Narrowing her eyes, Anna chewed on the end of a maraschino cherry stem. “There has to be some way we can use what we know. We’ve worked so hard.”
“Exactly. And I know we can think of something. We’re smart, we’re committed and we have a lot to say.” Warming to her topic, Stephanie declared, “The women of the twenty-first century need to know what we have to tell them.”
“Like how to turn the tables.” Her friend smiled gleefully. “Like, what are you thinking, girls? You do not need to get hooked up with some loser and let him bring you down.”
“Exactly,” Stephanie said firmly. “Like you should never sit around waiting for a man to call. Better yet, you should sleep with whoever you want and then not take his calls or return his messages. Better the dumper then the dumpee, you know?”
“This is good, Steph!”
“The women of tomorrow should do what they want, when they want. Forget marriage. Forget all those nasty bonds that only benefit the men.” Marriage—that’s your five-year plan, isn’t it, Stephanie? Mr. Findlay’s mocking words played back in her mind, spurring her on. “We’ll come right out and say, hey, bucko, I want to sleep with you, but you can darn well do your own laundry and pick out your own ties and, and—”
“And make your own Thanksgiving turkey!”
“And trimmings! We should never share our money, our closets or our bathrooms—”
“Oooh. Bathrooms. Excellent one,” Anna chimed in. “No fighting over seats up, seats down, which way the toilet paper roll goes, any of that.”
“Because we don’t need them or any of their baggage!”
Anna’s volume rose as she came in with, “You are so right! Not in my bathroom! Not with your baggage! But lots of sex. Everywhere, anywhere, all the time! Sex!”
Stephanie suddenly noticed all the attention they were getting in the crowded bar. Anna went on, blithely indifferent, bouncing on her barstool and slamming a fist into the air, as her voice grew increasingly louder.
“Boink ’em and throw ’em away! Woo-hoo!”
“Anna, maybe you should—”
“No, listen, Steph. We should so do this! A new message for a new century. Gloria Steinem meets Britney Spears. Independence. The bad girl. The independent bad girl! It’s perfect!”
“Okay, well, let’s not run away with ourselves.”
“No, no, you don’t see.” Anna leaned closer. “I don’t have a job, and you’ll be working for Missy. They don’t respect either of us, and we don’t have to put up with that. So you’re going to go back to work on the Monday after New Year’s and tell Findlay that you quit.”
“I am?”
“Yes, you are. And then we’ll have the time. We already have the brains. And we have you.”
“Me?” Stephanie asked dimly. “What does that mean?”
“Well, we can’t go revolutionizing women without a spokesmodel.” Anna crossed her arms over her chest. “Face it. No matter what we do to me, I’m still going to be too short and too square. But you…You’ve got real possibilities. You could be really hot if we put some Tae Bo and a few Glam products where our mouth is. Besides, you’re great at presentations, remember? You pitch like nobody else. This is like one big pitch.”
“But, Anna…” Stephanie peered at her friend. “How did we get from ‘boink ’em and dump ’em’ to me being a spokesmodel? I am so not the type. I’m way too nice!”
“But that’s just it. Inside, I think there is definitely a naughty girl itching to get out.”
“Out of me?”
“You bet! Babe, you and me, we know women ages 18 to 25 like the back of our hand,” Anna argued. “We know exactly who they want to be. So we provide the who. You! I do the marketing, you write the results, you live the results. This is so perfect.”
“Are you talking a how-to?” Stephanie asked. “Or something more like a like a video or a magazine?”
“We’ll figure that out later. Put some focus groups together and see what plays the best.”
“But what’s our message?”
“We’ve already got it. The independent bad girl. Spike your stiletto heel through his heart!”
“That’s a tad violent, isn’t it?”
“Okay, then—sassy sisters doing it for themselves. Guys are for fun, but not for forever.” Anna beamed with satisfaction. “We make up for every Fred in Accounting, for every Mr. Findlay who ever picked a bimbo over the smart girl. We show them all who knows what about marketing. And our demographic eats it up with a spoon.”
Stephanie blinked. She couldn’t quite believe it, but this all made sense. Cold, hard, perfect sense.
“So?” Anna prompted, raising her cosmopolitan in a half toast. “Do we show them what we’re made of?”
Sassy sisters doing it for themselves. She loved it! She could already see the marketing plan, the product tie-ins, the PR possibilities dancing before her eyes.
No more Ms. Nice Girl… Letting out the naughty girl inside…Stephanie smiled with grim satisfaction as she lifted her own glass. “Let’s do it, Anna. Let’s show the world.”
1
A few days before Thanksgiving, three years later
“STEVIE, DO YOU THINK we should ice down your nipples before you go out?”
Stevie Bliss, aka Stephanie Blanton, author of the fabulously successful new book, Blissfully Single, whipped around so fast she almost knocked her assistant over. “Anna, are you nuts?” she whispered. “Ice down my…? You’re kidding, right?”
“Of course I’m not kidding.” Anna fixed her with a stubborn stare. “Nipples happen to be big right now. Our focus group went off the charts when they saw video of J. Lo at the—”
“I’m not doing it,” Stevie interrupted. “Besides, I’m wearing a jacket. Nobody would see them, anyway.”
“Are you sure?” Anna persisted. “We’ve gotten as much play as we’re going to get off the rest of our out-there elements. Maybe one more is just what we need for a new round of press. We’re coming up on the biggest shopping day of the year. We’ve got to keep you in the public eye.”
Stevie almost smacked her. Anna was her best friend, her confidante and her partner in this crazy plot to put them and Blissfully Single on the map, but sometimes she really went too far.
“I’ve done everything you’ve asked, Anna, including the no underwear thing, which I personally think is ridiculous—”
“It killed on the surveys and you know it,” Anna returned. She began to tick items off on her fingers. “For our last element, we gave them a choice of tattoo, various piercings, magenta or blue hair, exposed midriff, exposed thong and even carrying a snake. Nothing scored like going commando.”
“I know, I know.”
“It makes you naughty, outrageous, but not too far over the line. And it gives us an advantage over most men, who are so distracted by what may be going on under there that they forget to feel threatened by the message.”
“I know, I know.”
Sounding just a tad testy, Anna said, “I don’t make this stuff up, Stevie. It’s all in the hard data.”
“And I have done everything so far that skewed right with that data,” Stevie explained