Dear Kelly Bloom

Before the end of his second month at the Gazette, Connor was told that he wore his misery too openly. “You need to hide it better,” said Sandra Cramer, the staff writer who did most of the movie, concert, and theater reviews and was also the paper’s primary fact-checker, “Or else, like Woody Allen, learn to make a joke out of it.”

She smiled, her bicuspids longer than her incisors. He guessed that she was in her early fifties, about the same age as his mother, but Sandra was thinner and funnier and harsher than his exhausted mother was. Sandra wore her dark brown hair piled on the crown of her head and favored black eyeliner, along with dramatic scarlet lipstick which by noon she had usually chewed down to a residual ring. She spent large swaths of most afternoons striding around the newsroom, her colorless lips pursed or silently moving as she worked out copy in her head.

“I wish I could be like Woody Allen,” said Connor. “But I don’t think I’ve come up with one original joke in my life.”

She stared at him, hovering over his cubicle. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears. Had he made some awful rookie error, as his overworked predecessor had once done, typing President Osama instead of Obama on one of the letters he’d prepared for his boss, Preston Dryden III?

“How good are you at giving advice?” Sandra finally asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said, wondering who on the other side of his cubicle’s walls was paying attention to their conversation. From what he could tell, everyone at the paper eavesdropped; with more cubicles by far than offices with doors, it was hard not to. “Probably not very good. Look where I ended up.” He tried to laugh, but the sound stayed in his throat.

She leaned her small, trim body against his cubicle’s outer wall. It shuddered briefly, Connor’s calendar of the city skyline and the giraffe photo an ex-girlfriend had given him swaying on their pushpins. A fluorescent light flickered dispiritingly above his and Sandra’s heads. The newsroom bulbs often seemed on the verge of dying; a man in maintenance grays, clipboard in one hand, showed up from time to time to glower up at the offending bulb before leaving again without replacing it.

“I’m sure you’re as good as anyone else in this dump,” she said. “I want you to answer these questions and e-mail them back to me by six today.” She handed him a torn half-sheet of copier paper with three barely legible lines scrawled in blue ballpoint.

“All right,” said Connor. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“I think you’re the one, so don’t disappoint me,” she said. She gave him a look more comical than fierce before going back to her desk, which was inside an office that included a door, one with a lock, and no window for the inquisitive to peer through.

Preston Dryden III and Sandra were rumored to be having an affair, but whether or not this was true, Connor didn’t care. He wanted only to report to work every day, do a capable job, and avoid conflict. During his first month at the Gazette, he had missed the quiet of the library where he worked during his last year of college, the orderly rows of the books he’d shelved, the hours spent alone in the carrel he favored on the library’s poorly heated top floor, his little steel-frame chair and pen-gouged table situated under a humming, dust-spewing vent. There he had leaned drowsily over his notes and dog-eared textbooks, trudging his way toward respectability.

The questions Sandra sent weren’t as challenging as he’d expected but he also wasn’t sure if he knew how to answer them properly:

1. 1). What would you do if you caught your best friend stealing from your wallet?

2. 2). What if you stumbled across your married mother out with another man?

3. 3). What should...