Bella shifted nervously in the back of the elevator as it climbed ever higher, stopping every few floors to let well-dressed businesspeople off. She checked her reflection in the paneled mirrors, adjusting the hem of her pencil skirt, smoothing back her long blonde ponytail, checking her makeup, and generally worrying about her appearance. She needed this job. The interview had to go perfectly. She couldn’t afford another failure.
Though she was only in her second year of college, she had switched her major a half a dozen times. Nursing was too gross, pre-veterinary classes were too hard, English was too much work, and she had tried education only to learn she couldn’t stand children in large groups. On top of that, she had never been very good at school. She had begun to form a sneaking suspicion that her high school teachers had let her sneak by with B’s and C’s only because she was sweet and pretty. She had been put on academic probation, and her parents refused to pay for another semester until she figured out what she wanted to do. She had moved out of the dorms into a house with five other girls, and desperately searched for something to pay her share of the rent that she could apply for with her meager qualifications. She filled out nearly fifty applications, only hearing back from five, all of them turning her down. It was with fading hope and a drained bank account that she clicked submit on the application for a personal secretary at the BlueStar marketing firm, accepted the call for an interview with a wavering voice, and now rode the elevator to the sixty eighth floor of the downtown skyscraper in her best interview clothes.