Not My Type (3 page)

“I’ll look this over in
my
room while you take a shower. Because you stink,” she added, in case I’d forgotten. Nice. A double dig.

I didn’t bother answering, instead heading for the stairs. A shower sounded great. Thirty minutes later, I walked back into Ginger’s room to find her curled up in an overstuffed beanbag in the corner where I used to keep my desk. I flopped onto her bed and stared at the ceiling where she had pinned up a poster of the
Glee
cast. “It doesn’t bother you that these people stare at you while you sleep?”

“It’s not your room anymore, so mind your own business,” she muttered, absorbed in my résumé.

“I thought you were going to look that over while I showered,” I said.

She didn’t look up. “I had to do my nails first.”

I amused myself while I waited by judging all the choices she had made in decorating “the room that used to be mine.” A mirror sat atop my old pine dresser, now painted a soft pink. Ticket stubs and wallet-sized pictures of her friends were tucked into the mirror’s frame, and a souvenir pompom in NVHS blue and white hung off the corner. A pleasant pastel jumble of nail polishes in light pink, medium pink, and every shade in between covered one edge of the dresser top, and the rest was covered with bottles of body sprays, hair products, half-used lipsticks, and several folded notes.

“I thought texting destroyed the art of passing notes,” I said.

“It depends on whether your teacher will confiscate your cell phone if they catch you. Or if you have friends whose lame parents won’t let them have cell phones.” She didn’t look up from my résumé.

“Ah.” The wall the bed rested against used to host a collage of my snapshots from happier days, pre-breakup. Now it held two shelves of Ginger’s dance trophies, plus a pair of battered, bedazzled jazz shoes.

I shook my head, wondering how we could be so different. I owned exactly three bottles of nail polish, all from the OPI Rocker Chick line. I figured a bar of Dove soap and a ninety-two-cent tube of Wet-n-Wild Cinnamon Spice lipstick, with a little mascara thrown on for special occasions, constituted a reasonable beauty routine. My guilty pleasure is funky jewelry. It used to clutter the space now full of Ginger’s hair products. I can’t resist handmade pieces, and the Circus Cookie box that holds mine runneth over on the much smaller dresser in my shared room.

The wall behind Ginger illustrated the biggest difference of all. When it was mine, it had held my growing collection of used paperbacks I’d picked up from secondhand bookstores and yard sales. But I’d boxed them up months ago and put them in the garage in anticipation of the post-marriage move that never happened. Ginger, who was amazing with anything involving her hands, had taken down my shelves and painted a really cool stylized mural of Rapunzel letting down locks of rich brown hair. As much as I missed seeing my old friends lined up, waiting to be read, I kind of loved the mural, a fact I would never, ever share with her. She already had an inflated ego.

“I’m done,” she said.

“And? Do I pass?”

“You got all the formatting right,” she admitted. I could tell she was bummed that she didn’t have anything to criticize, but I can use a Word template with the best of them.

“Thanks. I know how to write a résumé,” I said. “You can give it back now.”

“You don’t know how to write a
good
résumé,” she corrected me.

“You just said yourself that I got it right.” I stretched out on her bed and smacked her with my foot in the process. Accidentally, of course.

“I said you got the formatting right, but the stuff in it is pretty lame.”

“Sorry I haven’t lived a more fascinating life so I could write a more interesting résumé for you.”

She thumped her head on the wall behind her. “You are so oblivious. You’d think an
English major
would be a little more creative and descriptive than this.”

“I can only write down the stuff I’ve done, Ginger. What do you want me to do? Add my four years in the White House that never happened?”

She rose to her knees and shuffled over to the bed. “Look at this,” she said, pointing at my entry for the two years I’d spent on the
North Valley Gazette.
“You really think some big-shot Salt Lake paper is going to care that you wrote for a high school newspaper in Pleasant Grove? No, they’re not.”

“If I take that off, then I don’t have anything journalism related.”

“You don’t have to take it off. You have to make it sound better.” She held her hand out like a surgeon requesting a scalpel. “Pen!”

I slapped one from her nightstand into her outstretched palm. “You’re ridiculous,” I said.

“Shut up,” she said. “I’m trying to prove to Mom that I really do have nice bonding moments with you.”

“Nice bonding moments? Does she want me to mentor you to improve your attitude or something?” It sounded like something my parents would dream up.

“If she did, would she tell me that? No. I’m supposed to be, like, helping you or something so you’re not a total recluse. It’s lame, but you know how Mom is when she wants you to do something. It’s easier to pretend you agree than to listen to the nagging.” She grumbled the last part with an air of distraction as her pen scribbled furiously across the page. Geez. My one-page résumé was turning into a novel because I knew when she handed it back I’d be staring at some pretty spectacular fiction.

“Wait, Mom thinks
you
need to fix
me
?”

Ginger glanced up. “What? You don’t think you need fixing?”

“I know I do, but why on earth would they think
you
could do it?” And I fell back on her bed, laughing.

Ginger glared at me and waved my résumé. “I have written proof of exactly how little you’ve accomplished in your life up to this point. Do you really think you have more going on than I do?”

I sighed. “No. But if I don’t laugh that my seventeen-year-old sister has more going on than I do, I will cry. Big, fat, bitter tears.” How lame is my life that my mom thinks Ginger has something to teach me? I decided not to digest that on account of how the idea would probably choke me.

“So you admit that I’m as qualified as anyone to help you with this sorry glimpse into your life?” She crumbled it, eyeing me defiantly. I said nothing until she was done and it rested in her palm, a pitiful white wad of paper.

“I can just reprint it, you know.”

She chucked it at me. “I was being dramatic.”

“No!”

“You could use a little more drama,” she said. “Part of the reason your life is so lame is you’re pouty all the time. Nobody likes a moper, Pepper.” She scooted over and snatched the paper wad back. “Flipping the cake over was the most interesting thing you’ve done since Lan—”

“Don’t say it!” I snapped.

“Whatever. But you should totally take my advice since I’ve pretty much got my whole future figured out and you don’t.”

The sad thing is that while anyone else who said that would sound like they were bragging, Ginger was right. She’d taken every business-related class North Valley High offers, not to mention her part-time job at the salon. Given her natural sense of style and unflappable self-confidence, she was well on her way to making her future happen sooner than later.

Which was nice for her but depressing for me.

“Fine. What do you suggest I do with this résumé, then?”

“You have to tweak it. I read your blog sometimes,” she admitted grudgingly. “You can be creative when you want to. Like here,” she pointed to the crumpled résumé where I had entered my experience as a features writer. “It doesn’t have to say North Valley High School student newspaper. It can say you wrote for a Utah Valley regional newspaper.”

“I’m not going to lie, Ginger. You better not be doing this kind of thing on your résumé either. Is that the kind of stuff your teacher has been instructing you to do?”

She stared at me, unmoved. “What’s the lie? I’m just suggesting you be less specific than ‘student newspaper.’ Or you can be all uptight and precise and never get a job. I guess you have to decide how much you love Handy’s.”

Ouch. I cleared my throat. “Any suggestions for how to spin managing a sandwich shop?”

She grinned. “A few . . .”

Forty minutes later, I plucked a fresh copy of my résumé off the printer in my dad’s office. The professional-looking document bordered on fiction, but it contained no actual lies, and in this job market, I knew I would need every edge I could get. Time to send it out and see whether my pessimism or my parents’ optimism would triumph.

For once, I wouldn’t mind being wrong.

* * *

I sat in my office at the back of the store and stared at the wall, willing the curling sticky notes left by managers past to rearrange themselves in a way that would suddenly clarify how to handle the food orders for Handy’s. I had just spent a half hour placating a customer who was irate that there weren’t any sprouts available for her sandwich. Who knew we’d have a run on sprouts during the lunch rush? I hated ordering for the store almost as much as I hated trying to figure out payroll. Maybe more since I couldn’t ever get the food orders exactly right. Payroll eventually added up after much weeping and wailing and smacking the computer monitor. Ordering was more like playing darts blindfolded.

I desperately wanted to be done with Handy’s, now more than ever, since all of this job searching had planted the seed of escape. I’d barely begun submitting my résumé three days ago, and I knew it would take time for it to get into the right hands, but as I agonized over how many tomatoes we really needed for the next week, I wondered how I could stand the wait. I’d sent it to every single paper I could Google in a fifty-mile radius, including the
Advocate
and the
Bee,
much to my mother’s delight.

I stared down at the order sheet in front of me. How much mayonnaise did I need? Probably extra in case Brady and friends showed up again. What about bell peppers? And mustard packets? And toilet paper for the restroom?

Kill me now.

My cell phone rang in the middle of a desperate attempt to forecast our sliced turkey needs using the quadratic equation and a rain dance. I didn’t recognize the phone number but would probably accept a collect call from the state prison if it got me out of ordering for a few minutes.

“This is Pepper,” I said into the phone.

“Pepper, this is Tanner Graham from the
Bee.
I received your resumé and wondered if you would be available to come in for an interview this week.”

I hopped up and did a three-second jig before I said calmly, “Sure. When should I come in?”

“I know it’s short notice, but could you make it in tomorrow?”

“I can do that. When should I be there?”

He gave me the details, and I scrawled them down on a scrap piece of paper, my fingers tingling with excitement. It wasn’t the
Advocate
, but it was light-years better than Handy’s Dandy Sandwiches. When I hung up after the most professional good-bye I could muster, I squealed. It didn’t matter that I sounded like a nine-year-old Justin Bieber groupie; only the forlorn papers tacked haphazardly all over the office walls were there to witness my happy dance.

Then I began the freak out: what to wear, what to wear, what to wear?

* * *

“You don’t have anything to wear.”

Leave it to Ginger to cut to the chase.

I knew it was bad when instead of shushing her, my mom ordered her to help me find an outfit. Of course I have clothes to wear. I have a closet full of clothes that are great for going to a cool little dive and listening to live music. But to Ginger’s point, I didn’t have anything that screamed, “I’m a grownup journalist. Hire me.” And I really, really needed clothes that said that.

In my room, she dug through the dresses crammed into my side of the closet. Rosemary bounced on her Strawberry Shortcake comforter and watched, beside herself with the joy of sister bonding. A dark purple dress flew over Ginger’s shoulder.

“I like that one!” Rosemary said.

“Too funky,” Ginger responded without turning around. My favorite denim skirt and a bright green sundress joined it.

“You’re making a mess,” I complained.

“So? I don’t have to clean it up, and I need to make room in here,” she said without turning around. She yanked out a plaid skirt and stared at it critically. It nearly joined the pile on the floor before I could snatch it from her.

“This is a great skirt,” I said. “This could totally work.”

Ginger snorted. “Maybe if you’re going to work at
Emo Kid Weekly
. I thought you said the goal was to dress like a grownup.”

“It is, but I don’t want to dress like a creepy Stepford wife. I’d like to still look like me.”

“There will be time for that later,” she said. “Right now, you need to look like a reporter for the
Bee.
You keep picking stuff like you’re interviewing at the
Advocate.
The
Bee
is going to have a much more conservative vibe.” She pulled out a black pencil skirt. “This is a start. Put it on.”

I did, pulling it on with the
Goonies
T-shirt I was already wearing. Ginger turned around with another blouse in her hand.

“Knowing you, you would probably wear it just like that,” she said. I grinned, not arguing, and she rolled her eyes and thrust a shirt at me. “Try this. If we had one more day to go shopping, we could find something better for you, but this will have to do.”

I stripped off my
Goonies
tee and slipped my arms into the button-down blouse she’d handed me. It was plain white and boring. “I’d rather wear all black,” I said.

“No.”

I saved my breath rather than argue.

“We have to work on shoes next,” she said. “None of yours is going to do.”

“They’re going to have to,” I said. “I can’t borrow any before tomorrow.” Ginger and my mom had ridiculous size-seven feet. I wear a nice, normal nine. Which is to say, I’m jealous of their small feet. At least we’re pretty much the same size in everything else.