Free The Pink Ghetto by Liz Ireland

for heaven’s sake. I shouldn’t have to sneak behind her and double check every little parcel.”
    “No, you shouldn’t.”
    Rita chuckled a little, then stopped just as suddenly. “Maybe this one last time.” Before I could get in a word about guidelines, she darted toward the hallway.
    I wandered back to my office, but happened to catch Cassie’s eye as I walked by her open door. I hesitated to ask for her help, but maybe this would be a good icebreaker.
    “You wouldn’t happen to have guidelines for the different lines of books, would you?”
    She stretched her back as if she had been hunched over a manuscript nonstop since the last time I had seen her. “I think so—let me check.”
    She swiveled toward her file cabinet and opened what could have been an advertisement for a perfectly organized file drawer. All the colored tabs were perfectly staggered. No messy stray papers sticking out of file folders.
    “When was this picture taken?” I said, pointing to Cassie’s graduation photo.
    “High school,” she said as she flicked through her files. “I was salutatorian.”
    I made a humming sound of approbation. It seemed expected.
    “I should have been valedictorian, but the varsity quarterback had gotten extra credit for doing independent study. All he turned in was a five-page paper on the history of the NFL, but he got as much credit for it as I got for calculus. It was sort of unfair.”
    I frowned. It was unfair, and now she kept that photo on her desk as a…a what? A testament to having been passed over? Cheated?
    “Here they are!” she said brightly, pulling out a small stack of stapled-together pages. She flipped through a couple of multicolored sheets. “I knew I had restocked recently.”
    “Great.”
    She smiled up at me. “You can get them from Mercedes’s assistant.”
    I froze, momentarily confused. Did this mean Cassie wasn’t sharing? I looked pointedly at the pile of papers in her hand. “I just need one.”
    “Oh, no. You’ll need more than that,” she said. “People ask for them every day. You should keep a stack handy.”
    “Okay, so if I just took one of yours and made copies….”
    She shook her head. “Mercedes wants them all to be uniformly color coded. A different color for each line of books, see?” She flipped through her stack again, to demonstrate. Or to taunt me. “We had a meeting about this a few months ago. Guidelines should be color coded—she doesn’t want the Pulse guidelines to be green, for instance. They should be this pale red color.”
    “Uh-huh.” She kept leafing through those guidelines so that it was all I could do not to snatch one out of her hands and make a run for it. She clearly was not going to cough one up. “Okay…guess I’ll ask Mercedes.”
    “Her assistant, Lisa, is who you should ask. She usually has a whole stack of them.”
    So do you, but a fat lot of good that’s done me. I grinned at her. “Well! Thanks for your help.”
    She tilted her head and aimed a reptilian smile at me. “First day going well?”
    “Going great,” I said.
    “Terrific!”
    I got the guidelines from Mercedes’s assistant without further ado, but the next time I saw Andrea, I had to ask her, “Have you ever sensed any animosity from Cassie?”
    “Oh, that one’s a real go-getter,” Andrea said. “And a stickler for the rules, too. It’s probably eating her up inside that you got hired in a level above her.”
    I told her about the guideline incident.
    Andrea’s brows knit into a puzzled frown. “I’m sure Julie had tip sheets here somewhere…” She turned to my file cabinet. In five seconds, she was handing me a little stack of guidelines.
    I sank down in my chair, feeling like a dope. “ Tip sheets, ” I said. “I didn’t think…”
    Andrea shrugged. “Give yourself a break. It’s your first day.”
    My first day. Right. I needed to get a grip. “Forget what I said about Cassie,” I said. “I’m just being