Get my message? Dinner tonight?

Eric was her sexual savior, and she started thinking about where they’d go to do the deed. She didn’t like the idea of the ever-vigilant Jada seeing a man disappear inside her apartment. But Eric also had a roommate, and Piper was past the age of having sex while a bro played Call of Duty on the other side of the bedroom wall.

She went back to work. A routine online check to see if anything new had shown up about Spiral revealed a recent post on a local club life message board left there by somebody who called himself Homeboy7777.

Spiral is the best place in Chicago to score all kinds of good shit without getting stabbed or shot.

She’d stake her reputation on the fact that nobody was scoring much of anything at Spiral, now that Dell was gone. Registering herself as Wastoid69, she posted an appropriately obscene response, denouncing Homeboy7777 as a troll and Spiral as a “fucking drug wasteland only good for picking up the hottest chicks in the city.”

***

At five on Friday evening, Piper met Jen and Amber at Big Shoulders. It was one of their favorite places, with good coffee, friendly baristas, and Carl Sandburg’s poetry painted on the wall.

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat...

Piper hadn’t seen her friends for two weeks, and she’d been looking forward to this all day, but Jen was uncharacteristically glum. “Dumb Ass called me into his office and asked me how I felt about getting a face-lift.”

Amber Kwan smacked the flat of her hand on the table hard enough to rattle her cup of house-blended tea. “Your face is perfect,” she exclaimed. “Ask him how he feels about a sexual discrimination lawsuit!”

Hearing the soft-spoken opera singer speak so vehemently made Piper laugh, and even Jen smiled, but only for a moment. “I’m trapped,” she said. “I don’t want to leave the city, and what other local station is going to hire a forty-two-year-old meteorologist?”

The early October days were getting shorter, and a streetlight came on outside the window. “Maybe you need to remind him how many over-forty women are watching the news,” Piper said. “How does he think they’ll react if they hear about the kind of discrimination you’re facing?”

“Yeah, that’d work, all right,” Jen scoffed. “He’d twist the story against me while he replaced me with someone younger, prettier, and cheaper. After that, I’m sure every male-owned station in town would jump at the opportunity to hire a known whistle-blower.”

She had a point.

Amber distracted Jen with the latest gossip from the Lyric. Without Berni shooting her threatening looks, Amber was funny and relaxed. Piper made up her mind to talk to Berni about her attitude, whether Amber wanted her to or not. Then she dropped the bombshell about what she’d seen in Lincoln Square.