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if she’d gotten up that morning and decided to really look the part of lexicographer. Ready for grammatical and personal perfection, with not a single loose hair in the way. But there was a mischievous little quirk to her face that offset the stark quality of her straight part, gray blouse, and black skirt—Mona smiled sideways, with one eyetooth showing.
    “Good morning.” She leaned into my cubicle, whispering. I could smell her soap. It wasn’t a floral scent, but something wholesome and robust, like Ivory or Irish Spring.
    “If you say so,” I whispered back. “Morning, afternoon, night—it’s all running together lately. I wake up in this chair sometimes and wonder what day it is.”
    “You’ll get used to it,” Mona said. “Although some of the senior editors
still
fall asleep at their desks. Guess what?”
    “What?”
    “That ‘editrix’ cit we found? It’s even fishier than I thought.”
    “Really?” I suppressed a yawn. “How’s that?”
    “No
Broken Teaglass
in the editors’ library. No listing of it on any of the library websites I checked. I tried a couple of used-book-shop websites, and Amazon. Nothing. I even called this giant used-book store in Portland, where my cousin works. They didn’t have any
Broken Teaglass
. And no one’s ever heard of Robinson Press. It’s like it never existed.”
    “I’m sure it
existed
. Maybe it was just a vanity press or something. Maybe
The Broken Teaglass
was just some crappy book that happened to fall into some editor’s hands. And then he research-read it for shits and giggles.”
    Mona closed her eyes. “Please. I hate that expression.”
    “Alrighty,” I said.
    “Anyway. Do you really think such a book—about dictionary editors—would just fall into some dictionary editor’s hands, and then that dictionary editor would blindly research-read it like anything else?”
    “I didn’t say it necessarily happened that way, exactly.”
    “Then how do you think it happened?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I just started working here a couple of weeks ago. There are probably a million ways that this could’ve happened that I’m not smart enough to know about.”
    “Yeah, well,” she persisted. “I was looking forward to reading this book, whatever it is. And it looks like it’s just … imaginary.”
    “Maybe you should ask some of the older editors about it. Someone’s probably heard of it. Maybe even one of them is the one who research-read it in the first place.”
    “Yeah. I guess I’ll do that. I probably should have thought of that before.”
    “Tell me what you find out.”
    I was doing my best to feign interest. I liked Mona. She was sort of cute and vaguely amusing. I wanted to give her an excuse to come back to my desk.
    About a month into training, after about fifty practice definitions, I was ready to start defining for real. About half of the staff—fifteen or so regular editors and three of the science editors—had just started working on
New Words Supplement
, and I got to join them early on in the project. The
Supplement
was a small paperback companion book to the unabridged dictionary. Samuelson published a new
Supplement
every ten years or so. The idea was that people could buy this to use alongside their unabridged dictionary, rather than buying a whole new, expensive unabridged. Accordingto Dan, the
Supplement
was a good place to get one’s defining feet wet, since very few people actually bought it.
    I joined the
Supplement
staff pretty near the beginning of the project, when they were halfway through the “B” words. After that they were going to do the “A” words, then “C” words, then onward. Turns out dictionary editors rarely start with “A.” Who knew? It’s because supposedly reviewers usually just lazily look up “A” words when they’re assessing the quality of a reference book, and you don’t want reviewers looking only at the work produced while your lexicographers are still a