Читать книгу The Pink Ghetto - Liz Ireland - Страница 10

By lunch, I was finally beginning to relax, if only because it finally dawned on me that chances were good that I wouldn’t be fired on my first day.

I had worried that once Andrea dropped me back by my office, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, besides stare at those ominous manuscript piles on the bookshelves. But if there was anything I really knew how to do, it was fritter away time. First I had to check out my computer. Solitaire had not been removed, and I even had pinball! This reminded me of the e-mail question, so I set up my account at rabbot@candlelight.net. Then of course I had to e-mail all my family and friends and brag about my new corporate identity.

My sister Ellen replied immediately. She had just finished law school the year before and was working in a law firm back in Cleveland.

I’m psyched about your new job. Congrats! I don’t read romances, natch, but what a hoot to be working there. Maybe you can send me a few beach books next summer. (I guess I do read a few of those…just don’t tell anyone here at the office!) XOX, E

Once I started looking at it, rabbot seemed like a really bizarre handle. Like rabbit misspelled, or a combination of rabbit and robot. I started imagining bad sci-fi movie titles. Attack of the Killer Rabbots!

So after much contemplation and doodling on my notepad, I changed my address to the more respectable rebecca.abbot@ candlelight.net. And then, of course, I had to send out my change of address.

Ellen wrote back in a flash.

Stop procrastinating and get to work!

XOX, E

Oh, and one of my coworkers wants to know if you publish something called Regencies? I think they’re like fake Jane Austen books…which actually sounds kind of good, now that I think about it. Do you really get freebies?

I made a note to send Ellen books.

All in all, setting up my e-mail killed a good hour and a half. A few games of pinball later, Andrea was knocking on my door. I reduced the screen and swiveled toward her.

“How’s it going?”

“Great!” I said.

“Lunch?”

I was up like a shot. “Sure.”

Rita was right behind her. “My treat.”

“Which means she’s expensing it,” Andrea translated.

We stopped by Cassie’s office on our way out. “Want to go to lunch with us?” Rita asked her.

A plastic serving container of breadsticks and celery sat on the desk next to the manuscript she was reading, along with a half-eaten apple. “I’d love to, but I promised myself I would read this book today.” She eyed me staring at her meal. Like any veteran of Weight Watchers (ages twelve and fifteen), I was no stranger to breadsticks. I sometimes wondered if there were any other people besides WW veterans who actually ate those things.

I smiled at her, sensing a kindred spirit.

She did not smile back. “I like to stay up on things.”

“Well, carry on,” Rita said. “We’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”

Two hours later, we ambled back to the office, full of Chinese food. I had expected to get the lowdown about what they expected from me in my job. Instead, I got gossip. Gossip about everyone. There were no affairs reported, no embezzling or money scandals, no shocking Candlelight secrets revealed, although you wouldn’t have guessed it from the urgent tone in Rita and Andrea’s voices.

“Did you know Ann takes her Maltese to doggy daycare every day?”

“It must cost her a fortune.”

“What else does she have to spend it on? The woman has no life. It’s pathetic.”

“Sad. She should try online dating.”

“First she should try to do something about that acne scarring.”

“Would insurance cover plastic surgery for that?”

“She could pay for it herself if she weren’t wasting all her money on her canine.”

They asked me a few polite questions about myself, which I evaded to the best of my ability. (If Ann and her doggy daycare were worth a conversational massacre, imagine the hay they could have made out of my living with my ex-boyfriend.) By the time the fortunes cookies rolled around, it felt like I had been working with them for months instead of hours.

When I got back, I continued to pile up accomplishments. I played a few rounds of solitaire and did very well. A few people, some of whom I had met that morning, came by to ask how I was settling in. Actually, I think they had afternoon restlessness and just wanted to get away from their desks for a while.

At one point, I had three other editors and Lindsay the editorial assistant all squeezed into my office, talking about famous person sightings they’d had in New York City. Ann—she of the pampered pooch—had stood in a deli line behind Leonardo DiCaprio, which was pretty damn impressive. The only famous person I’d come in that close contact with was Al Roker, who Fleishman and I had seen coming up the theater aisle the night we had gone to see Gypsy.

Lindsay had a good one. “Whoopi Goldberg goes to my dentist.”

This revelation brought gasps. “No way!” Madeline exclaimed. “Your dentist?”

Lindsay puffed up a little, sensing she had scored. “I saw her in the waiting room once, even. She was there for a cleaning, the hygienist told me.”

“Where? What dentist?”

“His name is Dr. Stein, and he’s on Eighty-fifth Street.”

Ann’s forehead wrinkled. “Does Whoopi Goldberg have good teeth?”

“Of course she has good teeth! She’s a movie star.”

“I’m sure they’re capped. All actors have caps.”

“Be crazy not to. In a movie close-up an incisor can look twenty feet tall.”

“Wait,” Andrea said. “Our insurance pays for Whoopi’s dentist?”

Lindsay nodded her head.

“That’s it. I’m switching.”

“Just like that? Because Whoopi goes somewhere else?”

“Why should I settle for substandard?” Andrea asked defensively. “You can bet with all that money she has, Whoopi’s checked out her dental care options.”

“Do you know she travels in her own bus?” someone asked. “Like a rock star.”

Just as the conversation was about to turn full tilt onto the subject of celebrity transport, someone rapped on my doorjamb. Standing behind Lindsay was a woman of medium height, with dishwater blond hair cut in an unflattering page boy, and wearing an olive green pantsuit of the most aggressively dumpy design imaginable. She surveyed the crowd through an owlish pair of glasses.

Suddenly, it was as if someone had shot off a bird gun at a duck pond. Coworkers flew out my door, leaving me floating all alone in the sights of…well, whoever this was. I still didn’t know, but a knot of foreboding formed in the pit of my stomach.

“Hi,” I said, attempting to keep the uneasiness out of my voice.

She smiled tightly. “I didn’t mean to break up your little party.”

I blushed self-consciously. “No—it’s just my first day. I’m Rebecca, by the way.”

“Hi, Rebecca, I’m Janice Wunch.”

I really had to keep my lips from twitching. If ever a person looked like a Janice Wunch, it was this woman. Poor thing. You would think she would have changed her name, or at least her glasses.

“I’m the production manager.”

I kept the polite smile frozen on my face. I had no idea what this meant.

“I have a little list here—well, actually, it’s quite long—of things of yours that are late to production.”

“Of mine?” I asked, confused. “But I just got here.”

“I’m sure many of these are projects that were originally Julie’s, but of course they’re your babies now.”

“Oh, I see…”

She handed a list to me, which filled up an entire page. It was staggering how late I could be on everything on my first day.

“In terms of priority, of course, the edit for The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard needs to get done first. It’s nearly a month late. I have told Rita about this repeatedly, and she said she was going to get Lindsay to do a preliminary edit, but then apparently she changed her mind when Lindsay left the manuscript on a crosstown bus and they had to ask the author’s agent for a duplicate.”

I nodded. As urgent as the situation was with The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard, there were two other late edits on the list, along with other stuff that I was completely clueless about. What was an art info sheet? I owed five of those. Where was cover copy supposed to come from? (Me? I wondered with growing hysteria.)

“No big deal,” Janice said. “Just get it to me ASAP—or by the end of the week, if you can.”

I gulped. The end of the week was sooner than what I had in mind. She had to be kidding. “If there’s a problem getting some of this stuff in…”

She blinked at me with what appeared to be sincere incomprehension. “Why should there be?”

Maybe because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?

My heart started to pound. This was why you should never stretch the truth in a job interview. Eventually someone was going to expect you to know something.

When Janice Wunch left my office, I closed the door behind her and succumbed to a moment of blind panic. What the hell was I going to do now? I was contemplating simply running away and spending the rest of my life as an editorial fugitive when my phone rang. I leapt for it. I didn’t care if it was bad news. At least someone from the outside world was trying to contact me.

It was Fleishman. “How’s the little editor doing?”

“She’s dying.”

He laughed. “You sound stressed.”

I told him about the late list. I told him I didn’t even know what most of this stuff was. I told him to prepare for my impending departure from the ranks of the employed. “I’ll send the clothes back to your mom,” I promised.

“Just go ask that assistant person what to do,” he said.

“Lindsay? But she’ll think I’m an idiot.”

“All the better—that’ll make her day. Assistants love to think people working over them are incompetent morons. It reinforces their own suspicions that they should actually be running things themselves.”

“Yeah, but this girl seems…well, incompetent. I would be happy to give her ego a boost, but I don’t trust her to give me correct information.”

“Hm. Is there anyone else you could ask?”

I thought of Cassie, who looked as if she had never made an incompetent move in her life. “Well, I’ll give it some thought.”

“That’s the spirit!” Fleishman said.

“Anyway, I should be home around six-thirty.” I felt a sudden longing to be there now.

“Good, because I’ve got a huge surprise for you.”

“I hope it involves a large pizza box.” After this afternoon, I had a feeling I was going to need some serious comfort food.

He laughed. “Oh, it’s better than that.”

There was a knock on my door and I hung up the phone to answer it. James, the mailroom guy, was standing there, his stance impatient. He was wearing headphones. “Mail,” he mumbled.

He handed me a plastic tub full of manila envelopes, business letters, and fat padded mailers, all addressed to Julie Spears. I grabbed it automatically and then staggered back under its weight. “Hey, wait a minute!”

He frowned and asked loudly, over whatever was being pumped into his ears, “What’s the matter? You’re her now, right?”

He pointed to Julie’s name.

As much as I would have loved to refuse delivery at that moment, I had to admit that I was indeed Julie now. Damn.

I began to sort through the top of the pile, separating the letters from the packages. I decided that I would come in early tomorrow to open the packages. I needed to think of some kind of logging system, since I didn’t see any evidence of one among Julie’s stuff. Gingerly, I opened a few letters.

Happily, most of them seemed manageable. A woman wanted to know if she could send me her book about a nurse midwife who finds herself pregnant after having a fling at her ten-year high school reunion. Sounded good to me. Another writer was dying to have me read her romantic suspense novel involving a female paratrooper who is taken hostage in a war-torn country and falls in love with a Norwegian Red Cross worker. That sounded good, too. But what did I know? I fired off letters to basically everybody telling them to mail me whatever.

A reader wrote to inform me that she had found several typographical errors, including the misspelling of the word gynecological, in a book called Twins on His Doorstep. She wanted to know if Candlelight books wanted to hire her to proofread their books. I looked up the word gynecological.

Then I looked up misspell.

I put the letter aside with a note to query Kathy Leo.

Several people had written requesting guidelines for writing romances. I searched Julie’s file cabinet, but found nothing under guidelines. When I went over to Lindsay’s cubicle to ask her about guidelines, she wasn’t there.

I was pondering how unethical it would be to rifle through someone else’s filing cabinet when Rita flew out of her door and almost slammed into me. She looked wild-eyed. “Where’s Lindsay?” she asked, practically hyperventilating.

“I don’t know. I came here to ask her about guidelines.”

“She didn’t go to the mailroom, did she?” Her voice cracked on the word mailroom.

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“I hope I didn’t miss her.”

I tilted my head. “Is everything all right?”

Rita sighed. “Probably. But one time she sent a manuscript to the wrong author, and since then I’ve tried to keep my eye on her when she goes to the mailroom so I can follow and double check them.”

“You check every package?”

She frowned. “Is that nuts?”

“Um….” After all, she was my boss. But no wonder she hadn’t taken a vacation in forever.

“You’re right. It is.” She released a long breath and combed her hand through her frazzly hair. “I mean, she’s my assistant, for heaven’s sake. I shouldn’t have to sneak behind her and double check every little parcel.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

Rita chuckled a little, then stopped just as suddenly. “Maybe this one last time.” Before I could get in a word about guidelines, she darted toward the hallway.

I wandered back to my office, but happened to catch Cassie’s eye as I walked by her open door. I hesitated to ask for her help, but maybe this would be a good icebreaker.

“You wouldn’t happen to have guidelines for the different lines of books, would you?”

She stretched her back as if she had been hunched over a manuscript nonstop since the last time I had seen her. “I think so—let me check.”

She swiveled toward her file cabinet and opened what could have been an advertisement for a perfectly organized file drawer. All the colored tabs were perfectly staggered. No messy stray papers sticking out of file folders.

“When was this picture taken?” I said, pointing to Cassie’s graduation photo.

“High school,” she said as she flicked through her files. “I was salutatorian.”

I made a humming sound of approbation. It seemed expected.

“I should have been valedictorian, but the varsity quarterback had gotten extra credit for doing independent study. All he turned in was a five-page paper on the history of the NFL, but he got as much credit for it as I got for calculus. It was sort of unfair.”

I frowned. It was unfair, and now she kept that photo on her desk as a…a what? A testament to having been passed over? Cheated?

“Here they are!” she said brightly, pulling out a small stack of stapled-together pages. She flipped through a couple of multicolored sheets. “I knew I had restocked recently.”

“Great.”

She smiled up at me. “You can get them from Mercedes’s assistant.”

I froze, momentarily confused. Did this mean Cassie wasn’t sharing? I looked pointedly at the pile of papers in her hand. “I just need one.”

“Oh, no. You’ll need more than that,” she said. “People ask for them every day. You should keep a stack handy.”

“Okay, so if I just took one of yours and made copies….”

She shook her head. “Mercedes wants them all to be uniformly color coded. A different color for each line of books, see?” She flipped through her stack again, to demonstrate. Or to taunt me. “We had a meeting about this a few months ago. Guidelines should be color coded—she doesn’t want the Pulse guidelines to be green, for instance. They should be this pale red color.”

“Uh-huh.” She kept leafing through those guidelines so that it was all I could do not to snatch one out of her hands and make a run for it. She clearly was not going to cough one up. “Okay…guess I’ll ask Mercedes.”

“Her assistant, Lisa, is who you should ask. She usually has a whole stack of them.”

So do you, but a fat lot of good that’s done me. I grinned at her. “Well! Thanks for your help.”

She tilted her head and aimed a reptilian smile at me. “First day going well?”

“Going great,” I said.

“Terrific!”

I got the guidelines from Mercedes’s assistant without further ado, but the next time I saw Andrea, I had to ask her, “Have you ever sensed any animosity from Cassie?”

“Oh, that one’s a real go-getter,” Andrea said. “And a stickler for the rules, too. It’s probably eating her up inside that you got hired in a level above her.”

I told her about the guideline incident.

Andrea’s brows knit into a puzzled frown. “I’m sure Julie had tip sheets here somewhere…” She turned to my file cabinet. In five seconds, she was handing me a little stack of guidelines.

I sank down in my chair, feeling like a dope. “Tip sheets,” I said. “I didn’t think…”

Andrea shrugged. “Give yourself a break. It’s your first day.”

My first day. Right. I needed to get a grip. “Forget what I said about Cassie,” I said. “I’m just being paranoid.”

Andrea laughed. “Maybe, but don’t forget the immortal words of Richard Nixon: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you.’”

At six-forty I straggled up the stairs to the building lugging my copy of The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard. Every muscle in my body felt tired, even my mouth from holding it in a tense friendly smile for half the day. I really needed to have a Calgon evening, but unfortunately the apartment was tubless. Maybe I could have a hot shower and relax for a little bit before tackling the editing of the manuscript, which I was determined to make considerable headway on that night.

As I reached the third floor where we lived, the door was flung open. There stood Fleishman, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. “You’re finally home! The pizza’s cold.”

He took my totebag full of manuscript as I dragged myself through the door. “Cold is okay,” I said. Even after pigging out at lunch with my coworkers, I was starving now. “Sitting at a desk all day really gives you an appetite.”

Fleishman had set the little table in what we laughingly called our entertainment area. It was the ten-foot square of space into which we wedged a round eating table, a futon couch, a thirty-five-inch plasma screen television, a bookcase, and the microwave oven. (The kitchen didn’t have room for the microwave.) He had even put out cloth napkins and lit a candle. At the moment I would have been happy to collapse on the couch with a pizza box in my lap and an IV hookup to a box of wine, but it was really thoughtful of him to try to make the apartment nice for the occasion.

Though I wondered what kind of occasion he thought this was. It wasn’t as if I had never worked before.

“Have a seat.” He guided me over to a chair and pressed me into it. “I have to show you the surprise.”

“Oh.” I assumed that this was the surprise—pizza by candlelight. That would have been enough.

But Fleishman had never been one of those people for whom enough would suffice. He was fond of over-the-top gestures, and as he skipped back to Wendy’s closet of a room to retrieve whatever he had hidden there, I wondered what on earth he could have gotten. I mean, he had already arranged a wardrobe for me. At the moment, I felt I lacked for nothing except self-confidence and a modicum of editorial know-how.

He came running back with a large cardboard box, which he put carefully on the floor in front of me. It was just a plain brown box, though it had a big white bow around it. I was just so exhausted I couldn’t focus, because it appeared to be moving.

“Open it,” he said.

I frowned at it suspiciously. “What is it?”

“Open it.” When I hesitated, he yanked the bow off himself.

After that, I didn’t have to open the box. It opened itself. Suddenly, I was staring into the face of a tan colored puppy. His little pink tongue was sticking out at me, panting like mad, and his paws were scrabbling pointlessly against the cardboard. He wanted out of that box and onto my lap. Onto someone’s lap. Like all puppies, the eagerness in his eyes gave you the impression that he wasn’t going to be too particular. Anybody would do.

He yelped. I jumped.

“Isn’t he cute?” Fleishman said. He picked up the puppy and plopped the squirming mound of fur onto my chest. My neck and face were immediately assaulted by that tongue and the Mighty Dog breath that went with it. “His name’s Maxwell.”

“Maxwell?”

“For Maxwell Perkins, the editor. I thought your dog should have a publishing name.”

“My dog?” Maxwell let out another yelp, letting me know that was A-OK with him.

“I thought it would suit him better than naming him some lame author name, like Hemingway. That’s so unoriginal. Of course, Max isn’t exactly original, either. We could call him Perkins, but people might think we named him for Anthony Perkins—”

It was time to interrupt his soliloquy. “My dog?”

“Of course. He’s a gift.”

The dog was having a hard time balancing on my lap, so I put him on the ground. He proceeded to try to crawl up my leg. I had to admit he was awfully cute. His fur was short and bristly in appearance but soft to the touch, and his little face was like something you’d see in a Puppy Chow ad. The tips of his ears folded downward, giving him a look that was goofily rakish.

“He’s a purebred Norfolk terrier,” Fleishman said. “He’s even got papers.”

It was hard to believe something so small and silly looking had a pedigree. Also, pedigree was usually accompanied by a healthy price tag. Last I heard, Fleishman was supposed to be broke. “What did you do, rob a pet store?”

Fleishman laughed. “I put him on American Express.”

“Since when do you have one of those?”

He looked offended. “I’ve been a proud member since ten AM this morning.”

“You know AmEx makes you pay off in full at the end of the month, don’t you?”

“Okay, so at the end of the month I’ll find some money.”

Shame he couldn’t have found some when we were scrambling for the rent.

He laughed. “Rebecca, will you lighten up? I charged the pizza, too—and you don’t mind that.”

Speaking of pizza, I grabbed a piece and chewed as I stared at Maxwell. At the first whiff of food, he plopped down on his rump and started to wag his stubby little tale. His big brown eyes melted me. They could have melted the polar ice cap, what was left of it. “Hey Maxwell, you want some pizza?”

“No—no pizza. I got some Science Diet puppy formula.”

He said it with such paternal sternness, I drew back in surprise. “I can’t believe you got a dog. Dogs are a lot of work, you know. They’re a responsibility. They have to be fed regularly, and walked, and housetrained…”

Not to mention, I started thinking about Ann and her Maltese. No life. Pathetic. Would that be me soon?

“Yeah, but puppies are so cute,” Fleishman said. “How can you resist?”

Maxwell was chewing on my shoestring. The truth was, I couldn’t resist. Outside of a goldfish, I hadn’t had a pet since I was a little kid. I had always wanted a dog.

“I felt it was time,” Fleishman said. “We’re getting older, you know. Besides, won’t it be nice to have a warm body to come home to?”

I glanced into Fleishman’s eyes and felt the pizza like a lump in my throat. I looked back down at Maxwell, who was still gazing at me adoringly. Or maybe it was just hungrily. It would be nice to have a warm body waiting for me, I supposed, even if it was canine. And as long as I kept food in my hand, I would always have his undivided attention. How many relationships could you say that about?

“So what do you say…” Fleishman looked at me. “Can we keep him, ma?”

I laughed. “Did you really think I could get rid of that?”

As if knowing his cue, Maxwell barked. Which reminded me. “Did you check this out with the landlord?”

“It’s okay. I bribed the super when I got home.”

“How did you do that?”

“Cash advance.”

I would have loved to lecture on the fact that he would regret being so financially reckless someday, but the fact was that he probably wouldn’t. Fleishman lived in a parallel universe where the chickens never came home to roost. Or when they did come home to roost, they ended up laying golden eggs.

“So how was your day?” he asked. “I mean, up to now. I know you’re blissfully happy now.”

“Half okay and half awful.” I told him about what had happened with Cassie after I talked to him on the phone. “I think she has it in for me, I really do. If you could have seen the look in her eye when she was sitting there with those tip sheets…”

“Some people are just like that.”

“Right.” And some people were just psychopaths. I was pretty sure I had put my finger on our office psycho, but I didn’t have the evidence. “Plus I have all this work to do now.”

“Homework?” He looked alarmed at the idea of work being brought into the house, and eyed my tote bag suspiciously.

“Just till I’m caught up.”

“When will that be?”

I thought for a moment. “Somewhere in the year 2010.”

“Did you bring any more books home?” he asked.

“Just the one I’m editing.”

He seemed disappointed.

“I’d better get to work,” I said, reluctantly. It would have been so nice to play with the puppy and then just conk out.

Fleishman got up. “I’ll take Max around the block.”

I looked doubtfully at that unruly lump of fur. “Does he walk on a leash yet?”

“No, but he enjoys gnawing on it. I’ll just carry him down and set him on a patch of grass, if I can find any.”

He left and I got out the book. I was already so tired, I wondered how I would be able to stay awake long enough to get anything done. I spent ten minutes just getting myself situated—sharpening pencils, brewing a pot of coffee, doodling on a pad of Post-it notes.

When Fleishman and Max came back, I hadn’t even started yet.

“I’ll just sit here and read,” Fleishman said. “I won’t bother you at all.”

He settled on the couch with a copy of Forgotten Nights by Joy Silver, an amnesia book I think he had already read. Max proceeded to chew on the cover. The next time I looked up, the book had dropped to the floor next to the futon, and Fleishman was asleep with the puppy on his chest.

I wished I had a camera.

Then I shook my head. I was entertaining thoughts I shouldn’t. Like how sweet it was of Fleishman to bring Max home, even though the thought of taking care of a dog for the next fifteen years made me a little panicky. It was hard not to feel, there in that little room with just the three of us, that it had been a rather couply gesture. Not that we were a couple in the real sense…but still. It made me wonder if he still ever thought of me as girlfriend material.

I shouldn’t have cared. Fleishman was my friend, and he was more friendly as a friend-friend than a boyfriend. In the past, every time it seemed that something was starting to brew between us, it seemed he would simultaneously start slipping away. That he would avoid my eyes and suddenly develop a fondness for going with his guy buddies to see loud movies with lots of explosions and sexy girls in tank tops carrying machine guns.

But when we were just friends, like now, he was so something else. We were so comfortable together, like an old married couple.

It was so irritating. Why couldn’t the person you want just fall in love with you? That would solve everything.

I forced myself to focus on my work rather than the enigma that was my roommate. Gradually I became more involved in the story, and before I knew it, it was after midnight and Wendy was coming through the door.

She glanced at Fleishman on the futon, and then me camped out on the table. Then she did a double-take back to Fleishman. Fleishman and Max.

I winced. Fleishman and I hadn’t discussed what Wendy would say about the dog. But now that I considered it, there might be trouble…

“Do you know what month a woman’s supposed to have an amniocentesis?” I asked, hoping to distract her.

Wendy wasn’t looking at me. “What’s that?”

“It’s the test pregnant women take to…well, I’m not sure why, exactly. But the woman in this book is going for an amnio in her second month. Isn’t that a little early?”

She put her arms akimbo and affected a Bones from Star Trek voice. “Damn it, Rebecca, I’m a lighting designer, not an obstetrician.”

I laughed.

“But that’s not what I was asking you about.” She pointed to Fleishman’s snoozing form. “What is that?”

“Oh, that’s Maxwell Perkins. Fleishman brought him home today.”

Wendy sank into a chair. Lately she had seemed to chafe about stuff going on in the apartment. “Isn’t this the sort of thing we’re supposed to have roommate conferences about?”

“When have we ever had a roommate conference?”

“You’re right. It’s not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship…and from now on it’s going to be a dictatorship run by that little ball of fur there.” She seemed genuinely worried. “This is no joke. Dogs are a lot of trouble.”

“That’s what I was telling Fleishman. But he was being so sweet—he bought the puppy for me for my first day of work.”

She crossed her arms. “You don’t think that’s kind of odd?”

“Why?”

“It’s sort of…cozy. Giving a person a puppy. Don’t you think?”

“Well…yeah, it seemed kind of domestic.”

“Right. Like Fleishman wants to play house.” Her brows arched meaningfully.

I lifted my arms, and suddenly realized how stiff my shoulders felt from being hunched over that book. I had to stretch like Cassie had in her office this afternoon. I couldn’t believe I had been working for almost four hours, and I still wasn’t anywhere close to done. Maybe I wasn’t doing this right.

“How did your day go?” I asked.

“Okay, except I got my next project. I’m going to have to design the lights for Death of a Salesman. Another dreary one. My professors must think I should specialize in tragedy and angst, but I tell you what. It’s made me want to graduate and go light roller-skating tourist musicals and revivals of Annie.”

I nodded. I knew just how she felt. Back when I was an undergraduate studying English lit, I spent semesters slogging through James Joyce and William Faulkner when I would dream of getting out and reading fun stuff again. Pure fluff.

I stared down at my marked-up copy of The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard. As wish fulfillment went, this seemed a little over the top.