The Washingtonienne Read Online Free PDF

with my hair parted perfectly to the side, on my way to get an internship in the United States Senate. I didn’t look like the sort of girl who fucked strange married men on conference tables at three o’clock in the morning.
    I found the Hart Senate Office Building and queued up for the security screening. I wondered if I would have to stand in line like this every day as I waited for each person ahead of me to clear. Maybe it was the southern or midwestern influence here, but people were so friggin’
slow
. And no one was yelling or complaining about it. I guess there was no rush to get to work.
    I threw my black boarskin Kate Spade bag onto the X-ray belt and stepped through the metal detector.
    Beeep!
    “It’s probably your shoes, ma’am,” one of the security guards said.
    Ma’am?
Was he talking to me?
    “You’ll have to remove your shoes, ma’am, and put them through the X-ray machine.”
    “Seriously?” I balked as a plain-looking girl wearing flats grumbled in line behind me.
    How unglamorous. So much for my Hill debut. Frown.
    Note to self: You can never wear Manolos as long as you work here.
    Or I could wear them anyway and use the security screening as an excuse for being late to work in the future! Fabulous.
    I returned through the metal detector, put my pumps back on, and immediately felt better. I despised that “taken-down-a-notch” feeling I got whenever I took my heels off.
    I click-clacked across the marble floor, looking up at
Mountains and Clouds,
the colossal Alexander Calder sculpture in the atrium. The looming steel mountain and the black metal clouds hanging overhead were so ominous-looking. I had never seen anything like it before .
    My phone suddenly went off, its Salt-N-Pepa “Push It” ringtone echoing throughout the marble hall. It was April calling to make sure I was on my way to the office.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    “I’m standing next to the big black thingy,” I told her.
    “I always hated that thing. It’s so big and scary looking, like something out of a nightmare.”
    “Exactly! It’s fabulous.”
    “I feel like shit,” she groaned.
    “Hungover?”
    “Big-time. And I’m still wearing your dress. By the way, people are loving it! The senator was in the office this morning, and he was checking me out!”
    “Maybe he’ll ask you out on a date.”
    I was kidding, but didn’t these things sometimes happen? At least, it was fun to think that they did.
    “I feel disgusting,” April continued. “I had to buy a toothbrush at the Senate convenience store when I came in this morning.”
    “The Senate has a convenience store? Where?”
    “It’s in the Dirksen Building. And isn’t it funny that they sell
toothbrushes
there? It’s like they know we’re all having one-night stands or something!”
    “Do they sell condoms?” I asked. “Because if they don’t, they probably should.”
    “Condoms? Oh, please. No one would be caught dead buying condoms here!”
    “Why not? Do senators only hire virgins or something? You would think that they would want people with
life experience
working for them, and that they’d want to keep you all disease-free.”
    “Shit, I have a call on the other line—fucking constituents!” April groaned. “See you up here soon. Bring coffee!”
    I looked around. I didn’t see a Starbucks anywhere, so I asked a security guard where I should go.
    “Two places: Dirksen or Russell,” he said, referring to the other two Senate office buildings. “The good coffee is in Russell.”
    He gave me directions to a pseudo-Starbucks called Cups. To get there from the Hart Building, I had to take the elevator to the ground level, where I crossed over into the Dirksen Building. Once inside Dirksen, I took the stairs down one flight to the basement level, at which point I circumvented the cafeteria, arriving at the hallway that connected Dirksen to Russell, where Cups was located, at the end of the hall.
    It took me about half an hour