Ginger moved to Chicago the week after graduation.
Her hasty introduction to the big city was just the sort of radical event that had begun to happen to her lately. For the first time in her life, she was impulsive. Unhinged from the watchful eyes of roommates, friends and love interests, she felt both lonely and free. But she loved the city, loved the energy, loved the masses of people rolling like waves over the sidewalks, eclipsed by the towers.
She still thought fondly of college: the breezy days spent lying in the grass, a paperback broken open beside her, eyes drinking in the words she craved with such relentless lust. She had been a popular girl, never lacking in dates and never paying for anything. But she did not hop from one bed to another. Instead she was elusive, playful and aloof. Most guys found her too brainy to be tolerated long-term, despite their admissions that she was one of the hottest women on the entire campus. College life was a lazy one, and Ginger was a chameleon. She could scarcely recall a situation where she did not absorb and emulate the scene around her. It was not a conscious decision for her to do this, but she was extremely self-aware, and thus she had noticed this trait.
It surprised her that, inexplicably, a week before graduation, she rapidly packed her bags and scoured the internet for a Chicago apartment. She found one in a neighborhood called Lincoln Park, which was near an actual park. While she enjoyed college and still indulged in its memories, she had felt that it was finished with such a sense of finality that she had no problem tossing herself headlong into this new life — the urban life.
She took to it with ease. She discovered an Austrian bakery not far from her apartment, visiting it each Sunday morning for breakfast pastries. She spent a couple Saturdays on Michigan Avenue, acquiring items that underscored her developing cosmopolitan taste, a taste she had largely repressed since her modeling days. But now it yearned to escape her, craved to be manifested in her purchases and it swelled her wardrobe and cosmetics collection.
One Monday morning, Ginger had woken early, as she always did. She could not help herself but to wake up and get moving. Her apartment was small but it suited her. She spent her days at work and went out on the weekends. Ginger never sat still, particularly when it was warm out, which it was not yet; not in Chicago. Although June crept nearer, it was more a speculation of warmth than a promise.
She wore a tight pair of black pants with a silky lavender top beneath smooth charcoal fibers. She still needed her coat, of course, and a Coach purse. A Muvado watch complimented several silver rings purchased from high-end boutique jewelers throughout the city. She picked up a Donna Tartt novel to read on the bus and stepped into the cold morning.
When she arrived at work, she noticed a guy packing-up his desk, haphazardly tossing office items — assorted papers, desk toys, items of this nature — into a cardboard box.
“Who is that guy?” she asked a colleague.
“Not sure, but he’s outta here. They’re already starting to look for his replacement.”
“What did he do? What are they looking for?”
“Ambition. Maybe charm. This guy was boring as all hell.”
The man they were looking for, unknown to Ginger, was Tom Drake.
After work that day, she stepped into an eerily icy wind. She had heard that the winds here were awful. Miserable things that whipped around the edges of the skyscrapers and plowed into you like a bulldozer. It pierced her coat which had been warm against a still cold, but not against this. She had worked late that evening and it was dark outside.
She bent into the wind, departing the bus and clipping rapidly down the sidewalk. It was deserted. She could not see well. Her heart quickened as the cold chilled her and she began to feel as if a pair of eyes was upon her. A sound like metal grating spun her around with a gasp that caught chilly air in her lungs. She coughed and squinted at the sound, but it was not he masked aggressor she had imagined, but a construction sign rubbing against metal with the unpredictable cadence brought upon by the wind. She tried to relax. This was a safe neighborhood, she told herself. No one was watching.
No one was watching.
