LITMIR.BIZ

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the rest of me.

      Mental Note: buy ChapStick at Duane Reade on the way home. P.S. Make appointment for lip wax ASAP. P.P.S. Haircut, too.

      Back to skinny, ravishing below-the-neck moi. I look ten times better in this dress than I did in the silky teal shirt I wore into the dressing room. Kate gave the shirt to me for my birthday. It has a designer label and I know it cost her a fortune. But the cut and color are all wrong. Her taste is expensive, but not necessarily good. At least, not when it comes to others.

      Kate’s big on teal. Aqua, too. Shades that complement her bluish-green colored contact lenses and year-round tanning salon glow. Shades that seem to cast the same sickly tint to my skin that fluorescent lighting does.

      Naturally, I told Kate that I love the shirt. Naturally, I feel compelled to wear it. But only to places like the ladies’ dress department in Bloomingdale’s, where the chances of meeting a potential boyfriend are about the same as finding one strolling along Christopher Street in Greenwich Village on a Saturday night.

      “You don’t think this dress is too skimpy for a corporate Christmas party?” I ask Kate now, tugging the hem southward.

      She dismisses the query with a wave of one French-manicured hand. “Nah.”

      “Are you sure? Because the last thing I want to do is look cheap.”

      “Tracey, that dress is almost two hundred bucks on sale. It’s not cheap.”

      “I know, but sometimes expensive things can look—Kate, what the hell are you wearing?”

      She shrugs.

      I grab her arm and pull her all the way into the dressing room.

      “That’s a wedding gown!” I accuse.

      “Yup.”

      “Are you and Billy…?” Still clutching her white-satin-encased arm with price tags dangling, I jerk it up to examine her fourth finger for a telltale diamond.

      Nothing.

      Kate is unfazed. “I’m thinking we’ll get engaged at Christmas. He’s coming to Mobile with me to meet my parents and…well, he knows I’m not going to keep living with him forever without a commitment.”

      “Forever? Kate, it’s been three months.”

      Will McCraw and I were together three years. Three years, and instead of moving in together, we broke up. To be blunt, he dumped me. No, first he cheated, then he dumped me. And when he did, I passed out cold. Literally. I collapsed in an undignified, heartbroken heap on the parquet floor of his twenty-sixth-floor studio apartment.

      But that was almost three months ago.

      A lot can happen in three months.

      Clearly, Kate thinks so. She sways her narrow hips slightly, the long white skirt rustling above her pedicured toes as she undoubtedly imagines herself at her reception in Billy’s arms.

      I glance down at her feet. Pretty pink polished toenails in the dead of November. Huh. That Kate sure thinks of everything. I don’t even shave my legs at this time of year unless I think somebody’s going to see them.

      Maybe that explains why she’s standing there in a wedding gown with a damned good chance of becoming a bride momentarily, while I don’t even have a date for the Blaire Barnett Christmas party next weekend.

      But I’m not the only one. Brenda isn’t bringing her husband and Yvonne isn’t bringing her fiancé and Latisha isn’t bringing her boyfriend. It’s going to be Girls’ Night Out—to celebrate my triumphant return to the ad agency.

      I quit my job back in September; in fact, on the same day the dumping/fainting incident took place. But Blaire Barnett, unlike Will, wanted me back.

      What happened was this: the temp secretary who replaced me filed a sexual harassment suit against my ex-boss, Jake. Long story short, he wound up getting fired, and they offered me my old position back.

      I was reluctant to take it, because I was making more money working for Eat Drink Or Be Married, a Manhattan caterer. But waitressing is hard, dirty work, it encompassed my nights and weekends and there were no benefits. Besides, I missed my old friends at Blaire Barnett; I was offered more money, and they promised me the opportunity to interview for the next junior copywriting job that opens up over in the Creative Department. Meaning I won’t be a secretary—or broke—forever.

      All in all, it’s good to be back.

      In fact, all in all, there’s not much about my life right now that isn’t good. My regular life, that is. My love life is a different story. The kind without a happy ending. At least, so far.

      Kate—currently a vision in Happy Ending—gathers her long blond hair on her head with one hand while running the other along the row of satin-covered buttons at her back, feeling for gaps.

      I step toward her, my legs engulfed in yards of swishy white, and attempt to fasten two buttons near her tailbone. It isn’t easy. They’re slippery, and the size of those mini M&M’s I haven’t had since July.

      She says, “I swear, Tracey, three months is long enough to live together without a commitment. If Billy doesn’t get me a ring for Christmas, I’ll be shocked.”

      “So will I.”

      “I thought you just said—”

      “It’s only been three months. That’s what I said. I didn’t say I don’t think you and Billy should get engaged.”

      Nor did I say that I like Billy about as much as I like the teal silk hanging on the hook above my head. Kate is my friend, and Billy—like that ugly designer blouse—comes with the territory.

      Besides, I can’t help wondering if maybe I’d be rooting for Kate and Billy if I had somebody, too. It isn’t easy to watch your best friend fall madly in love when two complete seasons have turned since you last had sex.

      “Raphael doesn’t think I should have moved in with Billy,” she says, as I triumphantly manage to hook one minibutton into its microscopic loop. “He said something about Billy not wanting to buy the cow when he’s getting the latte for free.”

      I roll my eyes, muttering, “Raphael has given out so much free latte, he should have Starbucks stamped on his, um, udder.”

      “Tracey!” Kate giggles. “Raphael is the first to admit he’s a slut, especially now that he’s not with Wade anymore.”

      “He was a slut even when he was with Wade,” I point out.

      “Exactly. But he has old-fashioned standards when it comes to me—”

      “And me,” I interject.

      “Right. He wants to marry off both of us, so that we can make him an uncle.”

      “He said that?”

      “He said aunt. Auntie, to be specific.”

      “Oh, Lord. I can see it now. Auntie Raphael.” I shake my head. Raphael is one of my best friends, but he’s definitely out there. In a good way, of course.

      “Whatever you do, Trace, don’t tell Billy what Raphael said.”

      “About the free latte?”

      “About being the aunt to our future kids. He’d probably consider that grounds for a vasectomy. You know how he is about gays.”

      Gays. That’s what conservative Billy calls Raphael and his kind.

      His kind being another charming Billy phrase.

      What Kate sees in him, I’ll never know. Yes, he’s as beautiful as she is, and yes, he’s rich as a Trump. But he’s shallow, and opinionated and ultraconservative—the latter being his worst crime, as far as I’m concerned.

      I was raised in Brookside, New York, a small town so far upstate that it

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