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Dear Therapy Journal that is supposed to change my life (but I’m not holding my breath just yet),

If you’re like me, when you think about dying, you think about a sick person in the hospital with bags of fluids being dripped in and greasy, thinning hair, and an operation scheduled at 10 a.m. in the O.R. I happened to get that image from Terms of Endearment. But apparently there are other ways of dying that are a lot less visible. Like, “being numb to life emotionally.” Or at least says my shrink, Dr. Fenwick.

That surprised me. I thought that was just a thing melodramatic people say. Actually, hearing it from him like that scared the crap out of me. I don’t really want to die. I just . . . well, I wouldn’t mind if I stopped thinking I could have saved my dad from that fire he died in twenty years ago, for just a couple of hours a day. This way I could free myself up from guilt to care about some other stuff besides blame, death, dying, cowardice, fire—a grim set of thoughts to say the least. Like for instance, if I saw a really great sunny spot on a bench open up, and I wanted to go for it, but then I saw another person—close to my age, not really old or pregnant or anything—look at it just a second later, I would actually take the spot, instead of thinking I should give it to her because what if I didn’t, and then she sat somewhere else, and it was at that somewhere else that a car came flying up over the curb and right into that very spot on the park bench, and the girl about my age died because of it.

Unfortunately, Dr. Fenwick doesn’t do anything a little bit at a time, like allow me to just let the girl have the seat 70 percent of the time and then work my way down from there, asserting a little more and a little bit more, over a period of time such as twenty-five years. Dr. Fenwick wants me to jump right in. He calls it “behavior modification.” He says I need to force myself to change my life, and eventually, my obsessive emotions will catch up. We’re starting with a new job and recording it all in this journal, so I don’t make light of the “drastic changes” I’ve made. We’ll see, I guess . . . technically I don’t have to start modifying until Monday, so I’m sticking it out at my current job every last second until then.

Though I knew I’d be trying at least to quit soon, this fact didn’t at all lessen the blow when my boss, Nasty, struck again. This time I’d just relaxed into a fantastic article on harnessing the power of positive thinking through eating three Oreos a day (really, this is what it said, and it was surprisingly intriguing . . . explaining about the importance of implementing such a simple ritual to help you meditate on the simple enjoyments of life). I was just thinking that would be a much better method than this crazy immersion thing of Dr. Fenwick’s and much easier, when I heard her voice like an ax chop, “An-na!” If this hadn’t persuaded me to move my ass in two years, then I really don’t think anything will.

And then the twister that was my micromanaging boss, Ms. Elizabeth Jackson, aka Miss Jackson if You’re Nasty, aka Nasty, swished herself in her slim white pantsuit over to my unfortunately public cubicle.

Though I’d probably appear to be in the wrong place with my halfhearted attempt at fashion, we’re in the public relations department for the chic New York City daily paper, New York, New York, so I didn’t need to act like I wasn’t reading this Oreo Zen article. In fact, it’s my job to read these kinds of articles and to know exactly what is trendy at every minute of every day so that I can call up morning news show producers and print publications to pitch editors from our paper to come in and speak as experts on these very topics. For instance, last week, I had our hygiene and moral-deficient executive editor, Joseph James, on Goodmorning City! To expound on the latest trend of having nude portraits of yourself painted eating a fruit that symbolizes what kind of person you are (Madonna had one with a pineapple—spiked on the outside, but sweet in the middle; Paris Hilton’s was just the opposite—a pomegranate, which is quite beautiful looking, but a real bitch to deal with). My roommate, Ray, thought very quietly, looking out our 87^th Street, third-floor window before he said he thought I might be an overripe banana.

“Why’s that?” I’d asked him. My hair was propped up in a loose bun and I could feel it flop as I sat up straighter on our sofa.

“If someone just looked at you, you’d seem okay, even with a couple of scrapes and spots, because you’ve got that protective peel. But if they could see inside, well there’s all that bruised stuff deteriorating your base.” His words were tender and slow.

Boy did I wish I hadn’t brought that up. That was the night we really started talking about the big T: Therapy. Before that, I’d yessed him with no intention whatsoever of doing anything about it. I wasn’t that kind of person. I didn’t talk to myself or fear foods that started with the letter P. I was fine.

So I didn’t cover up the Oreo story on my screen when Nasty finally materialized, thinner than ever—scary thin, really—her unmanageable black hair curling wildly, the stiff corkscrews threatening to scratch away over my shoulder the way they did, oh, twenty or so times a day.

“AN-NA!” she screamed. Her hands were on her hips, and she stood over me, and all I could think was, that’s it! I quit! Whatever it is she wants me to do, she’ll tear it to shreds, say it would look worlds better in Georgia (the font, not the state), and if I switched everything around the opposite way, and stood on my head whistling the theme to Seinfeld. And then before she submits the work without changing a thing and taking all the credit, she’d say, maybe she should do it herself since I’m so “incompe-sent.” She doesn’t realize the word is incompetent.

This would bother me more if I actually had aspirations toward any goal, but I’m more of what you might call apathetic. I wasn’t always this way, but let’s start by telling a little of the painful stuff at a time, okay?

“How can I help you, Miss Jackson?” I asked with as clean a slate as I could bring to the situation after two years. Sure I could have left thousands of times if only I had the energy to . . . or the will. But I haven’t found those two things easy to come by. Every time I feel an energy spike, I think: but do you deserve it? You, who allowed her very own father to burn to death, do you deserve to follow your dream? I’ve been told it’s ridiculous, but I can’t believe it. Never have.

I should probably start eating Oreos tomorrow for inner strength and harmony, but I’m sure I won’t. In a world of doers, I’m that one girl who mixed up the a.m./p.m. thing and overslept. I don’t want to be this way, really I don’t, but I haven’t exactly worked out how to be any other way. Although one day I know I will...all I need is the right opportunity. “Opportunities don’t smack you in the face,” my friend Nina is always saying.

“ANNA, DID YOU RECEIVE A CALL FROM DOCTOR FRIEDMAN ABOUT MY VACATION NEXT WEEK AND FORGET TO TELL ME ABOUT IT?”

Oh no. Not the vacations. Anything but the vacations. I’d take an assignment any day, over calling Doctor Friedman, the fourth plastic surgeon Nasty has mentioned this week . . . who was obviously avoiding her, because once again she wanted something else enhanced, nipped, tucked or otherwise altered and wanted it now. I’d always assumed Nasty was more plastic than person. But no matter what I knew, she never let on. Nasty was a master publicist. And she made stellar attempts to cover up what she referred to as her vacations.

“No, I haven’t, Miss Jackson,” I said as if I were clueless. I blinked a lot and twirled a strand of hair in my fingers for effect. I’ve found it always best to play dumb. She liked it that way.

“WELL, CAN YOU CALL HIM AND TELL HIM I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHETHER WE ARE GOING TO BE ABLE TO PROCEED IN PLANNING OUR VACATION?” Nasty screamed though she was standing so close her hair was scratching my décolleté. She might have been hinting that my cowl-neck was too low cut, which was probably true, although it was just because I couldn’t get it to lay right though it had looked fabulous on the girl at the store, who helped me into the same one. She was very nice, and so I started telling her too much about my life, until I realized I’d just let her know that I could lay for hours and hours, still, and rethink maybe if I’d not had my transistor going in my bedroom during the fire, then I could have realized everything approximately 2.3 minutes quicker, and then I could have saved Dad.

I pinched the shirt up a little higher, and it slipped right back down. You are not her secretary! You are not her secretary! I chanted it in my head.

“Of course I can call him for you, Miss Jackson.” I took the pink Post-it with the telephone number printed in Nasty’s perfect handwriting.

I pictured the Oreos, unscrewing the sides to reveal the hard, chemically cream; I would stand my ground . . .

That’s another thing Nina’s always saying: “Just stand your ground! Don’t let her scratch you up with that grody hair!”

Nina is a fabulous friend, the kind of friend you would fly halfway around the world to be with you if she thought you needed it. The kind of friend that didn’t ever ask, “Do you need me?” but instead just took it upon herself to be needed and didn’t sweet talk around things in a way that would never help. She abhorred—on account of their “emptiness”—the words, You’ll be fine.

Instead, she signed up for “yogalates” and knocked on your door to accompany you there with a fresh bottle of Poland Springs. But Nina still didn’t get that I just wasn’t made that way. In my head, sure! I could conjure all sorts of rational comebacks, such as, “It’s very sad the way you are always trying to fix your outward appearance instead of working on whatever’s going on inside,” or “Rather than take your problems out on me, how about you bet laid or something?” But she’s doing something to help, which is more than I can say for myself—plus, those comebacks could easily apply to me.

Apparently I hadn’t always been this way. My mom says that before my father died, I was always elbowing my cousins out of the way, so that I could dance the meringue in the middle of our holiday get together musical reviews, stopping every once in a while to eat a green olive. She says I was fond of the words, listen to me! But I can’t remember a bit of that. I’d give everything I own (which wouldn’t be that much) if I could remember even a shred of it.

“Doctor Friedman’s office,” a chirpy voice on the line announced as I crushed the Post-it in my palm. I avoided Nasty’s eye, by staring instead at the mug next to my monitor. If you look too closely into her eyes, it’ll scare the crap out of you. Her eyes are such a dark brown you can barely see a distinction between the pupil and iris, and though I’ve heard them described as “elegantly deep,” I think it’s more of an Exorcist type of thing.

“Yes, ummm . . .” I focused so intensely on the mug that it went fuzzy, but I could recognize my father’s mug with my eyes closed.

“Can I help you?” Chirpy prompted in a sweet, but remarkably efficient manner.

I found myself unsure of how to continue, given Nasty was standing over me and I wasn’t meant to know that Doctor Friedman was being called about a little matter known as cosmetic enhancement. “Yes, er, I’m calling to see whether Doctor Friedman was able to schedule his vacation with Ms. Na—er, Elizabeth Jackson?” I could feel her breath on the side of my face now that I’d swiveled my chair. I gulped, praying this would work. Oreos—chemical cream, annoying crumbs, not going to work; the mug—remember grabbing the mug while sitting shiva, climbing Mom’s wobbly stepladder, reaching up on tiptoes to grab it and hide it under my velvet smock dress, hearing the wails: “so young, so young,” between their bites of crunchy rugelach.

“Oh, ma’am, I apologize, but I think you’ve got it wrong. Doctor Friedman doesn’t schedule vacations; he schedules cosmetic surgery procedures.”

Oh God. Nasty crouched down, her head level with my own, her arms crossed over what would soon not be a concave chest, waiting for the outcome. This was so not in my job description!

The tension of the potentially explosive situation heavy on my own modest chest, I counted to three and tried again. “Yes,” I tried Chirpy’s tone, “So is he going to be able to schedule that very special, life-enhancing vacation with Ms. Jackson, do you know?” Please get it. Please...

Nasty’s face was turning, well, Nasty. I knew I only had a certain amount of time before this got really ugly.

Chirpy’s sweet was replaced by self-righteousness. “I believe I already told you we do not schedule vacations, special, life-enhancing, or otherwise.” But as the words emerged, their meaning must have snapped into place in her mind because I heard a throaty chuckle, some muffled whispers, which I’m pretty sure amounted to, “Now that’s a new one!” When Chirpy returned, it was in complete understanding. “You poor dear, yes. Doctor Friedman says he can schedule the, um, vacation, for a week from Friday, but that Ms. Jackson will only be able to enhance her vacations by half the size she had originally hoped. Anything more would add extra strain to her back.”

How had I veered so far from my goals? When I was young, I wanted to be a writer. Anna Walker, author. We had a calligrapher write that up all fancy at a town festival when I was a kid. The parchment was still framed on my bedroom door. On the other side, my mother kept my room just as it had always been—yellow walls, ratty quilt paint-spotted from my artistic days. Even the Duran Duran poster and the books I’d worn the spines out on remained.

The vacation episode did have a positive outcome: Nasty would get her new boobs and somehow, I felt inspired creatively. All afternoon I used the PowerPoint skills I’d gleaned at a boring seminar the week before to animate a promotional style presentation of Nasty’s surgical metamorphosis during my two-year employment at New York, New York. I called it: Plastic Makes Perfect . . . or Does it?

I even wrote in a game option I imagined licensing to Milton Bradley: “Pin the Scalpel on the Plastic.” I’d market it as a millennium update to “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” which, let’s face it, today’s kids are too sophisticated for. At first I was thinking I’d keep the tail though there was no hard evidence she had one. I figured the hipsters who shopped at Urban Outfitters would like it, too. I smiled for three hours straight.

“Pin the tail on the plastic just doesn’t make sense, Anna.” At one, I met my roommate, Ray, for lunch. He’s a trader at L.A.R.G.E. Bank and so he’s got a great business sense.

“Yeah, well, fuck you.” It wasn’t odd for me to be so candid with him. I met Ray at the University of Connecticut when he’d “mistakenly” checked the female box on his housing questionnaire. He claimed female roommates were better overall—neater, more thoughtful, caring. I happen to think he’d been thinking more of stealing inappropriate glances when the opportunity arose, but whatever. We’d cohabitated undetected through to Graduation; certain Resident Advisers were onto us, but Ray managed to charm his way back to secrecy, and we’ve remained roommates ever since.

“Use that fucking attitude at fucking work and maybe you’d be fucking writing for that fucking paper instead of creating yet another fucking press campaign that your nasty boss will take fucking credit for while treating you like shit.” He took a boyishly huge bite of burger, dipped a fry in ketchup, and winked at a waitress at the neighboring table. She seemed intrigued, which in turn made Ray bored with her, so he refocused on me. So goes the plight of the good-looking trader. In my next life, that’s what I’d come back as.

He smirked and I shook my head. His womanizing amazed me; it wasn’t fair to everyone else for a guy to be that good looking. Still, as much as I shared things like mental illness, menstrual bloat, and gorging at Burger King with him, I could never imagine being romantic with someone who had such little respect for women.

Ray switched girls like I switched lip gloss—which is quite a lot, since my other best friend, Nina, is a fledgling spa owner and obsessed with making me her guinea pig. She once cut my hair into a Christmas tree and called it a shag. Ray never laughed harder. The problem was my hair’s thick as a lawn and it took five years to grow out. Nina removed hairstyling from the services roster. “It’s better to specialize anyhow,” she said, unpacking a new cream wax, which she was going to use on me God knows where. In Nina’s defense, she did once help my anorexic eyelashes, which she described as looking “like God got called away before he could finish.” She gave them a conditioning treatment and a clear mascara that made them look at least ten pounds heavier.

I glanced at my watch. I couldn’t believe I’d still have at least three hours of work left. Surely, life was not meant to be this meaningless.

I rolled my eyes. However, I knew Ray’s thoughts and they were right—that the answer to all this would be to pursue my dream of writing for the paper instead of this thing I was doing because I was too—I don’t know; lazy, scared, under-confident, undeserving to do anything about it. Even now, after I had been ordered to quit by my shrink—to save my life, no less—I was still pushing it off as long as possible.

“Do you love your job?” I asked Ray. He never complained about anything, only said things like “Everything’s great, what’s up with you?” when you knew it couldn’t possibly be great that often.

“Do I love my job? Hmmm.” He leaned back, stretched his legs, and clasped his hands behind his head. Three girls at a neighboring table smiled at him. He pretended not to notice. “It is what it is,” he said. “But,” he leaned in close, his chin resting in his palm, “you’re different. You, Anna Walker, are all about emotion. You need to feel a certain way to be fulfilled. And you know what I think? You need to find an editorial position, quit your job, and tell that Nasty that she’s just too nasty.”

Either he knew nothing about me or he knew more than I, myself, did—another reason I swore we’d never hook up. If he tossed me like all the other girls, then I’d lose our friendship, and I didn’t think I could survive without that. I guess I must have been wondering too long without saying anything, because Ray began to blink hugely, twice, like Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched.

“Sorry,” I said, tossing my finally-shoulder length hair behind my shoulder. I am never, and I mean never, cutting it again. “I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it.”

“Well, aren’t you working on your project from Fenprick?” Ray never said anyone’s name properly. Nina was Meana; his boss, Franklin, was Stanklin.

“Then you’ll be fine.” He waved away the idea of anything else as an impossibility.

“You know,” he took my hand and turned serious, “I’ve said this before but I want you to really think about it now: you were just a little girl, and your dad wouldn’t have wanted you risking your life through roaring flames and falling beams to save him.”

I just wish I could see it that way. But despite that tiny, rational part of my brain that wants to believe that’s true, I can’t manage to settle on that—it’s an exhausting process trying to, which I go through about twenty or so times a day, which doesn’t leave much time for anything else. So, though I’m skeptical and resistant, I’m glad Ray did the research and found the best practitioner of cognitive therapy for bereavement, and then set this whole thing up.

“Thanks,” I said. “Now go back to work and then have fun ruining some poor girl’s life.”

My first meeting with Fenwick was terrifying. Not because of Fenwick himself, who is actually very gentle and looks a little like Albert Einstein, but with some black flecks in his hair, and freckles.

“Hello,” I said, when he looked at me, half sitting on his green leather couch like I was ready to stand up and go at any second. I’d already said hello, but I didn’t know what came next.

We sat like that for a while, and I wondered if he were performing some visual evaluation. I played with the tassel on my purse and eyeballed the tissue box on the table in front of me. I should just go. I could see hours of this stare down ahead of me, and it didn’t look good.

“Well, I...” Oh wonderful, I thought, as I reached for the Kleenex. Two words, and here I was blubbering so I couldn’t even be understood. All this time trying (though failing) not to think of it, trying to get past it, and here I was digging the whole thing up with a bulldozer. But I looked up and Fenwick seemed—unbelievably—to understand.

I found myself reciting the version of events I had on a circuit through my mind. “I could see the fringes of my grandmother’s afghan catching already, smoldering,” I told him. “My mother was at the door, and the flames burst out, the backdraft in action, and I saw my own shoelace had caught. I slammed the door shut, and I could smell it—rubbery, chemical. And all of a sudden the heat, the smoke, I was shocked by it. I tried to yell, ‘Dad! Dad!’ But the words were too faint, I knew. Still I waited for him to chant back, ‘Anna Banana!’ Now the flames had come up through the door. Maybe he was gone, to the meeting place! I remembered so clearly this sudden idea of the meeting place! I looked around; the afghan was gone, burned completely—no longer would my mother and I wrap ourselves inside it to watch movies.” I tried like a skilled salesman to hype up the terror to shed a rightful light on my fleeing the scene, the version of things I told people when I wanted them to like me, because I wanted Fenwick to like me and tell me I was fine, and why didn’t I just go home and have a nice ice cream—maybe with fudge? And so I continued until I got to the part with Mrs. Sothers and the braids.

Fenwick sat back and crossed his right leg over his left—something I’d learn he always did when he was about to say something important. “I am unbelievably sorry that happened to you. That is a hell of a thing to happen to a little girl.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I stumbled on, “Thank you,” which didn’t seem exactly right. Though I sought it, I always hated when someone felt bad for me; I didn’t deserve it. I wrung the tissues in my palm maniacally. One fell onto the Oriental rug and I bent over to pick it up.

Twenty-five thousand, three hundred and fifty—approximately. “Once or twice,” I said. I had memorized, certain portions from children’s books that I’d checked out over and over, my name all down the front of the little green card. Page 5: “The best advice in case of fire is this: Get out and stay out! If there is a fire in your home, follow the escape routes you have practiced. Don’t stop to collect toys or other items.”

“I see,” Fenwick said. He continued on as if he knew exactly what was in my head though I tried to shroud it. “Now, I am going to tell you this once, and then I am not going to say it again, because if I do, you’ll keep coming back for me to reassure you about it, rather than learning to live with the doubt you have, the questions you will always have...”

I was trembling. “Okay, whatever,” I said sarcastically to save face though I craved a complete absolution more than anything; “save me with your magic words.”

Fenwick must have heard it all before; he leaned in close, his voice softened to just above a whisper, a tendril of his hair swung just above the surface of the table. “You did not kill your father.” He let that hang there, connecting us for a moment. “It is not your fault there was a fire. It is not your fault your father was in the basement. I am a father, and I have already taught my children their exit strategies in case of a fire, and if the situation should arise, the last thing I would want them to do is to go off those paths to rescue me. You did the correct, natural thing for a child to do, and I am positive that if your father were here today, he’d back me up on that.”

“I know tha—” I tried, but I couldn’t play it cool; here was a professional telling me the exact thing I’d ached for all these years, as if it might actually be true, like the grizzly image I’d had of myself all these years were nothing but a malfunction of thought.

The tissues were shredded, soaked, packed. I drank up every syllable, unabashedly now. Still, I could feel a resistance to believe him. “But I was nine. That’s old enough.” That was an automatic response for me. I had tons of them: press the button and out they came. At nine, I already knew how to cook, I walked to the bus stop myself. I could count to five hundred. I was able to sign the word hello in Spanish and Japanese. But as I ran through them, I could already tell these responses had been deflated, stripped of their power somewhat.

“Have you ever thought you might have an obsessive-compulsive disorder?” he angled his head gently, blinked softly.

I shook my head no.

“You think about this fire all the time, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“You play it out and play it out, trying to think of it differently, trying to let that new view of it stick so that you could stop thinking about it, feel good about yourself, and move on, don’t you?”

I didn’t say I’d almost missed this appointment because I couldn’t get up off the park bench until I could accomplish that very thing. “Yes.”

Fenwick shook his head, as if what I’d just agreed to fit the profile of a particular emotional problem and he knew exactly what I’d suffered; ridiculous. And yet comforting. I wanted him to be right. There was nothing in the world I wanted more than that.

“It’s going to take a while until this all makes sense before you can work all this out, but here’s your strategy now. Never try to convince yourself of your innocence, because you’ll never be able to do it, not for good anyhow. Just try to live with the not knowing. Just try to do the best you can to concentrate on the present—on making breakfast or having a meeting at work—and ignore how you feel altogether. If you’re gonna feel bad, feel bad . . . just let that hang out with you. Because the thing is, you just can’t trust how you feel, Anna. You’ve been seeing things this way for so long, it’s so embedded you’ll have a very hard time trying to feel like you didn’t kill your father like you do deserve to care about yourself now. So let it hang out and eventually, the feelings will lighten up. Now, you tell me how many things in your life you’ve allowed to slip through the cracks because you didn’t think you deserved to move on, or because you couldn’t bring yourself to.”

I looked to the intricate pattern of the rug, a twist and turn masterpiece, and wondered whether one could ever find a way out of the paths we set out on.

After lunch, Nasty was locked in her office, but every once in a while I heard her yell, “Chris!” Apparently Chris is her boyfriend. He sends a lot of flowers with cards that I can’t help peeking inside of. And she yells at him a lot. It’s difficult to tell when Nasty is happy, but after two years, I recognize signs such as café latte rather than plain coffee and Chanel No. 5 instead of Joy. With her, you’ll never get something as simple as a smile.

So I went back to the Plastic Makes Perfect! presentation. I wrote a script, taking an interactive route, imagining I’d ask participants, “Can you guess which body parts have gone on, ahem, vacation, ladies and gentlemen?” I couldn’t help myself from coming up with yet another branding option: this one with an educational bent. I could sell the presentation to doctors to educate their clients on what might happen to them, should they go overboard. This would help the doctors’ images and provide excellent opportunities for easy media coverage. Magazines and news programs love stories that come ready-made like that. I could imagine taking it one step further with the sale of publishing rights to a giant press like HarperCollins—and give them the option of a fun gift book, or a serious educational tome, whichever might fit into their upcoming catalog.

By the time I clicked “print”, I was pretty satisfied with myself. It had been over a year since I’d gotten the opportunity to finish any project here, and so it felt really good to do this—absurd as it was. The day had flown by, I felt I’d accomplished something.

As I heard the sheets make their way through the printer outside my cubicle, my extension rang. It was Nina.

“Ohmigod, I got us appointments at Get Nailed, that sexy new nail spa everyone’s talking about. We go Wednesday at five thirty. I can’t believe I got these! I had to act like I was a French model.” Nina wanted to research all the competition so she’d know just what her spa should be. We’d been doing this for as long as I’ve been working at New York, New York.

“Okay, now that’s not nice. Why do you have to bring up the French Model?” Until recently I’d been serial dating the one straight male publicist in print media—Jason Jones. But we were too different. He saw all the press events as temptation, rather than late nights with obnoxious, spoiled people who drank too much. We would argue about that and about his kissing girls in the V.I.P. when my back was turned. I would say, “Jason, you can at least wait until I go to the bathroom,” but I didn’t do anything about it. Ray said I was punishing myself and he wouldn’t stand for it. But it turned out neither of us had to do anything. Jason dumped me for the French Model Kristina Stina, which was an unbelievable thing, believe me.

“Please, you need some tough love; you’re the only woman in the world whose ego was actually boosted by the fact that her boyfriend dumped her for a beautiful model. What’s it been, five months since you’ve been on a date?”

“Four and three-quarters, actually.” I was honestly glad she brought it up; I felt like unloading some of my baggage and this was my entrée. We were the kind of irreplaceable friends who could do this with each other. Nina’s a complainer and she’s turned me onto its liberating qualities: “like yoga without the yucky sweat smell,” she’d been known to say.

“You’re too good for Jonesy . . . and all the other stupid guys you pick. Anyhow, we’re going tomorrow, so don’t waste money getting your nails done or anything.”

As if I would ever have my nails done. With the money I get paid, I’m lucky I can afford to keep our apartment stocked with toilet paper—except when I can’t and I nick it from the staff bathroom. The greatest part about all Nina’s research is that I didn’t have to pay for a thing and got to do all the posh things the people in Harper’s Bazaar do. If Nina wasn’t opening this spa, I’d have spent my whole life thinking the magazines made all that stuff up because I’d never believe people would pay five hundred dollars for a haircut.

“Cool. Dinner after, at mine?” When I say mine I mean the pub around the corner for burgers and waffle fries and a bowl of salad so big you could bathe in it. Ray and I basically lived there. This is New York City neighborhood life. At least for my group. We don’t do the chichi spots like Bungalow 8 or Suite 16. We prefer darts and two-dollar beer.

“Oh shit! I gotta go!” I flung myself out of my roller chair, around the fabric wall and toward the printer. It had only been about forty seconds since I heard the old workhorse stop buzzing its pages out, but I didn’t want to take chances. If anyone got a glimpse of the plastic presentation, I was history. Over and done with. I could forget defecting over to Editorial. Nasty would mop the floors with me. Though lots of authors made careers out of putting out romans à clef—airing their boss’s dirty secrets for all the world to see, I did not have any wish to start my career that way.

I slowed to a walk for the last few feet, already relaxing into the idea that I’d be there in a second and I had nothing to worry about. Who would see it? The printer was solely for Nasty and myself, and Nasty refused to learn how to print her own documents. I once tried to show her the printer icon, but she refused to get it. “I don’t see it. No, I don’t,” as if—rather than an image clear as day—it was one of those optical illusions that look like a man’s face at first, but if you really looked, you could make out the image of a woman’s body.

I was amusing and calming myself with these thoughts, watching my cute ankle-strap Mary Janes heel-toe-heel-toe their way to the printer. Which is how I wound up smashing into Joseph, of Joe Says—the senior editor who also happens to write the most-read gossip column in New York . . . the one who would live for this sort of thing. He grabbed a page off the printer.

What the heck was Joseph doing using our printer? Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.

He held up the sheet in question, waving in his other hand what looked like a printout of his next column as he answered the confounded look on my face. “My printer’s broken. I.T. hooked me up to yours temporarily. They say you and Nasty are the only two using it.”

In answer to my subliminal question, he locked his little eyes right on mine. It was an unmistakable expression—yes, he’d seen the presentation about my boss.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God. No. No need for The Big Guy. Get a hold of yourself. There’s a way out of this, to make sure this doesn’t go any further. And then everything will be just fine! Of course it will be. Think.

I searched his face, hoping somewhere on its too-small, densely freckled surface, beneath the floppy red hair and between the big red ears, there might be a clue how to make this right.

The corners of Joe’s lips curled into a smile, his eyes creased at the corners, and slowly he asked a question nobody cared to hear the answer to, “So what are you guys working on?” This could not be good. I had to say something and say it fast.

“Joe . . . listen. This is a private . . . um, birthday thing for Nas—er, Miss Jackson. We were joking about it, and it doesn’t mean anything at all. And it certainly should not be shared with anyone in the world. Ever.” I must have been clenching my jaw tightly, because as soon as I was done speaking, it started to throb like a heartbeat.

“Anna, Anna, Anna,” he sang, shaking his head. “Certainly you don’t think so low of me?” Could it be possible he knew how I felt about him? I’d never said anything to anyone at work. And I always made sure to smile at him with all my teeth showing.

But his words didn’t exactly amount to a promise to keep the presentation secret. As if to instill even more doubt, he lowered his lids, pursed his lips and flashed a glance toward Nasty’s door. As he turned to walk back to his office at the opposite end of the corridor, I just knew he was going to ruin my life. He grew smaller and smaller as his butt swished under the glow of fluorescent lighting, but not small enough to make me feel any better.

The first day I came to work here—which was as a temp because Nasty couldn’t keep an assistant to save her life—I remember thinking how glamorous it was. Everyone dressed really smart with accessories and matching bags. Sure, this is Manhattan, and lots of people dress like that, but I never thought I’d know any of them.

No one spoke to me. And as the weeks went by, that didn’t change. It was like I had a sign taped to my head instructing them not to. I tried hard to dress better to fit in. “Are you sure you want to wear three necklaces together?” Ray asked one morning as we walked to the subway. I took one off, but it didn’t help any.

Even the receptionist would wrinkle up her nose in place of a hello. And that was really disappointing because I thought, wow, this is the kind of place I’d like to be. The keyboards clicking, the messy stacks of magazines everywhere, the messengers bringing and sending grand invitations in fancy envelopes and long tubes. The editorial area is an amazing place. I brought Nina in when everyone had gone off to a fashion show and the stash of beauty products nearly gave her a stroke. They’ve got clothes and electronic gadgets and designer cleaning products and exotic coffees that smell up the whole floor.

But eventually, after I was hired, I got into my own groove. There was Belinda, the secretary of the editor-in-chief, Ed. She was from California. Belinda stood tall—five-feet-ten-inches tall (a good five inches taller than me)—and she had this amazing blond hair that twirled down her back into a V. She called everyone “child” in her velvety voice. And I really liked that. I had something to bring to Ed, and she said, “Whatcha got there, child?” I wanted to hug her right then and there.

Sometimes she’ll call me just to say, “Wanna go take a walk? I could really used a walk.” And for an hour, she’ll chain-smoke Virginia Slims and tell me the most amazing stories about how she grew up thinking she had to be a movie star and wear jeweled glasses. You couldn’t tell it from looking at her, but Belinda is quite a dreamer.

My other friend is Judy, in advertising sales, which, she claims is the craziest job here. She goes to dinner with potential ad buyers every night of the week, kissing their asses and agreeing to nutty notions like, “Why yes, I love cleaning bathrooms, too!” if an ad buyer from SC Johnson Wax says they do. All the while she has to stick in little messages about how many readers we’ve got that make more than a hundred thousand dollars per year and how many stories about cleaning products we run annually. Judy is a couple of years older than me at thirty-one and about to be married, so I’ve been helping her pick out dresses and throw-away cameras and Jordan almonds in pink and silver, and engraved invitations that may or may not include her and Steven’s middle names.

The thing is, I am really going to miss them. I know Dr. Fenwick said I’d have to get a new job, but I wasn’t going to do it today! And I was really going to try and stay here! In fact, I thought maybe I could score an assistant editor position that I’d seen posted on our employee bulletin board. I’ve never been big on change, and already I’ve had to make so many so quickly: seeing a shrink, swapping to a lotion with antiaging ingredients, I even ate Korean food the other day. There is a limit to how much a person can bear.

I packed my stuff up at five on the dot, walked into Nasty’s office to go over our evening closing, and almost found myself thinking I’d miss her. I had promised myself that at some point I would find out why she was so hateful to everyone. Every once in a very long while I’d see her laugh at something I’d point out in my trend watch, and I’d catch a flicker of something warm in her eye. I thought, maybe, I’d know why I didn’t see it more. You see, people like me have quite a tolerance for other people . . . we give them tons of leeway under the idea that everyone makes mistakes and hopefully someone will view me that way, too.

“That time already?” Nasty asked, swirling around in her chair to face me, sitting in her guest seat. I opened my evening project folder to a report and handed a copy to her. It was all a big farce since she buttoned up all the deals after I put the legwork in. I could call New York magazine for ten weeks going, working them up about our holiday issue and why they should write about it, and then she’d see that in the report and say, “I’ll take that file now,” and snag all the glory for herself when we got a three-page story placed.

Everything I said felt melancholy in its finality. Also, there was guilt. I didn’t know whether her fragile ego could handle this kind of public humiliation. Boy did I feel for my replacement. “Yes, I guess it’s that time,” I agreed, slowly, swallowing to coax open my tightening airway.

“Okay, well, Weight Watchers magazine. That’s a good market for us,” she said. “All those overweight women love to sit at home and read because they’re too humiliated to go out looking like that. Could you imagine? It’s disgusting. Put down that cream puff, I say.”

I know, believe me I know it’s an unbelievable thing that I could have been thinking at that moment how much I am going to miss her, how I am sorry to have done this hurtful thing to someone like Nasty. But I never thought she really meant any of it. I thought she suffered esteem issues and projected it onto others because she didn’t know what else to do. “That’s what I thought,” I lied. “They’ve got three million readers plus issues are given out at three health club chains nationwide.”

“Been speaking with them since May, huh? Okay, well, why don’t you pass that over to me now?”

I had brought the file for her in anticipation of the request. I had saved all my correspondence onto a CD and I passed that over, too. Since it had been five months and they were ready to include us, I figured Nasty would want it now.

The rest of the meeting followed suit. Each sentence was stuffed with subtext. Tomorrow she would hate me. She might even try to kill me. Again, it seemed my lapse in judgment would be my ruin. Maybe I should see a brain surgeon rather than a shrink. Maybe he could implant some judgment where it seems to be missing.

At the end of the meeting, Nasty tried to turn things into a failure, the way she always did. “Well, tomorrow’s another day and maybe you’ll do better then.”

“Today I didn’t get fired up at that and run off to drink two generous glasses of chardonnay over chicken fingers and salad with Nina. I simply said, “Goodnight, Miss Jackson.” And I thought as I pulled my autumn jacket over my shoulders, how those words had a distinctly melancholy sound.

Later, I explained to Nina how I thought of my time with Nasty now: a montage of memories, with Barbara Streisand crooning in the background. My head tossed the slow-motion laughter, the back pat, the tête-à-tête over important papers and steaming coffees.

“That wasn’t you and Nasty. That was a young Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari—what the hell happened to him—in Bosom Buddies.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right.” I couldn’t bring myself to eat even a single lettuce ruffle.

“And besides,” Nina added, “why would Joe print anything about her? Although she ruins your life daily, nobody else could give a crap about that frizzy-haired Barbie doll.”

Wait a minute. Wait. That’s true, isn’t it? Joe’s column is about celebrities! And Nasty is no celebrity! She’s not the child or daughter of a celebrity, nor is she dating a celebrity. “You might have something there,” I said. It was amazing how my heart could start beating so quickly, my breath could just stop, and the whole room suddenly feel like it was crashing in, only for me to completely recover in a few moments.

“Good. Now get some sleep because we’ve got our appointments tomorrow, and I read they won’t even think of taking you if they don’t like the way you look. Wear something nice—maybe that cute sundress we found at that sample sale, you know the one? With the blue flowers?”

I was too tired to think whether I wasn’t dressing nicely enough. I’ve never been great at knowing what goes with what. I used to follow the way they put it all on the store mannequins to take out the guesswork. Lately, though, I guess I’ve been too disinterested to do even that. On Monday, Ray told me to go back and switch into the brown skirt.

Alone in the apartment later, I changed into pajamas I should have thrown in the garbage five years ago. I parked myself on the sofa for whatever Lifetime movie would appear on the television screen.

When Ray walked in, my brown hair was soaked with tears over Julia Roberts’s heart-wrenching performance as a diabetic bride in Steel Magnolias, and the pigtails I’d scraped it into had generated a large amount of fuzz around the crown from shifting around on the cushions and getting soaked and matted from the tears; they must have looked more like horns than hair.

“Oh no. Not horn hair and Lifetime. Lord, tell me, please, why do I live with a chick who’s not even sleeping with me? Why?” he begged of the ceiling, placing on the coffee table a bag that could only be holding a Veniero’s cannoli box.

“How’d you know?” I asked as he unsheathed the pastry box. I pulled the kind of sad little girl face I hoped could score me a hug.

“It was a conspiracy. Meana told me. Your mom told me. I read about it in the evening edition of New York, New York.”

“We don’t have an evening edition,” I barked. In his very unique way, Ray was so calming. He knew just what to say.

“Really? Cause I saw it there, plain as day: Plastic Fantastic! So Fake Debate Begun on Limits of ‘human’ classification.” He sat next to my feet, slowly untied his shiny shoes, and then leaned back on the sofa, letting his head drape over the pillows. “People were buzzing about it on the six train. Nasty is gonna be pissed. You’ll be sacked for sure.”

I kicked his thigh why my slouchy tie-dyed sock. He had almost convinced me by making light of the whole thing.

“Anna, what the hell are you wearing? It’s no wonder you don’t have a boyfriend. And you better get one soon, because I’m not gonna let you stay here rent-free when you’re out of a job, so you can forget that right now.” He loosened his tie and propped his feet on the table, rubbing my pilled legging soothingly with his free hand.

The very long, very dark night did have one beacon: the movie Vision Quest, featuring a young and really rather cute Matthew Modine, was playing on cable, and I caught it right from the opening credits (something I’d always considered a lucky sign). The film inspired me and made me promise myself that I would find a way to make my own dream come true. I promised my father, too, whom I remembered once saying to me, “Follow your dream, baby doll” (though, after so many years I couldn’t be sure he’d actually said it—although I thought I remembered the actual dream he’d been encouraging me to accomplish had been to meet Big Bird in person).

I knew about vision quests from Robert Frost’s poems, and I knew a person had to come far from what they knew comfortably to accomplish life’s greatest feats. And on that note, I woke to start the day.