Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online Page B

Bumblefuck, this allegedly safe haven, and the next thing you know, you're stumbling over dead bodies."
    "I didn't stumble over her, I found her."
    "Same difference," said Janie, shiny lips pursed in distaste.
    I shrugged. It was so good to have Janie around that finding a dead body almost seemed like it wasn't too high a price to pay. "Can you stay?"
    "Well, I think I should," Janie proclaimed, taking another swallow of her drink. "I don't think you guys are safe here all by yourself."
    "And you're going to defend us?"
    She reached into her bag again. "Mace," she said, showing me the spray can. "Straightening iron. All-day lipstick. BlackBerry. If the killer shows up, I'll just CC him on all my edit memos and bore him to death."
    "Sounds like a plan," I said.

    Janie and I had met nine years ago, when we'd both landed interviews to be fact-checkers at New York Review, the nation's preeminent literary magazine (at least, that's what the masthead said).
    "In here," whispered the mousy woman administering the test. There were two desks in the stuffy little room. The one closest to the door was occupied by a slender girl in a chic black suit that, unlike mine, probably had not come from the clearance rack at Century 21. She was bent over her pages so that I could only see the tip of her nose and her beautifully streaked hair.
    The woman handed me five paper-clipped pages, two blue pencils, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. "Use standard proofreading marks, please," she whispered. "You have thirty minutes."
    I sat behind the desk on a chair covered in stained gray fabric, tucked the novel I'd been reading on the subway into my purse, and tried not to be disappointed. I'd majored in English at Columbia and then, because that didn't make me quite unemployable enough, I'd picked up a master's degree in American literature and done all of the course work toward a Ph.D. Ever since leaving Columbia, I'd been temping in law offices, living at home, sending off resumes to any magazine that I thought would have me, and dreaming of writing a book of my own without actually doing any writing. On Friday nights I'd go to the library and take out a dozen novels from the new release shelf to last me through the week. On Sunday nights my father and I, and Reina, if she was home, ordered in Chinese. I'd date every once in a while--an SAT tutor I'd met in the video store, an MBA candidate whose mother played bassoon with my dad. It was a quiet kind of existence, not unhappy, but not particularly exciting. Sometimes at night I'd turn off my lamp and lie motionless in my bed, in the darkness, listening to the sounds of buses and taxis on the street, the sound of voices calling and laughing, and I would think, I am waiting for my real life to begin.
    I wiped my hands on my skirt and looked around the Review 's offices. I'd expected something more impressive from the magazine that had published some of the most important fiction of my lifetime: a cozy, dimly lit sanctuary with mahogany desks and secret nooks, hidden corners and shabby armchairs where the geniuses would sit with their deep thoughts and their tumblers of whiskey. Instead, I'd found a falafel cart guarding the door on Forty-fourth Street and, up on the seventeenth floor, grids of humming fluorescent lights and cheap-looking blond wood desks, which lent the space all the romance and mystery of a podiatrist's office.
    The test turned out to be an essay on the geography and climate of a place called Pago Pago. Was that even a real place? Was this story something the Review would publish? Had published?
    The girl with the great hair pushed her chair back from her desk. "In Beauty and the Beast, " she asked, "did Beauty ever sleep with the Beast?"
    I was nonplussed. "Is that what your test is about? Beauty and the Beast ?"
    "Nope. Pago Pago. I was just wondering. Do you know?"
    I set my pencil down. "The fairy tale or the TV show?"
    "TV show." She was petite, I saw, with close-set hazel eyes and