This one was addressed to "Katie" instead of "Kathleen." "It was a pleasure to see you again last night and to meet all of your delightful friends," it said. "I know I must have startled you, but please believe that I mean you no harm. Quite the contrary.

My offer is truly one you can't afford to pass up. You are more valuable than you realize. Please contact me at your earliest convenience."

I was tempted to write back and tell him that if his offer was so good and so aboveboard, he shouldn't have a problem telling me what it was. My mama didn't raise any dummies, and even in a small town I'd know better than to contact a strange man who was so vague about his intentions. With a great sense of satisfaction, I hit the delete key.

Since Mimi still wasn't in, I took advantage of the opportunity to check my personal e-mail. There was the message from Gemma about dinner. And there was yet another message from Rodney. I added his address to the spam filter and deleted the message, unread, along with all the messages telling me I could lose weight, increase my breast size, make money at home, grow a bigger penis, buy herbal Viagra without a prescription, and get a lower mortgage rate. If all those messages were true, everyone would be slim, attractive, wealthy love machines. Obviously, that wasn't the case, so odds were, the job offer was no more real than all the other junk mail.

Mimi was her usual charming self when she arrived, meaning that she really was acting charming, and anyone who hadn't seen her evil incarnation would think she was just the coolest boss ever. Maybe ol' Werner had bought some of that herbal Viagra stuff. She remained that way all morning, but the daggers made an appearance at lunchtime.

I was sitting at my desk, trying to salvage one of her memos into something readable by English speakers, when she stuck her head into my cube. "Are you going to lunch?" she asked.

"Not right now, thanks," I said absently, still focusing on my computer screen. "I need to finish this, and I brought a sandwich."

"You know, it wouldn't hurt you to be more sociable around the office. Eating lunch at your desk every day isn't good for office unity. I'd prefer for you to go out with the rest of the staff."

I had to bite my tongue to hold back all of the responses that popped into my head, like telling her that she was the main problem with office unity and that I'd go out to lunch with her at the pricey bistros she preferred when she paid me enough money to be able to afford it. I certainly wasn't going to waste my precious entertainment dollars on socializing with her.

Fortunately this was just one of her drive-by shootings and she didn't seem to want a response. Before I could think of anything to say that wouldn't get me fired on the spot, she was gone. Feeling lower than a snake's belly in a wheel rut, as my grandma used to say, I went back to work on the memo. My one spark of rebellious revenge was to leave a grammatical error. She'd never know the difference— obviously, since she was the one who'd written it—and since it was her name on the memo, anyone who did know the difference would get at least a whiff of incompetence from her.

Then I got my sack lunch, changed into my walking shoes, and headed out to Battery Park. There was something about looking at the water, with the Statue of Liberty looming not too far in the distance, that helped calm me down.

Plenty of other people were out enjoying the gorgeous early fall day. There were a couple of busloads of tourists toting cameras, a few classes of schoolkids waiting for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, and a lot of lower Manhattan business types enjoying the same kind of office escape I was.

A guy roller-skated past me, and I wouldn't have given him a second thought if it weren't for the elf ears he wore. I watched as he skated down the sidewalk and met up with a girl wearing fairy wings. I wasn't sure if it was the same Miss Airy Fairy I'd seen the day before or if I was wrong about those things not being a fashion trend.

The elf and the fairy gave each other an enthusiastic kiss. Nobody else in the park seemed to notice them.

Then I wondered what I found so weird about the situation. It wasn't like there really was a roller-skating elf kissing a fairy, given that neither elves nor fairies actually existed. It was just two people in costume, and that shouldn't faze me at all. I'd known people in college who'd gone to class for weeks in their live-action role-playing game costumes when they were in the middle of a major campaign, and that wasn't even in the weirdness of New York.

I turned my head and noticed a man in silver skin paint and a metallic jumpsuit doing robot mime for a crowd of tourists. I didn't think that was particularly strange, so why did all this other stuff bother me so much? I guess I wasn't as sophisticated as I wanted to be.