The Girl and the Genie Read Free

but her thoughts kept drifting back to Mitch and she’d find herself fuming, and soon the words she was staring at barely made any sense to her. When she later returned back to her apartment, Sally was there but with the cold look Sally gave her she knew Mitch had already lied to her, and that her roommate believed him.
    “Sally, I don’t know what Mitch told you, but it’s a lie—” Emily tried to tell her, but Sally gave her a brittle, hurt look and walked away from her, and Emily knew it would be pointless to tell her what really happened.
    Now almost a week and a half later, Sally still refused to talk to her and barely could even look at her. Emily in response kept out of the apartment as much as she could. She no longer felt comfortable there, but the truth was she hadn’t felt comfortable in her apartment for months—not since Mitch started hanging around. Of course, it wasn’t her apartment since her name wasn’t on the lease. So she felt both stuck and hurt. Hurt from the coldness she now felt from Sally, and even more so that her best friend would believe this liar over her, and stuck because as much as she no longer felt as if she had a home, she didn’t want to lose her best friend and roommate even though she knew she already had.
    So she felt blocked, frustrated, and somewhat hurt romantically and personally, and professionally it wasn’t much better. When she started her job as an associate editor she was filled with so much passion believing that she would discover and bring to the world new literary voices. Very quickly it became hard to ignore the cynicism that the older editors wore every bit as densely as the musk cologne that her boss, Mr. Pish, would use to dowse himself. It was even harder over the last three years not to get disillusioned when she’d see the only books that Mr. Pish and the other editors bought were the formulaic and dumbed-down books that barely hid their contempt for their readers. When Mr. Pish moved Emily off the slush pile to instead report on the agented material being submitted to him, Emily continued pulling manuscripts out of the slush pile hoping to find that one gem, especially given how routinely formulaic and mediocre the agented submissions were. Three weeks ago she found that gem. The voice was so unique and fresh, and the novel beautifully crafted. She had to believe that Mr. Pish would feel the same way, and so she urged him to read it. He seemed surprised that she would do so, but indicated brusquely that he would take a look at it. Today he called her into his office.
    Mr. Pish had been an editor for over twenty years and he tried hard to look the part, always wearing tweed sport jackets with leather patches on the elbows as well as baggy trousers. A pale pear-shaped man with only a scattering of hair, he also wore his arrogance every bit as thickly as he did his cynicism and that awful musk cologne. He kept a picture of his wife on his desk, and she looked much like him with that same self-important expression as he often had, although she possessed more hair than he did. When Emily entered his office earlier that day, he sat staring at her bug-eyed. He often would stare at her bug-eyed, but usually with an inscrutable expression. This time his small mouth was pushed into a stern frown. He asked her why she wasted his time with that so-called gem.
    His question stunned her. She couldn’t believe he was referring to the same manuscript that she had urged him to consider. “Do you mean Theater of Sin ?” she asked, hearing her voice break into a stammer, and hating the fact that she was stammering in front of him.
    “Exactly,” he said. “The title did give me hope, but the book was otherwise an utter disappointment. Where were the teenage vampires? Zombies? Even werewolves, for goodness sake! Or simply a page-turning plot? Or at the very least a young, plucky heroine who finds romance in every chapter? Since none of those were present, explain to me