“My boss Giselle used to say I was worth my weight in designer handbags because I had the highest client retention rate in the store.”
There’s pride in my voice, but Giselle’s name has a bitter edge in my mouth.
“It’s hard to believe your boss didn’t do everything she could to keep you,” Jared says.
“Yeah, well, it turns out that loyalty and success mean nothing when you suddenly don’t photograph well for the store’s Instagram.”
I thought about how keen I’d been to get back to work after my surgeries, but then I’d found myself consigned to the storeroom and back office, not on the shop floor.
I tell Jared this and then finish off the story. “When I confronted Giselle about it, she pretty much told me she didn’t want me interacting with her clients because, according to her, luxury retail was about selling fantasies and I’m now too much reality.”
I still can’t help wincing every time I remember that conversation with Giselle.
“Darling, you know I love you, but this isn’t really the look I want for my brand.” She waves a vague hand to encompass my whole body, but the way her gaze lingers on my scars makes me understand that to her, I’ve gone from asset to liability.
“You’re a smart boy. I’m happy for you to keep working for me, but I don’t want you interacting with the clients. You’ll scare them off.”
“The thing is, she never even gave me a chance to try,” I say quietly. “I would have accepted it if clients had actually complained or if my sales dropped, but she just assumed I’d become some kind of retail repellent without any evidence.”
I can’t believe I’m spilling my guts about all this to Jared.
But I guess you could say that spilling my guts has been my mojo with him right from the beginning.
“Isn’t there an employment law to protect you in these circumstances?”
I shrug. “It didn’t seem worth the fight. Besides, after the accident, Carlos started a Givealittle page for me that raised enough money that I could afford to take some time off work and go back to studying.”
I’d had mixed feelings about the Givealittle page Carlos had insisted on setting up after my accident. “You might as well find a silver lining in all this, babe,” he’d said.
I’d hated being the object of people’s pity. And it seemed like some of my supposed friends thought they could buy their way out of guilt rather than offering the support I actually needed. But then I’d had an anonymous donation of twenty-five thousand dollars. I suspected the money was from one of my wealthy ex-clients and was motivated by pity, but it had been life-changing because I could now afford to retrain. So it turns out pity is profitable.
“I’ve always liked animals, and I figure animals won’t judge me based on what I look like,” I finish up.
I manage not to tell Jared how it’s been a struggle to go back to studying, which has never come easy to me due to my mild dyslexia.
I also don’t say I’ve since discovered a large part of the job of a vet nurse still requires you to be people-facing, and I worry that no matter how good I am at my job, clinics will hire people without scars ahead of me.
The poor man doesn’t need all my insecurities dumped on him in one day.
“Your boss is an idiot,” Jared says finally, with the kind of conviction usually reserved for religious declarations. “But fashion’s loss is the veterinary world’s gain.”
“Plus, cats already think humans are hideous naked creatures who can’t even lick their own butts properly, so my face probably doesn’t even register as a problem,” I say.
Jared laughs, and I grin.
The great thing about Jared is that I don’t have to explain to him about my accident.
That’s the problem with meeting new people now. They all want to know what happened to my face. At first, it was amusing to come up with tales of shark attacks, bear-wrestling incidents, or insisting I got into a disagreement with a very vindictive cheese grater. However, after a while, it became exhausting to have to explain what happened again and again.
But Jared was there with me. He knows exactly what it was like to be stuck in a car down a hole.
And he’s a medical professional. He can probably guess the many surgeries it took to get my face to the state it currently is.
Although I still look like someone tried to make a Picasso painting out of Silly Putty and gave up halfway through. If New Zealand didn’t have a free public health system, I would definitely be asking for my money back.
Instead of talking about my accident, Jared asks me more about my course, which then turns into us exchanging funny stories about the vet and paramedic professions.
We discover that both humans and animals have an alarming tendency to eat things they shouldn’t, though at least the Labrador who swallowed three socks had the decency not to claim he was doing it for TikTok views.
