I hit send on my last email of the shortened Friday, closed up the contract database, saved and closed the grid I was poking at, straightened my piles of this way and that papers, put my shoe back on, and headed for the stairs. It was Friday, and it was party time. The muffled bump and hum of rap music had slid up to the 9th floor from the 6th like the smoke monster on Lost, and the smell of chocolate and cheese wafted down from the 11th. For some odd reason my apprehension far exceeded my excitement as I walked up to check out the scene with Maren. I'd imagined that it was going to be a scene straight out of The Office, or possibly the British Office, seeing as the alcohol intake of children's book publishers is much higher a percentage than one would innocently imagine. Maybe we need more substance in order to come up with whacked-out ideas that children would love, like "Is Your Mama a Llama," or "I'm Your Bus." I expected awkward mingling, too-sweet wine, some table cloths, and a chat or two with some people I only see hunched over their keyboards. I was mistaken, in the grandest of ways.
The 11th floor had a dance floor, packed with younger revellers, head bobbing and fist pumping to "Empire State of Mind," overlooking the lower Manhattan skyline. I spoke with an art director who's breath was rank but I had never known she was in love with Belgium, had amazing taste in music, and was clinically claustrophobic.
The 6th floor, which is usually the floor where all meetings take place, had catered delicacies like shrimp, leg of lamb, and cheese, cheese, cheese. Somehow, we had found heaven, squished within the walls of Scholastic. Maren and I tracked down our only crush - in publishing women don't have many options - whom we had nicknamed and swooned over just because. He played it cool, though, poking at his iPhone and pretending to ignore our pleas to go up to the dance floor.
The 2nd floor had coffee and cakes and randomly a huge screen with a video of snow falling in a quiet forest, on repeat. I wasn't sure what to make of this video - was it supposed to make us feel that warm Christmas-y feeling? I felt more like I was in a scene from Into the Wild. People kept standing in front of the projector, the shadows of the falling snow drifting down their faces, until someone awkwardly pushed them to the side.
We figured the 11th floor was where the In-Crowd was, so we headed up, wine glasses in hand, through our asylum of employment, the eeriness of drinking amid the deserted cubicles setting in. When we arrived back on 11, the majority of the crowd stuck with "
The white man's overbite" as their move of choice, but as the night wore on, the dancing became somewhat graphic.
That was when Maren and my brown and blue eyes locked, glazed over, and we peaced out, to skip down Broadway and join the masses of the wintry Manhattan evening.
