. "Hardly. Things for school, I guess. I was in charge of our senior class gift. I was lead deb at my cotillion."
Kirsten hadn't realized she had the power to inspire the kind of incredulity that was evident on the guy's face. "You were lead deb at your cotillion?" he asked, the laugh in his voice turning just a little bit mean. "Isn't that a little Age of Innocence or something?"
She shot him a withering look. "So is that a yes, I can put it, or a no I can't?"
"I wouldn't tell anyone that you had anything to do with a cotillion if I were you, but that's just me," he said. "You've really never had a job? What do you do with yourself over summer vacation if you don't have a job?"
The truth was that you went to parties and took tennis lessons and basked in the sun and fooled around with Jimmy Cooper. But she couldn't exactly say that. So instead she glared at him again.
"Hey, sorry. I think you should give up on this scene."
Now she was really pissed. "Look, my father is not going to budge on this, and I have to support myself. So you might think I'm a stupid rich girl who doesn't need a job, but if I'm going to make the rent next month, I need to find something now."
He looked amused. "I was just going to suggest that you'd do better looking off campus. Nobody should have to work eight hours without a lunch break. Not even rich girls."
"Seriously?" she asked. "You think I should look off campus?" He might be a jerk, but she'd defer to his expertise, since he'd apparently been job-hunting before.
"Yeah," he said. "Here you're at a disadvantage. Anywhere else, you're in the same boat as everyone else. Or everyone else who's never had a job."
Kirsten felt a surge of relief as she folded the applications in half and looked around for a trash can. She tried to think of off-campus jobs she could do: she could work at a clothes store, she thought, or maybe a bookstore. She would find the Yellow Pages, write down all the book or clothing stores in a three-mile radius of her apartment, and systematically visit every one, asking if they had any jobs. Having a plan energized her. She gathered herself to leave.
"Hey," the guy next to her said, and she thought she heard slight hesitation beneath his surface confidence. "A bunch of us are going out for drinks at Finnegan's tonight at about 8. It's kind of a dive, but the drinks are cold and the food's pretty good. I don't think they card. You should come. Find out how the other half lives."
"I think I have plans tonight," she said, although she was pretty sure that her plans amounted to sitting around with her roommates and a joint. She tried not to sound like she was blowing him off: he was self- righteous and maybe an asshole, but he'd been helpful. "But thanks."
"Ok," he said, sounding just a little disappointed. "Maybe I'll see you around. I'm Sandy Cohen, by the way."
"Kirsten," she said by way of an introduction, thinking that if she didn't give him a last name, he couldn't look her up.