Nic Tatano - Twitter Girl

NIC TATANO

A division of HarperCollins Publishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

HarperImpulse an imprint of

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2014

Copyright © Nic Tatano 2014

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Nic Tatano asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International

and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted

the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access

and read the text of this e-book on screen.

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,

downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or

stored in or introduced into any information storage and

retrieval system, in any form or by any means,

whether electronic or mechanical, now known or

hereinafter invented, without the express

written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © September 2014

ISBN: 9780008113117

Version 2014-09-01

Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

For Myra, who always sets my heart atwitter…

Contents

Cover

Title Page Twitter Girl NIC TATANO A division of HarperCollins Publishers www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright HarperImpulse an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2014 Copyright © Nic Tatano 2014 Cover images © Shutterstock.com Nic Tatano asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Ebook Edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780008113117 Version 2014-09-01 Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Dedication For Myra, who always sets my heart atwitter…

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Also by Nic Tatano…

Also by Nic Tatano…

Nic Tatano

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

@TwitterGirl

Tornado whips through Mississippi trailer park, causes three million dollars worth of improvements.

Yeah, that’s the tweet which got me fired. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that it made me America’s most polarizing figure overnight. I, Cassidy Shea, former network reporter (handle: @TwitterGirl) whose stories included a snarky attitude that attracted more than one million followers, let her 200 IQ ass do the talking once too often. Who knew that one hundred and fourteen characters could sink my career like a stone, but, then again, when something goes viral on the Internet… well, the thing whipped around the country faster than the tornado that inspired it.

Oh, and before you think I’m some insensitive New York snob who makes fun of those less fortunate, let me remind you of the follow-up story that hardly anyone saw. That tornado only touched down for a minute and it wiped out an abandoned trailer park that was about to be bulldozed by the government for a pork barrel project. It actually saved the feds millions in demolition costs and enabled them to start construction early on the desperately needed Museum of American Macramé. (Slogan: ‘Got Knots?’) Not one person was injured by the tornado, nothing else was damaged, nobody was left homeless. It simply whooshed a bunch of ramshackle mobile homes outta there and was done. But nooooo, you didn’t pay attention to that story, did you? You had the same knee-jerk reaction as the network president, who was deluged by angry tweets from flyovers (a network term for people the airlines zip over between New York and Los Angeles.) So even though I got canned three days ago, Twitter Girl still gets bushels of nasty comments collected in one convenient location by a very genteel hashtag:

#FireTheRedheadBitch

Merry Christmas, Cassidy. Enjoy the pink slip in your stocking?

Most of these tweets contain lovely terms of endearment and suggest I perform various impossible anatomical acts that I won’t share. Suffice it to say I will never be able to set foot in the State of Mississippi again, which won’t exactly break my heart. Or, more importantly, a television station. Which will.

So for the first time in my professional career, I have absolutely no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

“Hey, Caz, come look at this!”

The voice you hear belongs to my twenty-five year old kid brother Sam, with whom I share a home here on Staten Island, often called the forgotten borough of New York City. He’s been a saint through all this, compiling all the nice tweets and direct messages of support so that the redhead bitch might cheer up during the holidays. Every night after dinner he cuts and pastes them into one document, prints it out and makes me read them aloud. But with three days to go before Christmas, I’m unemployed and not in the mood. I shuffle down the hall and find him rolling toward me in his wheelchair, iPad in his lap. “Sam, you don’t need to keep doing this. I’m okay, really.”

He smiles, making the dimples in his lean face pop. His green eyes brighten as runs his fingers through his mop of black hair to get it out of his face and points at the screen. “Caz, you really need to read this.”

I roll my eyes. “I just want to forget about it, Sam. Look, I appreciate what you’re doing—”

“I think it’s a job offer.”

His words make my jaw drop. For the past few days I’ve been radioactive, so much so that my agent dropped me right after she told me my television career was toast and I had not only burned every bridge but napalmed them down to the molecular level. “Some television station wants to hire me? You’re kidding.”