The Pink Ghetto. Liz Ireland

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