Box Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

question, I can’t resist giving a ludicrous answer: “No.”
    â€œAre you serious?” they’ll ask. “For how long ?”
    â€œSeven hours,” I’ll say.
    â€œWhat?” they’ll demand. “How do you do that?”
    â€œSome Box Girls go in their pants, but I prefer to avoid liquid for twenty-four hours prior to my shift. Just dry out like a raisin,” I’ll say.
    Of course we are allowed to go to the bathroom.
    Like the questions, I also hear a lot of observations about, well, myself. One night, a young African American guy leaned over the counter and said to the male concierge, “She’s got a good booty for a white girl.” I lay there on my stomach, my booty behind me, stadium-like lights shining down upon it, and stared at my book, frozen. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Though I’m no expert, I’m fairly certain this means I have a “large” booty for a white girl.
    I much prefer the question I’ll hear if I’m lying very, very still: “Is she real?”
    This always makes me happy because I know mannequins don’t have cellulite.

Underdog

    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  BOX GIRL RULE #5: Ultimately this is a modeling job and you must take care of your body. If you have severe bruises, bandages, or casts, you must wait until your body is healed and then ask to be put on the schedule .
    My legs looked like a Jackson Pollock painting: several sharp slashes of red here (cuts from various thorny things), a drizzle of dots there (mosquito bites), a mysterious patch of puffy pinkness (poison ivy, probably). I emailed the box coordinator to get my shift covered. I didn’t explain why, saying only, “I don’t feel well.” I felt fine. But the problem was too hard to explain, especially to someone in Los Angeles, where there is no grass. My legs were torn up because my dad had asked me to mow the lawn a few days before, while I was home in Connecticut.
    My dad, firmly planted in the one percent, cuts his own grass. He says it’s good exercise, but let’s be honest: It’s because he doesn’t want to pay anyone else to do it. He is an old-school man who’s worked for every dollar he’s ever had andrefuses to waste a penny of it. My dad mows his own grass, drives his cars until the doors fall off, and organizes his own garbage to take to the dump.
    While he is happy to spend money on things he really cares about—family, food, golf, a good Scotch—he absolutely loathes wasted money. Hell hath no fury like my father when he found out a Blockbuster movie was turned in late and we were charged an extra dollar per day.
    He asked me to cut the grass because he had recently undergone knee surgery and couldn’t do it himself. His knee had been injured during a misunderstanding with a purebred Newfoundland in The Hamptons. He and my mom were spending a weekend with some friends who have a summerhouse in Southampton, and my dad was doing some late afternoon laps in the pool. Apparently his style of swimming—the two-armed flailing with a modified frog kick, which he calls “the backstroke”—alarmed the Newfoundland. (As it turns out, they are rescue dogs.) I can’t blame the dog, really, because with all the gasping for breath, the excessive splashing, and the arms straining over head, my dad’s backstroke does sort of look like he’s drowning. Called to action, the two-hundred-pound dog dove into the pool to save my dad. In fending off the giant Darth-Vader-looking beast, my dad tore his meniscus. This, of course, was devastating to his golf game, and he would later joke that the damn dog should be put down. I think he was kidding.

    In the fifth grade, my class created fish tanks out of two-liter soda bottles as a science project. This was every student’s favorite part of the whole year because we got to take home the tanks—and our