Who sold us into that room

The betrayal is sitting in my chest like something I swallowed sideways. Someone I saw in the last thirty days. That is the only math that works. I am running faces — clients, doormen, the girl who did my highlights last month and asked too many questions about where I was going on Thursdays, the photographer's assistant who lingered too long near the fitting rooms. Someone made a phone call. Someone sold us both into that room and I do not get to know who yet and that is the part that is keeping me awake.

At 10 AM I caught my reflection in the hostess's full-length mirror and I did not recognize the woman in it for a full second. Not her face. Mine. The posture. The way I was holding the hem like I was born to hold hems for other women. Black, alone, paid in cash, the help. I have styled a woman whose name is on a building. I have pinned Oscar hems. And today I stood in that mirror and I was the help. I have been the help before. I have never seen it from the outside while it was happening.

The hostess asked me, in front of her husband, whether I had ever styled "girls from my own neighborhood." I smiled. I said I had. I did not say what I wanted to say, which is: I am standing in your bedroom right now, and I am from my own neighborhood, and I am the girl.