Amanda was 19 years old, although small and sleight for her age. Her petite build sometimes made people think she was younger than she was, but Amanda tried not to let it bother her, telling her she’d be grateful people kept guessing her age wrong when she was a little older. Amanda had bright, innocent-looking green eyes, covered by a pair of round glasses to adjust for her near-sightedness, and silky red hair she was very proud of. Normally, she wore it in a variety of styles, but of late she’d styled it very straight to try and look professional, much like her clothes; respectable white blouses and dark business pants were the order of the day for Amanda when she dressed to impress, although the girl’s lucky Disney Princess Pens, at least one of which was always in her pocket, added a slight glitch in her image as a professional young lady.
When she’d been a very little girl, watching her beloved princess movies and playing with her dolls, she’d imagined college to be a magical place where you learned how to be a grown-up and left to do the job you wanted to do for the rest of your life immediately after you’d learned.
When she’d been a teenager, she’d assumed college would be where she got serious and became a successful adult. Just like her first 18 years of classes had been laid out and easy to follow, Amanda would find the secret plan she’d adhere to for the rest of her adult life at college.
As it turned out, college had not been the magical place she’d been expecting, and as her organized high school days faded behind her, Amanda was starting to realize the only certain thing about the adult world she was rapidly hurtling into was uncertainty. She didn’t have a major yet; didn’t know what she was going to do when she graduated, or even to an extent what she was doing right now. She’d always thought things would be quite simple once she’d gotten this far in life; she’d just wake up one day and be all grown up and know exactly what she was doing all the time. The realization this was not the case had been a bit of a shock, and Amanda had been taking life one day at a time since it had come to her. Everything had been a lot simpler when she’d been a little girl, she lamented. Sometimes she wished she could go back to the days when she had everything figured out and her goal in life was becoming a magical princess rather than a worried young woman making life up as she went.
There had been some silver lining, at least. In her flailing around to find some sort of stability, Amanda had managed to land an internship with a very successful company. People told her she’d gotten her foot in the door in a very good place to go far in life, but to Amanda it seemed like that just increased the pressure not to make any mistakes, which was why she was always a little nervous but on her best behavior when she encountered her manager. As she’d just been called to her manager’s office, Amanda was understandably a little nervous, but walked briskly towards it. She twirled one of her lucky pens as she walked absentmindedly, looking down at the smiling face of Cinderella for a little boost of courage before she reached her manager’s door and knocked politely.