“They fucking love to tell everybody they defended affirmative action. Like it makes them not racist or something,” Derrick whispered as he leaned into me.

As Eileen droned on at the podium, I glanced around the room, feeling the nervous energy of my new colleagues despite their placid faces. I marveled at their new ties and well-tailored suits, their shiny heels and pressed collars—the adult equivalents of sparkling white sneakers on the first day of kindergarten. I looked ahead at the Columbia girls sandwiching Carmen in their subtly different suits and instinctively smoothed my blouse in response.

I caught Derrick eyeing me knowingly. “You’re lucky,” he said quietly.

“Hmm?”

“Nobody really knows what ‘business casual’ means for girls. You can wear whatever you want. For all anybody knows, it’s a fashion statement.” He paused for a moment. “But for the record, you’re right. Suits are business attire. You’re in business casual.”

“You’re in a suit!”

“I’m all business all the time, baby.” He winked; another laugh slipped out of my closed lips. I didn’t hear the end of the simultaneously intimidating and motivational speech, but we were suddenly dismissed to the fortieth floor for technology training. As we shuffled en masse down the hallway to the elevator, we passed a glass-enclosed conference room where six white men in dark suits sat around a glossy, hulking wood table.

“Those guys are probably in M&A,” Derrick said with a cock of his head.

“How can you tell?” I asked, staring through the glass.

“The way they sit. What they wear. How they look.” I looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Like total douchebags. The highest-paid, most well-respected douchebags at Klasko. It’s the most competitive group to match into. It was the same in the LA office. And everywhere else, I think. What groups did you say you were interested in on the questionnaire they sent around?”

“I put real estate,” I muttered, hoping that would pass muster. I looked back at the men in the conference room and the intermittent strobes of light thrown off their wrists by their watches and cuff links. They were all well groomed and well dressed. Their gazes were focused, and they seemed to be playing a part in the exact scene one might picture when asked to imagine a meeting taking place in corporate America. Perhaps because of this, they made me feel slightly starstruck.

One of them, who seemed younger than the others, still had an expertly cut suit, shiny hair, and perfectly tanned skin. I saw then that Derrick was right. It wasn’t just their attire or just the intensity in their eyes or just the way their knees spread confidently apart under the table. It was the combination of it all. They somehow seemed more important than the rest of us—than me. I struggled to peel my eyes away from them as Derrick and I drifted down the hall, my neck rotating to keep them in my sightline. When I finally turned my head forward, I reminded myself of the rumored astronomical hours they billed and demanding clients they catered to. As I continued to our next session, their sheen dulled in my memory.

Chapter 2

The technology training room we were led into was a dimly lit interior space with at least a hundred computers and phones lined up in neat rows. Frigid air blasted down on us from overhead vents, keeping the machines cool and our bodies shivering. Derrick pulled a seat out next to his for me, and I gratefully plunked myself down into it.

A woman with a long, frizzy braid down to her waist paced the front of the room, then cleared her throat to speak. “The computers and phones at your stations are designed to look just the way the ones in your offices do. We’re going to start with the phone . . .”

“Ten bucks says no other living thing has been inside her apartment this decade,” Derrick whispered.

“Harsh!” I whispered through a laugh. “You’re on.”

“. . . and believe it or not, the most common mistake people make with the phone is not hanging it up. You’ve been warned.” She smiled broadly. “Let’s start with how to place a call. It’s the easiest thing we’ll do today, but let’s get in the habit of practicing absolutely everything. I’ve turned off my cell phone, and written my number on the board behind me. You dial nine for an outside line and a one, so to call me it’s 9-1-9-1-7-6-1-2-3-1-4-2. Everybody practice calling it now, but do me a favor and don’t leave a voice mail.”

We laughed courteously as we picked up our receivers and dialed. I waited for her outgoing voice mail to come through.

“Nine-one-one emergency response, what is your emergency?” the voice on the other end asked. I looked at the receiver in horror and then slammed it down in the cradle.

“What happened?” Derrick leaned over, looking at my phone, but I was too mortified to answer.

“Very good. Okay. Let’s move on to transferring calls.” We all turned our attention to the front of the room. “You’ll note the hold button—”

Suddenly, my phone rang, interrupting our instructor.

The entire class turned toward me; Derrick even rotated his chair to stare me down. The instructor frowned, gesturing at my ringing phone, and I grabbed the receiver.

“Hello, everything is fine . . . I’m fine . . . I just misdialed,” I stammered into the phone, then hung up before the caller could say a word. I could feel my cheeks radiating, confirming that I had turned a humiliating shade of crimson.

“Who was that?” the instructor asked, sounding more curious than accusatory.

I stared at her, unable to invent a story quickly enough. “I must have dialed an extra one after the nine-one,” I said quietly.

“You called nine-one-one?” Derrick hooted. There was a brief silence in the room, followed by an eruption of laughter. I looked up from my white-knuckled fists resting on my thighs and was surprised to see a roomful of sympathetic faces. Derrick threw an arm over my shoulder, and I melted into his side with a dramatic pout.

“Whatever, I just called the managing partner of the firm by accident,” somebody called out from the back of the room. I looked toward the voice and met Carmen’s eyes.

“You called Mike Baccard?” the instructor gasped.

“At least nine-one-one can’t fire you!” Carmen said, and the room erupted into laughter again. I nodded gratefully at her.

The instructor smiled. “Oh, you really are a special class. But let’s move things along. At this rate, we’re not getting out of here before the end of the day, and I have three new kittens at home who aren’t going to feed themselves!”

Derrick and I locked eyes. “I’m pretty sure pets count as living things,” I said.

“You have me there, Vogel.” He smiled. “I owe you a drink.”

We were given offices with unobstructed views of Manhattan, firm email accounts, firm cell phones, firm laptops, firm credit cards, firm 401(k)s, firm health insurance, Equinox gym memberships, and firm gym bags to encourage us to use them. I met my secretary, Anna, who showed me the picture of her grandchildren in the locket around her neck and proudly told me that her oldest son had just joined the clergy. I liked her immediately. She asked me about my message-taking preferences, offered to turn my changes to documents, and insisted she’d keep me fed even when I thought I was too busy to eat. I didn’t know what “turning changes” meant, and I couldn’t fathom living in a world where work ever trumped the demands of my growling stomach, but I thanked her profusely, and silently vowed to never ask her for a single thing I could manage to do myself.

“I come in at nine each morning to get your affairs and schedule in order,” she continued. “Most attorneys come in between nine thirty and ten thirty, but there’s no rule for you. I leave at five thirty, and the night secretary covers you until I come back in the morning. Sound good?”

I nodded, and she returned to her cubicle outside my office to allow me to get settled.

“Let me know if you need anything, anytime!” she yelled to me. “I take care of you and the two attorneys on either side of you, but I’m never too busy, even if I seem it.”

I smiled gratefully and sat back down at my desk, scanning emails from the training coordinator about our schedule for the coming week. To pass the time until our lunchtime ethics train ing, I called Carmen’s extension to practice joining a conference call. The rest of the day flew, and when our benefits training ended at four thirty, I returned to my office, feeling it was too early to leave. Soon after five, I looked up and locked eyes with Anna, who was packing up to leave for the night just outside my office. She nodded knowingly and walked toward me, leaned her shoulder against the doorframe.

“You should go home, honey. You’ll be working so hard you’ll forget what your apartment looks like soon enough. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She ducked out of my doorway before I could say goodbye.

My phone rang, instilling a sudden panic in me that it was time to do real work, but Carmen’s name was on the caller ID.

“Hi.”

She laughed. “How weird is it that we have offices?”