1Damn it! My best you'd-be-a-fool-not-to-hire-me blouse is now soaked with some idiot's french vanilla. This is what happens when you don't move into town long enough to unpack before your major interview. This is what happens when you stop at the corner Starbucks twenty minutes before said major interview. The only other shirt I can find in the stacks of unopened, moving boxes is a bright, tangerine nightmare given to me from an aunt three Christmases ago. A little, low cut number that looks like a reject from Michael Flatley's closet. I don't know why I still have it. It should have been tossed somewhere along the many, many highways between my hometown and Jersey. I can't go topless! This will have to do. I wouldn't have gotten this 2,000 miles away job offer if they were going to hire me for my sense of fashion.

I marched into the lobby five minutes before I needed to be in Dr. Lisa Cuddy's office. A sense of impending doom fell upon me, and I'm certain that the failing alarm clock, and the coffee incidents this morning weren't flukes, but in fact elements of a spectacularly horrible theme that will be this day. No, no I can't think like this. I have a second chance, out of Iowa, and away from the past. This will be different. I'm siking myself up for it and can't believe myself when I smile at the receptionist as she points me to the elevators.

"You're way off!" I hear someone practically scoff in my direction, as I'm marching towards the elevators. I turn around to see a man with a cane, indeed, talking to me. He's above six feet tall, has dark hair that's beginning to lighten up in spots, and penetrating blue eyes. I realize that for the first time, in an incredibly long time...forever...I'm attracted to a man before I catch myself. I'm ashamed. "Pardon?"

"You're extremely off." He repeats his assertion, this time using "extremely" as if the situation was somehow bleaker. "Don't let the flashing red lights outside fool you. Unless you have a ping pong ball that you can't dislodge yourself, you're in the wrong district." He rubs the t-shirt beneath his jacket between his middle and forefingers to insinuate my own shirt. Then pops two tell-tale white pills into his mouth straight from the bottle. I notice the almost laughing, jeering shine in his ocean, blue eyes now, but can't tell if he is joking or high.

If it weren't for the last half hour I've had, or the morning I've had, or the moving here, or the last three miserable, desolate years I'd had, I might have pitied him and walked away. But I can't, this was the last emotionally emetic experience on the camel's back, and I was glad to unleash my burden upon this jerk. "Perhaps then, you could point me in the right direction! For in your drug induced state it seems that you think I resemble a prostitute that has turned you down! Thank-you but unnecessary! If I ever require your solicitude I'll send up the gimp signal!" Every couple
of words my voice becomes louder until I found that I'm yelling. I blush slightly and turn on my heel to the elevator doors.

I couldn't feel him move behind me immediately, and assumed that I had stunned him immobile. He never attempted to respond as I waited for the door to open. It seem like forever, until they whooshed apart and I could step in, when I turned around to press the button, I saw him staring hard at me but with a slight smile at his lips. He moved to join me inside. As if predicting his movement I held my palm up to hinder him. "Don't even think about getting on with me." Me eyes telling him of all the unholy hell I would unleash on him if he tried.

I was so relieved to be alone on the ride up. I was about to have the interview of a lifetime, and all of a sudden I felt like I could cry. It wasn't the weird argument with the crazy man down stairs, as much as the upheaval of so many feelings all coming at me at once. Even though the awful words I'd just spoken were beneath me and I regretted them the moment they left my mouth. I didn't have time to analyze what had just happen or to beat myself up about it for the next three days starting this second. I needed to focus on the task at hand...focus on the good. I made it. I'm here. I'm moving on.