An Innocent Fashion by R.J. Hernández Read Free Book Online Page B

velvet buttons down her spine. As the heart monitor teetered on silence ( beep . . . beep . . . beep! ) I half-shouted, “I mean, really— Régine is a fashion magazine—how can it possibly be that hard?”
    At this, Sabrina pivoted just her head, so that her chin was pointed over her shoulder. “You think working at Ré gine would be not—that—hard?” The corner of her eyebrow flickered, a crack in her otherwise self-assured countenance. “All right,Mr. St. James, with the ‘great eye,’ who went to Yale —” I felt the soul of my dying dream approach the final threshold, as Sabrina pressed her ID card against the reader— beep!
    â€œMonday. Nine o’clock.” Without taking her eyes off me, she pressed her back against the Régine door, and with a final combative glare said, “Wear something deserving of your presumptuous sweat.”

chapter two
    I f I had possessed a greater sense of self-awareness, or a lesser sense of self-importance, I might have appreciated the perfect irony of my interview—that Sabrina Walker considered me inferior to the standard at Régine , when for the past four years I had entertained a kind of superiority complex toward the world.
    I hadn’t always been as confident as I was by the time I got to Yale. Despite my obsession with reading, or maybe because of it, I had been a terrible student throughout elementary and middle school; semester after semester spent suffering bossy, simpleminded teachers, who believed the height of knowledge was memorization and never had good answers to the important questions. There was no reason for me to think high school would be any better; based on the rumors, it promised to be much worse. Along with the rest of the incoming students, thecourse I dreaded most was Freshman English, taught by the infamous and decrepit Ms. Duncan, who was “too hard,” assigned too much homework, and failed more students than any other teacher. She ran her classroom like a ballet studio, in which the slightest flail at the barre was cause for ruthless admonition, and unlike the other “mean” teachers who redeemed themselves by selecting favorites, I’d never heard of anyone being spared by Ms. Duncan.
    Desperately hoping she wouldn’t pick on me, I took a seat in the back row of her class on the first day, as she prattled about her “rigorous standards” and distributed worn-out copies of The Great Gatsby . Pausing two desks in front of me, she caught my eye and gestured toward my suit, which admittedly distinguished me from my peers. “Looks like we have ourselves a Mr. Darcy,” she commented with a self-amused smirk.
    Having read Pride and Prejudice , and almost everything else by Jane Austen, I knew exactly who Mr. Darcy was, but lowered my gaze to the desk to discourage further negative attention.
    Ms. Duncan mistook my silence for a lack of comprehension. Raising a droopy brow, she sighed, “I should know better than to make literary references to illiterates.”
    I was one second flabbergasted, the next inwardly erupting like a furnace that had just been stoked. Who did she think she was to make such an assumption about me, when I had probably read more books than she had? My anger bubbled upward as she creaked slowly down the aisle and thrust a book on the student’s desk in front of me; I watched her long, woolen dress swing nearer, and before I could control myself Austen’s own words escaped through my teeth with the searing precision of a lighter’s flame: “‘Angry people are not always wise.’”
    Her wrinkled jaw dropped, then she recovered. “That’s a lineyou learned from the movie version, surely.” Her shadow fell onto my desk. “Let’s see how well you do writing ten-page literary essays based on terrible movie adaptions. You won’t be the first who tries, and you won’t be the