Girl In Pieces by Jordan Bell Page B

dinner tonight. He likes nice places. Maybe that new place downtown? I hear they have an entire menu dedicated to organic food.”
    “Also,” she continued without breathing,” they support a local art collective. I like art, not the weirder modern things made out of trash and whatever. I like art that’s romantic. What about you?”
    “Love it.” I dropped back into my seat and marveled at how much bigger our work space felt once the pizza boxes were gone. “The cubists still kind of escape me, but I’m willing to try out just about anything.”
    “No, silly, I mean do you have a boyfriend?”
    Death. Death and torture and hell fire. That was what I imagined raining down on top of Gwen’s very shiny blonde head. But I managed to keep my cool and not launch myself across the table to end her.
    “I haven’t bought one of those yet, but I’m shopping for a nice customizable model. Maybe in blue.”
    Asian guy snorted behind his phone, but Gwen sort of blinked at me. “I don’t really understand what you mean.”
    “I mean no, I’m not dating anyone presently.”
    She shook her head and I swore she actually meant it when she said, “I’m so sorry.”
    “Yeah well,” I shrugged. “How else can I prove my feminine independence but through casual, meaningless, hook-ups?”
    Gwen turned a million shades of red. Asian guy and Guy with the Goatee looked up from their work. I ignored them both.
    “I’m sure someone will snatch you up, Kat. You’re pretty enough even if your sarcasm is a tiny bit,” she pinched her forefinger and thumb together and squinted, “…strong.”
    “Don’t take this the wrong way Gwen, but you sort of seem more Home & Gardens than edgy alternative lifestyle. You know that Midtown Edge has a column about sex, right?”
    She blushed again. “I told you, I’m good with grammar. Written grammar, anyway. I have an eye for catching mistakes and fixing people to make them sound a lot smarter than they actually are.”
    “Hey,” Asian guy said, looking a little hurt. “You’re my editor.”
    Gwen wagged a finger at him. “No one wants to know how the bread is made, Marc, they just want to know that it tastes delicious.”
    Asian guy, Marc, opened his mouth to retort but found nothing to put her in her place. This made Goatee guy guffaw and despite myself, I laughed too.
    Maybe it wasn’t so bad, working with a team. That was definitely something I hadn’t had before. Sure, I had been able to work at my coffee table in my pajamas at two in the morning, but I always had to do that alone. There was no lively banter, no inside jokes, no weird but interesting personalities. I had to go looking for those things at South River Bar, and now that I didn’t have that…well maybe it wasn’t so bad, working for a soul sucking corporate machine if I got to have people like this within spitball distance every day.
    Silver linings girl here, reporting for duty.
    In the next few hours I heard more about To-Die-For-Max-Sheridan than I knew about any of my exes. I learned that Marc had a pretty powerful addiction to his iPhone and Goatee guy’s real name was Randy and he wrote a column about the alternative music scene. Just one more scene I didn’t even know existed in my own city. How had my world gotten so small?
    The personal ads came in by email. At first I didn’t read them, just formatted and arranged them on the page. There was a stack of almost two hundred waiting for me. Most of them were for jobs, used furniture, events. I liked the missed connections ads. There was something endlessly hopeful about them. Not surprisingly, they were Gwen’s favorite part of the whole magazine.
    But there were other ads too that went into the adult section of the personals. Men looking for women, women looking for men, women looking for women, men looking for men, and then a lot of acronyms I had to Google to understand.
    BBW - Big Beautiful Woman. I liked this, but I wondered what constituted big