walked in on a boyfriend having sex with my best friend. I’ve not even had a telephone interview, much less one that required business attire.
“It was a wash,” Missy says. “They’re only paying seventy. It would be a step down.”
“Seventy thousand dollars?” I spit.
Missy shrugs. “It’s beneath me,” she says.
The phone rings.
“Are you ready to get plastered? I am,” Steph declares on the phone. “My mobile phone died on me. My plane was late. The conference was a mess, and, well, I’ve got some serious news to tell you, but I think I should do it in person.”
I have $20. I try to tell myself this is enough for a night out on the town, like back in college when I managed to get the change in the couch cushions to support a night of pitchers and cheese fries.
“I’ve got news, too,” I say. “Missy’s moved in.”
“What? Are you joking?” Steph coughs. “You let the klepto into your apartment?”
“I sort of didn’t have a choice, and besides, you said you didn’t even think those rumors were true,” I say.
“OK, well, what the hell. I’m feeling generous. She can come along if she likes.”
“She might have to. Of the two of us, she’s the one with cash.”
We all gather at the bar at Red Light, because Missy won’t be seen in one of our “local dives” and she insists that she’ll pay for our ten-dollar mango martinis rather than be seen in an Irish pub sucking down Harp.
“So? What’s the news?” I ask Steph.
“Well…Ferguson has lost weight,” she says.
Ferguson was my old supervisor at Maximum Office. Everyone called him Fat Ferguson with no sense of irony. He was probably nearly three hundred pounds, and because of this, Fat Ferguson had a sweating problem. He carried a ring of sweat around his armpits and a spot on his belly even on the coldest of days. I never saw him without his sweatbands. I kept thinking that perhaps they meant something, like the rings in a tree, but I never found any correlation. They were just there. Pit stains.
“You don’t know pain until you have to work on that man’s computer,” Missy says. “Do you know he once got an entire French fry stuck in his keyboard? Don’t ask me how he did it.”
Steph laughs.
“So how much weight has he lost?” Missy asks. Fat Ferguson had already started the Subway diet well before I left, and was already less of Fat Ferguson and more like the incredibly Shrinking Ferguson. His pants always seemed in danger of falling down.
“You wouldn’t even recognize him. He looks almost normal. He’s lost fifty more pounds,” Steph says.
“Are you stalling?” I ask Steph. “Surely your big news isn’t that Fat Ferguson is still on his diet.”
“OK, well, do you want the bad news or the good news first?”
“Good,” I say, without hesitation. Missy snorts.
“I quit my job!” Steph beams, looking proud.
I drop my cigarette. Missy pats Steph on the back. “Nice work,” Missy says.
“You quit! Do you have any idea how crazy that is?” I can’t believe Steph would willingly embrace a life of squatting, bill-evading, and bad credit. It doesn’t seem possible.
“I’d taken all I was going to take,” Steph says. “I quit on the last day of the convention, after I’d not slept for nearly three days.”
“But, Steph, maybe you could still get your job back,” I start. “You don’t know what it’s like out there. The job market is terrible.”
“I’m not too worried. I’m going to freelance,” Steph says.
My mouth drops open. “Freelance? Are you crazy?”
“Don’t listen to Jane. You don’t need those cocksuckers,” Missy says, tapping out some ash into my empty martini glass.
“Steph, I think you need to think this through,” I say. I am beginning to sound like Todd.
“Too late. I told Mike that he was a low-life asshole and Ferguson that he smelled like Vienna sausages.”
“You told Fat Ferguson he smelled?” I know I should find this funny, but
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