Pink Slip Party Read Online Free PDF

nine, he once stuffed eleven Cheerios up his nose on a dare.
    “So?” Todd says, hand out palm up.
    I slap it, giving him five.
    “Your resume, ” he grunts, rolling his eyes.
    Kyle, in the meantime, snatches it out of my other hand.
    “Hey,” I protest, weakly. I am trying to figure out if it would be bad if I had a two-martini lunch.
    “Since when did you graduate from Harvard?” Kyle asks me.
    “Can we order?” I ask, hiding behind my menu.
    I spend the entire lunch answering Todd’s rapid-fire career questions — and Kyle and he have quite a laugh at my expense reading over my resume. They don’t appreciate creative art, and I dismiss them.
    “I’m thinking I won’t get a new job. Do you know how much I can sell a kidney for?” I ask Todd.
    “Maybe $250,000 on the black market,” he says, seriously. Todd, being an actuary, is always putting values on things. He doesn’t see the joke in it.
    “You can’t be contemplating organ-selling already,” Kyle says. “You’ve only been laid off for a couple of weeks.”
    “You’re saying that because you think I’m fiscally responsible?”
    “Remember, Kyle, this is the girl who, when she was twenty-two, didn’t open her mailbox for six weeks for fear of seeing her MasterCard bill,” Todd says.
    “I was not afraid of my bill,” I say. “I was shooting for plausible deniability.”
    “Right, you thought if you didn’t see the bill you wouldn’t have to pay it,” Todd says. Todd gives me an affectionate shove as he says this.
    “I don’t know what’s so crazy about that plan,” I say. “And, if I don’t get my unemployment check soon, I’ll have to put the Bill Avoidance plan into effect again.”
    “What about your Mystery Boyfriend? I bet he’d give you a loan,” Kyle says.
    Mystery Boyfriend is what Kyle and Todd call Mike because I refused to introduce them to him. For one thing, I knew they’d disapprove. It was a relationship that has Jerry Springer written all over it. If Todd knew about it, he’d feel the need to have a family intervention to talk about sexual harassment and the laundry list of reasons you shouldn’t date coworkers, especially when they’re in management. Todd is very overprotective, which is nice when you’re nine and being chased by a 150-pound-sixth grade bully. It’s not so nice when you’re twenty-eight and trying to have sex more than once a decade.
    “The Mystery Boyfriend dumped me,” I say, “so no, I’m not going to tell you about him.”
    “Ouch,” Todd says.
    “Sorry,” Kyle adds.
    “It’s OK,” I say. “I figure, if you’re going to lose your job, why not your boyfriend, too? Get all the sucker punches out of the way at once.”
    The bill comes, and Kyle reaches for it. Naturally, Todd — like Dad would — lets him pay without any protest.
    Todd does, however, do me the good service of drinking half my vodka martini on the grounds that I shouldn’t smell like booze at the job fair.
    I am not very marketable. I do not need anyone to tell me this. I am a creative person with an art degree who has worked at a number of thankless jobs, and even in the best of times, the art staff is expendable. I went to a headhunter’s office last week, and she had the audacity to snigger at my resume as she read it. The three most deadly words in the English language to a recruiter are Art Major and Unemployed.
    Todd and Kyle insist on taking me directly to the career fair. They know me too well. They know I plan to run home as soon as they leave me.
    The career fair is dingy and depressing, with cardboard booths and a sea of bored-looking human resources people wearing uniforms of beige.
    “I’m leaving,” I say, turning around. Todd and Kyle grab my arms and pull me back to the fair.
    “Let’s explore,” Kyle says, tugging on my arm, taking me in the direction of the Kentucky Fried Chicken booth.
    “Are you interested in management opportunities?” says a man wearing a beige tie.
    “I