I’m helping her I’m helping her I’m helping her…

Without fail, I always needed to chant those three words to fall asleep during a job. At night, alone with my thoughts, I always felt a tiny bit disgusting, maybe even a little cheap, despite the fact that I was anything but (now that I’d had dozens of perfect reviews, my prices were blush-worthy).

During the course of every assignment, there were always things that poked at my insecurities. In this case, Jing-Jing’s mother speaking as if dropping out of college was the worst move ever (even if you had a million-dollar company to run) had made my college-dropout ears burn like hell. And Jing-Jing’s response, though not the worst, hadn’t soothed me any. Not that it was her job or anything. It just sucked. I already judged myself enough for a lifetime’s worth, so did I need everyone else judging me too?

To fall asleep, I usually had to remind myself of the bolded section on the client’s form, the one I always memorized. The answer to Why do you need our services?

I had never met the suitor Jing-Jing had written about, but now that I’d had one dinner with her, I could see her punching out her answer with forceful keystrokes, a little sideways purse to her lips. Amazing what you could learn about someone in a short time when your meal ticket depended on it. As with almost every single one of her answers, she’d gone all out, detailing how her parents and Hongbo’s parents wanted them to be together for “all the wrong reasons,” which revolved around their families having been friends for decades and believing their children would be a fantastic match despite them having nothing in common. Not to mention Jing-Jing’s obvious disgust for him, which she had sort of tried to hide at first (“he’s just not quite right for me, personally”) but also not really, especially by the fourth paragraph (“I think even his mustache is evil—it twitches every time he mentions his Lamborghini, Sheila, which he named after the model who rolls around naked on top of a Lamborghini in some music video”). For the Wangs, it also didn’t hurt that Hongbo’s family was stupid rich due to the success of their tech company, No One Systems, which was, according to Jing-Jing, “thriving despite its founders not realizing that the period in No. One is important and that No One means something else.” (I may have laughed reading that part.)