Free Box Girl by Lilibet Snellings

had scribbled a list of my monthly expenses: rent, utilities, car insurance, food.
    â€œIt will work,” I said, even though I knew damn well it wouldn’t. In fact, while interning at the magazine, I accrued an impressive (horrifying) amount of debt on a now-closed credit card.
    Even so, I loved it at Flaunt . In addition to housing a stable of extraordinarily talented writers, photographers, and designers, the magazine was known for throwing some of the most legendary parties in LA. The editor-in-chief was a fiery, five-foot-five Venezuelan man named Luis. His husband, Jim, was the art director. With a tanning-booth tan and black lacquered hair, Luis looked like he was made of wax. If the devil wore Prada at Runway , then the devil wore John Varvatos jeans and Chrome Hearts jewelry at Flaunt . Except that he was far from the devil, more like your favorite flamboyant uncle. He was hilarious and generous and kind, if not a little bit insane.
    Everyone was a little bit insane there—it was just the sort of chaos I had been craving. Dogs darted down the hallways, an unnamed cat lived in an upstairs closet, and everyone smoked cigarettes out of their office windows. Forget a scale in the kitchen or spare bikinis in the bathroom, more often than not, there was no toilet paper to be found. During my interview,the guy asking me questions was wearing high-top Converse and a pair of long johns under a pair of shorts. His wiry hair was pulled into an unkempt bun, and he would later show me, with pride, the “booger wall” next to his desk. The offices were smack in the center of Hollywood, on a traffic-choked street just south of Sunset Boulevard. I finally knew what Phyllis Diller meant when she said, “Living in Hollywood is like living in a lit cigarette butt.” But that, too, only added to the office’s filthy, fabulous, fraternal appeal.
    Yet after a year, I told them it was time for me to quit. I don’t know why I left. I probably should have stayed and asked them to give me a full-time position. Afterward, they told me they would have; all I had to do was ask. So taken by the free-flowing lifestyles of all the freelancers that surrounded me, I think I was scared of something so full-time. Thus, I made up my mind: I was going out on my own to become a freelance writer. In my deluded, twenty-four-year-old mind, I thought I could make a living doing this.
    Before I knew it, I had become one of those people who populated the freeway at midday; who thought it was just as normal to throw a birthday party on a Wednesday as it was on a Saturday; one of those work-from-homers who took up all the treadmills at the gym at two o’clock and were always talking about what project they were working on, though there were probably no projects at all.
    One day, soon after taking that terrifying, paycheck-less leap, a girlfriend called on her lunch break. She worked in finance in San Francisco. I raced to pick up before the last ring and said breathlessly, wrapped in a towel, “Hi, so sorry, I just got out of the shower.”
    â€œWhat do you mean you just got out of the shower?”
    â€œWhat do you mean what do I mean I just got out of the shower?”
    â€œIt’s two o’clock on a Tuesday.”
    And that’s when it hit me: I was, officially, unapologetically, one of them .
    Little did I know my timing for this transition could not have been worse. Within months, the bottom dropped out of not only the publishing industry, but the entire economy. Everyone in magazines was terrified of the Internet. “It’s the end of print,” they’d say. Many publications shuttered, and those that didn’t desperately strained to keep their pages above water. Magazines that used to pay me a dollar a word dropped that to ten cents, or in some cases, to nothing. During this period, I got an assignment from a small but reputable arts magazine to write a 500-word piece about a young,