I had been in Chicago for nine days when I figured out, in a single moment, that the cream blouse was wrong.

I was in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the building that housed the offices of Wickline & Co. The bathroom had three stalls, a long marble counter, two sinks with the kind of high gold faucets that you saw, in Dayton, only in the bathrooms of restaurants people went to for anniversaries. There were small succulents on the counter. There was a pump bottle of hand cream that smelled like figs. There was, on the wall above the counter, a sign in tasteful sans-serif type that said, simply, Hello.

I was washing my hands. The woman next to me was washing hers. The woman next to me was wearing a blazer that fit in the way that I had not, until that moment, understood that blazers could fit. The blazer had been made for her body. Her body had been made for the blazer. There was no give anywhere. There was no pull. The shoulders sat on her shoulders. The sleeves ended exactly at the wrist of the watch she was wearing, which was a Cartier, which I had never seen up close on a person who actually owned one. She had on a thin gold chain at her throat. She had on small careful gold hoops. She had on dark jeans that were not the dark jeans I had bought at the Kohl's at Eastown in Dayton in 2022. They were a different category of dark jeans entirely. They were the kind of dark jeans that cost three hundred dollars and that you bought once and then wore for a decade.

She glanced at me in the mirror. She gave me the polite small Chicago smile that I had been receiving since Tuesday at seven different coffee shops and from four people on the train and from one man in the elevator.

She left.

I stood at the sink with my hands under the hot water and I looked at myself in the mirror.

I was wearing the cream blouse.

I was wearing the cream blouse with the pearl-effect buttons and the small gather at the wrist that I had bought in 2022 at a Dressbarn before they closed the Dressbarn. I was wearing it with the gray slacks. I was wearing it with the navy cardigan. I was wearing it with the small gold earrings my mother had given me for my twenty-fifth birthday and a pair of dark flats I had owned since the second year of college.

I looked, in that bathroom mirror, at a perfectly competent woman from a small Midwestern city who had tried, on the morning of her ninth day in Chicago, to dress like the woman she had been on the morning of her last day in Dayton, because the morning of her last day in Dayton was the only set of clothes she had, and because nobody had warned her that the cream blouse, in the city she had moved to, was not a blouse but a uniform, and the uniform was visible from the river.

I dried my hands.

I went back to my desk.

My desk at Wickline & Co. was on the fourth floor of an old converted warehouse on Goose Island, in a long open room with exposed brick and high windows and twenty-two desks arranged in pods of four. My pod was in the back corner. I was sharing it with three people I did not know yet. Across from me was a girl named Hadley, twenty-four, copywriter, had been at Wickline since she graduated from the University of Michigan. Diagonally was a man named Dominic, twenty-nine, account manager, had come over from a bigger agency in Cleveland. To my left was an empty chair. The empty chair belonged, on the org chart, to a person who would turn out, on day eleven, to be Simone Alvarez. She was on her honeymoon-with-someone-she-had-not-actually-married. She had taken a week off to go to Mexico City with a man she had been dating for four months and was in the process of breaking up with, in slow elegant sequence, by means of being on vacation with him. I would not learn this for two weeks.

I sat down at the empty desk. I opened my laptop. I had been at Wickline for nine days. I had been given:

— a desk
— a laptop
— a corporate Slack account
— a pile of brand decks to read
— a single forty-minute one-on-one with Priya in which she had said, kindly, the first month is going to feel like drowning, and that is fine, you are allowed to drown
— a single twenty-minute one-on-one with Owen, the creative director, in which he had said, less kindly but still kindly, do not pretend you understand things that you do not understand. Ask me. Ask Priya. Ask anybody. Pretending will kill you.

I had also been given, by Annika Wickline, a single passing nod from across the floor on day three, and an email on day four that said only: Brooklyn — glad you're here. Get up to speed. We'll talk in October.

I had read the brand decks. I had read them at my desk. I had read them on the train. I had read them, at night, in the sublet in Logan Square, on the small wicker chair with my feet up against the radiator. I did not understand sixty percent of them. I understood, however, that this was the point. I had been hired into an agency where smart competent people had been doing smart competent work for ten years, and I was a junior brand coordinator from Dayton, and the gap was real, and it was my job to close it, and the closing was going to take a while.

The closing was going to take a while. That was fine. I was here.

The cream blouse, on the other hand, was a problem with a clearer solution.

At lunch I left the office. I walked four blocks through the part of Goose Island that had become, in the last six years, a quiet collection of agencies and architecture firms and small high-end coffee shops with wooden counters. I went to a coffee shop. I bought a cortado. I sat at the window. I looked at my checking account on my phone.

My checking account, after the relocation stipend and the deposit on the sublet and the U-Haul and the gas to drive the U-Haul and one tank of groceries and the new metro card, contained, in numerals, the kind of number that I had not had in my checking account since college.

I did not have the money to buy a new wardrobe.

I had, in the very back of the budget I had built in a Google Sheet in May, two hundred dollars I had set aside for clothing — emergency. I had not planned to use it on the ninth day. I had planned to use it in October, when the weather got cold.

I texted Tessa.

The cream blouse is wrong.

She wrote back inside ninety seconds.

Wrong how.

Wrong like. I am the only person in this building wearing a cream blouse from a Dressbarn.

Brook.

I do not have the money to fix this.

Brook.

What.

You walked into your first office wearing the only blouse you have. Of course you did. Now you know. Now you fix it. Two hundred dollars. Get a black blazer that fits properly. Get one pair of dark jeans you can wear with everything. Get one decent silk shell. Wear them every day for the next three months. People will not notice. People will only notice if you keep wearing the cream blouse. Stop spiraling. You are at lunch.

Yes ma'am.

Brook.

Yes.

You have been in Chicago for nine days. NINE. Nobody is even paying attention to you yet. They are all too busy trying to look like the people next to them. You are fine. Drink the coffee. Eat the lunch. Go back. We will fix the blouse this weekend.

I drank the cortado. I ate a small expensive sandwich. I walked back to the office. I sat back down at my desk. I read a brand deck.

I did not, that day, throw the cream blouse away.

I did, that weekend, take the train downtown to a Nordstrom Rack and spend one hundred and sixty-three dollars on a black blazer that fit, a pair of dark jeans that fit, and one decent silk shell in a deep navy. I wore the new uniform on Monday. Hadley said, in passing, cute blazer. I said, thank you. I did not say, this is the first item of clothing I have bought for myself, in my new life, with my own money, that I picked because I liked it and not because I could afford it.

It would not have been the kind of thing to say at a desk in a pod on a Monday morning at Wickline & Co.

It was, however, true.

I have kept the blazer.

I am wearing it, today, in the picture I am looking at while I write this.

It still fits.