Free All Fall Down: A Novel by Jennifer Weiner Page A

“Oh, God,” I groaned. I’d worn a pink jersey dress and nude heels, and Sarah and I had posed on Sarah’s desk, in front of her floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Bryant Park. When the shot had been set up, I’d thought we looked nice. Seeing the picture now, all I could think was Before and After. Way, Way Before and After. Worst of all, the caption underneath read “ SEXY MAMAS : Mom-bloggers Allison Weiss and Sarah Lai at play in Manhattan.” Never mind that I hardly looked sexy, and Sarah wasn’t a mom.
    Ah, well. At least we looked reasonably professional. The photographer, who’d clearly been expecting the online version of Girls Gone Wild, had been disappointed to find ladies in business clothes, one of whom was almost forty, with nary a tattoo in sight (Sarah had a few—“just not,” as she put it, “where the judge can see them”). He had not-so-subtly pushed me toward the edge or the back of the shots, while trying to get Sarah to bend over her desk, or to stand with her hands on her knees andwave her bottom in front of her laptop—“so it’s, you know, sex and the Internet.” When she refused, and also politely turned down his offer to shoot her posing with a whip, he’d asked us to have an edible-body-paint fight (thanks but no thanks). Finally, he asked if we would at least stand side by side. “And can you kind of touch each other?”
    We’d declined but agreed to play catch with the Egg, a vibrator designed to look like a retro kitchen timer that Sarah had reviewed in her monthly sex-toy roundup.
    I turned away from the laptop and slipped my finger into my bag, found my tin, put the pills I knew I’d be needing—two Percocet, courtesy of my dentist, who was still prescribing them for the wisdom teeth he’d taken out six months ago—underneath my tongue. Then I called Sarah.
    “It’s great!” I said. I’d meant to sound cheery, but I thought I sounded closer to hysterical.
    “I told you it was NBD,” Sarah answered. I took a deep breath.
    “I guess I’m just worried about what Dave’s going to think.”
    “Ah.” Sarah’s boyfriend, an architect ten years her senior, was unswervingly supportive and, as far as I knew, completely unthreatened by a girlfriend who wrote about threesomes and bestiality for a living.
    “But it’ll be fine,” I reassured her. “Hey, I should get going on my post. Call you later?” We hung up and I scrolled, idly, to the bottom of the Journal ’s story, where twenty-three comments had already appeared.
    I clicked, and began to read. LOL the one in the pink looks like Jabba the Hutt. No wonder she needs sex toys! “But I’m not the sex-toy writer,” I said, as if my computer could hear me. I shook my head and kept reading. I’d hit that  . . . the second commenter had written, followed by three blank lines that I scrolled past toread, . . . with a brick, so I could get to the hot one. The third left behind the topic of my looks to consider my credentials. This is why the terrorists hate us, added commenter number four.
    I closed my eyes. I told myself it did not matter what a bunch of strangers who, clearly, could hardly read and who would never meet me had to say. I told myself that it was ridiculous to get upset by comments on the Internet . . . It wasn’t as if the people could reach through the screen to actually hurt me. It wasn’t as if I was real to them; I was a name, a picture, a thing: Feminism, or Women Today. I told myself that I looked just fine and that the people who’d written those hateful things were probably idiots who played video games in their parents’ basement, putting down their joysticks only long enough to spew a little hate online and then masturbate bitterly.
    Dave’s computer gave a soft chime, the same noise my laptop made when an e-mail arrived. Reflexively, I toggled to the e-mail screen and double-tapped the link that would let me read the incoming missive. Which turned out to be for