My name is Emily, and I'm lucky. I'm sure people are jealous of me for that. But I don't have the kind of luck that I really want, the exciting kind. My type of luck is useful, even good, but it's boring. For example, I won the lottery once. It was a nice windfall ... and just enough to pay off my student loans. Very helpful but unexciting. I met a famous person on the subway, not a movie star, a well-known musician, or anything cool like that. But she helped me get my current accounting job. Practical, and I'm thankful but boring. One time, I lucked into a first-class airplane seat. That was very nice, but first-class on a business trip from New York to Houston was boooooring.
Mundane, run-of-the-mill, practical, uninspiring - all words that described me and my life. Don't get me wrong, it's been a fine life. I grew up in a nice house with solid, loving, and cliched parents. They gave me a good start in the vanilla suburbs, where I graduated high school with above-average grades and then went to the state university. There, I studied accounting, got more good grades, and had the usual college social life. I wasn't a wallflower by any means. I went to parties, dated boys, and had a bit of sex. It was all pretty great. However, my life didn't have the kind of thrill that deep down inside I craved. A little bit of daring, adventure, and maybe even danger was what I secretly wanted. When I finished college, got my fortuitous job opportunity, and joined the nine-to-five workforce, I decided that the words Emily, lucky, and exciting would never be spoken in the same sentence. That changed one day when, unluckily, I got stuck in an elevator.
Las Vegas, Sin City, the land of neon, gambling, sex, and bad but tantalizing decisions. I was there on a business trip - yawn - running a multi-day seminar on the fine points of estate tax planning - double yawn. My days began at seven AM and lasted in the classroom until five PM. After that, I ate dinner with co-workers and students who went out on drinking sprees, to see shows, or to gamble. I, on the other hand, sat in my hotel room and prepped PowerPoint slides for the next day's lectures. The routine was suffocating, but it was what the job required, so I buckled down, did the work, and wished for a miracle to come my way - one that would let me enjoy a bit of glittering Las Vegas.
My wish came true at six-forty-five AM, in the Wynn Hotel elevator between floors thirty and twenty-nine. There was a harsh screech, and the car suddenly stopped. "What the fuck was that?" A tall, buxom blonde exclaimed. There were five of us in the under-ventilated compartment. More metal-on-metal sounds emanated from somewhere over our heads. The elevator jerked twice more and then went motionless.
"The fuck?" A brunette said, echoing the blonde. "That doesn't sound good." I silently agreed with her but decided to keep quiet. I was outnumbered. The four women were all dressed in very revealing and matching outfits that made it clear they were together.
I held my breath, wondering if this was a scene from
Final Destination,
and waited to plummet to my death. There was one final groan of metal, a harsh clang, and then silence. The ceiling fan fluttered, the lights on the panel blinked off and on, and then went dark. "God-damnit!" Number three (a bottle blonde), who was just as bosomy and curvy as her compatriots, jabbed at the button for the lobby. "I think we're fuckin' stuck." She punched one button after another without eliciting any response from what was now clearly a dead elevator. "I can't fuckin' believe it. We're gonna be late, and Sonny's gonna have a cow! Just our luck."
"Relax," the fourth centerfold look-alike, a dark-skinned Latina, said. "I'll call and tell him what happened. It's not our fault." She tapped on her cell phone screen a few times, then looked up with a furrowed brow. "I don't have a signal." She looked back and forth at her companions as worry obviously grew inside her. She turned to me, "Excuse me, ma'am. Do you, by any chance, have a cell signal?"
Ma'am? Do I look that old?
I thought, feeling a little offended. But since she was polite, I put on my best kind and helpful face and said, "No, sorry. I don't." I'd already looked at my phone and seen zero bars of reception.
"What the hell are we supposed to do?" The Latina sounded worried.
"Chill, Corina," the statuesque blonde said.
"But nobody's gonna even know we're in here. We could be stuck here ... forever."
The tall woman rolled her eyes and reached for the emergency phone on the wall. "And they call blondes dumb." She picked up the handset and told the person on the other end our situation. After a few moments, she hung up and turned to us. "Guess what? He said we're stuck. Duh! And he said they're sending someone to figure out what's happening. He reassured me that the elevator won't fall and that we've got plenty of air."
"How long are we going to be here?" The brunette asked. "Tiffany," -the bottle blonde's name - "is right; Sonny is going to be pissed if we don't show up to the booth."
"Ruby," the first blonde sighed, "I have no idea. And we need to give the hotel guys a chance to figure out what's going on."
"Maybe they could call Sonny for you and let him know so you don't get into trouble," I suggested.
"Excellent idea." She picked up the phone and quickly but politely asked that Sonny be filled in on what was happening. "Anyone you want to tell?" she asked me. I gave her the cell number of my co-presenter. It didn't bother me that I wasn't doing another boring slide show.
Despite the anemic ventilation, the atmosphere in the elevator eased after that. The four women introduced themselves: Amber (the tall, natural blonde), Corina (the Latina), Tiffany (the bottle blonde), and Ruby (with brunette hair). "I'm Emily," I said and stuck out my hand.
"Oh, I love that name," Tiffany said. "You're Irish, right?"
Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. Yes, I had flaming red hair, pale skin, and a scattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose, the stereotype of an Irish lassie. But I was raised in Iowa and had never thought about my heritage. "Sure," I said, not wanting to rock the boat. I saw Amber silently snicker at her companion's comment.
"You're beautiful," Tiffany said.
"Thank you. So are you," I blurted out without thinking. "All of you are." I hate it when people (mostly men) only comment on a woman's appearance, so I quickly added, "Are you here for a reunion or something?"
Tiffany squared her shoulders and puffed herself up. "We're working," she said proudly.
They were four women with enough makeup to sink a ship, all scantily dressed like the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and had boobs big enough to feed a legion of babies. I could imagine what kind of "work" they did. But they looked theatrical and exotic, precisely how I had wanted to be ever since high school. Whatever they did, it wasn't estate tax accounting, and a part of me was jealous. My inner adventure-starved soul cried.
I want to 'work' too
. I forced the kind and helpful expression back onto my face and controlled my tone. "Really? What do you do?"
"We're part of the AVN expo."
The what?
I thought silently. "I'm not familiar with that," I said aloud.
