Free Room for Love by Andrea Meyer

want to make a dishonest woman of me? When I even slightly rumpled the truth as a child, my mom would see it all over my nervous little face and punish me. I learned my lesson. I don’t want to lie to anyone. I just want to write a good story and make a few extra bucks. “I’m not a very good liar,” I tell Clancy.
    â€œYou’re not lying. You’re going undercover,” she says. “Now get to work. A thousand words. You’ve got six weeks. Two dollars a word. I’ll put a contract in the mail.” Two dollars a word? That’s two thousand dollars! That’s what I make at my job in a month, working ten, eleven hours a day. Jesus Christ. I spring out of my chair, sprint into the hallway, and scream at the top of my lungs, all the while jumping around like a spaz. A FedEx guy leaving the graphic design firm down the hall smiles at me and shakes his head.
    I return from my episode with my heart racing, convinced that I’m utterly incapable of facing “10 Awesomest Flicks to Watch While Taking Bong Hits,” which is next on my pile of articles to proofread this morning.
    â€œHey, Sam, where is everyone?” I ask.
    â€œSteve is at a breakfast meeting with an investor, Chester has class until eleven, and Spencer and Trevor are MIA. Apparently. Steve called and said you’re in charge, get to work, he’s counting on you. Maybe you should think twice before planning your next birthday party on the night before we ship.” Sam is a self-righteous twit. N’est-ce pas?
    Everyone’s momentary absence buys me some time to slack off, and if there was ever a morning when I needed to slack off, it’s today. I type “craigslist.org” into my browser. “New York. Housing. Rooms/shared.” Boom. About a million listings come up. I click on them one by one, at first uncertain what I’m looking for. Most ads are thoughtful enough to include a neighborhood in the heading, so I click on apartments in downtown Manhattan—the Village, SoHo, NoLita, the Lower East Side. I figure if I actually have to visit these apartments, I should stick as close to home as possible. It occurs to me that I should also focus my energies on apartments with outrageously high rents. I’m not going to have to come up with the money because I’m not really renting the place, but the piece is about meeting guys I’d like to date, so I should look at apartments likely to be inhabited by guys I’d want to date—i.e., financially sound ones. God knows I don’t need another struggling, unsuccessful new boyfriend. Done with boytoys! Done with commitment-phobes! Done with poor, starving jerkoffs who won’t be able to provide for me and my future children! Tribeca lofts appeal to me, as do charming brownstones in the West Village and cozy, sun-filled floor-throughs with gardens in Cobble Hill. On the first few pages of ads, the most promising apartments are inhabited by women or groups of twenty-something guys. It takes me fifteen minutes of solid browsing to find something interesting enough to investigate: a filmmaker renting a room in his 2,500-square-foot loft in SoHo. He’s asking $2,200, which sure qualifies as a lot for half an apartment.
    I glance surreptitiously around the office. Sam is engrossed in a shopping site, apparently browsing for lilac bridesmaid gowns. I roll my eyes and get up to nonchalantly put on a mix of songs from Chester’s favorite sound tracks and saunter casually back to my desk as Modern English belts out the opening lines of “Melt with You” (featured in Valley Girl and 50 First Dates, both on my list of top-ten chick flicks ever, and the little-known indie Cherish, which I also dig). I dial Graham’s number. A sleepy voice answers. It has a British accent. I picture a tawny-haired Englishman, his aristocratic good looks buried in a sage-green flannel pillowcase as he reluctantly holds a phone in