Chapter One

~Nicole~

“Thank you so much for answering all of our questions, we’ll give you a call soon to let you know what we’ve decided.”

“Thank you,” I said, standing and offering my hand. “I very much look forward to hearing from you.” Except they weren’t going to call me. I knew it, my interviewer knew it, and I was sure the woman at the front desk knew it.

“No problem. If you want to step outside, the receptionist will show you out.”

“Of course.” I gave them a polite smile, trying not to let my expression falter until I was back outside at the relative safety of the bus stop.

I had been doing great, answering all their questions sincerely and I had the relevant experience, but the entire interview I could tell that something was off. Most likely they had already hired their quota and were just interviewing me as a backup if someone didn’t show up.

Dammit!

I’d been trolling around Vegas for two weeks and I didn’t even have a place to live yet. And I couldn’t find a place to live without a job. Sure, maybe I could have planned my departure from my hometown a little better, but I didn’t see why that was interfering with people wanting to hire me. People moved, didn’t they? All the time!

Well, I could always be wrong. Maybe they would call me in two days and give me the job offer. But I doubted it. After so many interviews, I had managed to get a sense of when I was gelling with the interviewer or not.

I sighed and checked my watch. I still had one more meeting before I could run away to my hostel for the night. If there was one thing I was grateful for in this entire situation, it was cheap boarding in the city.

But money was running out and I couldn’t stay there forever. I needed a job and I needed it ASAP. Sure, I was saving tons by having a track phone and only riding public transportation, but I needed more money in and less money out.

I just had to cross my fingers and hope that the next interview would be the one.

I looked at my phone again. I could still just barely connect to the café’s wifi that was at the corner of the street. Pulling up the bus schedule, I had about a half an hour wait until my ride came.

Well, that was no problem. After living in the frigid Northeast for so long, I was happy to just sit out and soak up some sun.

But not without proper protection, of course. I pulled out some sunscreen from my purse and slathered my shoulders, my knees and my shins, which were all of my general burn zones. Unfortunately, I did have to leave my face bare, as I had been allergic to sunscreen there since I was a wee little girl.

It was not a pleasant experience discovering it, believe you me, but I had quickly learned to never put anything with an SPF on my face again.

Instead, I relied on big, floppy hats, which I promptly pulled out of my bag after replacing the sunscreen. Looking around, I found a nice tree to sit under on one of the medians in the parking lot and went about people and traffic watching.

Vegas certainly was different from home, but that was what I was looking for, wasn’t it? Something so far away and so different that nobody could know who I was or the baggage following along behind me.

When I had first arrived, I had imagined neon everything. And while I hadn’t been entirely wrong, the farther away from the strip one traveled, the more everything just started to look tired and desert-like.

Not that that was a bad thing. The tiredness told a story. Ones of gambling and mobs and dreams both conquered and dashed. This was the kind of place someone could fall in love with or be crushed by. I just hoped that I was the former.

The people were something else too. So many tanned, toned bodies, and people who seemed to already look like movie stars. While I knew I was no ugly duckling, these people made me feel frumpy, pasty and awkward.

But that was okay. The last thing I was looking for now was a relationship. But I couldn’t help but think that, once I was gainfully employed, that I might dye my hair a crazy color like all of the unicorns and mermaids all around me.

At least my skin color wasn’t what made me stand out. After growing up in a small, Podunk town in the middle of nowhere, being half Asian had made me stand out almost as bad as ‘that one black kid’ that was at our school for one year before transferring. But in Vegas… well everyone was a different color and no one looked twice at the mixed-race woman getting on the bus.

Speaking of the bus, I was pretty sure that I saw my number rounding the corner. Had it been a half hour already? Time certainly flew! I felt like it was the first break that I had gotten all day and it was over.

Oh well, all of the nose to the grindstone business would pay off when I had a job and an apartment. I just had to tough it through the uncomfortable parts.

And if there was one thing I knew about myself, it was that I could tough out pretty much anything on my own. A lesson I had learned as a child, and I hadn’t forgotten it since.

***

I looked up and down at the ramshackle building in front of me. Latching onto the wifi of the nearby McDonalds, I double checked the address and saw that yes, indeed it was.

“That doesn’t bode well…” I murmured to myself, pacing back and forth in front of it.

The windows were all beige with dirt and the venetian blinds were either crooked or broken. The front door had no sign and there were only two cars in the parking lot.

…Oh dear. I knew that this couldn’t be good, but what choice did I have? Sighing, I opened the front door and headed in.

Only to find no one inside.

There was a front desk, alright, but it was completely empty, and there was a nice layer of dust all over everything. I walked around the room a couple of times and everything looked unused and incredibly old.

“Ah! May I help you?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin and whipped around, my heart in my throat. I saw there was a man standing at a door at the other side of the room, a sleezy car salesman smile on his face.

“I’m here for an interview.” I said, regretting the words as they left my mouth.

“Ah, yes! Nikki, right?”

“Nicole.” I corrected.

“Nicole, of course, I should have remembered! Right this way.” He gestured for me to follow him down the hall and I did, wondering if this was how I got axe murdered.

He led me to an office that was almost as dusty as the front area, and the chair I sat in was creaky as all get out. It was about as uncomfortable as I could physically get without being directly attacked, but I pasted on my customer service smile and readied myself for the questions.

“So, is the call center at another location?” I asked, looking around. I could already tell there wasn’t one here. There was no humming of the servers, or sounds of workers, or even toilets flushing. And call center employees took a lot of bathroom breaks. It was the only way to escape the monotony of taking call after call on a headset with people who forgot that you were human.

“Great question!” Double uh-oh. “In the modern word with email, texts and social media, we realized the call center set up was inherently dated. So, we decided to throw the old paradigms away and start up entirely new!

“You see, if you want to stand out nowadays, you have to stand out. And we think the best way to stand out is to meet face to face with our consumers! Connect with them on a personal level, you know?”

I looked flatly at him, smile sliding from my face. “This is a door to door sales gig, isn’t it?” I asked dryly.

“Oh, I can understand why you might think that from the outside looking in, but I think you’ll find that we’re tightly knit family hoping to expand our communities into-”

There were a lot of sucky things in life I could tolerate but being duped for an interview was not one of them. Man, I should have noticed all the red flags, but I was so desperate…

“Thank your time, but I’m not interested in canvassing or door to door sales.” I stood up and offered my hand, only for the man to start blustering.

“We’re really not-”

Ugh. I could see that he was still trying to pull the wool over my eyes and slide that sales grease all over me. If there was one thing that I had learned in my year and a half of call center work, there was a good way to sell things and a bad way, and this guy was screaming the bad way.

“You have a good day now.” I said, dropping my hand and turning around to leave.

I was able to find my way out, the man following me the whole time and telling me that I was making a mistake, but I ignored him.

He was lucky I didn’t pop him one. But thankfully, I had gotten most of my temper issues out when I was a young kid who was tired of being called racial slurs on the playground.

By the time I made it to the door, he was screaming at me that I would regret my choice, but I was so done. Rage and disappointment mixed inside of me, making me more nauseous than anything else.

Walking back over to the McDonalds, I logged into their wifi and checked the bus schedule.

“Well isn’t it my lucky day,” I groused to myself, seeing there was going to be an hour and a half until a bus came by that I could take to another bus before finally getting to the neighborhood where my hostel was.

Or… I could take a bus in fifteen minutes right down to the strip and get drunk in a casino bar just for being there.

…that was a good way to accidentally spend too much, but honestly, I needed the break.

Treating myself to a cold glass of water and the cheapest food item they had, I headed back to the bus stop.

I could start everything over tomorrow. For tonight, I just wanted to forget.