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  “No.” Latoya was more than emphatic.

  This was not good.

  “Would anyone like to comment?”

  Jemma raised a finger. “People read Scoop to escape reality, not to read about it. Cancer? Hormones? Menopause? I mean, ew.”

  I don’t know if it was the weekend or my jealousy that James had gotten to write about something with a modicum of intelligence or that I’ll always be my parents’ daughter, but I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t you think we have some responsibility to our readers?” I asked. “We have a broader reach than almost any newspaper. Maybe we should do . . . something . . . with that.”

  Jemma glanced skyward in an apparent appeal to heaven to deliver her from me. “We write about important things all the time. But nothing goes wrong that a very expensive stint in rehab, or some very expensive plastic surgery, or perhaps a very, very expensive vacation on a private island can’t fix. And that’s what our magazine is about.”

  “I think—” Latoya began.

  “Excuse me. Does anyone smell smoke?” Jemma wrinkled her irritatingly pointy nose, which got a dozen other noses twitching like bunnies’ at a petting zoo. Shit. My shoes. I ever so casually shifted my legs away from Jemma and wrinkled my nose along with everyone else. There were murmurs around the conference table, until Debra asked Jemma to check with building security.

  “Let’s wrap up for now, people,” Debra called as Jemma Minnie-Moused her way out of the conference room. The editorial staff shuffled toward the door. I was about to slip out with them, when—

  “Megan?”

  I turned back. “Yes?”

  Debra slid her glasses onto her nose. “See me in my office in five minutes.”

  This was really not good.

  Choose the analogy that best expresses the relationship of the words in the following example:

  DOWNSIZING : SELF-CONFIDENCE

  (a)stovepipe pants : plus-size model

  (b)Page Six exposé : notoriety

  (c)Britney Spears : K-Fed

  (d)Grammy win : ticket prices

  (e)drunken rampage : opening box-office number

  Chapter Four

  Istood outside the door to Debra’s spacious office, listening to the wind howl around the corner of our building. NY1 had warned that the first real cold front of November was moving in. This seemed an apt metaphor for my life.

  The mail guy wheeled his cart past me, careful not to make eye contact. Even the mail guy knew I was a Scoop leper. I glanced through the glass wall of Debra’s office. She was on the phone but waved me in.

  I stepped into her office for the first time since I’d been hired and was struck again by how spare and clean it was. Glass desk, Toshiba laptop, plus more of those floor-to-ceiling windows. She motioned me into one of the three black director’s chairs facing her desk. The only decoration in her office was a silver Tiffany-framed photo of a much younger Debra at the beach, grinning at a little boy. Debra never talked about her personal life.

  “Uh-huh. Okay. Fine . . . Yes, I’ll let you know, Laurel. Talk to you soon.” Debra finally hung up. “Megan.”

  “Yes?” I managed, folding my hands in my lap.

  “Your instincts are scaring me.” She swiveled her Aeron chair to look out the tall glass windows.

  “I know my pitch was a little off,” I admitted. She was staring at me as if I were a dead cockroach on her desk, but I plunged on anyway. “Sure, people like to read about the rich and famous, but if you think about it, we have a unique opportunity to reach so many different types of women. Scoop’s demographic is—”

  “Jemma was right, Megan,” Debra interrupted. “I’d hoped to move you from captions to articles by now—that’s why I put you in Latoya’s department. But it’s been two months, and you’re just not getting it.”

  My face flamed anew. “I’m sure I can come up with some better ideas.” I hesitated, just in case Debra wanted to jump in at this point and agree with me. No such luck.

  “I have to let you go, Megan.”

  I looked at my lap. Let me go? As in fired? Unemployed? Unemployed again? I gulped hard. “I understand. I’ll just go clear out my—”

  “I’m not finished,” Debra interrupted.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She folded her arms. “I like you, Megan. Actually, you remind me of me at your age.”

  Evidently, she would have fired herself, then. I blinked my suddenly watery eyes.

  “You’re smart. Your ideas are intelligent and ballsy. And you’re a hell of a writer—none of that is lost on me. But Scoop isn’t the right fit for you. You should be writing for a weightier magazine. East Coast. Rolling Stone. Even Rockit.”

  Gee, you think?

  “I do have some good news,” she continued. “There’s a job in Florida. Teaching. It’s only for two months, but I think you’d be perfect for it.”

  Teaching? In Florida? For two months? This was her idea of good news?

  I started to stand again. I felt my throat tightening and hoped to escape before the tears bubbled up again. “Thanks for thinking of me, really. But I’m not a teacher.”

  I turned to go, but Debra raised a finger. “Wait. Hear me out. One. It’s mid-November—publishing is practically dead from Thanksgiving until the first of January. No one is hiring. No one is even interviewing.”

  Unfortunately, I knew she was right. Of all the times of the year to get canned, this was the worst.

  “Two.” She held up another finger. “You won’t have any expenses. The gig comes with room and board. And three. It pays better than Scoop. Much better.”

  Okay, this wasn’t making any sense at all. I didn’t have teaching credentials. Even if I did, teachers normally didn’t get paid much. And what kind of two-month-long teaching job included room and board? Some fill-in gig at a rich kids’ boarding school? No, thank you.

  Then again, certain realities awaited me when I left the Scoop offices: I couldn’t live with James, and I didn’t want to live with Lily. I couldn’t look for a job, and I had no savings to fall back on. Heading back to New Hampshire to work at Earth Lovers somehow didn’t appeal to me; nor did getting a job at Bloomie’s wrapping Christmas gifts for people who could actually afford them.

  “When does this job start, exactly?” I asked cautiously.

  “Exactly now. There’s a black car waiting for you downstairs.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. To take you to the airport, should you choose.”

  “To go to Florida,” I filled in.

  “Palm Beach, specifically. By private jet.”

  Private jet? To be a teacher?

  “All the details will be explained to you when you arrive.” Debra shuffled a stack of contact sheets from a recent photo shoot. “And you’ve got nothing to lose. If you hate it, you can get right back on the plane and be home in time for the ten o’clock news.”

  “But I . . .” I wasn’t even sure what the but was exactly, but . . . but something. It was all too bizarre.

  “Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, Megan,” Debra said gently.

  A leap of faith. I wasn’t really a leap-of-faith kind of girl. Watch carefully from the side and suss it out—yes. Big leap—no. But what were my options, really? And even if she had just fired me, for some reason, I didn’t want to let Debra down. Weirdly, I still liked her. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  She smiled. “Excellent. You’re on your way, then.”

  I rose, feeling numb. “I’d say thank you, but I’m not sure what I’d be thanking you for.”

  “Have you read the new Vanity Fair?”

  I shook my head. I liked Vanity Fair—it was on my Top Ten List of Magazines I’d Like to Write For. But I’d been too busy having my life fall apart to pay attention to the latest issue.

  “You might want to check it out during your flight.”

  She took a copy off her desk and gave it to me. I didn’t bother asking why. Evidently, why was another piece
of this bizarre puzzle. As I shook her hand and then left her office for the last time, I felt like Alice heading toward that damned rabbit hole.

  If a private jet travels from New York City at 521 miles per hour, how much time will elapse before wheels-down in Palm Beach, a distance of 1,231 miles?

  (a)1 hour

  (b)2 hours

  (c)4 hours

  (d)6 hours

  (e) Does it matter? There’s an inexhaustible supply of free champagne!

  Chapter Five

  This can’t be happening,” I murmured to James. “It isn’t real.”

  We sat together in the back of the black car that had picked me up outside my office. No, wait, my former office. The Slovakian driver had just gone over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey. There was no traffic in the middle of day, since the rest of the world was, you know, at work.

  James draped an arm around me. “Well, unless we’re in the same delusion, it’s real. Odd—very odd—but real.”

  Odd didn’t begin to cover it. I was just grateful that he was able to go with me to the airport. Even before I’d left my former office, I’d called him and babbled about what had happened—how I was on my way to Florida after a pit stop at his apartment to pick up my Century 21 bargain-rack specials and my toothbrush.

  “Thank you for coming,” I told him again. He’d feigned a toothache and an emergency dental appointment to join me for the ride. “Don’t forget to drool a little when you get back to work. Novocaine.” I nodded seriously.

  “Will do.” He squeezed my hand as we approached a sign that said TETERBORO AIRPORT. Teterboro Airport? I’d figured we were headed for Newark, but judging by the low buildings and prop planes parked nearby, I wasn’t heading to Florida in a 757. “Excuse me, sir?” I called to the front. “Are we in the right place?”

  “Not to worry.” The driver had a thick accent. His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “I know where you are going. Your boss, Debra Wurtzel”—he pronounced it Vets-el—“gave to Boris ex-plea-cit instructions. Sit back and enjoy ride.”

  Enjoy ride. That was a joke. How could you “enjoy ride” when you didn’t “know destination”?

  Boris turned onto a service road, showed some identification at a security checkpoint, and then—to my shock—drove right out onto a tarmac. We rolled to a stop next to a jet with a dozen windows and the letters LL elegantly entwined on the tail.

  “Your plane,” Boris announced.

  “What’s LL?” James asked.

  “No clue.” I made no move to get out of the car.

  James squeezed my hand again. “It’ll be okay. Maybe you’ll have time to do some writing? And I’ll see you in ten days for Thanksgiving.”

  What finally got me out of the car was remembering what Debra had said—if I didn’t like what I found in Florida, I could get right back on this plane and fly home. Oh-kay, then.

  I thanked Boris. Then, hand in hand, James and I crossed the tarmac to the Gulfstream. A flight attendant stood at the bottom of the steps. She wore an impeccable black suit with a nipped waist, the kind actresses wore in the forties.

  “Ms. Smith?” she asked pleasantly.

  My stomach was turning vomit cartwheels. “Yes.”

  “I’m Adrienne. I’ll be your flight attendant today.” She had the faintest trace of a southern accent. “You’re traveling alone, correct?”

  “Unless I can kidnap my boyfriend.” I looked hopefully at James.

  “Do you have any bags?” Adrienne asked.

  “Just this.” I held up my tattered navy blue JanSport. “But I can carry—”

  “No worries.” Adrienne took my backpack. “I’ll see you aboard. We’ll take off as soon as you’re ready. May I prepare a beverage for you?”

  My mouth opened. No sound came out.

  “You can decide when you’re aboard.” She smiled and headed up the steps and into the plane.

  Now it was just James and me, in a setting that felt way too much like Casablanca, except in, you know, New Jersey.

  “I’ll call you when I get there. Wherever there turns out to be. And just in case I don’t come back tonight . . .” I pressed up against his chest and gave him what I hoped was a memorable kiss and my best Bogart impression. “We’ll always have Teterboro.”

  Forty minutes, three hundred miles, and thirty thousand feet of altitude later, the Gulfstream was somewhere high above Virginia. There’d been a decent amount of turbulence, so I’d been confined to my plush white leather seat, where I sipped a bottle of FIJI water. Finally, though, the air had turned smooth.

  Adrienne came to me. “Feel free to walk around. Captain says it’s fine. Can I prepare your lunch?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, really,” I told her. “But thank you.”

  “Something simple, then,” she told me with a wink.

  As she moved back toward the galley, I unlatched my seat belt and gave myself a tour of the cabin, having been too freaked out before takeoff to do much more than huddle in the first seat directly behind the cockpit. Not that I was a stranger to airplanes. I’d even been bumped to first class once. But a good look at the inside of the Gulfstream was enough for me to conclude that people who own private jets do not fly like you and me.

  Just behind me, there was a semicircle of white leather seats facing a sixty-two-inch plasma high-definition television and a state-of-the-art sound system. Each seat had its own pink marble TV table, with recesses for cups and plates. Beyond was a small room with a pink toile-covered queen-size bed. And then there was the bathroom.

  I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found airplane bathrooms a little nightmarish. Early in a flight, they reek from whatever disinfectant kills every germ known to humankind. Later on, they reek for other reasons. Not this one. The walls were white marble, veined with forest green. There was a glass shower stall with multiple gold showerheads. A green velvet swivel chair faced a white marble vanity that held baskets of hair- and skin-care products. A tower of fluffy white towels rested on a shelf. I ran my finger along the familiar embroidered initials: LL.

  When I made my way back to my seat, the captain was standing in the open cockpit door.

  “Miss Smith, hello. Welcome aboard. Don’t be concerned—I’ve got her on autopilot.”

  “Good to meet you,” I said, though the autopilot thing did not fill me with confidence. When I’m thousands of miles up, up, up, I like to see a human at the controls, controls, controls.

  Though I didn’t have the nerve to say that, I did muster enough courage for a question. “Would you mind telling me whose plane this is?”

  “Laurel Limoges, of course.”

  Oh. Of course. Well, that solved everything. And by everything, I mean nothing. Who the fuck was Laurel Limoges?

  “Anyway,” the captain went on, “I wanted to apologize for the bumps. Should be smooth sailing from here down to Palm Beach.” He checked his watch. “We ought to be on the ground by four o’clock. Anything we can do for you, just let Adrienne know.”

  He went back to the cockpit—whew—and I turned back to my seat to find Adrienne setting a place for me in the TV viewing area. There were a linen place mat and napkin, both with that damn LL logo, heavy silverware, a crystal goblet, and a water glass.

  “Ready for lunch, Miss Smith?” My something simple included a salad of pears, endive, and Gorgonzola, a warm baguette, red wine, and bubbly mineral water.

  I hadn’t eaten since my jelly doughnuts with Lily, and this looked amazing. “Thank you. Really.” I sat.

  “Please let me know if there is anything else I can get for you.”

  “Actually . . . my backpack?”

  “Right away,” Adrienne said, verging on Stepford Wives agreeability.

  I broke off a chunk of the baguette, slathered it with butter, and stuck it in my mouth. Taste-bud bliss.

  “Here you go, Miss Smith.” Adrienne set my backpack on the seat to my left. “Anything else?”

  I sipped the b
ubbly water. “No, thanks. This is terrific.”

  “After you eat, if you’d like me to launder your shirt, we have facilities in the galley. There’s a . . .” She motioned to the doughnut stain, which I’d completely forgotten about. “It will only take forty-five minutes. There’s a robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door, if you want to change.”

  Okay. I was impressed.

  I ate half the salad, then dug Vanity Fair out of my backpack. There was a piece by Dominick Dunne about a murder in Nashville and the husband’s conviction ten years later. A feature on the former members of Talking Heads. Both interesting but seemingly irrelevant to me, Florida, or why I was going to Florida.

  Then I turned another page and stared straight at a full-page photo of two blindingly gorgeous teen girls fully dressed and half submerged in a swimming pool. The simple caption said that they were Sage and Rose Baker of Palm Beach, Florida.

  THE FABULOUS BAKER TWINS

  by Jesse Kornbluth

  Paris who?

  If you’re still snickering over her sexcapades or getting your gossip on over tabloid shots of the on-again-off-again best friend who wears anorexia like a couture accessory, then you’re already five minutes ago. Welcome to the new millennium in white-hot-celebutante hype: Sage and Rose Baker, the Fabulous Baker Twins of Palm Beach, Florida.

  Sage and Rose Baker are objectively better-looking than the tabloid titillators who came before them, and if the eighty-four-million-dollar fortune that will soon be theirs can buy it, they will be much, much more successful. They are also only seventeen years old.

  They are nearly identical redheads—Sage is older by six minutes. Rose tans, and Sage keeps her flesh so pale she is nearly opalescent. Each is breathtaking, with cut-glass cheekbones, a slightly clefted chin, enormous emerald-green eyes, and full, pouty lips. They are a pair of throwbacks to the beauty of Jean Shrimpton, although when I mention this, they look at me blankly. Evidently, their ideas of beauty icons don’t go further back than Christina Aguilera.

  The Fabulous Baker Twins are the granddaughters of Laurel Limoges, founder and CEO of Angel Cosmetics.