Windfall Page 0,4

else I could be proud of doing.

"Oh, bullshit, of course you have a chance. A good one, too. You're credible on camera, honest, and the guys just love you. You've seen the website, right?"

I gave her a blank look.

"Your page is going through the roof. Hits out the ass, Jo. Seriously. Not only that, but you should read the emails. Those guys out there think you're damn hot."

"Really?" Because I didn't think there was anything hot about getting hit in the face with buckets of water. Or standing around in walking shorts, an I Love Florida! T-shirt, and oversized sunglasses with zinc oxide all over my nose. Too much to ask that I appear in a decently sexy bikini or anything. I had to look like a total dork, and do it on cheesy, cheap sets standing in rubber ducky pools or piles of play sand.

So not hot, I was.

"No, see, you don't get it. It's the theory of the magic glasses," she explained. Cherise had a lot of theories, most of them having to do with secret cabals and aliens among us, which made her both cute and kind of scary. I picked up a brush from the makeup table and started working on my hair; Genevieve, a burly Minnesota woman with a perpetual scowl, bowl-cut hair, and no makeup, took the brush away and began working on me with the tender care of a prison-camp-trained beautician. I winced and bit the inside of my lip to keep from complaining.

Cherise continued. "See, you know in the movies how the really hot girl can slip on a pair of horn-rims, and all of a sudden there's this entire silent agreement between all the people in the movie that she's ugly? And then there's the moment when she takes them off, and everybody gasps and says she's gorgeous? Magic glasses."

I stopped in the act of sipping coffee and braced myself as Genevieve tamed a tangle in my hair by the simple, brutally efficient method of yanking it out by the roots. I swallowed and repeated shakily, "Magic glasses."

"Like Clark Kent." Cherise beamed. "The outfits are your magic glasses, only instead of everybody being fooled, they're in on the joke. It's an open secret that you're totally hot under all that geek disguise. It's very meta."

"You're not originally from here, are you?" I asked.

"Florida?"

"The third planet from the sun."

She had a cute smile, one side lifting higher than the other and waking a dimple. I saw one of the office guys leaning in the door, mooning at her-not mooning her, mooning at her-but then there was always somebody doing that, and Cherise never seemed to notice, much less mind. Oddly, none of her admirers seemed capable of asking her out. Then again, maybe they knew something I didn't.

"How many hits?" I asked.

"Are we doing the drug talk again?"

I eyerolled. "To the web page, geek."

"Couple hundred thousand so far."

"You're kidding!"

"Um, not! The IT guys told me all about it." This was not surprising, because I was sure the IT guys tried to chat her up all the time. What was surprising was that Cherise had actually listened.

"What were you doing listening to IT guys?"

She raised an eyebrow. "We were talking about The X-Files. You know? Remember?

The show with Mulder and Scully and..."

Oh, right. Alien invasions. Weird occurrences. This was, strangely, right up Cherise's alley. Hence the tattoo.

The coffee was decent, which was a surprise; generally it was rancid stuff, even early in the morning, because the station wasn't exactly upmarket. Maybe somebody had gotten disgusted and popped for Starbucks again. I consoled myself with sips as Genevieve continued to torture my hair. She was backcombing, or possibly weeding.

"So? You got the rest of the day off?" Cherise asked. I was unable to move my head to nod, so I flapped my hand in a vague yes. "Cool. I have to do some voice promo stuff tomorrow, but I'm outta here for the day. Want to go shopping? I figure we can hit the mall around ten."

It was seven A.M., but that was Cherise. She knew the opening schedule of every store in a tri-state area, and she planned ahead.

Genevieve picked up the hair dryer. My scalp cringed, anticipating third-degree burns. I'd have stopped her, but the weird thing was that at the end of all of