Using My Friend's Cast-offs to Become Successful novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Charity Bag
At her birthday dinner Camryn hands Susie a dress and a paid placement she doesn't want, in front of everyone, and Susie takes both; at 6 a.m. her new boss opens the door and says she is not Camryn.
Camryn Ellingwood threw her twenty-first birthday dinner at a steakhouse on Newbury Street, and I paid for nothing.
That was the point.
Everyone at the long table knew it, because Camryn liked to say it out loud.
"Susie is my project," she told the waiter, with her hand on my shoulder. "She gets whatever I'm done with."
The whole table laughed.
I laughed too, because I had a scholarship, two dining hall shifts and a mother working nights in Worcester.
Laughing was cheaper than leaving.
Bea sat across from me with her red curls pinned up and her jaw set.
She had come as my plus-one and had not touched her wine.
"Ignore it," I mouthed.
Bea mouthed back a word that was not ignoring.
At nine, Camryn stood up and tapped her glass.
"Presents," she said. "But backwards. I'm giving."
A man in a black vest rolled in a cart with a garment bag and a cream envelope on top.
Camryn lifted the bag by its hanger and let it swing.
"Susie, come here."
I stood.
My shoes were two years old and my coat came from a church sale.
Every phone at the table was already up.
"This is the Marchetti dress," Camryn said. "I wore it once, to the gala. Once. It's yours."
She pressed the bag against my chest.
It smelled like her perfume.
"And this," she said, and held up the envelope, "is a placement at Amesbury Capital. Ten weeks, paid, seven thousand a month."
Somebody gasped.
"My mother set it up for me," Camryn said. "But finance is so boring, and I'd have to see my ex every day."
The table roared.
"So take it, Susie. You take everything I don't want, don't you?"
She said it sweetly.
She said it like a gift.
I looked at the phones, and at Bea's hand gripping her fork, and at the envelope.
Seven thousand a month was more than my mother cleared in two.
I could feel my face going hot, and I could feel everyone at the table waiting to see which girl I was.
The girl who cried, or the girl who grabbed.
I smiled.
"Thank you, Camryn," I said.
Then I took the envelope out of her hand, and the dress off her arm, and I looked right into the closest phone.
"I'll take that. And anything else you're tired of."
A beat of silence.
Then Camryn laughed, and everyone laughed with her, because it sounded like I was still her dog.
It wasn't what I meant, but I let them think so.
Outside, the cold hit my teeth.
Bea slammed her purse on the hood of a parked car.
"You said thank you," she hissed. "You said it to her face. She called you a leftover collector in front of her entire sorority."
"She did."
"And you smiled!"
"She handed me seven thousand dollars a month, Bea."
Bea opened her mouth and shut it.
I tore the envelope open under the streetlight.
The letter was on thick paper with a navy crest.
Amesbury Capital. Placement for a student analyst, ten weeks, paid. Start date: tomorrow, 6:00 a.m.
Tomorrow.
Under it was a handwritten address in blue ink.
It was not the office.
It was a residential street in the South End.
"That's weird," Bea said, reading over my arm. "Who starts at six at someone's house?"
"Someone who wants to see if I show up."
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Camryn.
"Don't get used to it. Everything I throw away, you get to wear for a while."
I read it standing in the cold with her dress over my arm.
My thumbs didn't shake.
I typed, "Then keep throwing."
I sent it before I could think.
Bea stared at me.
"Who are you?" she said.
"A girl who needs seven thousand dollars," I said. "Help me iron this."
We did not sleep.
Bea ironed the Marchetti dress on a towel on our dorm floor while I looked up Amesbury Capital on my phone.
Benedict Amesbury, thirty, managing partner.
His father had founded the firm and died two years ago.
There was one photo of him at a ribbon cutting, tall, dark hair, a grey stare that went through the camera.
There was one line in a society column from last spring.
"Amesbury is engaged to Camryn Ellingwood, daughter of the Ellingwood Foundation."
I sat very still.
That was the ex she did not want to see every day.
She had handed me her ex-fiance's firm.
"Susie," Bea said. "Don't go."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a trap."
"It might be," I said.
"And you're still going."
"I'm going."
At 5:40 a.m. I stood on a quiet brownstone street in the South End.
I wore the Marchetti dress under my church-sale coat, with the letter in my hand.
The block smelled like snow.
There was a brass number on a black door, and nothing else.
I knocked twice.
The door opened almost at once.
A man stood there in shirtsleeves with his cuffs rolled, a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other.
Dark hair.
Grey eyes.
A watch with a cracked leather strap.
He looked at me for a long moment, then past me at the empty street, then back.
"You're not Camryn Ellingwood," Benedict Amesbury said.
"No," I said.
Something moved in his face that was not disappointment.
"Good," he said, and stepped back to let me in.
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