Amanda Milam was wearing Vandal colors on her nails when she sat down to talk. Not by accident — she does that a lot. Working in a school will do that to you, especially when the school is the one you graduated from twenty years ago and never really wanted to leave.

"I loved growing up here," Milam said. "And I knew I wanted to raise our kids here."

A 2006 graduate of Vandalia High School, Milam is now in her second year as a clerk in the school's front office — answering phones, managing the daily rhythm of a building that never quite follows a script, and spending two hours each day in the lunchroom taking lunch numbers and keeping an eye on things.

"You can walk in with the mindset of, 'This is how my day is going to go,'" she said, "and that first phone call can completely change your day."

Before the school, there was banking — a decade in lending. And before the banking, there was a dream she'd carried since high school: nail technology. Back then, the only path required a full cosmetology license, and Milam didn't want to do hair. So she set it aside.

Then came COVID.

"For once I'm going to do something for me," she told herself.

She enrolled in a ten-week intensive at New Image Technical Center in O'Fallon — Tuesday through Saturday, eight to five. By her fourth day, she was on the floor working with real clients in the school's built-in salon. She finished the program, got licensed, and went to work full-time as a nail technician.

She loved the work. But it was hard on the body. And then one evening, while she was doing a client's nails, the conversation turned. The client happened to be the school's current secretary — and she mentioned she was leaving.

"I'm like, you know, I could do both jobs that I love," Milam said.

And she could. The school schedule gave her summers off and evenings free. She could do nails three nights a week and still be present for her daughter Noelle, a fourth grader who just placed sixth out of twenty-four girls at her first state tumbling meet.

"It just all fell into place," she said.

The two careers look different on paper, but they share something Milam feels in both: the satisfaction of making someone's day a little better. Her favorite part of the nail work, she says, isn't the manicures — it's the pedicures, especially for elderly clients dealing with neuropathy or diabetes.

"People leave, and they do feel good," she said.

And there's something else. "We look at our hands constantly," she said. "And it's so nice for people to look and be like, 'Oh, I love your nails.’"

Milam and her husband — a 2005 Vandalia grad — are both born and raised here. She never had the itch to leave that so many of her classmates insisted they felt. She smiles now thinking about how many of those same people swore they'd never come back.

"And they came back," she said. "Maybe a U-turn."

She understands why. Vandalia is close enough to bigger cities to feel connected, but small enough to feel known. It's a place where neighbors still show up when something goes wrong.

"We're just a tight-knit community," Milam said. "We come together when we need it."

These days, her life moves between the front office and the nail table, between school-year routines and summer bookings, between Noelle's tumbling meets and the steady parade of hands and feet that come through her chair. It's a lot. But it fits.

"It's perfectly located," she said of Vandalia, "for a little bit of everything."

She could be talking about the town. She could just as easily be talking about the life she's built inside it.