She'll Take It Read Free Page B

squints and says, “I thought you were this girl Clara I was supposed to meet for drinks that night.” Regardless, to this day I’d like to thank the Saint of Neurotic Impulses that I wrote on the window, and the Saint of Obscure Skills that I am, and always have been, an excellent mirror writer. Before I fall asleep, I strike a deal with the Saint of Kleptomaniacs . As long as Ray calls tomorrow, I promise not to steal.

Chapter 2
    O kay. I’m going to be honest with you. I was born with sneaky fingers. My mother delivered a healthy, eight pound, twenty-two inch, blue-eyed, wailing thief. At the age of two I stole car keys from the babysitter, at four I lifted three jars of Jif peanut butter and a box of plastic knives from Safety Town, and at six I was regularly pilfering chocolate milk for me and a few choice friends. All through junior high and high school, if anyone wanted anything, I was the girl who could get it.
    They came to me for condoms, pregnancy kits, Swiss Army knives, makeup, and the occasional vibrator. I charged a flat twenty dollars an item, and by the time I graduated from high school, I had a little over six thousand dollars in shoe boxes under my bed. In every other aspect, I was a good kid. I did what my parents told me, I was kind to the elderly, I got straight As with the occasional B, and I once spent an entire summer painting birdhouses for the mentally ill. Could I help it that I had an uncanny ability to make objects disappear off the shelves and into my pockets without a trace?
    And living here is like an alcoholic living in a bar. New York is full of large, anonymous, evil, money-grubbing department stores. I can’t feel too guilty ripping them off knowing that we’re being ripped off in return. You can bet they’re polluting the environment, gauging prices, following black people around the store, and/or have secret factories in underdeveloped countries where starving, grubby children sew glass eyes on teddy bears they’ll never get to play with. Just thinking about it makes me want to run to Bloomingdale’s and relieve it of a few tubes of lipstick. But first I’m going to listen to my message. You see, what did I tell you? Today is a new day, and the blessed answering machine is blinking. I pray to the Saint of Men Who Want to Call But Have Suddenly Had All Their Fingers Chopped Up in a Horrible Blending Accident and Finally Decide to Call With a Pencil in Their Mouth, please, please, please, let it be Ray.
    But it’s not. It’s a message from Jane Greer, the “placement coordinator” at Fifth Avenue Temps. In a gravelly Brooklyn accent she demands to see me in her office tomorrow morning. Jane is intimidating on a good day, but she’s never left me a message like this. I have good reason to be afraid; Jane is famous for having a short fuse and a long range. I’m going to need backup. I venture into the living room where Kim is lounging on the couch with her recently painted toenails propped up on several pillows. “Uh-oh,” she says when I tell her about the message from Jane. While I wait for her to elaborate, I study her little piggies. They’re tangerine orange. It would look hideous on me, but she can get away with it. At six foot one, Kim Minx takes up the entire couch.
    Her head is propped on the armrest and her long blond hair cascades down the side. She’s flipping through the latest edition of Vogue . Despite commercials begging me not to, I do hate her because she’s beautiful. I also love her because she’s my best friend. Kim and I met eight years ago at an open audition for milk, making it a “cattle call” in more ways than one. This was way before the celebrity milk mustache campaign, and they were in search of a beautiful young ingénue to deliver the line, “Mmm, milk. Does the body good.” In typical cattle call fashion, young, eager women were lined up for blocks