The Kiss Test Read online

  “I still can’t believe it,” I said, leading the way out into the hall that circled the station offices. “This has to be the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “Hit ’em up for a raise, I say.” Cleo shoved an unlit cigarette between fuchsia lips and headed off for her smoke break before her blood-to-nicotine ratio got so low her organs began shutting down.

  With a grin, I bounced off to the break room to get my stuff from my locker. This award was big. National. It would open doors to other jobs, if I wanted other jobs. But I loved it here at WKUP and had no intention of leaving for a very long time. Even if they didn’t give me the raise Cleo suggested I hit them up for.

  I had to tell someone. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed as I walked.

  “X-Treem Sports, Chip Xavier speaking.”

  “Hey, Chip. It’s Margo. Can I speak to Chris?”

  I pushed away the tiny twinge of guilt I felt for not calling my boyfriend first to tell him the good news. Kevin and I aren’t married, so that unwritten rule about having to first tell your spouse about every momentous occasion in your life didn’t apply. Oh, Kevin’ll be happy for me. He’ll tell me he’s excited and push all the right body parts to show his support, but Chris…Chris will get it. He’ll know what it means to me. Kevin is my boyfriend, but Chris Treem is my best friend. Has been for nearly twenty years. Even though he’s straight as an arrow—and thick as a log to hear him tell it.

  The summer I turned ten was a very bad year. My dad walked out, my fragilely Southern mom took to her bed and my older brother, Rob (Chris’s former best friend), took solace in his Sega Genesis. I needed someone to talk to, and Chris was taking applications for a new best friend. The rest is history.

  “Chris here.”

  “You’ll never guess what I got.”

  He paused to consider a moment, then suggested, “You bid on a square of Elvis’s used TP and won.”

  “You know, your crappy attitude about Elvis is the only thing that prevents you from being the perfect friend.”

  “It’s my only fault. So shoot me.”

  “You wouldn’t like where I’d aim. Now will you be serious? Guess what I got.”

  I heard a cell phone, presumably Chris’s, going off in the background.

  “Can we do this without the twenty questions?” He silenced the phone.

  I sighed. It almost took all the fun out of it. Almost, but not quite. “I just won Best Country DJ. Today’s Country Magazine called during my show.”

  “Damn! That’s pretty huge, isn’t it? Your big mouth finally paid off.” I smiled at the pride in his voice. That was why I’d called him instead of Kevin.

  “I even get to go to L.A. next month to be interviewed. With a stop in Nashville for a photo shoot for the cover. It’ll be in an issue a couple months from now.”

  “Pretty good, for a girl,” Chris said. “I’ll buy on Friday night.”

  “Damn straight.”

  We said goodbye and I pocketed the cell phone again, glad I’d taken the time to call. Kevin I’d tell in person tonight, over Chinese take-out, maybe naked, so we had something to fall back on if our enthusiasm levels weren’t equal.

  I continued down the hall, slowing and moving to the side to let pass a group of tourists being shown around the station by Clement Banks, assistant to Joe Looney, our general manager. Clem was a major dweeb, who spent much of his time kissing ass and pretending to be more important than he really was. The tourists appeared to be Asian businessmen, smiling broadly and gesturing to each other as they moved through the green-carpeted hallway under Clem’s guidance.

  Spotting me, they stopped and bowed and smiled. I bowed back, hoping that was the correct response to their greeting. For all I knew, it was insulting for a woman to bow. Or construed as some sort of sexual signal. No one jumped my bones, so I was probably wrong about the last part.

  “Hey, Margo!” Clem waved from the other side of the group. I groaned inwardly. I’d been hoping to pass without any acknowledgement from him. But Clem wasn’t going to ruin my good mood. “Gentlemen, this is Margo, our morning DJ, just coming off her show. She’s been one of our most popular DJs. Margo,” Clem continued pointedly, “these men are touring the station from the Soon Kim Group of South Korea.”

  Hmm. Maybe we hadn’t been transported to Korea overnight. Maybe we’d been invaded. Not that it bothered me. You couldn’t live in New York without being used to the ethnicity of the city. Still, how many Koreans actually listened to Garth Brooks and Johnny Cash? Did these guys even know “A Boy Named Sue”?

  Smiling, I bowed again at our guests. “Have fun, gentlemen.” I turned away, but Clem called out to me. Oh, lucky me, I thought, turning back and flashing a smile that would only fool someone who expected everyone to smile at him.

  “Margo, someone wants to see you in the break room.”

  A few minutes later, I discovered the entire station waiting for me, complete with flowers and a cake that said Congrats Margo! Best Country DJ!

  Cleo and Ben were there, having circled around the hall to beat me to the lunch room. My friends Katya Steinberg and Adair Lewis from sales, Duane and Yin from promotions, and everyone from engineering and sports were there, too. God, my life is good, I thought, accepting hugs and well wishes from all my closest friends and coworkers, who’d apparently been alerted yesterday about the award.

  Someone had mocked up a cover of Today’s Country Magazine, where they’d superimposed my face over the body of a country star who was much better endowed than I (perhaps I should consider a boob job before my photo shoot), and had inserted the headline Margo Gentry, DJ of the Year!

  I couldn’t stop grinning. I accepted a knife and began cutting the cake and distributing it all around. “Where’s Joe?” I asked the crowd at large, missing our general manager, one of my favorite people.

  “He had a meeting he couldn’t get out of,” our intern, Nigel, said. “He was pretty pissed about missing your party.”

  Oh well. Even that wasn’t going to get me down. I’d see Joe later.

  Katya, a spindly, spiky-haired blonde and one of my close friends, sat down at the table with her cake. “I could barely get a break to come here. Your award’s put your time slot in demand for advertising already. The phone’s been ringing off the hook for the past twenty minutes.”

  I laughed. “Glad I could help.” I’d put up with reading Korean advertising on-air for the rest of my life, if only I could keep this feeling.

  I loved my life. It was perfect.

  Chapter Two

  “Double Trouble”

  My celebration with Kevin went pretty much like I’d envisioned—Beef Chow Yuk and nakedness included. There was also the added bonus of sweet-and-sour sauce body paint, sticky but satisfying. He was happy for me to the extent an accountant could show happiness. I mean, granted, my Best Country DJ Award wasn’t as exciting as Kevin’s Best Tax Loophole Award, but he tried to work up the same enthusiasm.

  After my show the next day—a damn good show if I do say so myself—the general manager sent word for me to come to his office. I practically jogged down the hall to see Joe. I’d missed him sharing in my excitement yesterday. He was the best boss I’d ever had, besides being my mentor and good friend. You know, one of those people you can always count on. I knew he wanted to congratulate me, and I’d take all the pats on the back I could get.

  I knocked at Joe’s door. His gruff voice barked softly to enter. Joe was a huge man, probably six-eight and solid muscle, mammoth in size and girth, especially to a five-foot four-inch girl like me. He sat behind a tiny metal desk—the station owners weren’t big on esthetics—circa nineteen thirty, I think. Maybe it wasn’t really tiny but just looked that way because of Joe’s size.

  “You summoned me?” I said, drawing Joe’s attention from the papers he was inspecting.

  He glanced up and quickly removed his reading glasses before standing.

  “Margo.”

 
I blinked at his somber tone. Joe tended toward cheerful and nearly effusive enthusiasm, with a soft spot for his morning girl, in my own humble opinion, and I surely expected him to be thrilled about my award. Now, he was decidedly not effusive. Or thrilled.

  “I missed you at my party yesterday,” I said. “But, I know you planned it. It was really nice. Look, I brought you the magazine the guys in IT made.”

  He ignored the magazine I tossed on the desk and looked up at me. A stab of worry went through me. Despite the huge smile I had on my face, Joe looked like someone had died.

  He motioned to the faux leather chair in front of his desk, but I shook my head. “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind,” I said, twisting my waist one way then the other, in an effort to get some of the kinks out. It would also serve as a warm-up for the Central Park run I planned to take with Katya and Adair in a couple of hours. “A shift in the studio is enough to freeze the limberest joints.”

  Joe nodded again and returned to his own seat, not quite meeting my eyes. His fingers thrummed lightly on the cover of my magazine, not really seeing it. “Well. Margo.”

  The pause became so pregnant it nearly gave birth.

  “You okay, Joe?”

  He finally looked up, meeting my eyes, his gaze serious and forbidding. For an instant, I felt a catch in the pit of my stomach. Maybe someone had died and Joe had to tell me who it was. I briefly racked my brain trying to remember who in the station I hadn’t seen this morning. Who might have been hit by one of those damned cabs that honked at nothing or who may have succumbed to some fast-acting virus spread through the subway by a bronchitic sicky. I came up with no one.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He heaved a deep breath. “The station’s been sold.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” I said. The station had been up for sale for months with no takers, and I knew that the current powers-that-be were getting a little antsy. New blood, new investors, meant bigger and better things for WKUP. “When did this happen?”

  “It was finalized yesterday afternoon. That’s where I was during your party,” Joe said. Then he waved at the chair again. “Sure you don’t want to sit?”

  “I’m fine. Tell me about the new owners. Anything new and exciting in the works?”

  Joe groaned. “They’re Korean.”

  Completely aside from the fact that I’d heard the terms “Korea” and “Korean” more times in the past two days than I had probably ever heard them before in my entire life (today’s program had contained even more Korean ads than yesterday’s), I was a bit surprised at his reaction to the nationality of our new owners. We had a pretty eclectic group of people working for the station, maybe not the typical employees of a country station in the South, but this was New York after all. Diversity was our middle name.

  Then it hit me. Korean ads, Korean weather, Korean businessmen touring the building (they’d made a repeat appearance this morning, sitting in with Cleo through part of my show). I glanced back at the door and jerked a thumb in that direction. “The Soon Kim Group?” I guessed. Joe nodded grimly.

  It would be different, I supposed, with Asian owners of a country radio station, but it probably wasn’t unheard of. Maybe.

  “Is this a problem?” I asked, rising up on my toes, stretching out my calf muscles and thinking vaguely about my run. As much as I loved my job, by the time I was done with my shift my body screamed for exercise. And I needed to work off some of the nervous, excited energy my award and the anticipation of the interview were giving me. That reminded me that I also needed to schedule time off to fly to Nashville and L.A.

  “Yeah,” Joe said, folding the reading glasses he still held in his hand, placing them gently on the blotter in front of him and picking up the neon-green stress ball he kept on the desk. Cleo had given it to him to replace the cigarettes he’d given up last year. He gave it a few fierce squeezes, and I wondered if it honestly did anything to relieve the stress. He still seemed to have a pulse beating beneath his balding pate, right smack in the middle of his forehead. “Yeah, it is a problem.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re dropping the country format. It’s going to be an all Korean Jazz station.”

  “Pardon me?” I was sure I hadn’t heard him right. “Like Chick Korea?”

  He smiled at my attempted levity, but then shook his head slowly and sadly. “They’re letting a lot of people go.”

  My head snapped up. “But, why? Stations get bought out all the time and nothing changes. Things just go on as normal.”

  “Not this time, I’m afraid.” Joe looked like he was ready to cry. I’d never seen him like this before and it scared me to death. I didn’t deal well with emotion.

  Suddenly, my heart thudded to a complete stop, and I sank into the formerly proffered chair. “Oh no. Not you, Joe. Please say they didn’t fire you.”

  If anything he looked even more miserable than moments before. He tossed down the stress ball and rearranged his glasses on the desk until they were precisely parallel to the edge of the magazine with my face staring up at him.

  “No, not me.”

  “Then who?”

  “You.”

  ***

  Two hours later, I’d arranged with the personnel department to end my employment with WKUP. A good severance package had been offered, along with the opportunity to allow them to assist me in a job search. I’d accepted the former and turned down the latter. Surely I could find my own job. After all, I’d just won Best Country DJ. That had to mean something, didn’t it?

  I changed my clothes and silently rode the elevator down eighty-five floors, flanked by Katya and Adair. They both sent furtive looks at me from the corners of their eyes. I’m sure they were wondering just how suicidal I was.

  Our walk up Fifth Avenue to Central Park served as a warm-up for our daily run, dodging New York citizens and tourists to hone our reflexes. The incessant noise was comforting in its sameness, in its constancy.

  Unlike my employment.

  Damn.

  I picked up my pace.

  “Margo. Honey.” Adair panted beside me. “You know I can’t fan in these crowds. Can’t you go slower until we get in the open?”

  Katya, his roommate and conscience, growled at him from behind me, and I could imagine the look on her face. It would speak volumes—“Don’t say anything to upset Margo. She’s just been fired.” Okay, I was exaggerating. I hadn’t been fired. I’d been downsized, laid off, phased out. Whatever.

  Adair remained silent all the way to the park. I was feeling too mean to care whether he sweated up his designer tank or not. Don’t take this wrong. I liked Adair a lot. He’s a great friend, aside from having had to almost compete with him for men a time or two. But his vanity and freakish paranoia about sweating while running—and thus possibly staining—his trendy duds, was highly annoying. Adair would pull out a pocket fan—to prevent wetness from forming anywhere on his body—as soon as we hit the “openness” of Central Park and there was no chance of someone bumping into him and getting the blades tangled up in his chest hair.

  I’d insert an eye roll here if I had the mental energy to actually roll my eyes.

  I dodged people and cabs, barely stopping for lights in my desperation to run. Adair and Katya, ever the faithful friends, kept up their suicide watch. We entered the park and took off like taxis through an intersection. As we moved onto the road that threaded through the park—used by runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers and any other souls brave enough to risk being stampeded by the health-conscious—the elm trees closed in, and the traffic and horns were silenced, or at least muffled. Central Park was like a completely separate world from the rest of Manhattan. A bit of nature persistent in its survival amidst the stone and steel of the city. Something to be cherished, a respite from rushing, even while running.

  As predicted, Adair pulled out his fan the minute the coast was clear, and every few minutes he’d aim it at an armpit or down the front of his racer-bac
k tank, ensuring any droplets of sweat that dared to appear were instantly blown into submission.

  “Do you want to talk about it, Margo?” Katya asked tentatively, keeping pace with me on my left while Adair brought up the right. “It might make you feel better.”

  Adair agreed. “Talking always makes things better. Kat and I talk all the time and look how healthy and well-adjusted we are.”

  I shot a glance at the man running beside me, chin thrust in the air, pointing a whirling pink pocket fan at his neck. “I’m not sure I could stand to be as healthy and well-adjusted as you, Adair. It might just make me sick.”

  Katya chuckled nervously. “Did they say anything about who else might be, you know, let go?”

  “Everyone on-air,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything about anyone else.” I didn’t voice my concern that it might be just a matter of time before many of the other English-only-speaking employees were let go in favor of Korean-speaking employees. No need to scare my friends half to death. The very idea of them both losing their jobs at the same time was frightening. The two of them had shared an apartment for five years and were almost like an old married couple—minus the sex, given they both had a preference for sleeping with men. They pooled their money and their support. Take that away and they’d be in trouble.

  “That’s just wrong,” Adair professed, craning his neck to follow the assets of a cute guy who sped past us on roller blades.

  “His ass?”

  “Don’t be perverse. I can carry on a conversation while admiring the view. It’s wrong that you were fired.”

  “She wasn’t fired!” Kat protested. “She was laid off. There’s a big difference.”

  “And the difference would be?”

  “This wasn’t her fault. She didn’t do anything wrong!”

  If I ever needed defending, I’d go to Katya. She should have been a lawyer. Or an animal rights activist. She was passionate about protesting mistreatment and upholding the downtrodden. Not that I fit that description. I might be down, but I wasn’t trodden yet.