Free These Girls by Sarah Pekkanen Page B

them down. That’s how you lose accounts.”
    Did Joanna always talk this much, and this quickly? Abby was exhausted just listening to her.
    “Sure,” Abby said. When she’d made her plan to go to grad school, she’d given up her apartment to save money and wascrashing with her girlfriend Sara, who spent most of the time at her boyfriend’s house. Abby paid half the rent, and everyone was happy with the arrangement—but Sara knew it would be temporary and wouldn’t mind the short notice. “I can move in over the weekend.”
    The relief in Joanna’s voice was clear, and soon Abby realized why: Joanna was never around. She left every morning at 8:15 and was rarely home before 8:00 P.M. At least one night a week, she traveled with the senator as he tried to shore up support in towns like Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. She had a busy, important job—Abby heard her on the phone one evening, feeding information to a reporter for The New York Times —but Abby felt sorry for her.
    Joanna didn’t know what it felt like to walk in the golden morning with a calm, alert baby tucked snugly against her chest. She hadn’t spooned the first taste of avocado into Annabelle’s mouth and seen a shocked look spread over the baby’s face before she spit it back out. Did Joanna ever take a long moment just to put her nose against Annabelle’s head and inhale deeply?
    Joanna had handed over the best part of her life to Abby and walked away without a second glance.

Six
    SHE WAS A FINALIST for the beauty editor job!
    She had to stop bouncing around like a game show contestant who’d just won a cheap toaster and think, Renee admonished herself. First she needed to assess her competition. Two other women, both in-house candidates like Renee, were in the running. Renee knew the name of one of them: Jessica, a fellow associate editor.
    Jessica was nice enough, Renee supposed. Pleasant, that was the most fitting word for her. She had sleek blond hair, her best feature, although her face was a little pinched, as if she were perpetually sniffing a carton of milk to see if it had gone bad. She was slender and of average height and just kind of . . . vanilla. Jessica’s voice never varied from a low, easy pitch, and she didn’t show much emotion—no big smiles or deep frowns. She seemed to be lacking the gene for excitement. That couldn’t all be Botox, could it? Jessica was only in her twenties—although nowadays that’s when some women started preventative Botox. Renee suppressed a shudder, thinking of injecting poison into her forehead—though she reserved the right to becomea flaming hypocrite and embrace it in another decade or so if crow’s-feet made an appearance.
    So, Jessica wasn’t a huge threat, unless she saved all her spark and channeled it into her writing. Who was the other contender? At times like these, it paid to be friends with all the best office gossips. Renee made a few calls and came up with the name: Diane Carlson.
    Diane was tricky, Renee thought, idly doodling on a piece of paper on her desk. She was smart, for sure, a Yale grad who never let anyone forget it. And of course, she was skinny. A whippet probably had a higher body fat percentage than Diane. But Renee thought Diane wanted to be a writer. Other than bright, witty briefs about new products, there wasn’t a lot of writing involved in the job, although it did require a special talent to describe eyeliner in a hundred new ways during the course of a career. Maybe Diane saw the job as a stepping-stone. Or maybe she coveted all the free goodies, too.
    Renee sighed, thinking about the spa trip the current beauty editor, Bonnie, had gone on last month. She’d booked two full days of appointments. She was rubbed and plucked and exfoliated and deep-conditioned and highlighted and decuticled and spray-tanned—then sent home with a giant shopping bag of products, everything from sable brushes to scented candles to La Mer skin cream. And she was paid for doing