“Oh dear,” croaked Mrs. Dern, Headmaster Mah’s longtime assistant and an exceedingly committed smoker. “Are you all right?”

“I am, but I’ll probably miss first two periods,” I said.

Mrs. Dern made the mistake of sounding concerned rather than suspicious, so instead of boarding the first R5 winding back through the Main Line, I wandered around Thirtieth Street Station. I found a Chinese food buffet, and even though it was not even ten in the morning, the undisturbed rows of glistening meat and vegetables were too beautiful to resist. I made a plate, and with the first plastic forkful I shoved into my mouth, I bit into some mysterious pocket that exploded, a burst of salty, gritty chemicals that made me gag.

That’s what I tasted in my third and final round that night. A foul, bitter blob on my tongue deposited in tandem with a boy’s euphoric groan.

When I woke up it was morning and I was in a bed and in a room I didn’t recognize, the sun unraveling like flight lines, welcoming and warm, as initially oblivious to the night’s tragedy as I was.

There was movement behind me and before I turned over to see who it was, I accepted that I wanted it to be Liam so badly that it couldn’t be. But of all people, it had to be Dean. He was shirtless, his lean torso exposed, and, for a moment, I thought I would throw up on it.

He groaned and rubbed his face. “How you feeling, Finny?” He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at me, curiously. “Because I feel like shit.”

I realized I was still wearing my Victoria’s Secret tank top, but only that. I sat up, clutching the duvet cover to my chest, looking around the room. “Um, do you know where my pants are?”

Dean laughed, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “No one does! You were walking around without them for half the night.”

The way Dean told it, this was just another innocent anecdote from our wild party, the same way some senior announced he was going home and everyone found him passed out in his car in the driveway the next morning, never even having fit the key into the ignition. Or the way another guy from the soccer team had forgotten to put any turkey on the sandwiches all the guys made late night, so he ended up eating a mayonnaise sandwich. It was a story so funny it deserved to be told again and again: TifAni was so hammered she walked around without pants for a few hours!

Life had shifted drastically while I slept, but Dean was looking at me like we were comrades in this post-party apocalypse, and it was so impossibly tempting to accept that reality over the other one that I did with a weak laugh.

Dean gave me a towel and dispatched me to the guest room. There, on the floor by the dresser, were my enormous panties crumpled into a little leopard ball. I shoved them in my gym bag, ignoring the blood.

CHAPTER 5

Oh come on. No one?” The editor in chief of The Women’s Magazine spun around her office like a Phillip Lim–outfitted lazy Susan, presenting a tray of macaroons to a circle of painstakingly malnourished editors in an unsuccessful bid to get one of us to eat.

“I’m off sugar,” I said, defensively.

Penelope “LoLo” Vincent dropped the tray on her desk and plopped into her chair. She waved her hand at me, her nails painted the color of gangrene. “Of course. You’re getting married.”

“Oh, fine. I’ll bite the bullet!” Arielle Ferguson was our associate editor, very sweet and very clueless in her size eight dress. She lurched forward and selected a cookie, so pink it concerned me, between her fingers. Ugh, Arielle, I wanted to telecommunicate to her, LoLo only wants the anorexic editors to eat.

LoLo watched Arielle, aghast, as her jaw worked through the two hundred empty calories. Everyone held their breath, frozen in secondhand fear for her. Arielle brightened when she swallowed. “So good!”

“Right.” LoLo lingered on the word, her tongue snapping on the t, a deranged mother hen cluck. “So! What does everyone have for me?” She dug the heel of her YSL Tribute sandal into the floor and spun half an inch in her chair, her eyes holding Eleanor in their laser gaze. “Tuckerman, go.”

With a flick of her wrist, Eleanor transferred a pile of blonde hair from the front of her shoulder to the back. “So I was talking to Ani the other day and she mentioned how her friend used to work in finance, and how sexual harassment is still shockingly commonplace in that industry.” She nodded at me. “Right, Ani?” I was slow to smile at her. Only when I did, did Eleanor continue. “So Ani and I were talking, you know, it’s like we’ve come so far in terms of recognizing that sexual harassment is a problem and educating people about it. Which is great. But it’s like we’ve gotten really black and white and earnest about issues like this at the same time that raunchy humor—particularly from women—dominates pop culture. It’s bled over to how women speak and joke around, and that blurs the line in terms of what women are comfortable with, so how do you know what is unacceptable, or even illegal behavior in your professional life? I’d love to do a piece that examines what is sexual harassment in 2014 when nothing is sacred anyway.”

“Fascinating.” LoLo yawned. “What’s the hed?”

“Well, um, I thought, ‘What Is Sexual Harassment in 2014?’”

“No.” LoLo examined a chip in her nail.

“The Funny Thing About Sexual Harassment.”

LoLo spun in my direction with a gay little laugh. “Clever, Ani.”

I glanced at the notepad on my lap, bearing the words “THE FUNNY THING ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT” in all caps, skimming all the research I’d collected underneath it. “Also, there’s this great book coming out and we could time it to our story. It’s by these two Harvard sociology professors. Specifically about how pop culture has influenced the workplace much more so than we realize.” The galley was sitting at my desk. I’d requested it from the publicist so I could read it before pitching this very idea to LoLo.

“Excellent.” LoLo nodded. “Be sure to pass that to Eleanor and help her with anything she may need.” The vein in her forehead throbbed like an angry heart over the word “anything.” I always wonder if LoLo knows more than she lets on. That she sees what a talentless hack Eleanor is, what an obvious kiss ass. Eleanor is from some Podunk town in West Virginia. But oh, the places she’s gone since she’s moved to New York. She’s tenacious, I’ll give her that much. We have so much in common that it took me a while to understand why we didn’t get along. Infighting. We both defeated the odds to get to where we are now, and we’re terrified there isn’t room enough for the both of us.

“Now”—LoLo drummed the armrests of her chair—“what have you got for me, Mrs. Harrison?”

Shifting in my seat, I gave her my backup option, the one I wanted to present as a fun little aside, a great cover line, once I’d wowed her with a pitch that actually had some gravitas. Eleanor makes me meet with her before we go into these meetings so we can discuss the issue as a whole, make sure the lineup is just the right amount of smart and skanky. She tends to pluck my sharpest idea and present it as this half-baked nugget I was struggling to make something out of until she swooped in and reshaped the whole thing into ASME-winning material. “The American Council on Exercise recently adjusted the calorie burn for a few activities,” I began, “and sex is one of them. It’s almost double what they assigned it twelve years ago. I thought it would be funny if we had some writer do the Sex Workout or something. She could wear a Jawbone and a heart rate monitor and actually evaluate her efforts in terms of calories burned.”