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plumber?” I ask.
    Natalie considers the TV carefully. “It could be the one where Jakarta does twelve pregnancy tests in a row—”
    “—and then smashes the mirror on the medicine cabinet when they all come back negative!”
    “Yesss! I love this one.” She takes a long sip of her coffee, then grabs the soft yellow pillow my grandma crocheted and nestles into it. Since Nat and I met three years ago, she’s spent so many hours snuggling with that pillow that I think of it as hers. When she’s settled, she says, “So what happened? Tell me everything.”
    I repeat the story of Samir, and Natalie reacts with appropriate gasps and exclamations. “What a douche,” she says when I’m finished. “But I guess it’s good she found out before they were living together, right? Is she moving home?”
    “For a little while, I guess, until she figures things out. She didn’t want to talk about it last night.”
    “God. What are we going to do about Samir?”
    This is one of my favorite things about Natalie. It’s never “What are you going to do about your problem?” It’s “What are we going to do?” “We came up with some revenge ideas last night,” I say. “But it was really late, and I think they were pretty stupid. Just pranks, mostly.”
    “No, it can’t be a prank. Miranda lost someone she loved, so we have to find something Samir loves and take it away. What does he care about?”
    “Besides himself? I have no idea. I met the guy for three seconds, and that was three seconds too long. You should have seen him gazing at his own reflection in the window. It was nauseating. And I literally saw him sign a cocktail napkin, tuck it in some girl’s bra, and tell her it would be worth a ton someday.”
    “Okay, so he’s an egotistical fame whore. We can work with that.” Natalie chews meditatively on her coffee stirrer. “Miranda has a finished novel, right? Would it piss him off if she got published before he accomplished anything big? If she got famous first?”
    “Yeah, absolutely. But she’s been trying to sell that book for a year already. She’s gotten enough rejections to decoupage her entire kitchen table.”
    “What’s the book about?”
    I stuff some muffin into my mouth as I try to remember exactly how I’ve heard Miranda describe it. “It’s a ‘lyricalexploration of love, loss, and coming of age in a 1930s West Virginia coal-mining town.’ ”
    Natalie bursts out laughing. “Ooh, nice one. That’s funny. But seriously, what’s it about?” Then she sees the expression on my face, and her smile collapses. “Oh. You’re not— Oh .”
    “But you can help her, right? You have publishing connections now.”
    She snorts. “An unpaid internship is not ‘connections.’ ”
    “Fine, so we’ll get her famous some other way. She’s good at lots of stuff, right? Help me out here. How do people get famous really fast?”
    We gaze idly at the TV as we think. On the screen, twenty-four-year-old Jakarta dumps an armful of pregnancy tests onto the drugstore checkout counter. The mountainous woman behind the register looks totally unfazed as she slides them over the scanner one by one, painfully slowly. A voiceover informs us that if Jakarta wins the $200,000 prize for getting pregnant first, she’s going to open a combined dog and human salon called Primp My Pooch, where pets and their owners can be groomed to match.
    “If I needed instant fame,” Natalie says slowly, “I’d do that.” She nods toward the television.
    “What, buy a bunch of pregnancy tests?”
    “Go on a reality show. Those people are household names, and they don’t even have any skills.”
    It’s brilliant—I can’t believe I didn’t think of it first. And aside from the fact that my sister’s not exactly a fan of reality TV, she’s perfect for the screen. She’s beautiful, she’s personable, and she’s good at almost everything. Plus, she has somenice messy emotional baggage, which is like peanut