The Pink Ghetto. Liz Ireland

curves? Who needs ’em?” I joked.

      “Right. Well, what I could use is a vacation, but I doubt that’s coming anytime soon, unless it’s in a place with padded walls.”

      She went on to explain to me that Pulse Pod people worked on all sorts of books aside from medical romances. “We also work on Hearthsongs, Flames, MetroGirl, Historicals, and occasionally Divines.”

      She might have been speaking to me in a foreign tongue. I was lost. All I could think of when she said divine was the cross-dresser who starred in Lust in the Dust. I was pretty sure that wasn’t what she meant.

      She stopped. “Divine is Candlelight’s inspirational line. Those books are really hot right now. You might say preachers are the new vets. Vet heroes came into vogue a decade ago. And cops are always the rage.” She sighed. “We don’t do a lot of Divines in this pod, though. Mary Jo is pretty possessive of those. Have you met Mary Jo Mahoney?”

      I shook my head.

      “You will.” She inhaled on her pen. “Lucky bitch—she knows she’s sitting on the gold mine over there in the God Pod. It’s where the real growth is now.”

      I left the interview with mixed feelings. I couldn’t decide if the job looked like a great thing or a nightmare. When I got home hauling a totebag full of books, Fleishman was all over me. (Well, all over the totebag.)

      “More books? Yay!”

      I was beginning to worry about him. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

      “I called in sick.” When I leveled a stare at him, he smiled impishly. “I had to see how your interview turned out.”

      “It went fine.”

      “I’ll say—there’s a message from Kathy Leo on the machine.”

      I gasped and scrambled over to the phone. When I called Kathy, she announced, “I was calling to offer you the position of associate editor for Candlelight Books.”

      Associate? I gulped. Maybe I’d heard her wrong. “I thought…”

      She laughed. “I know. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Mercedes came to plead your case. The thing is, we can’t up the starting salary for assistants without causing a revolution around here, but she really was impressed with you, so we decided that we should bump you up a job grade.”

      Fleishman, who was practically shoving me out of hearing range so he could stick his ear next to the receiver, too, gave me a high five.

      “I-I don’t know what to say,” I stammered. “Except…” Except I think I’m in way over my head now. “Except how soon can I start?”

      Chapter 3

      Kathy Leo’s call put me in a panic.

      What was I getting myself into? Sure, I could bluff my way through a half-hour interview or two. Apparently I had bluffed beyond my wildest dreams. But how could I bluff my way through eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year?

      Answer: I couldn’t. I was so screwed.

      I didn’t even own the clothes to look the part. Aside from my Mao suit, my wardrobe leaned heavily toward the ultracasual, as befitted an ex-grocery shopper. I was utterly unprepared to enter a world where I needed to look like a grownup. I wasn’t even sure I still owned a pair of panty hose. Didn’t people still wear those?

      On Friday, the day after the call from Kathy Leo, I was still flat on my back on the futon in the living room, awash in worry. Worrying was about all I could do, since God knows I didn’t have the funds to remedy my fashion deficiency. And no amount of money would render me suddenly competent for a job I was in no way qualified for.

      I had a versatile skirt made out of some kind of tensile material that was supposed to be breathable but really felt like Saran Wrap, and I had the Mao suit. Wendy had an actual dress I could probably borrow to throw my new coworkers off my feebly garmented trail. That was three outfits—maybe five if I accessorized cleverly to disguise the fact that I was wearing the Saran Wrap skirt in three different incarnations. If I did that for two weeks, maybe three, I would probably be able to splurge for something new at Filene’s Basement with my first paycheck.

      I envisioned myself at the end of those three weeks in my gamey black skirt, already the office pariah. Possibly by then the powers that be would have found me out—that I, ahem, stretched the truth in those interviews. That I had no business even applying for such a job. That actually, despite four years of college English, none of which remotely touched on the subject of grammar, my relationship with the technical ins and outs of my native tongue was haphazard at best.

      In other words, that I was a fraud.

      Just as I was considering holding up the nearest Duane Reade for some Zoloft, the apartment door flew open and Fleishman rushed in. At least I was pretty sure it was Fleishman. His distinctive features were almost indistinguishable behind heaps of colorful shopping bags.

      “Where have you been?” I asked. “I thought you had work today.”

      “I did, but then I got a summons from Natasha.” Fleishman was the only person I knew who called his parents by their first names, a practice that in my family would have earned any kid a whack upside the head. But Natasha Fleishman never seemed to mind; she seemed to think it was part of her son’s bad-boy appeal. Fleishman’s attitude toward his family was always that of a beloved scapegrace. His father might not be speaking to him, his mother might have to sneak into the city to see him, and he might profess contempt for everything they stood for (up to and including budget footwear), but he acted as though he believed they would all eventually come around to see his undeniable value and charm.

      I wondered, though. Fleishman took an awful lot for granted. No person, even a father, wanted to be called a miserly old fascist forever. I mean, language like that tended to alienate people.

      He grinned and explained his mother’s surprise appearance in town. “Natasha came to have lunch and to drop off part of the Fleishman fortune on Fifth Avenue. She called me at work before heading over, so I took the rest of the day off and here I am.”

      I eyed those bags. One said Sak’s, one said Barney’s, and a few others boasted names of stores that I didn’t recognize.

      “She took you to all those places?” I asked.

      “No, no, no. Natasha just took me to lunch. I told her that we were collecting clothes for a charity drive, though, and so before coming over she loaded up the Benz with all her castoffs.”

      “What charity?” I asked.

      “The Rebecca Abbot foundation, dedicated to clothing the intolerably attired.”

      He laid all the bags at my feet. I could hardly believe it. There had to be thousands of dollars worth of stuff in there!

      “Oh my God. It’s like having a fairy godmother burst through the door!”

      “I hope you don’t mind hand-me-downs,” he said.

      He was joking. How many times had I repeated the factoid that I had not owned a first-hand coat until I was thirteen? When you’re the fifth of six kids, you learn to look at the closets of your siblings as your own personal thrift store. But this—this was a big step up in closet class.

      I tossed my arms around Fleishman and gave him a noisy kiss on his cheek. “I can’t believe you did this for me, Fleish.”

      “Who else would I do it for?” he asked, his grey eyes practically sparkling at me.

      When people ask me to describe Fleishman, I usually say he sort of resembles the young Martin Landau from his North by Northwest days, only that doesn’t really do him justice. He’s that tall, thin, and angular, but he’s dapper. When you look at him—and he’s so distinctive that people always do crane around to look at him on the streets or in restaurants—you