The Pink Ghetto. Liz Ireland

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