The Department of Lost & Found Read Online Free PDF Page B

and pajama bottoms and reemerged with the towel wrapped around my head. “I can’t believe that you did this!” I was sixteen all over again and my mother had just called my swim coach and told her that they were pulling me from the team so that I could focus on my SATs. It’s not that I loved swimming, and truly, it wasn’t even that I didn’t want to focus on my SATs (after all, no one became president with lousy SATs . . . or so I thought at the time), but it was all so typical: her making decisions about me, for me, whether I wanted to quit swimming or not.
    My mother eyed me coolly. “The senator and I both spoke with Dr. Chin. And this is how it’s going to be, so don’t waste your energy screaming at me. You need to preserve what you have right now.”
    “Why are you butting in?” I pulled the towel off my head, throwing it on the couch. “This is totally ridiculous. It’s my life . I The Department of Lost & Found
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    know what’s best for me, and cutting myself out at work is not what’s best for me .”
    My mom moved forward to kiss my cheek. “Honestly dear. I really don’t think that you know what’s best for you.” And then she took my father’s hand and walked out the door, leaving me there shaking from rage, damp hair, and the side effects of chemo.
    A month later, with nothing much to show for my time off other than accumulated knowledge of The Price Is Right, I knew with more certainty than ever that my mother barely knew me, much less knew what was best for me.
    Now, back at the office, as the gold-mirrored elevator doors opened, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the buzzing of the junior aides in their cubicles or the pulsing of the incessantly ringing phones. No, it was a foul, fetid rotting smell. I gulped down a pocket of air and tried to breathe through my mouth as I made my way through the maze of cubes to the senator’s office at the opposite end of the floor. When we first moved in, Dupris had attempted to make the space look luxurious—I convinced her that it certainly wasn’t illegal to allocate the extra campaign money for renovations—but regardless of how she dressed it up, it still looked like a drab, lifeless void . . . except for the toiling of the actual live bodies. Staid white cubes were laid out like honeycomb; bluish-grayish carpeting hid linoleum tiles on the floor; fluorescent bulbs glared down from above, highlighting our omnipresent purple under-eye circles.
    Blair was laughing into her earpiece when I reached her desk.
    She pushed her blond bob behind her ears, then held up a finger and mouthed, “One second,” when she saw me. “Love you, too,”
    she said, before she clicked off. “Sorry.” She looked up at me and beamed. Clearly a new boyfriend.
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    a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h
    At twenty-two, fresh out of Georgetown, Blair still had the naïveté to be caught up in the throes of young Manhattan love, which would inevitably get stomped into the ground as soon as one of them got too drunk one night and made out with another twenty-two-year-old in a basement bar with pulsing music and far too many candles to legally pass any sort of fire code. “I told him not to call me here, but, you know how it is . . .” She waved her manicured hand in front of her.
    “It fucking reeks in here. What the hell is going on?” I peered down, ignoring her idealistic romanticism.
    “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. Yes, yes, I know.” The blood drained from her face. “Um, a pipe burst three days ago, and um, water seems to have gotten underneath the carpet. So, um, it seems to have, um, mildewed. The cleaners are coming tonight after work.”
    “Whatever.” I sighed and looked toward Dupris’s door. “Can I go in?”
    Blair bit her lip. “You just missed her actually.” Her voice rose an octave, as she jumped out of her chair and tripped over one of the legs. “Natalie, I’m so sorry! I tried to tell her that you were coming in, but she said that she