Ihad migrated from wallowing and eating cake at the Sparrow and Thyme café to wallowing and baking cake in my small apartment—devil’s food cake because nothing says I had a bad day like your own personal three-layer chocolate cake.
“How about this job?” Maeve suggested. “It’s an assistant to an executive at a snack food company. I bet they let you have free chips!”
“Find a position at an alcohol company so we can get free drinks,” I said.
Maeve scrolled through the job postings. “I think we should just apply to all of these and see what sticks.”
I sighed. “What’s the point? Our applications are going to end up in résumé purgatory. They won’t even give us the courtesy of being sent a rejection letter.”
I divided the batter into three pans then opened the oven to check the temperature.
“And of course, it’s not working!” I yelled.
My upstairs neighbor banged on the floor. “Knock it off!” he yelled through the thin ceiling.
What the fuck!
“You knock it off!” I screamed at the ceiling. “You blare your music and wake up the whole neighborhood. Now you get a taste of your own medicine.”
“Turn on your music,” I ordered Maeve.
“You have well and truly lost it.”
“I’m tired of being used and taken advantage of, and I’m not going down without a fight.Josie and the Pussycats, let’s go!”
Maeve rolled her eyes but pulled up the YouTube playlist and blasted the early 2000s soundtrack. My upstairs neighbor responded by blaring his latest and most horrible hip-hop mixtape to date.
“Maybe you need to find us jobs in another state so we have to move!” I yelled to Maeve over the noise.
But Maeve didn’t respond; she was glued to the laptop screen.
“Maeve?”
My friend looked up at me, wide-eyed. “Tess, what did you do?”
My stomach sank. “I didn’t do anything.” I hurried over.
She turned the laptop around.
A headline read, in big bold pink letters, “At the Top of My Hate List Is My Boss.”
I skimmed the article. It was about my being an assistant to Beck, and it had all the salacious details.
“I didn’t write that,” I said, horrified.
“Are you sure?” Maeve asked. “Did you drunk write it? You’ve been drinking a lot lately.”
“I swear.” But then I kept scrolling and saw it.
“That’s my hate list,” I whispered. “But I didn’t send that to a newspaper. Oh my god, it makes it sound like I hate Beck.”
“You do hate Beck,” Maeve reminded me.
“Not like that. And I certainly don’t hate his sisters. Crap! What if they see this? We have to get it taken down. How do we get it taken down?” I raced around the small apartment, feeling like a mouse in a cage. “I need to call Beck and explain. I need to call the girls. Slander! Help! Someone call the lawyers.”
My hands were shaking as I pressed the contact for Enola’s cell number. “Oh thank god,” I said when the call connected. “Enola, sweetie, you didn’t happen to see anything on the internet, did you, that seems like it came from me but it absolutely did not—”
“You mean your hate list?”
