“I read it in your book.”
I watched as she got up and went to the newsstand on the corner to buy a candy bar. She wore a faded minidress over a pair of jeans, her hair in a straggly braid down her back. Crowds of Austen employees milled around on the sidewalks, having descended from their heights to graze for food at earth level. I didn’t like being in their vicinity and I certainly didn’t want to run into Kitty. As I inspected the crowds, searching for her, a woman sat down next to me on the bench. She was wearing a beige trench coat despite the weather: hot with no sign of clouds. Most of her face was covered by black sunglasses, and she held a silver phone to her ear.
“I’m talking to you but I’m not talking to you,” the woman said.
“Wh . . . ? Are you . . . talking to me?”
“Of course I’m talking to you.” The woman lifted up her sunglasses and it was Julia. She put the sunglasses back down and looked in the opposite direction, still holding the phone to her ear. “Do you have any gossip about Kitty?”
It was startling to see Julia in the light of day. “Why would I have gossip?”
“You’re a source now. I need gossip about Kitty. It’s for a good cause.”
I didn’t mention that Verena had told me about the exposé of Austen. I liked that I knew a secret about Julia—and that she didn’t know that I knew. “I have her list of article ideas for upcoming issues.”
“Aces,” said Julia. “Email that to me.”
It wasn’t a request so much as a command. “How’s Leeta?” I asked. I thought of Julia and Leeta as a pair, though I had never seen them together.
“She’s finally back at work. She’s a bit of a loose cannon, you know.” In a weird way, I missed Leeta. She had sprung up from nowhere, haunted my daily life, and then disappeared. I wanted to see her again, but not really.
Verena returned with her chocolate and put her arm around Julia, who wriggled away and stood up, still with the phone to her ear, looking blank and unexcitable. “I should not be seen talking to the two of you, especially not you,” she said, pointing at Verena with her foot. She pretended to talk on her phone, moving her lips and laughing, though no sound was coming out. Finally she said, “I have a conference call about lip liner with the West Coast now,” and drifted away into the crowd.
“Poor thing, her paranoia must be off the charts,” Verena said, motioning to the barricades. When I asked her about Julia, she said there were five Cole sisters, all of their names beginning with J: Julia, Josette, Jillian, Jacintha, and Jessamine. Their surname was Coleman, but they had deleted the man. The sisters all worked in the media or the fashion and beauty industry, and were all spying like Julia. “They’re like a cabal,” Verena said. “They live in a massive loft in Tribeca, the Weird Sisters.”
I felt a twinge of panic regarding the email addresses, but I tried to push the thoughts from my mind. It was better that I didn’t know why she wanted them. Then you’ll never have to lie.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Verena said, “but none of the Cole sisters have breasts. Their mother died of breast cancer when the youngest sister was only two. All of them have the gene, so when they turned twenty-one, one by one they had preventative double mastectomies.” I remembered looking down Julia’s shirt in the Beauty Closet and seeing the roses and thorns tattooed on her chest. She’d been wearing a bra, so I’d assumed there were breasts there too.
I peeled a mayonnaise-free strip of crust off my sandwich and put it in my mouth, then slid one of the tomatoes out from underneath the wedge of lettuce, careful to avoid the tuna. I ate tuna all the time at home, but with fat-free mayonnaise. Real mayonnaise was different. Once I had a taste of real food, I always wanted more. I spent my days tiptoeing around food, the way one might tiptoe into a baby’s room while it’s sleeping. One wrong move and the baby wakes up and screams. That’s how it was with hunger, too. Once it awakes, it screams and screams and there’s only one way to quiet it.
“Since you’re planning on having surgery, why not just eat everything in sight?” Verena asked. “Pretty soon you’ll only be able to eat baby food. You might as well enjoy yourself before doomsday strikes.”
“My doctor said I have to stay on my plan now, otherwise the adjustment will be too difficult later—Oh God, there’s Kitty,” I said, spotting the red bushel of curls. I turned sideways on the bench, covering my face with my hands. It was impossible for a three-hundred-pound woman to blend into a crowd, but I tried.
Verena told me Kitty was gone and I looked up to see the back of her head gliding through the glass doors. “How do you think Kitty feels about you?” she asked, but I told her I didn’t want to talk about Kitty.
“A Baptist isn’t afraid to confront hard truths.”