Free Plus by Veronica Chambers

“I think I can get seven. Which after commission means you still clear more than twenty.”
    Okay, Bee, I thought, you’re good at math. They couldn’t possibly mean seven dollars a day. They must mean seven hundred a day. But seven hundred a day for a three-day shoot is a little more than two thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money, especially for someone who’d never modeled before.
    I looked down at the contract and saw all the zeros and then it hit me. “Five” was five thousand. A day. American. And I’d just negotiated my way up to “seven,” which was seven thousand. A day. American.
    “Cool,” I said, trying to play it off as if I made that kind of cheddar all the time, when in reality they were going to pay me half of my tuition for three days’ work. I took a deep breath and said, “Where do I sign?”

    I walked all the way from Bleecker Street in SoHo to my apartment on 118th Street. I passed a gazillion stores, and I kept wanting to run in and buy something. It was freezing cold, but I didn’t feel a thing. I was rich! I was filthy, stinking rich! I didn’t have to worry about charging that stuff from Victoria’s Secret, Laura Mercier, and Forever 21 on my dad’s card. I could pay him back.
    Seven thousand dollars a day. Three-day shoot. One day of travel on either end. I got paid for those days too. That was thirty-five thousand dollars. The agency took fifteen percent, and Leslie said I’d have to put a third away for taxes, but still. I’d clear twenty thousand dollars for five days’ worth of work. No wonder rich people thought it was gauche to talk about money. I didn’t tell a soul. Could not get the words— twenty thousand dollars —to come out of my mouth.
    At Fifty-ninth Street, I decided to walk through the park. Central Park is the best place in New York to go when it’s cold and snowy. It’s always packed, like an urban Disneyland—full of kids and people sledding and ice skating. I even saw this guy on cross-country skis once. I thought about going to Italy: flying business class, staying at a fancy hotel. It sucked that I couldn’t bring a friend, but it was worth a try. Leslie had said that with the money I earned, I could “take my boyfriend to Puerto Rico.”
    Maybe that’s what I would do. When I did the job and showed Brian the magazine, he would take me back and I could invite him on a romantic weekend getaway to Puerto Rico. I wouldn’t even have to tell Chela until I was sure that Brian and I were completely solid. If things worked out with me and Brian, she wouldn’t get mad at me. She was my friend, and your friends always want what’s best for you, right?

    The next day I went to see my adviser. She said that she couldn’t excuse me from a week’s worth of classes but that students with professional careers were not uncommon at Columbia. She said that I needed to go to each of my professors, explain that I had a job in Italy, and ask if they could please give me the course work to complete in advance. This was fine with everyone except for my physics prof, Petra Trotter.
    I’m not just saying this because physics is kicking my ass. Prof Trotter is a strange bird. She’s Canadian, which means she speaks English perfectly fine, but she says things like “aboot” instead of “about.” She also grew up in the wilderness of Canada, which she talks about all the time, like it’s the reason she’s a math genius. Actually, her childhood in the wilds of Canada is the reason she’s such a freak. She’s always making faces, weird, exaggerated faces like the kind you make behind someone’s back or when you’re mimicking an animal at the zoo. Case in point:
    I said, “Professor Trotter, I’ve got a job in Italy, and I need to be gone from Monday through Friday of next week.”
    Professor Trotter scrunched up her mouth and sniffed, like she smelled something terrible or she was a baboon at feeding time. “Well, what’s that aboot, eh?”
    I said,