Chapter 1

Just between us girls, Washington is an easy place to get laid. It's not like I was the prettiest girl in town or anything. I usually wasn't even the prettiest girl in the room. But I can tell you that it wasn't my personality that brought all the boys to the yard.

It was a simple matter of economics: supply and demand. Washington lacks those industries that attract the Beautiful People, such as entertainment and fashion. Instead it has the government, also known as "Hollywood for the Ugly." And without the model-actress population to compete with, my stock shot up when I moved to DC.

It didn't take much to turn heads there, and everybody was on the make and pretty damn obvious about it. Washington was a town full of young single people and bored married people, all desperate to connect with, oh, anyone. All you had to do was say hi to somebody and they were yours. You could go home with a different man every night of the week if you wanted to. So many men, so little time. How could I lose?

The downside was that almost everyone in Washington was an insecure nerd. Even the better-looking ones had nerdy skeletons in their closets. This was especially true of anyone who worked in politics. Only a nerd would be attracted to legislative power, of all things. Nerds love the idea of ruling over people, don't they? They truly believe that they should make all of our decisions for us just because they went to graduate school. I mean, can you name even one cool person in politics? There just aren't any. If any of us were truly cool, we would have been living in New York.

I CAME TO WASHINGTON by way of Manhattan, and I had made a nice little life for myself there before I shit all over it. In New York, I mean. And, yes, I suppose that happened in Washington, too, but that was later. New York came first.

We all grew up with big dreams of moving to New York City and living the Glamorous Life, but I was stuck with a four-year scholarship to Syracuse University, while my friends took off for NYU, Columbia, or one of the several "art and design" schools in New York. Between classes at Syracuse, I would trudge through the dirty snow to check my e-mail at one of the campus computer clusters. The brown slush on my practical, reasonably priced L.L. Bean boots would turn into a puddle as I read about the clubs and crazy situations that my friends were getting themselves into in New York. They were all there, having fun and being fabulous without me, while I languished at keggers and struggled to meet my deadlines at the college newspaper.

I could never get past the feeling that I was missing out on something: I had to get out of Syracuse as soon as possible, before I went insane with boredom.

On the merits of my resume alone, I was granted an interview at Condé Nast Publications in New York. I had beat out countless wannabes (which included many of my classmates at Syracuse) for a highly coveted chance to become a Condé Nastie.

These were the Big Girls: Vogue, Glamour, and back then, Mademoiselle, the one that hired my best friend, Naomi, right out of journalism school at Columbia. I had known Naomi since the second grade, when we were OshKosh B'Gosh-wearing tomboys who wiped boogers on the other kids when they weren't looking. How cool would it be if we both ended up at Condé Nast? I called to tell her the news, and she congratulated me on getting an interview, but warned me that if I didn't "look the part," Human Resources would send me home with nothing but a stack of complimentary magazines.

"Make sure you look good, Jacqueline!" she told me. "Get a blowout and a manicure before you come in. And you might want to tone up a little, too."

I knew that the girls in New York looked like models, but this was a job interview, not the velvet rope at Spa. Nevertheless, I had an outstanding resume and a charming personality. How could they not hire me?

Obviously, I had much to learn.

"SO HOW DID IT GO?" Naomi asked. We met outside for a cigarette after my interview. I didn't smoke, but I liked to pretend that I did. Smoking looked so good on me. Besides, it gave me something to do whenever I felt like goofing off and standing around outside.

I opened the L.L. Bean Boat and Tote that I used as a handbag, realizing that it didn't look right with the heavy gabardine pantsuit that I was wearing in June. It was the only suit that I owned at the time, and it was all wrong.

Everything about me was wrong: I had put my hair up in a messy ponytail because I was sweating in all of that wool, and my clunky Nine West shoes needed shining, but why bother shining $40 shoes? No makeup, no tan, no manicure: wrong, wrong, wrong.

I showed Naomi the stack of free magazines that the Human Resources manager had given me before she showed me the way out.

"They would have given you a job," Naomi told me, "if you had put yourself together like I told you to."

Naomi was wearing a giraffe-print Tracy Feith dress, gold stiletto-heeled sandals, and huge gold bangles on her arms. This was what entry-level employees wore to the offices at Condé Nast. She looked like Vogue, she looked like Mademoiselle. Naomi looked the part. Then I realized just how dumpy I looked in comparison. I needed a makeover ASAP.

"Did they make you sit in one of the Skinny Chairs?" Naomi asked, but I wasn't sure what she was talking about.

"They have these chairs in there," she explained. "If your ass goes over the edges when you sit down, they won't hire you."

She glanced at my posterior.

"I don't think you fit in," she concluded.

Copyright © 2005 Jessica Cutler