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Too much self-tanning lotion, maybe, or too much carrot juice. It kind of clashes with his blond brush cut. Also, by the way, Bill never smiles. Ever.
    “So here are the issues,” Bill said.
    We were still settling into our seats. I pulled out a legal pad and uncapped my pen.
    “We need to add someone old to one of the stories. Maybe in the one about the Latino kid who goes Rollerblading in the park. Make it his granny who takes him, instead of the teenage brother.”
    “Okay,” I said slowly, “the thing is, that story is an excerpt from a Newbery Medal–winning book. The brother is important to the little boy in the plot. I don’t know if the author—”
    “He’ll change it for our text. Tell him we can’t use the story, otherwise.”
    “The author is a woman.”
    “Right. All the more reason she’ll agree to change the brother to an old lady. Okay, next.” He consulted his notes. “Get rid of the ice cream sundae in the story about the kid who loses her library book. Change it to fruit salad.”
    “Fruit salad.” Ed wrote it down. “So, she knows she’s going to get in trouble for losing her book, and she uses the last of her allowance to treat herself to fruit salad , before she tells her parents?”
    “Yeah, it sucks,” Bill said. “But we can’t have foods with no nutritional value in the stories. Too many little fatties will be reading them.”
    Ed kneed me under the table.
    Bill looked at his notes. “And one more thing. We’re dead in the water with California if we don’t have an equal number of male and female characters throughout the book.”
    “We do!” I said vehemently. I knew this for a fact. “Forty-nine of each!”
    “Not true,” Bill said. “You have to count the animal characters, too. Freddie the Fox and Malachi Mouse in that barn story bring it up to fifty-one males. So change one of them to Fanny the Fox or Mary Mouse. Well, maybe not Fanny. That’s awkward. Felicia. There you go.”
    He stood up and slid his folder across the table to me. “Double-check my notes to make sure I covered everything.” He left the conference room.
    I looked at Ed, who smiled ruefully.
    “Do we have to pick life apart like this?” I asked.
    “We do, to ensure diversity.”
    “But we’re making this book dumb and bland. It’s un diverse, what we’re doing!”
    “Is that a word?”
    “I just invented it.” I gathered my stuff and stood up. “You know what, Ed? This meeting made me want to drink.”
    “I have a bottle of Bushmills in my desk. Let’s make Irish coffees.”
    “Some of these stories aren’t even that good. What is our priority, here?”
    “Demographic balance. Grace, you know we have to follow the bias and sensitivity guidelines if we want to sell this book.”
    “What about literary quality?”
    “That would be nice.”
    “Ed. You’re becoming a Stepford editor.”
    “Oxygen, baby girl.” He patted my shoulder. “Slip on the mask and breathe.”
    Tyler called me that afternoon.
    “Hey, beautiful, how’s it going?”
    “Just great, thanks.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Sitting at my desk at Spender-Davis Education.”
    “Oh, yeah. The job. So will you still help me do the Facebook page?”
    Apparently he was helpless. And apparently I was a sucker for it. “Well, I guess we can try to figure it out.” I told him to come to my office Thursday night at seven.
    He showed up at 7:22.
    “Hey!” He hugged me with one arm and held up a fragrant paper bag and a plastic bag that clanked in a bottle-y way. “I brought supper.”
    I led him through the maze to my deluxe, corner, outer-wall cubicle.
    “Hey, that’s pretty.” He liked my rosemary-bush Christmas tree.
    “I have windows!” I said.
    “I see that.” He touched the grinning Green Man sun catcher hanging on the glass.
    “That’s Pan. Father Nature. Peg hung him there to keep me ‘connected’ while I’m up here in this artificial environment all day.”
    “She seems like a real