The Continuity Girl Read Free Page B

it?”
    “I think I quit my job yesterday. I mean, this morning.”
    “Seriously? Aren’t you freelance?”
    Meredith thought this over. The lack of sleep and the two Bloodies were beginning to take their toll on her cognitive abilities.
     “I am, but I had a fight with Felsted—not
even
a fight really—and I just walked off the set.”
    “In the middle of shooting?”
    “It was sort of at the end but, yeah, pretty much.”
    Mish hooted. “Right on!” She punched her friend on the shoulder before prying up the door lock with her fingers and hoisting
     herself out of the car. “It’s about time. That guy’s an asshole. I’m just sorry you didn’t do it sooner.”
    Meredith removed her key from the ignition. Elle was now clipping down the driveway with a puzzled expression, pulling on
     her fingers with a dishcloth. A Jack Russell terrier bounced around her ankles emitting a series of high-pitched barks.
    Mish leaned back into the car and pinched Meredith on the thigh.
    “Let’s not mention it to her today, okay? I can’t deal.”
    “No prob.” Meredith got out of the car and took a deep breath.
    “Down, Starsky. I said
down
! Don’t— I told you NO. Guys—” Elle pulled her friends together and hugged them both at the same
     time. “Welcome to bourgeois hell. Don’t worry, I’ve got spiked punch for the grown-ups. And pregnancy punch
pour vous.
” She
     bumped her hip against Mish’s and began clicking her way along the flagstones back to the house. “How sick are you of cranberry
     soda? By my second trimester I couldn’t even stand the sight of the stuff.”
    Meredith took her cue. “Where are the brats?”
    Elle sighed. She often pretended (though not very convincingly) to be bored by motherhood for the sake of her as-yet-childless
     girlfriends. “In the backyard being molested by Krusty the Clown. You should see this guy—talks like a thug and charges a
     mortgage payment an hour—but the kids are absolutely bonkers for him. He’s like the pied piper of Summerhill.”
    The kitchen was at the back of the house, a half-renovated addition that Elle and Andrew had started before getting pregnant
     for the second time. The stainless steel appliances, imported from a restaurant supply shop on the Boulevard Saint-Germain
     in Paris, were already covered in a lifetime’s worth of tiny fingerprints. The floor was plywood covered in blue plastic.
     The tarp snagged on Elle’s kitten heel as she led Mish and Meredith into the room, trilling the praises of white wine sangria.
    “Oh hell,” she said, bending down to detach herself. “I was afraid the kids would get splinters. Half their fathers are lawyers
     and Andrew is completely paranoid. You know he kept saying we should just have the party at Chuck E. Cheese’s instead? As
     if.”
    She poured pale cloudy liquid into tumblers as she spoke, clawing extra chopped berries out of the pitcher and plopping them
     in each glass with her fingers. Elle shook her head and smiled, seeming to marvel for a moment at the vast stupidity of it
     all, the excess of poor taste and misjudgment that she alone had to put up with. Her facial expression was one Meredith recognized
     from wives in television sitcoms, usually adopted after their husbands had returned home with something laughably out of place,
     like a Christmas tree too big to fit in the front door.
    Mish took a glass of sangria from Elle’s hand, and her friends watched as she drained it in a single swallow.
    “What’s Chuckie Cheese’s?” Meredith asked, hoping to distract Elle.
    The other two women looked at each other and snorted. This was a joke they shared among the three of them: Meredith’s astonishing
     ignorance of mainstream popular culture. What she did know had been gleaned through movies and television as an adult. Meredith
     had retained the overly literal, slightly alien quality of a child who had grown up in an institution. In this case, as a
     boarder at the girls’