Dangerous Creatures by Kami García, Margaret Stohl Page A

you needed to have had other jobs. It had taken Ridley a few phone calls until she figured out how to say the things people most wanted to hear, which was usually her specialty. She didn’t think of it as lying, not exactly. She thought of it more as charades. You had to pretend to be the kind of person who got jobs, to get a job. What was that jobbish-workery-going-on-elevators sort of person like?
    Ridley learned everything the hard way. She learned that when people ask you to pick one word to describe yourself, you don’t say perfect . You also don’t say hot . After two misfires, Rid went with persuasive . While it didn’t exactly seem to persuade anyone, it wasn’t a conversation stopper, either.
    Lesson learned.
    She had also learned to apply for jobs Sirens could do in their sleep, for starters. She came close to getting a position as a SKILLED COSMETIC TECHNICIAN , but it turned out to be a gig applying makeup to corpses at a run-down funeral parlor in the Bronx, and Ridley had had enough close calls with the Otherworld as it was.
    Rid had been excited about an opening billed as a COUTURE RETAIL EXPERIENCE— until it turned out to be at Connie’s Cat Couture. Maybe Lucille Ball would be fine with it, but Ridley couldn’t stand the thought of being a Cat Couturier. The owner had suggested that Ridley stop by to let Connie the Cat “sniff you and lick you and just love you until you get the hang of her.” Ridley had said she’d rather lick Connie the Cat herself than do any of the above. The owner had told her where she could stick that mouthful of fur, and the conversation had ended pretty abruptly after that.
    By the time Rid got the hang of it, there was really only one gig left, and now she was standing on the sidewalk right in front of it.
    The Brooklyn Blowout
    It was a hair salon, but they didn’t call it that. This was supposed to be a party, or as the brochure said, a “Hair Experience.”
    Ridley wouldn’t be a stylist. She’d be a Dry Girl, which as far as she could tell was like a Fly Girl, but with a hair dryer.
    “You got this, right?” Necro looked through the stenciled glass, where a row of teased, painted, primped, polished Dry Girls were brandishing not only hair dryers and curling irons but straightening irons and hot rollers, as if they were weapons. “How hard could it be?”
    Ridley would have preferred actual weapons.
    Necro touched her blue spiky faux-hawk nervously. “I’d better get out of here before they drag me inside and make me look like Taylor Swift.” She began to back away down the sidewalk.
    “Necro,” Ridley called after her, on an impulse.
    “Yeah?” Necro didn’t look back.
    “I thought you hated me. Why are you being so nice?”
    Necro turned. “For the record, I do hate you. If you say otherwise to anyone, I’ll kick your butt. I’m only here to get out of sound check, which I hate even more than I do you.” Then she smiled in spite of herself.
    “Right.” Ridley smiled back. She turned to face the glass front door.
    “Don’t go soft on me, Siren,” Necro called from safely down the street.
    “Never,” Ridley said as she went inside.

    “Are you telling me I have to put my hands in that ?” In the shampoo room, Ridley stood at a row of six sinks, pointing like she’d just seen a snake crawl up and out of the drain. Ten feet away from her, a woman with coarse peroxide curls and dark black roots lay with her head tilted back, into sink number six.
    “Her hair?” Delia, the Blowout manager, looked amused. “Yes.”
    Ridley sighed. Being a regular person wasn’t starting off well. She had taken the Mortal subway here, and the whole way she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her.
    Again.
    Maybe that’s what Mortals are like. Maybe they really are just always watching each other.
    But Ridley had seen a man standing stock-still on the platform at Broadway Junction, grinning at her through the closing car doors.
    Sirens