These Girls (2 page)

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Sarah Pekkanen

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Washington Square Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition April 2012

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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.

Designed by Jill Putorti

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pekkanen, Sarah.

These girls : a novel / Sarah Pekkanen. — 1st Washington Square Press trade pbk. ed.

p. cm.

1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. New York—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3616.E358T54 2012
813’.6—dc23

2011039946

ISBN 978-1-4516-1254-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-1255-4 (ebook)

For my family of girlfriends, especially Rachel Baker

And in loving memory of Anita Cheng

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Acknowledgments

A Readers Club Guide

'The Opposite of Me' Excerpt

'Skipping a Beat' Excerpt

Bonus Material

Reviews

About the Author

About Washington Square Press

Ask Atria

One

“HOLD IT!” A VOICE
commanded.

The elevator was already crowded—at a few minutes before 10:00
A.M.
, everyone was heading for the upper floors of the Manhattan skyscraper that housed office space for a half dozen glossy magazines—but Cate Sommers instinctively reached out and prevented the doors from closing.

“Thanks.”

The air crackled with energy as Trey Watkins stepped inside, and Cate saw one young woman nudge another. Trey wore faded jeans, hiking boots, a green henley shirt, and his cheeks were slightly windburned, as if he’d just finished scaling a mountain. Which he probably had, right before he’d started a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and, Cate thought as she managed to avoid rolling her eyes, possibly shimmied up a tree to save a stranded bear cub.

“Excuse me.” Trey was standing to Cate’s right, and he reached an arm around her, enveloping her in a half hug. She blinked up at him in surprise.

“Nineteenth floor,” he said, grinning as he pushed the button. She leaned away from him, irritated with herself for being
unoriginal enough to fall, even momentarily, under his spell. Trey was a legend around this building, and not just because a six-foot-three, single, straight, employed man was more coveted and rare in New York City than a rent-controlled one-bedroom.

Sure, he was gorgeous, but Cate couldn’t get distracted by his presence, even if they were pressed together as close as it was possible to be without touching at the moment. This was her first month as features editor of
Gloss,
the magazine battling
InStyle
to nab a shrinking audience of consumers in their twenties through forties who liked a spirited mix of articles about celebrity, home, and style. She had photos of Will and Jada Smith’s new swimming pool to consider, headlines to tweak, and a profile of a young wife who’d left a polygamous marriage to shepherd through the editing process (the wife, surprisingly sexy with a new short haircut and a wardrobe with even shorter hemlines, had just won a bit part in a Quentin Tarantino film; otherwise the magazine never would’ve been interested). Plus she needed to weed through a stack of submissions for the first-person back-page column. All before noon.

The doors opened and Trey held them, politely gesturing for two other men to get out first, then they all headed toward the double glass doors etched with the words
THE GREAT BEYOND
. Cate could’ve predicted this would be their stop: The guys all wore sneakers, and one even sported a backpack instead of a briefcase.

Gender and dress identified who belonged to which floor long before the elevator doors opened: The young women in miniskirts and bright tights with sassy streaks of pink or blue in their hair all left for
Sweet!
on the twenty-fifth floor; the women in sensible gray or black suits picked up their equally sensible briefcases and headed into
Home & Garden
on floor twenty-two; and all the guys were disgorged on floor nineteen, which
churned out manly features yet spotlighted a gorgeous girl—or, more accurately, her cleavage—on every cover.

“Mmm.” The girl who’d nudged her friend rolled the sound around in her mouth as the doors slid shut, and the other four women in the elevator all laughed. Except for Cate, who flinched.

The sound was nearly identical to the one made by
Gloss
’s editor in chief, a Brit named Nigel Campbell, who—apparently following the trend set by the cover models for
The Great Beyond
—always left one too many buttons undone on his shirt. The troubling thing was, he’d made the intimate, yucky noise two days before he promoted Cate. She didn’t react, and now she couldn’t stop beating herself up about it. Later that night, in bed, she’d formulated the perfect response: an arched eyebrow and a pointed “Excuse me?”

But she’d frozen, and he’d walked on by, and it was as though the moment had never existed. She kept trying to convince herself that she’d misheard him, that he was clearing his throat instead of admiring her as she leaned over her desk to reach a file folder.

Except she still heard that sound whenever she met with him—she was always on the lookout, ready to put him in his place—but he’d never repeated it.

The elevator lurched upward and Cate glanced at her BlackBerry, tapping out a message to Sam, the writer responsible for the polygamist wife story.

Can we meet in my office at 10:30?

Cate had worked until nearly midnight making notes on the piece, which wasn’t quite right. She needed to coax a rewrite from Sam, who’d worked for the magazine for a decade, without alienating him. She wanted her first issue on the job to
be special, to sparkle with wit and depth and perfectly packaged information. This issue had to shine brightly enough to quiet the voices of the colleagues who’d wanted her job, those who resented the fact that, at the tender age of thirty, Cate had nabbed one of the plum positions at the magazine.

But, most important, to quell the whispers in her own head that told her she wasn’t good enough.

At least she dressed the part, in a black-and-red color-block dress and black slingbacks. Her long auburn hair was blown out straight, and mascara highlighted her wide-spaced, gray-green eyes, her best feature. Cate thought of clothes and makeup as her armor some days, a glossy veneer that protected and hid her true center. Since fleeing Ohio to start over in New York, she’d rebuilt her image. No one—not even her roommates, Renee and Naomi—knew about what had happened there.

Cate wasn’t close to Naomi, a photographic model who was always traveling or at her boyfriend’s place, but she’d hoped by now, after six months of living together, that she and Renee would have moved beyond a casual friendship. It certainly wasn’t Renee’s fault that they hadn’t. She was outgoing and kind, always flopping on the couch and offering Cate some of her cheap Chinese take-out dinner, saying, “Save me from my thighs!”

A few times they’d rented movies together, and Cate had tagged along with Renee on her girls’ nights out a couple of times—the woman was friends with everyone in New York; even doormen greeted her by name as she passed by—but so far, the kinds of confidences Cate yearned for eluded her. She was private, always had been, and couldn’t slip into the sorts of confessions other girls seemed to share as easily as trading a lip gloss back and forth.

The elevator stopped at the twenty-seventh floor, and Cate stepped out into the airy, lush space. Sunlight streamed in
through the oversize windows of the private offices rimming the perimeter, while dozens of cubicles with desks for the editorial assistants and copy editors filled the center of the room. Past covers of the magazine lent splashes of bright color to the walls, and the blond wood floors gleamed.

“Morning!” the receptionist called.

Two women were clustered around the receptionist’s desk, and Cate paused, wondering if she should join them. But one of the women was gesturing animatedly, and the others were hanging on her words and laughing. Cate waved and kept walking toward her new office, her shoes clicking briskly against the floor.

Just as she opened her door, Sam’s response pinged back: No can do. At a press conference all morning.

“And thanks for suggesting a different time,” Cate muttered as she dropped her briefcase onto her desk with a thud.

She sighed and forced herself to focus on all she needed to accomplish today, on the words and meetings and phone calls filling her to-do list. But she couldn’t erase the sound of illicit admiration—that half moan, half growl—that relentlessly wormed its way into her brain.

Half a banana. It was an outrage.

Who, other than a premature baby monkey, could nibble a few bites of banana and call it breakfast? Renee Robinson reached past the remaining half, which Cate had enclosed in Saran Wrap like a gift-wrapped package, and grabbed the sugar bowl, rationing a teaspoon into her travel mug of coffee. She rinsed out the coffeepot, then bent to pick up the shoes she’d kicked off the previous night and tossed them through her open bedroom door. Renee wasn’t naturally neat, but their Upper West Side apartment was so tiny that if the shared living space
wasn’t kept completely clutter-free, it would quickly turn into a candidate for the
Hoarders
TV show.

Other than three minuscule bedrooms (the apartment originally held two, but a flimsy partition halved the bigger one), there was a bathroom with a shower that was more temperamental than the fashionistas Renee worked with, and an optimistically named kitchen-living area that barely managed to contain two stools and a love seat. It was filled to bursting—kind of the way Renee felt right now in her boot-leg black pants and lavender silk shirt. She sighed, wishing elastic waists would suddenly roar into vogue. Or mumus. The mumu was highly underrated in the fashion world, in Renee’s humble opinion.