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I’m interning on the Hill in the meantime.”
    “Aren’t you too old to be an intern? It’s a little
Strangers with Candy.
”
    “Yeah, but I don’t know what else to do with myself.”
    “How much do internships pay?”
    “They don’t.”
    “That sucks! So what are you doing for money? Are Mom and Dad helping you out?”
    “Actually, I haven’t heard from them lately. I’ve tried calling home several times but they never pick up.”
    “Yeah, me too,” Lee said. “It’s not like them to dodge our calls.”
    “Were you calling home to ask for money again?”
    My sister was
always
hitting my parents up for cash. And they would actually give it to her, which enraged me. When
I
was in college, I worked as a cocktail waitress, which turned me into the malevolent misanthrope that I am today. I was too proud to beg my parents for handouts. But not Lee.
    “Can I borrow some money?” she asked me. “I’ll totally pay you back.”
    I sighed, knowing that she would never repay me.
    “I’m broke, but I’ll put a check in the mail this afternoon,” I said. “If you hear from Mom and Dad, tell them to call me. I’m starting to worry.”
    “Me, too. They forgot to pay my Visa bill.”
    “Oh, get a job, Lee.”
    “Don’t be a bitch, Jackie. Just send me a check. And try to have some fun now that you’re single again. You need to get yourself a rebound guy and forget about Mike.”
    I told Lee about Fred, and we agreed that he was definitely a rebound guy: The most I could hope for with him was some hot sex and that was it.
    But I didn’t want to rebound—I wanted to
dunk.
    “I hate being single again,” I told Lee.
    “Well, you know what they say: You can either be single and lonely, or married and bored,” she offered.
    “Thanks for cheering me up, Lee.”
    I got off the phone and went to bed. Or, in my case, the couch.

Chapter 7
    A pril skipped her morning workout so we could walk to the office together on my first day. I appreciated the nice gesture, but we kept getting in each other’s way, trying to do our hair and makeup in front of the same mirror. I wondered just how soon I would wear out my welcome here.
    “Maybe you could get a job as a waitress in the meantime,” April suggested, rummaging through my half of the closet, looking for something to wear. “You could work at Hooters or something.”
    I was appalled at the suggestion.
    “I am
not
a waitress,” I said indignantly. “My tits aren’t big enough anyway.”
    I checked myself out in the full-length mirror, as I pulled a sweater on over my chest. No, they definitely were not big enough, even though I was taking extra birth control pills to give that part of my body more volume.
    I was a fat thin person: a scrawny size zero whose body consisted of bones and flab, but no muscle. April was also a size zero, but she had one of those “gym bodies” sculpted by daily workouts at Gold’s. (They gave Hill staffers a generous membership discount.)
    She shook her head at me as I put on the mink coat that I had borrowed from my mother.
    “What? It’s cold out!” I said defensively.
    “Yeah, but
interns
don’t typically walk around the Senate offices wearing furs,” she sniffed.
    “I’m not going to walk around the
office
in my fur,April. Besides, who gives a fuck what some intern is wearing?”
    “You don’t want to give people a reason not to like you on your first day, do you?”
    “Oh, please. It’s the fucking U.S. Senate. I’m sure people have better things to do than sweat
me.
”
    “But what if someone throws paint on it or something?”
    “Would security actually let someone into the building with a can of red paint? As if.”
    Besides, even if somebody threw paint on me, I was the sort of person who would wear my fur
with
the paint stains, just to show them that I didn’t care. Now
that
would be a fashion statement. I would have been surprised if Alexander McQueen or someone wasn’t already selling fur coats