As soon as the parents left, the daughter plunked herself next to me on the posh leather sofa and immediately started hugging me and stroking my hair. I didn’t want to get on her bad side early on in this lucrative job so I smiled as I tried to untangle her arms. The more I tried to extricate myself, the harder she clung. I had no idea the French were so affectionate.

I’d been wrestling with the child for half an hour when the lights in the living room went out automatically and the glass cabinets along the walls lit up from underneath, illuminating an extensive collection of Buddhas. I felt like King Tut, except that I was alive and trapped in the mausoleum with a deranged koala. No matter what I did, I could not get the kid off me. She refused to go to bed. She refused to eat dinner. She refused to budge. With thirty Buddhas watching me, I was suddenly enlightened as to why these people were so generous with the baby-sitter.

When the parents arrived three hours later, they found their daughter snoring on the sofa. She had finally fallen asleep and I had not dared move her, lest she wake up. Normally, parents might be upset by this, but not these people. God knows they were probably relieved to have gotten away from their daughter for a few hours. The father handed me a twenty-dollar bill and asked whether I was available the following night. I didn’t know how to say in French “Not for all the tea in China would I return to this freak zone,” so I just told him I had to study for a test.

My three traumatic hours of baby-sitting the Cling-on convinced me to retire from the field. I decided to switch to house-sitting, a far easier yet potentially lucrative line of work. I let all my friends and neighbors know that not only was I available during all vacations but I was also good with plants. The latter wasn’t exactly true, since I didn’t own any plants and had never actually taken care of any, but I figured if the soil is dry, I water.

My first job consisted of watering the indoor plants belonging to a family a couple of streets away from us. Monday morning, before school, I rode my bike to their house and started watering every plant, just as I had been instructed. All of a sudden, I heard music coming from one of the bedrooms upstairs. I froze. I stood in the kitchen, watering can in hand, unable to scream or move. After a few minutes, I put down the watering can, slowly tiptoed out of the kitchen, and ran out the front door. I could barely ride my bike home with my entire body trembling.