Chapter One

      “I’m a cliché.”

      Samantha Hess flung herself down on her friend Katrina’s couch in overly dramatic frustration and pushed her glasses up her nose. “An overeducated twenty-four-year-old unemployed woman, single and living in Brooklyn in an apartment with no windows. Total cliché. It’s ludicrous.”

      “The only thing that would be even more ironic would be if you were Jewish,” Katrina said, cramming a piece of bruschetta into her mouth. “Then you’d basically be a cable TV sitcom.”

      “I am Jewish!” Samantha protested. Though she hadn’t set foot in a synagogue since she’d made her bat mitzvah, it still counted. She reached for her own piece of cheese-smothered bread. She needed carbs, stat.

      Katrina gave her an amused look. “I know you are. I was being facetious.”

      “Well, don’t. Your clever wit isn’t going to pay my rent.” Sam pulled her phone out from under her butt cheek where she’d sat on it and started what had become a three-hundred-times-a-day ritual of searching for any open job positions on all the known employment posting sites. It was hopeless. She knew it was hopeless. Marketing jobs for entry-level employees were as scarce as square footage in New York. “There are no jobs. At. All. I’m going to be forced to move home to Boston and listen to my mother tell me how she was right and I should have become a nurse.”

      “Oh God, a nurse?” Katrina made a face. “You’d have a terrible bedside manner.”

      “I know, right?” She clicked and scrolled, before thinking about what her friend had said. “Wait, did you just insult me?”

      “Is assuming you wouldn’t be interested in wiping someone’s ass an insult, or just proving how well I know you?”

      Uh, no. No ass wiping. She could own it. “Yeah, you totally nailed it. I would rather prostitute myself than change diapers, either adult or baby.” Slight exaggeration, but just slight. She had a very sensitive gag reflex. Which, then again, might make prostitution a poor career choice, as well.

      Fabulous. She was going to starve to death, end of story. “Why can’t there be jobs for brutally honest people? I’d be good at that. Or jobs for people who can wrap presents thoughtfully with great color schemes. Or people who are really, really good at catching a cab when it’s raining?”

      Those were no small achievements.

      “I don’t know about the first one, but the latter two sound like being a personal assistant. I don’t think you’d be so crazy about that either.”

      Hmm. Good point. “Probably not. I was good at my job, you know. It’s just this damn economy.” And now she sounded like those two old guys in the theater box on the Muppets. Damn economy. Grumble, grumble. “Being downsized is like the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech when you’re dumped by a guy.”

      Samantha reached for another piece of bruschetta. Two months. She’d been out of work for two months and unemployment only went so far.

      “I’m sorry. Have you tried more nontraditional sites for jobs? I know people have actually found positions on social media.”

      “I can find a job on Twitter?” For what, she couldn’t imagine. “Color me skeptical.”

      Katrina folded her legs underneath her, chocolate-brown cable-knit tights pulling taut. “You can find anything online. Literally anything. Like I bet you could use Google to search professional ass-kicker and find a job posting.”

      That made her laugh. “No way.”

      “Sam.” Trina gave her a long look. “I found an eBay listing for gently used condoms. And another for a woman’s placenta, at the bargain price of two hundred bucks.”

      Oh dear God. She made a face. “Ew. Double ew.”