Goody One Shoe (3 page)

BY SUNDAY, BILLIE’D HAD
enough
and escaped her apartment, unchained herself from the insufferable prose of
Edward Morse, soon-to-be not-so-bestselling author of fantasy drivel, and fled
to find sanctuary in church. She hadn’t attended services for months, and even
then, only to absorb the beauty that was the Reverend Gabriel Keene, the
message he conveyed less spoken than effervesced from his full lips. His take
on the word of God.

But that wasn’t her God. Not anymore. She wasn’t afraid of
her God. He was her friend, her confidante. Her God understood that all good
people aren’t perfect. That those who are the most broken need the most leeway.

She’d sat in one of the front pews, distracted by the pretty
priest. Visions of dangling modifiers and mangled expressions impeded her
prayers. No, that Sunday hadn’t been about God. Billie had just needed a better
view for a couple hours.

Her cubicle walls quaked when she slammed her briefcase,
heavy with the six-hundred-page manuscript, onto her desk. It had become her
cross to bear. The anchor that kept her from drifting off into calmer waters.
The old ball and chain, without the side benefit of rote sex and fake orgasms.
It became a metaphor for her life, heavy with sorrow and unrequited grief for
lost parents, lost childhood, lost limb. It was the weight of her loneliness,
the burden of her mutilation, the utter heft of her failure at normal. It was
her new handicap.

She picked up her mental red pen and edited the clichés out
of her own thoughts. If she were one of her clients, she’d have dumped herself
a hundred pages ago.

The latches opened with a hollow click. She peered inside.
The fat ream of paper stared back at her, her own red deles and carets and
strikethroughs taunted her with just how little she’d accomplished, just how
much more literary offal she had to slash and correct and, worst of all … read.

She hauled out the manuscript and slumped into her ergonomic
chair. Only seventy-eight pages in three days. At that rate, she’d be
freelancing before the week was up. All weekend she’d tried to focus, to find
the mental energy to face the slop on the pages. She’d sit on the sofa with
thirty sheets, nod off, awake to paper all over the floor. Have to sort it,
stack it, put it back in order. Not an easy task since the fatuous author
didn’t number the pages.

She tapped the manuscript with her red pen and sighed.
Reading aloud, perhaps that would work. Billie cleared her throat. “The earth
shook when he took me in his arms. Or maybe it was just me, trembling at the
cold, clammy touch of his undead fingers. His teeth penetrated the silky white
flesh of my virgin neck. An explosion of light emanated from him like a glitter
bomb. A glitter bomb of love.”

Billie threw up in her mouth a little.

“How goes it?” Jeffrey stood at her elbow, failing at his
barely veiled attempt to size up her progress. He was on standby, waiting for
her to blow it. He’d probably measured her desk, one of the few near a window,
before she got to work. Presumptuous, brown-nosing little wiener. She
suppressed a grin at the thought of him in a rhinestone-studded dog collar,
trailing behind Katherine, a leopard-skin leash in her hand.

Billie lowered the lid of the briefcase. “It’s going,
Jeffrey. Just like you are. Back to your hole.” She flicked her fingers at him.
“Shoo.”

He huffed at her and stuck his lower lip out, turned and
retreated to his hovel in the corner.

She clicked her computer on and stared at the screen while
it went through its daily start-up process. When the cursor turned from
spinning blue circle to hollow arrow, she clicked on the Outlook icon and
watched her inbox fill up.

She’d missed the due date on a ninety-thousand-word
nonfiction self-help book. Not that it would make any difference to sales.
Publish now, publish five years from now, same old love-yourself,
art-of-attraction, smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you flapdoodle that filled
literal and digital bookshelves. And flew off them too. Why did people fall for
such falderal? If anyone needed some feel-good self-help, it was Billie. But
even she couldn’t buy into the shallow end of that psychobabble pool.
Thrice-weekly workouts at the gym, that was her salvation. A beating heart and
the promise of heaven was all she needed. Or so she kept telling herself.

An hour later, her emails answered, other authors put off
with the excuse of competing deadlines, which was no lie, she buried herself in
the huge typewritten pile, the third vampire novel she’d edited that year. Come
on, people, vampires are so twenty-ten. What would be the claim to fame for
this group of neck biters — glowing? Sparkling? Or maybe some good
old-fashioned blood sucking murder for a change.

Seven hours, six cups of coffee, three stale doughnuts, and
one new red pen later, she’d fought her way through forty-seven more pages. She
rubbed her neck and eyed the pages, like the aftermath of a bad slasher flick.
Serves the author right, all that passive-voiced, head hopping, cliché-riddled
claptrap. Thank God for small mercies, after the glitter bomb of love, the
story was rife with actual sucking of blood, death, and gore. No angst-ridden,
teenaged, ashen-yet-shiny vamps. But the prose was painful. It wasn’t bad
enough he was ripping off Bram Stoker’s original character, this author was
channeling the adverb-heavy, run-on sentenced, writing style of the late
nineteenth century. The kind of stories only palatable in the modern day when computer-generated
on the big screen at the multiplex. Not wrought on paper — actual bloody paper
— and fraught with twisted metaphors and obvious similes and repeated misuse of
common idioms. Intents and purposes, damn it, not intensive purposes. Penal
system, not penile system.

She pitched her pen on her desk. It skittered across the
surface like the perfect skipping stone across a mirror-flat lake and landed at
Katherine’s feet.

Katherine stooped to retrieve it, placed it on top of the
manuscript, tossed her Coach bag over her shoulder, and left the building
without a word. She didn’t need to speak. Her one arched brow, lips clamped
into a thin line, and loathsome glare spoke volumes.

It was all Billie could do not to yell “bitch” at her back.
But Billie would never say that aloud. She was already swirling the profane
drain with all of the damns and bloodies, and even the occasional F-bomb she’d
been screaming in her head. Plus all the fantasies about Katherine’s demise and
Jeffrey’s undoing. She hadn’t had those thoughts about anyone before, except
the men who’d murdered her parents and took her leg. But God would forgive her
those transgressions. It was only imaginary. She’d never hurt a soul in real
life.

She snatched the pen from her desk and wiggled it across
Katherine’s retreating back. She drew a red gun in the air, shot a couple of
rounds into the kidney region. Red ink blood spewed and spattered and oozed
from the wounds, drenched Katherine’s Holt Renfrew skirt and dripped from the
hem.

And yet, she kept walking.

Billie clutched the pen in her fist. She plucked three more
of them from the old NaNoWriMo mug on her desk — the one she bought to
commemorate her excitement four years ago, the only year she tried to write
fifty thousand words of a shitty first draft of a novel in one short month.
Epic fail. But it did make a lovely pencil cup.

She tossed the pens into her purse, dog-eared the page she
was working on, stacked the bloody sheets and fastened them together with one
giant binder clip. It was only Monday, but she felt the need for a good sweat.
She needed to clear the cobwebs and let the proofreading juices flow.

PEG LEG CURLED UP
against
Billie’s thigh. His bodily warmth and moral support gave her the strength to
push through the final chapter of Morse’s future flop, a work she had unofficially
subtitled “Dreckula.” She turned the final page, laid her head against the soft
cushions of her grandmother’s old sofa, and heaved a massive sigh. One day to
spare. Job saved.

Sanity?

The jury was still out.

She ran her fingers between Peg Leg’s pointed ears and slid
away from his heat. She refreshed her email, surprised to find three new
messages. Her eyes widened as she scanned the subject lines. Potential clients.
Her very own clients. She glanced at the clock. Too late for her usual Thursday
treadmill time. She sat at the breakfast nook and clicked on the first email.

I’m a indie author, so I’m not making much money and
can’t afford you’re full fee. What services you could give me for under a
hundred? Or I could pay you out of future royalties. The book is awesome. Its
sure to sell a million copies in no time.

Billie ground her teeth at each error and composed a reply
in her head.
Dear Indie Author. Screw off, you moron. I’m not running a
charity, for Christ’s sake. I have to eat, too. For under a hundred I can offer
you some advice. Don’t quit your day job.

Her actual reply was polite, concise, and grammatically
perfect. One potential client down, two more to go. The second was no better,
offering to trade his “excellant” writing abilities for her “excellant”
editing. Pass.

She stared at email door number three and sighed. She was
going to need Earl Grey reinforcement before reading it.

Minutes later, a steaming, sweet, milky brew in her hand,
she clicked the message open.

Dear Ms. Fullalove,

I am seeking a professional editor for my first novel. It
is a psychological thriller, in the range of 325 pages. The fourth draft is
almost complete and I feel it will be ready for a professional’s eyes within
the month.

The indicative rates on your website are competitive. If
you are interested, please provide a firm quotation for a full edit
(proofreading and content) of an 82,000-word document. I would also appreciate
two references. I am attaching a brief sample of the book.

Sincerely,

Annabelle Wright

Well, hells bells. An actual prospective client.

Billie sent emails to four authors in her roster that she
knew and trusted. Authors to whom she had secretly offered editing advice
outside her lowly proofreading role. Authors who had rewarded her with their silence
and more than one gift card to her favourite coffee shop as secret
compensation.

She acknowledged Annabelle’s message and promised pricing
and references to follow. She grinned and picked up the warm teacup, held it in
both hands and leaned back in the chair. Step one in extricating herself from
proofing-pool obscurity underway. No more Edward Morses. No more typewritten
manuscripts. Unless Katherine was already planning the next roadblock in
Billie’s quest for freedom. To heck with Katherine. She wasn’t going to dampen
the mood tonight.

Billie gathered Peg Leg into her arms and headed to her
room. She set the cat on the bed, sat beside him and dismantled her at-home
prosthesis, a simpler form of the one she wore to work, with a smaller foot and
fewer layers of socks. Usually she didn’t even bother with that. Just hopped
around the apartment on one leg, or used her grandfather’s cane for support,
the one with the brass horse’s head for a handle.

She pumped baby lotion into her palm from the bottle that
was a fixture on her nightstand and massaged the emollient into her stump.
There were other choices, unscented, with aloe vera, with vitamin E. Too many
choices. The hospital used baby lotion during her recovery. The baby powder
scent was soft and soothing to her eleven-year-old self, and calmed her now.
Now that she knew recovery wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t a point in time. It was an
evolution. A journey without end. Her own never-ending story.

Each night, when that lotion hit her nostrils, she regressed
to a time when she felt reborn. A new baby learning to walk. Learning to live.
Learning to forgive.

She had learned to forgive her parents for dying on her. For
leaving her to grow up without their guidance. For abandoning her when she
needed them most. The hardest was forgiving God. She’d had many discussions
with Him. Had sworn at Him, sworn off Him. If He was everything, was
everywhere, why, why, why did He kill her family? Why did He leave her on her
own with only an old grandmother, far past her prime and exhausted by daily
life, let alone life with a mutilated young child, a recovering lost soul?
Heck, grandmother was messed up too. She’d lost her son, after all.

But Billie could never forgive those murderous men. Some
things were unforgivable.

No matter how often she strayed from His side, Billie always
found her way back to God. They had a complicated relationship. And a silent
understanding — as all understandings with God are. She agreed to be a good
girl on the outside. But on the inside, if she kept it to herself, she could
think bad thoughts. Swear and curse and imagine a tortuous revenge inflicted on
the evil beings of the world. The evil that God couldn’t control.

God agreed to let her have those silent indiscretions. So
that she could survive her wretched life.

THE COOL, PRE-DAWN AIR
brushed
Billie’s cheeks. She blinked hard, failing in her attempts to focus on the
twinkle of light to her left. She stared at the soft beam, followed the
illuminating ray it offered until her eyes finally connected with her brain and
she recognized the graffiti-tainted trash bin under the light standard half a
block up from her apartment building. She wavered, her balance off. She grasped
the wrought iron post of the fire escape and looked at her foot. One foot
balancing on the railing, her stump dangling mid-air.

Billie drew in a sharp breath. What the hell had her
deranged nighttime brain planned to do? Plunge her three stories to her death?
Well, guess what, night brain — that would have only crippled her. Again.

Next time, get up to the roof.

She took hold of the pole with both hands, eased her quaking
body down, shifted her butt onto the railing, and hopped to the grated floor.
Her window was wide open, the gauzy curtain blowing into the apartment. Peg Leg
sat on the window ledge, his head cocked to one side. He meowed at her, gave
her a withering glare, and disappeared into the living room.

Sleepwalking. She hadn’t done that in three years. A full
year after her last episode, she’d stopped seeing Dr. Kroft. Billie shut her
eyes and conjured the doc’s voice. Dissociative fog. Or something or other.
Coping mechanism. Resulting from trauma. Triggered by anything that triggered
the memories attached to her trauma.

Years ago, Billie would awaken, or have her conscious brain
take over, and find herself in the park a couple of blocks from her
grandmother’s house. Sometimes she’d have only ventured out into the yard. But
often she’d be gone for hours, come to on the subway, or in a part of town she
was unfamiliar with. It was when she was fourteen, after her night brain took
her on a field trip to a dark alley, the heavy beat of loud music vibrating the
asphalt, that her grandmother made the first appointment with the doc.

Billie rubbed her hands against her arms to ward off the
morning chill. To heat the ice that always replaced her blood when the
adrenaline of waking from a walking dream raced through her body. She crawled
through the window, righted the potted petunia, and brushed dirt from the ledge
into her open palm. She stared at the dirt, balled her fist and squeezed. She
looked out the window at the horizon. A purple dawn overtook the darkness. Peg
Leg poked at her clenched hand with his head and rubbed her knuckles between
his ears.

Billie swallowed. Maybe she needed to get back on the
psychology train. Before her night brain did something crazy. Something
permanent.

“Wilhelmina!”

Katherine screaming names from inside her office was never a
good way to start the day. Especially when it was Billie’s name.

She gathered her skirt and her courage and stood. She took a
deep breath, eyed the beautiful day outside the window where everyone was free.
She chided herself for her envy of the birds, envy of the wind, envy of the
clouds. That was her reincarnation wish — to return untethered and in full
control of her every choice. To take flight. Not be anchored by one lost leg.
Or anchored by legs at all.

She touched her fingertips to her hair to ensure everything
was in place, straightened her shoulders, and marched to her doom in the
chamber of horrors.

At the threshold, she tapped her knuckles on the doorframe.
“Yes, Katherine?”

You bellowed?

Katherine stood at her own window, the six-hundred-page
albatross in her hand. She turned and lifted it in the air.

Billie held her breath. If Katherine dropped that bomb,
binder clip be damned, red-stained pages would explode all over the office. And
Billie would be the one putting the unnumbered pieces back together.

“What the hell is this?” Katherine’s eyes burned, her laser
stare piercing Billie’s bravery.

“It looks like Mr. Morse’s manuscript.” Billie glanced at
her feet. She’d chosen the black pointed-toe flats with the faux snakeskin
texture this morning. But there was only one. In her haste to make the train,
she had failed to change the shoe on her prosthesis. It remained the dull brown
ballet flat with the rounded toe and the teardrop-shaped holes cut into the
leather. She couldn’t help but grin at the dichotomy worn on her feet. A
perfect match to her internal courage — pointed, black, reptilian, overwhelmed
by, and contrary to, the dull brown reality of the terror manifesting in
trembling hands and the threat of tears.

Goddamn tears.

Katherine slammed the document onto her desk.

Billie jumped, her heart hammered. This was it. She was done
for.

“Just what is your role here, Ms. Fullalove?”

“Proofreader?”

Katherine nodded. “Yes.
Just
a proofreader.
Only
a proofreader.” She tapped one finger on the pile of pages. “And in what
universe did you think that proofreader extended to editor, huh? Did I miss the
memo that you got a promotion?” She cocked her head and tapped that same finger
against her cheek. “Oh, wait.” She turned the finger on Billie. “I’d be the one
writing the damn thing.” Katherine took a step forward.

Billie braced for impact. But Katherine wouldn’t hit her.
Couldn’t hit her. That was crazy. It was just intimidation. A tactic she
excelled at. Stand your ground, Billie. Stand your damn ground. “I just
thought, since I’m already editing —”

“Proofreading.”

Billie bit her lip. “Proofreading. And I can see issues with
the plot, with consistency. And the characterization?” Billie furrowed her
brow.

“That is for the editor, not for you. If I wanted to know if
you could edit, I’d ask you to damn well edit. You’re just another minnow in
the proofreading pool. Now I have six hundred pages with your shitty red
chicken scratch marring the manuscript. How is the editor going to sift through
entire paragraphs slashed out, through your puny thoughts scribbled in the margins?”

“I added some pages of notes, cross-referenced with —”

“Not. Your. Job.” Katherine punctuated each word with a poke
to Billie’s shoulder with that offending, pointing, crimson-lacquered finger.

Billie swallowed. “Katherine, please don’t touch me.”

Katherine’s right eyebrow arched so high even her Botoxed
forehead crinkled. That brow was the harbinger of doom. The forecast of the
storm to come. Shit was going to hit the publishing fan.

“Get out.”

It was a whisper, but one so menacing, Billie thought her
heart had stopped beating. “Yes, ma’am.” Billie turned to the door, hesitated,
turned back to face the tempest, her gaze on her mismatched feet. “Do you mean
out of your office. Or out of the building?”

Katherine’s heavy sigh blew her caramel macchiato breath
across Billie’s face. “Get your gimpy ass to your desk and do your job.
Only
your job. Understood?”

Billie swallowed the urge to scream, “Fuck you, bitch, I’m
no goddamn gimp,” and simply nodded. She turned, strode to her workstation, sat
with purpose and a straight spine. She double-clicked on a file icon, opened a
manuscript, the priority work of the day, and began to proofread. And edit.
Couldn’t help herself. But she kept those edits off the digital page, hidden
away in her mind. Right next to Katherine’s dead body.