I threw an Undersea PEZ dispenser at her. “Okay, okay.”

The Undersea PEZ dispenser represented her former life as an actress. In the mid-eighties, before I was born, she had portrayed Duchess Quinnley in a sci-fi/fantasy film about intergalactic mermaids. An on-set injury the final week of filming stripped her of all enthusiasm for performing and she’d successfully sued her way out, bankrupting future productions before they could start. She’d been trying to live it down ever since; fans still blamed her for the abrupt end of what was intended to be a trilogy, while in other circles, her departure added to the cult appeal of the one film that had been made. At least this way, they argued, it couldn’t be “ruined” like other long-running franchises because it would never have an ending. Fan conventions and cosplay tournaments kept the cult alive, and invites to appear on panels still filled Mary’s inbox on a daily basis. One of my jobs was to delete them, unread, each morning.

Of the seemingly infinite collector’s items on eBay (toys, games, and action figures instilled with her likeness), the only one she owned was the PEZ dispenser, because it symbolized her current work as a script fixer: “People pay me to lift up my neck hinge and shoot out something tart and sweet on command, with ten more of equal quality lined up behind it.”

Seven weeks ago, she told me I was the best assistant she’d ever had, and that’s why she had to fire me. Instead of living my own life, I was living hers. I needed to throw myself into new situations if I was ever going to grow as a writer, as my own writer. I begged for another six months of time while I figured out where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, and she said she’d sleep on it. The next morning, when I knocked on her door, she handed me a one-way ticket to New York, paperclipped to the address of an apartment she’d leased in my name. (I found out later she’d purchased the building in the mid-1980s with her Duchess Quinnley money. It was worth a fortune now, but she preferred to rent to starving artists and offer them merit-based discounts.)

She blew me a kiss, closed the door, and locked it. I saw Frank in the window for a split second before the blinds snapped shut, too.

Now here I am at four a.m. in the Big, Rotten Apple, forcing myself to wake up on a weekday so I can be the first customer at the only place I’ll go all day, which happens to be across the freaking street.

Somehow, I don’t think this was what Mary meant by “living.” But until and unless New York stops being frightening and grotesque, I don’t see anything changing.