Been There, Done That Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  forty

  forty-one

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Carol Snow

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / August 2006

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Snow, Carol, 1965-

  Been there, done that / Carol Snow.—Berkley trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-425-21006-2

  1. Women journalists—Fiction. 2. Investigative reporting—Fiction. 3. Prostitution—Fiction. 4.

  College students—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.N66B44 2006

  813’.6—dc22

  2006042799

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Andrew, of course

  acknowledgments

  My agent, Stephanie Kip Rostan, signed me shortly after the birth of her first child; how anyone can be so smart and capable on so little sleep astounds me. She has been a tremendous advocate and sounding board.

  Cindy Hwang, my editor at Berkley, did more than simply improve my finished manuscript; her insightful comments and direction have made me a better writer.

  My parents instilled in me a love of language and laughter. As for my siblings, Tom Snow and Susy Snow Sullivan are two of the funniest people I know, while Kim Snow, my second set of eyes, started things rolling when she taught me my ABCs a long, long time ago.

  Dan Goodman, Kim Rueben and Melissa Karl Lam read my manuscript in its infancy and provided valuable feedback and encouragement.

  Finally, Andrew Todhunter inspired, cajoled and ultimately shamed me into finishing this book. He is my rock and my inspiration. Plus, he keeps the computer running.

  To all of you: many, many thanks.

  one

  Getting carded would have been okay if I’d been out for a glass of wine with my friends. Funny, even. They’d throw around the Oil of Olay jokes. I’d give thanks for good genes and poor lighting. I’d hand over my license, wait for the waitress to marvel at my birthday, toast the fountain of youth.

  But I wasn’t out with my friends. As Salad magazine’s new education editor, I was interviewing Donald Archer, Mercer College’s dean of admissions, for an upcoming profile, “Keeping Pace with Changing Times: One School’s Journey.” I was supposed to be a serious reporter. Serious reporters do not look nineteen, even if they are nineteen, which I am not. Serious reporters have frown lines and prematurely gray hair from time spent in war zones and inner-city emergency rooms. Dean Archer had just ordered a Manhattan. And as all good reporters know, when they drink, you drink, even if it’s barely past noon. Or you order a drink, at any rate—just to show camaraderie—then you let it sit there and wait for them to loosen up.

  The waitress had a nose ring, which made things worse. I passed the legal drinking age long before facial hardware came into vogue. When I passed the legal drinking age, this chick was still playing with Barbies.

  I pulled my leather bag off the shiny fake-wood floor, plopped it onto my lap and dug around for my wallet. If that bimbo knew anything, she’d know that no one under twenty-one can afford a Coach bag. I rooted around the extra tapes, pens, rumpled Kleenex: no wallet. I peered under my chair to see if it had fallen out. I stuck my hand in my blazer pocket (as if anyone under twenty-one wears a blazer), knowing full well it wasn’t there but feeling I had to do something, anything, because times were becoming desperate. I was about to dash to the phone to report my stolen credit cards when I remembered where my wallet was. It was in my pocketbook. In my apartment. Really, really far from here.

  “I had a date last night,” I blurted to the dean. “And I put my wallet in my pocketbook and forgot to switch it back.” I looked at the waitress, lowered my voice. “I’m thirty-two.”

  The nose ring quivered. “I’ll have to see some ID.”

  “I am so much older than you.”

  “ID.”

  I smiled at the dean, tried to laugh. “I’ll have a seltzer water. With lime.”

  I took a deep breath, looked around as if fascinated by my surroundings. We were in one of those nouveau pub chain places decorated with antique kitchen implements and rusted farm tools. On one wall, an enormous, homey sign proclaimed, without a hint of irony, LIKE NO PLACE ELSE. It had taken two weeks for my boss, Richard, to approve this expense account lunch, but he only allotted twenty-five dollars (which I suddenly, horribly, realized was at home in my wallet). It was this or Wendy’s.

  The dean settled back into his heavy wood chair, laced his hands over his generous stomach, and smiled benevolently, as if to a freshman in for counseling. Somewhere on the far side of middle age, the dean had the look of a former football p
layer: bulky shoulders straining against his suit, a neck as wide as his oddly square head. What had once been muscle had softened but not shrunk. Some women might find him attractive. I didn’t, but his face was kind, with crinkly light eyes and ruddy cheeks. A thatch of thinning strawberry blond hair topped it all off. From what I’d seen, Dean Archer was indeed warm and kindly. He was also boring as hell.

  The article had seemed like such a good idea when I’d discussed it with Dr. Archer’s dog trainer wife, whom I’d interviewed for an earlier feature, “The Four-Legged Tutor: A Guide Dog Opens Educational Doors for a Boston-Area Teen.” Evelyn Archer had practically begged me to write about Mercer, whose applications dwindled each time their tuition went up, which is to say continuously. Evelyn gave such good quotes (“With a Seeing Eye dog, it’s not just about having an extra set of eyes. It’s about freedom. About acceptance. About love.”) that I’d foolishly assumed her husband would be likewise brimming with pithy comments. I had 180 minutes worth of tape with me, but I wasn’t sure that was enough to catch one quote-worthy statement from Dr. Archer.

  “I had you pegged at twenty-two, twenty-three,” he said to me.

  “Good genes,” I said reflexively. “Bad lighting.” It was rather murky in here. And loud from all those voices bouncing off the tin ceiling. “So you were saying about colleges today, student apathy, the root problem . . .”

  “Thirty-two. Wow. And not married? How was your date last night? A nice boy?”

  “Nice. Nothing special. So the real problem with kids? You said . . . let me check . . . more far-reaching than absent parents and drug experimentation . . .”

  “I think I was going to say TV. Too much TV. But that doesn’t sound quite right. Maybe it will come to me later. Wow. You could pass for one of my students.”

  Women sometimes ask what kind of skin care products I use, assuming my youthful appearance must be something I either work at or purchase. Really, though, my skin is nothing special, unless you consider the light spray of freckles across the bridge of my nose. My eyes are big and blue. I’m on the short side, which may explain why I got into movies on a child’s ticket until I was sixteen. I have tiny breasts and almost no hips. I keep my brown hair longish for fear of being mistaken for a thirteen-year-old boy.

  For years, I wished I looked my age, if not older. A fifteen-year-old doesn’t want to look eleven. A twenty-one-year-old doesn’t want to look fifteen. Now that I’m getting older, I’m suddenly glad to look young. Except for today. Today I want to look forty.

  The waitress brought our drinks. My seltzer had a lemon instead of a lime. Dr. Archer’s Manhattan came in a frosted beer mug. I hoped he wasn’t planning to drive back to western Massachusetts too soon after lunch.

  Dr. Archer held up his mug. “To youth.”

  “To youth,” I replied.

  Two chicken Caesar salads and another super-sized Manhattan later, I’d learned that Mercer had a top-notch archery team and a junior year abroad program in an Eastern bloc country I couldn’t pronounce. I’d digested the rationales behind ever-increasing tuition costs—something about a commitment to low student-teacher ratios and a state-of-the-art computer center. My tape recorder had run out of tape. I had found nothing worthwhile to say about Mercer College and how it was adapting to changing times. Even worse, I had no idea how I was going to pay for lunch.

  The waitress dropped the check on the table—in front of Dr. Archer, no less. It almost made me like her, even though it did no good. He let it sit there. I let it sit there. He smiled kindly and started talking about affirmative action and what a stupid idea it was. I couldn’t take it any more. “Dr. Archer?”

  “Yes?”

  “I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.”

  He beamed. “The pleasure was all mine.” (No argument on this end.)

  “I’ll send you a draft of the article before we print it so you can be sure I’ve portrayed your views adequately.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” he said. He smiled. I smiled.

  Finally: “Dr. Archer.”

  “Yes, dear?” (I’d turned into “dear” about a third of the way through the second Manhattan.)

  “I don’t have any money with me.”

  He roared, his face getting even redder, and pulled a money clip from his suit pocket. “Don’t you worry about a thing, dear. A pretty little girl like you shouldn’t have to pay for lunch, anyway.”

  It was enough to turn a person back to Lifestyles. I was good at Lifestyles. Home décor, food, entertaining—it was shallow, it was fluff, but it was fun. Besides, it was comp heaven: samples of this, free admission to that. But how could I turn down a promotion? Sheila Twisselman, the editor-in-chief, guarded the Lifestyles section closely, and she would never leave. In the midst of building a ten-thousand-square-foot “cottage” on Boston’s North Shore, she needed all the Mexican tile samples she could get. She couldn’t string two sentences together, but since she was married to Richard Twisselman, the publisher of Salad magazine (“A mix of fresh ideas”), chances of a layoff seemed slim. So when the previous education editor, an abrasive middle-aged woman who had long maintained she was underappreciated, quit the magazine to teach high school, declaring the pay better than Salad’s and the students more polite than Richard, I dug out my college notebooks, convinced I could do a better job. I had taken a handful of education courses during my brief save-the-world phase, and they supplied me with enough jargon to sound like I knew what I was talking about, at least when talking to Richard, who knew even less than I did. The job was mine.

  To be honest, I never truly understood why Salad had an education section in the first place. Richard claimed it was indispensable because, “Boston is the education capital of the world.” Most likely, Richard kept it because it allowed him to pretend that he ran a serious magazine. Or maybe it was a shield for even deeper insecurities. Far too many of his sentences began with the words, “When I was at Harvard . . .” For a long time, I took that to mean that he had, well, gone to Harvard. And he did: he took an extension class there. In creative writing. Anyone can take an extension class at Harvard. I once took an art history class there. It was an excellent class. But I would never say I went to Harvard.

  My new job wasn’t the self-actualizing, world-changing power trip I’d hoped for. I liked the title, of course, but my raise barely covered the cost of an extra frapuccino per week. I missed having interior designers (never call them decorators) back to my place for a little input on paint color. My bedroom’s red accent wall is nothing short of inspired. And what I’d counted on as the biggest perk—an assistant—meant being subjected to a twenty-two-year-old named Jennifer saying things like, “You know NutraSweet? Like they put in diet soda? It causes cancer in rats? And I drink, like, ten Diet Cokes a day?”

  When I got back to the office, Jennifer was hunched over my computer. Her own outdated model had crashed last week, and none of the former English majors who populated the office had the slightest idea how to fix it. Today Jennifer wore a cropped navy-and-lime striped shirt. Bent over the computer as she was, her shirt rode up in the back, revealing half a foot of freckled white skin, a long, bony spine, and a blue butterfly tattoo. One could only assume it had flown out of her ass.

  “What you working on?” I dropped my bag in the middle of the desk as a way of reclaiming my territory. Then I nudged it to the side when I remembered the work I’d left her. “Those the interview notes?”

  “My novel.”

  “How’s that coming?” I tried to sound like I cared, but not too much.

  “Really, really great.” She leaned back and stretched. Today’s navel ring was a lime rhinestone. Her powers of accessorizing never ceased to amaze me.

  “And the, uh, interview notes? How are they coming?”

  “I didn’t get to them yet. But your article? About magnet schools?” She jabbed at they keyboard until she pulled up the file. “Okay . . . you’ve got: ‘Ask whether magnet schools are a goo
d thing or a bad thing, and you’ll get a different answer depending on who you’re talking to.’ It would be cleaner if you just said, ‘Ask whether magnet schools are good or bad . . .’ Then, technically, it should be, ‘to whom you’re talking.’ But that sounds kind of stuffy. So maybe we could reword.”

  I understood why my predecessor had hired Jennifer, who never listened to writing teachers who advised their students to write they way they spoke. Jennifer spoke like a moron. But she wrote like—well, like a writer. The problem was, I didn’t need her to write. I already knew how to write. I wanted someone to free up my time so I could write more. I wanted a good typist with excellent phone manner. I wanted a woman who found inner peace through the creation of color-coded file systems. When I’d been sick the week before, Jennifer cancelled an interview by saying, “I’m calling for Kathy Hopkins. She was going to meet with you today. She’s got to reschedule because she’s got, like, a major case of the runs.”

  I moved my briefcase back to the center of the desk. “That’s just the first draft. I hadn’t gotten to the editing stage yet. Did anyone call?”

  She stuck one electric blue plastic platform shoe on the edge of my desk. Jennifer has a preference for colors not found in nature. She smiled. “Not officially. But some guy named Dennis? First he said to tell you he called to say he had a great time last night. Then he said, no—just tell her I called. Then he said, no, never mind, I’ll just call her later.”

  She grinned up at me and tapped her orange gel pen on my desk.

  “Anyone else call?” I asked.

  “Is that Dennis Stowe? From the ad agency?”

  “Yes. Anyone else?”

  She uncovered another scrap of paper. “Some guy named Tim McAllister. He left his number.”

  My face must have frozen—or shined or grimaced, or something—because she said, “Is this bad news? Or good news?” She dropped her foot off my desk and leaned forward.

  “Neither,” I said. “Just an old friend from college.”