Lexicon

dragged a brush through her hair with occasional exclamations of dismay. Now she was alongside other women, she started to see the problem. Her hair was the wrong kind of blond: the kind from the sun. There was a gritty quality to her skin. She had absorbed Broken Hill. She had soaked it up and become savage. “Do not worry,” said the hairdresser. “We’ve beaten worse than this.”
    Afterward, the floor a graveyard of fallen hair, she found herself with a short bob and bangs like a steel door. It seemed like they had tried to hide her face. She looked strange to herself. “Do you wear glasses?” asked the hairdresser. “You should consider that.”
    She was shuttled back to the first clothing store, where her new look was praised effusively. She actually started to feel good and then the personal style adviser said, “Well, it’s an improvement, anyway.” She had forgotten how indirectly people spoke here. She had become accustomed to taking people literally.
    Hours later, laden with shopping bags, she was driven to a tall glass office building that offered no identifying logo. She entered a simple lobby, feeling newly manufactured in her gray woolen suit and stiff black shoes, her heart pounding in case she was about to meet someone she knew. But there was no one. A red sofa, a few paintings; it could have been anywhere. She waited at the reception desk until a young man with invisible eyebrows emerged from the rear office. “I’m Emily Ruff,” she said.
    “Just a moment.” When he returned, he had a plastic card, which he placed on the counter. It was blank but for: NL-L5D4. She looked at him.
    “That means level five, desk four.”
    “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.” She hefted her bags. It took her a minute to figure out the elevators: She had to insert the card into a slot before the buttons would do anything. Then the doors closed and she rose toward whatever was up there.
    • • •
    It turned out that level five was nothing but anonymous corporate space with a dozen or so roomy cubicles. Almost all were empty. It was very quiet and as her shopping bags rustled and banged she wished she’d left them with the receptionist. She passed a young woman on the phone and a boy with long hair and glasses who looked up from his computer screen but his expression didn’t change and she didn’t stop walking.
    She spotted identifying plates on the desk corners and began to triangulate D4. It was in a corner, with a pretty amazing view over south DC. It had a chair, a phone, a computer, and that was it. She stashed her bags beneath the desk and tested the chair. She waited. The phone would ring, she guessed. Eventually.
    After a minute, the boy with glasses appeared, accompanied by a girl whose hair was the good kind of blond. She looked familiar, although Emily couldn’t place her. She seemed very young. “Wow. Welcome.”
    “Hi,” she said. “Thank you.”
    “Isaac Rosenberg,” the boy said. “Nice to meet you.”
    “I’m Raine,” said the girl. “Kathleen Raine.”
    “Hi,” Emily said again. There was an awkward silence. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m here.”
    “Typical,” said the boy, Rosenberg. “We only got word a couple days ago that you were coming. You’re in NL.”
    “Neurolinguistics?”
    He nodded. “Testing and Measurement. Have you done any NL work before?”
    She shook her head.
    “It’s good for a theoretical grounding, supposedly. Anyway, we’ll get you started. Teach you the system. If that’s okay with you.”
    “Sure,” she said. The girl, Raine, was still looking at her like she was missing something, so she said, “I’m sorry, have we met?”
    Several expressions flitted across the girl’s face in quick succession, one of which said yes and another that told her she wasn’t supposed to ask. “No,” the girl said, but Emily remembered now: They had met at the school. Emily had forgotten because it was in that first week, and the girl had failed the tests and not been admitted. She had been very young. Emily had tried to make her feel better by saying she could try again the next year. Her name had been Gertie.
    “Hey, I apologize if this is inappropriate,” said Rosenberg, “but they really haven’t told us much and we don’t want to tread on any toes, so I’m wondering if . . . you know, if you actually want to do NL or if we should just leave you alone.”
    “I think I’m actually here to do NL. I’m just another graduate