Mercury in Retrograde Read Free

evenin’, I need some hot stuff baby toniiiight!”
    She grabbed her hefty reporter’s bag—which carried a notebook, several chewed-up pens, an extra sweater, her purse, and a stick of deodorant—and shut off the apartment lights before making her way out onto Sullivan Street.
    The weather had been forecasted as fifteen degrees with a winter storm on the way, but with the wind chill it felt at least twenty degrees colder, and the mixture of snow and sleet blowing perpendicularly into her face made it worse. Shivering, Penelope fought her way against the wind up Sixth Avenue to the West Fourth Street subway station four blocks away. After slipping twice on the stairs leading down to the trains, she finally made it onto the platform and hopped on the A train heading for one of the high-rise buildings in the Evergreen Gardens projects—which was neither green nor surrounded by gardens.
    LIBRA:
    Mercury, the cosmic trickster, is about to play havoc on your life. Shun making important decisions during this time as some crucial piece of information, or component, has gone astray or awry.
    Â 
    Fifteen blocks and about twenty worlds away, in a duplex garden apartment in a brownstone on West Twelfth Street, Lena “Lipstick” Lippencrass’s alarm clock went off at exactly 7:25 a.m.
    Lena yawned, waking from her Ambien-induced slumber with the cool cucumber slices that she had gingerly put on her eyes the night before still in place. She stretched and, slapping off the alarm, dropped the cucumber slices into the Hermés ashtray wedged in between the clock and the crystal block lamp on her nightstand, which also concealed Lipstick’s personal items: pens, hair ties, her prescription stash of Ambien, Xanax in a pillbox shaped like a Fabergé egg (“so Kate Moss”), Klonopin—for dire occasions—and the new diet pills Dr. Sachs on East Eighty-fourth had started prescribing to the social set (“They’re amazing!” said Lena’s mother, Lana Lippencrass. “I lost twenty pounds in two weeks—at that rate you can be practically Somalian by the Met Gala, darling!”).
    Lipstick fumbled around to the right side of the bed to what looked like the other nightstand’s twin but was really a cleverly designed mini fridge that held small bottles of Poland Spring water and more cucumber slices in a bowl of water—freshly cut by Gloria, the maid, who came every Tuesday and Thursday. Opening the fridge, Lipstick grabbed a bottle of water and downed it. Dehydration was a killer.
    It was pitch black in her room, thanks to the double-weight drapes that concealed the entire glass wall to the left of the bed, which led to her Parisian-style garden, with the exception of the faint glow from her laptop lying on the pillow next to her head. It was in that exact spot where her ex, Thad Newton III, had laid his disheveled blond, genetically blessed head comfortably for two years until Lipstick saw a photo of him—posted on the socialite gossip website, Socialstatus.com—drunkenly tongue-wrestling with her nemesis, Bitsy Farmdale. She’d dismissed himinstantly after seeing that distressing Web post eight months ago, and the right side of the bed had been empty of human content ever since.
    While she had dated Thad for two years, Lipstick had known him for almost a decade. And it was because of him that she’d been given her unusual moniker by her dearest friend, Neal, whose father Dennis had been close friends with Lipstick’s father, Martin, since their Harvard days.
    Lipstick had been on summer break between her freshman and sophomore years at Princeton and had just gotten her driver’s license at the ripe old age of twenty. She’d been driving Neal out to the Hamptons in her mother’s BMW, where they’d planned to spend the weekend dining at Sant Ambroeus, playing tennis and going to cocktail parties. Lipstick was, in particular,