LITMIR.BIZ

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Alex say?’

      ‘He’s sleeping.’ I shook my head hard, trying to shake away the black and white lines of the letter that had imprinted themselves on my eyelids. ‘I didn’t want to wake him.’

      ‘Pretty sure he’d want to be woken for this,’ she said, holding her hand out. ‘You must have really rocked his world last night, huh? Give me the letter.’

      ‘I flashed his friends, fell over, knackered my knee and then rocked his world,’ I said, ticking the order of events off on my hands before pulling the offending piece of paper out of my MJ bag with my thumb and forefinger. I just didn’t even want to touch it. ‘Enjoy.’

      ‘As long as worlds were rocked,’ she said, eyes trained on the letter. ‘Shit, Angie.’

      It was never a good sign when Jenny reacted to something badly. The queen of positive thinking, I’d sort of been hoping she would laugh, ball it up and throw the letter in the bin. Instead, she was putting on her reading glasses.

      ‘This doesn’t look great. Did Mary tell you they were going to do this?’

      ‘Nope.’

      Mary Stein had been my editor and ally at Spencer Media, but since we’d parted ways, I hadn’t heard a peep out of her. Not totally shocking: Mary was all business and, well, we weren’t in business together any more, but even so, I couldn’t believe she hadn’t given me a heads-up on this. I mean, it wasn’t a slap on the wrists, it was a deportation notice.

      ‘So, no luck with anything new?’ Jenny gave me her concerned face. ‘You email any other editors?’

      ‘I’ve emailed everyone I’ve ever met,’ I said. When Alex was first away, I’d spent days contacting every single editor I’d ever met in New York City. People from newspapers, websites, blogs – everything but high-school newsletters. And they were next. I’d even tried setting up my own blog with my fingers crossed for enough ad revenue to keep me in the style to which I had become accustomed, but to date I wasn’t even making enough to keep a gerbil in the style to which it had become accustomed. Those spinning-wheel things are not cheap.

      ‘But there’s nothing. Not even rejection emails. It doesn’t make any sense. I know I’m not exactly the world’s most renowned journalist, but after the whole James Jacobs thing, I thought I’d definitely be able to find something.’

      ‘The whole James Jacobs thing’ being the time I accidentally outed an actor when I was just supposed to be interviewing him. Still, as my dad always said, better out than in.

      ‘OK, I’m scheduling you an appointment with our lawyer,’ Jenny said, tapping away at her keyboard while I pushed my Diet Coke back and forth, leaving a wet trail across her desk. ‘He definitely works on employment visas and stuff. We have an Australian girl here, and he helped with that. You have to go and see him. Can you do this afternoon?’

      ‘What else do I have to do?’ I asked. This woman was truly a goddess. ‘I’ll be there.’

      ‘He’s hot.’

      ‘It won’t help.’

      ‘It always helps.’

      ‘Fair enough,’ I accepted. ‘Bad news does sound better coming from a pretty man. I don’t know, I just hate not knowing what’s going to happen.’

      ‘That’s because I turned you into a super-awesome take-control-of-your-own-destiny proactive ass-kicking wonder-woman,’ Jenny explained before taking a deep breath and a deep draught from her Coke. ‘But now there’s some stuff that’s out of your control and that’s hard to accept. Unless you take the control back.’

      ‘But how do I do that, oh genius?’

      I genuinely couldn’t see a way. Granted, I was still wallowing deep in the mire of imminent deportation, but how was I going to turn it around in thirty days? No one would give me a job, and I was fairly certain the US government wasn’t going to make a special exception for me to stay here just because I asked nicely. There wasn’t even time to sleep on it: thirty days was too soon.

      ‘I want to take it back,’ I said, trying to sound determined. ‘In fact, I demand it back. Control, I summon thee.’ I slapped the table, making my can jump. ‘I do want to be in control, but I don’t know what to do.’

      ‘Honey, I am the queen of solving the unsolvable. It’s what I do, it’s what I live for.’ Jenny pulled her thinking face while I thanked my lucky stars for my wonderful friends. She was very good at putting problems into perspective. ‘To help poor unfortunate souls like yourself.’

      ‘Please don’t quote The Little Mermaid in my time of need,’ I begged. ‘Although, if you can strike a deal to swap my voice for a visa, I’d consider it.’

      ‘And the world’s karaoke bars would rejoice,’ she murmured. ‘OK, am I right in thinking if you get a job, you can get a visa, or do you need a visa to get a job?’

      ‘Both.’

      ‘That’s not going to work, Ange.’ Jenny shook her head. ‘Visa or job? Which comes first?’

      ‘The chicken?’

      ‘That doesn’t even make sense …’

      Before Jenny could get up out of her chair and throttle me, the door flew open and Erin sailed in. That sealed it: I could never work in PR. Here I was, sitting in this sparkly, shiny office with dirty hair and jeans that hadn’t been washed for so long that they had started cleaning themselves, while Erin’s hair was so shiny, I could actually see how disgusting mine was in its reflective surface. For shame.

      ‘Angie’s being deported,’ Jenny answered for me. As was the way amongst our people. ‘Her visa got revoked.’

      ‘Shit.’

      We all nodded. It was pretty much the only viable response.

      We sat in silence for a moment, Erin pursing her lips in concentration, Jenny staring at her shoes, me thinking that I really should have taken my coat off before now. I was not going to feel the benefit when I got back outside. Massive concern. As was the fact that I had apparently become my mother.

      ‘You know what?’ Erin kicked off her high, high heels and leaned back in her chair. ‘That’s the easiest problem I’ve had to solve all day. I can’t believe it took me a whole minute to work it out.’

      It was?

      ‘It is?’

      ‘Sure.’ She looked at me and shrugged. ‘Just marry Alex.’

      Huh.

      For a moment I felt sick. Then hot. Then cold. Then hot again because I still had my coat on.

      Just marry Alex.

      Ooh.

      ‘Oh my God, that makes so much freaking sense,’ Jenny shrieked. It was as though Erin had walked in, put two and two together and miraculously come up with a four when all we’d been getting were fives and threes. ‘You can just marry Alex! Why didn’t I think of that?’

      ‘Because it’s stupid?’ I suggested.

      Because it was. Wasn’t it?

      ‘Do you think he’d say no?’ Jenny gave me her best sympathetic eyes.

      What a bitch. And the second she said it, I was terrified he might.

      ‘I don’t know what he’d say and I don’t want to know,’ I said quickly, curtly. ‘Next idea, please.’

      My brain was completely overloaded. Half of me had heard the words ‘marry Alex’ and already run off down the aisle, drowning out my worries with the ‘Wedding March’. The other half had caught the ‘for a visa’ part and was not happy. It just felt a bit grubby. In that slightly grubby, slightly exciting, but almost definitely it’s-a-bad-idea way. The idea of getting married to stay in the country

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