Givenchy Code

Chapter One This was not my day. First of all, it was drizzling. Which would have been just fine if I'd been curled up on my couch watchingSex and the CityorDesperate Housewivesreruns. Or buying shoes on eBay. Or even working on my thesis. But I wasn't doing any of those things. Instead, I was being yanked down East 86th Street by six furballs eager to reach the dog run at Carl Shurz park. So far, both Poopsie (aptly named) and Precious (definitely not aptly named) had left little steaming presents on the sidewalk for me to retrieve with the plastic grocery bags I'd shoved into my raincoat pocket before leaving the Kirkguard Towers. Second of all, immediately after depositing steaming package number two in a cheerfully labeled Keep Our City Clean! trash can, I ran smack into my ex, Todd. Or rather, little Daisy, Mrs. Oppenmeir's Lhasa apso, ran smack into Todd. I managed to skirt gingerly to the right, avoiding him but hopelessly tangling him in six leashes. "For God's sake, Melanie," he said. "What the hell are you doing?" Now, see, that's one of the reasons Todd and I broke up. I mean, how hard is it to remember that I prefer "Mel" and hate "Melanie"? And, frankly, it was perfectly obvious what I was doing. I really didn't need to be reminded. "I'm maxing out my credit for Manolos, Todd." I shook the handful of leashes at him. "What the hell does it look like I'm doing?" "What happened to the job with Josh?" Unperturbed by my annoyance, he looked up at me from a bent-over position, talking even as he struggled to loosen the ever-tightening leash-noose. Part of me was tempted to plant the heel of my left Prada sneaker on his gluteus maximus and give a little shove. But that would have upset the dogs, so I managed to stifle the urge. "It didn't work out," I said stiffly. Right after we'd broken up, I'd become a victim of university budget cuts and had lost my not-so-lucrative-but-still-handy-for-rent job as a teaching assistant. In what I'm sure Todd had considered a supreme act of chivalry by the male exiting stage left in my life, he'd arranged for me to get a flex-time receptionist job at a tiny little public relations firm on Madison Avenue. What Todd had neglected to mention was that his friend Josh was a prick who, when he hadn't been talking about my tits, had filled in the conversational blanks with comments about my ass. The man clearly wasn't acquainted with Title VII, and I didn't intend to be the one who introduced him. "You could have called and told me," Todd said, picking Daisy up and lifting her over a crisscross of nylon leashes. He shot me a look that could have been recrimination or a request for assistance. Not sure, I just stood there and shrugged. Once I'd discovered Josh's more endearing qualities, I wasn't about to call Todd. For one, we'd been quite broken up by then (if we hadn't been, introducing me to Josh would have been grounds, that's for sure). For another, I like to fight my own battles. So I'd called Josh a chauvinistic, Neanderthal prick, and then I'd quit. (Unfortunately, the name-calling was all in my head, but it had made me feel better.) Then I'd fallen back on my old standby of answering ads posted in the student newsletter or on the bulletin board in the grad student lounge. I've used this method to earn extra cash on and off since my first day on the NYU campus as a wide-eyed and innocent freshman from Texas. The results have never been fabulous, but the experience has certainly been varied. In addition to the wonderful world of pet care, I've also worked as a short-order cook, a Circle Line ticket agent, and a cocktail waitress at a restaurant with food so horrible it went out of business a mere five days after it opened. To mention just a few. Todd always looked askance at my revolving-door job situation, but so far I haven't minded (well, the dog thing is a bit much)Kenner, Julie is the author of 'Givenchy Code ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416543374 and ISBN 1416543376.