NINETEEN

Kezia

The low buildings and wide streets of the neighborhood meant that the sun poured through the windows earlier here than it did in midtown, where most of her friends worked. They had irresponsibly glorious central air-conditioning as well. Elevators that weren’t freight elevators. They opened their company refrigerators to more than expired milk and Brasso. Even Victor worked for a proper company. Kezia checked her phone. She had texted Victor several times since they got back but had heard nothing in return, which was unusual. When they did communicate, she was the one who felt guilty for not getting back to him fast enough.

“Is everything okay?”

Sophie, the assistant in cowboy boots, had manifested, blinking at Kezia like a fawn. A fawn with tennis-ball thighs. Sophie wanted Kezia’s job. Goal attained, she could then crawl up Rachel’s vagina, curl up in her uterus, and go to sleep forever.

“Things seem tense. Is everything okay with the Starlight Express?”

Office antics with her fellow fawns had left Sophie with a metallic sticker on her forehead, a bindi fixed to the exact spot where a hunter might shoot her.

“Yeah, it’s nothing.” Kezia minimized her in-box.

“Do you need me to call anyone?” Sophie pressed her bindi.

She wore a Lucite ring that spanned four fingers, one of Rachel’s favorites.

“I think I have it covered,” Kezia said.

To soften the blow, she added: “I can’t believe I have to make another round of calls where I have to say ‘Starlight Express’ with a straight face.”

“I think it’s the most fabulous necklace Rachel’s ever created,” said Sophie, as if they were being bugged.

“Really? The most fabulous?”

“Totes gorge. I love the contrasting philosophies and materials, you know? Like, the way the colors of the enamel stars work in reverse juxtaposition with the crystal?”

Were they making the Kool-Aid in breathable form these days?

“Well, it’s broken.”

“Awww, it’s the clasp, isn’t it?” Sophie touched a prototype of the necklace, laid out like a corpse on Kezia’s desk. “Poor thingy. What happened to you?”

Sophie was a notorious over anthropomorphizer.

“Okay.” Kezia gestured at the corpse with a pencil. “It’s two things. It’s the weight that’s pulling on the jump rings on either side of the clasp. So the mechanism inside the clasp is shifting at an angle and getting stuck. Like a frozen seesaw. And to top it off, whole sections of the cloisonné sky are chipping like nail polish.”

“Oh.” Sophie ran her fingers over it. “She’s trying to hold hands and she can’t.”

Kezia could read her thoughts: This belongs in a doll hospital. I want your job! Bubbles!

“If you need me to research new vendors for you, I can,” she whispered, so as not to wake the necklace.

“Sophie, I’m not trying to be rude but we have access to the same database, do we not?”

Kezia was the one with the institutional knowledge here. She didn’t ask for it but she had it. She was the most senior employee and with great seniority came great encyclopedic knowledge of the database.

“Yeeeeah.” Sophie smiled with a passive aggressivity that was downright evil. “But relying on that is what got you here in the first place.”

“We should probably let her rest,” Kezia whispered.

“Totally,” Sophie whispered and skipped back to her desk.

She was only five years younger, but in these transient times, that was enough to be raised on an entirely different planet. She did not, for instance, know why saying “Starlight Express” a dozen times a day should induce embarrassment. She had never touched a roller skate. Not even a rollerblade. She had probably never seen a Broadway show. Kezia tried to focus. She had two weeks to locate a new vendor on this continent, factoring in shipping, approval, and Rachel calling from Tokyo at time-zone abhorrent hours to complain about bean paste. It was impossible. There were four factories in the world that made cloisonné jewelry and out of those four, three were on the same side of the same street in Paris and the fourth was on the opposite side.

She changed her IM status to “invisible” and opened up the database. She called a manufacturing company in Rhode Island but they weren’t sophisticated enough to handle this. There was a company in California, in Sacramento, a contact she thought was old. This was confirmed when an automated voice informed her the number was no longer in service. There was a company in Evanston, Illinois, that kept her on hold to the Empire of the Sun soundtrack for so long, she thought she might burst into tears. She put down the phone and took out supply catalogs from her desk drawer—pages upon pages of bezels and tubing. None of this would work. She leaned her hand on her palm and pressed the zit on her chin. She played with a paper clip, unbending it into a tiny weapon. Maybe she could just hand-paper-clip all 150 necklaces back together again.

Her phone beeped and she looked enthusiastically at it. She had given up on texting and called Victor, asking how much she owed him for the hotel room, which she was sure would force a response. But it was only Rachel: “Why is there no middle-finger emoji?”

In the far corner of the loft, Sophie was speaking brightly with their advertising coordinator, Hannah. Sophie and Hannah were both twenty-four. Did they ever wonder what would happen to their friendship ten years down the road? Would they lose each other’s phone numbers? If Caroline hadn’t invited Kezia to the wedding, she wouldn’t have flinched. Caroline was always prickly. She used to make snide comments about Kezia’s slender build, throwing in Grey as well. She did this as if it were mandatory punishment for having a decent metabolism. All the money in the world couldn’t buy you that and, in fact, bought you the reverse: Ladurée macaroons, salami from Italy, smoked fish from Barney Greengrass. Kezia’s stomach growled at the thought of those macaroons. The Marksons would bring them back from Paris with a note tucked under the green ribbon, instructing Caroline to eat them “right away.” This was one of Kezia’s fondest memories of Caroline, and it wasn’t even about her—it was about cookies.

“God, this thing’s been acting up lately.” Hannah yanked at the door to the freight elevator.

“Haven’t ya, big fella?” Sophie addressed the door directly.

The metal latch finally gave, the sound of it reverberating across the loft.

“Peace out, Special K!” said Hannah.

“Night,” Kezia mumbled.

At long last: silence. Kezia went to the bathroom, trained a can of air freshener directly on Saul’s butthole, and settled back into her chair. The company’s homepage featured a quote from Rachel. It appeared as the website loaded, before a customer was granted permission to “Enter the World of Rachel Simone.”

1% Loaded:	SOME PEOPLE ARE THE THREADS,
35% Loaded:	RUNNING THROUGH OUR HEARTS.
70% Loaded:	THEY WILL ALWAYS BE THERE.
75% Loaded:	OTHER PEOPLE ARE JUST BEADS ON THE THREAD . . .
98% Loaded:	LIFE IS ABOUT SEPARATING THE THREADS FROM THE BEADS.

Then the text faded and in its place, in all its rock-crystal-and-cloisonné glory, was the piece on which the company’s reputation rode: The Starlight Express.

With a violent click, she exited the World of Rachel Simone.