CHAPTER ONE
Through the Looking Glass
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
C. S. Lewis
1989—San Jose, California
My first bad decision didn’t look like a mistake. It looked like a job offer.
Sylvia is a New Yorker, an attorney, and hard as nails. She leads my interview at a massive optical and dental practice in a lonely office park close enough to the San Jose airport to smell jet fuel, but not close enough to feel like you were going anywhere.
I push down the familiar déjà vu of settling for less and power through. I am twenty-one, broke, and still convinced I can outsmart my gut. For the right paycheck, I can tolerate this fluorescent hellscape. I ask for fifteen dollars an hour.
What I thought was a bold step toward financial independence was really my first yes to the wrong life. I knew it was time to get a real, grown-up job, and this was the best offer I had at the moment. I quit my first job at a car wash when all my coworkers were going off to college or getting adult jobs, and it just wasn’t as much fun as it had been when we were all in high school. I had never thought about a “career.” At the car wash, I hadn’t learned much, other than how to drink wine coolers and hang out with friends and drive over the hill to Santa Cruz for boozy bonfires.
I’d moved out of my childhood home for good three days after high school graduation when I was seventeen. College or a career were low on my list of priorities. One of the first things I did when I moved out of my parents’ house was, stupidly, sign up for a Costco membership. I thought that since I needed essentials like milk and toilet paper, my paycheck would cover it.How can I be broke? I still have checks! That bumper sticker reality was my actual financial strategy.
My car wash friends lived at home, so their paychecks were for pocket money—buying clothes and going out to dinner. I didn’t get it at first: that my paycheck wasn’textra money, it was survival money. I rented cheap rooms from random, often unsavory people or couch surfed when I mismanaged my funds and couldn’t pay rent. Other than fleeting moments, I never felt safe or comfortable, but I knew how to be quiet, nearly invisible. When I decided to leave the car wash like all my friends had already, I pored over classified ads trying to figure out my next move.
I didn’t have any skills besides cashiering and vacuuming filthy cars, but I found a job as a receptionist at an optical store in Los Gatos called Site for Sore Eyes. It did not take long to get bored of answering the phone, so our manager, a Japanese Mexican man with a beautiful accent who always dressed in stylish suits with a tie clip and pocket square, took me under his wing and became my first real mentor. He loaned me a textbook calledSystem for Ophthalmic Dispensing, which was loaded with descriptions, illustrations, and photos teaching subjects like “effective diameter” and “measuring interpupillary distance.” Each chapter ended with a quiz. I read the whole book and tried to copy my manager’s style of speaking to customers. In doing so, I subconsciously, and hilariously, started to copy his Japanese Mexican accent for a while before I noticed it. I registered to take the biannual certification test, drove up to UC Berkeley, and passed on my first try. I suddenly had a career as a California licensed optician, and Site for Sore Eyes would need to hire a new receptionist.
I loved my manager, but the store’s owner, Marty Dretch, was a sleazy guy who regularly parked his Jag in the handicapped space in front of the store—with no placard and no shame, even when there were empty spaces right next to it. He divorced his wife and co-owner of the company to da
