When Piper got to work the following morning, she found a printed memo on her desk with ‘IMPORTANT’ in red letters on the front page.

‘The fuck is this?’ she muttered, shrugging her coat off and hanging it over the back of her seat. There’d been some whispers that the company was in trouble and she really hoped this wasn’t confirmation. She made a little money from her blog, but not enough to live on; it really just kept her in takeaways and the occasional Joanie dress.

As I’m sure you’re all aware – the memo read – we’ve recently signed a girl band that we’re very excited about. They’re fresh and funky and we’re confident we’ll be able to position them in direct competition with Little Mix. They’re currently working with choreographers, stylists and producers, but in the meantime we need to come up with the perfect name.

They came to us calling themselves Feminine Hygiene, which we’re sure you’ll all agree is not ideal for the target market. We’ve workshopped a few names ourselves, but we’re not 100% on any of them. We’d love for everyone to get involved. We feel that not only will it give us access to a wide range of creative ideas, but also give everyone a sense of ownership over the band, which can only be positive going forward.

Piper rolled her eyes. Who had written this shit?

We’ve included a short list of names below, but this is in no way to be considered a shortlist. Any and all suggestions are welcome. There are no stupid ideas!

‘Minxy?!’ Piper said aloud before she could stop herself and heard a resulting laugh from further down the office in Accounts. And ‘Friendzone’ was definitely a stupid idea.

Grabbing a pen, she crossed out out all of the names apart from ‘Risky’ and wrote ‘Best of a bad lot’ next to it. Next to ‘Honey Badger’, she wrote, ‘This is what female Men’s Rights Activists call themselves so definitely out.’ She closed her eyes and tapped the pen against her teeth while she tried to think. ‘Flower’? There must surely already be a band named Flower. She wrote it down anyway; it could be a jumping off point. She googled ‘flower list’ and scrolled through, writing down any that had potential: Clover. Daisy. Peony.

---

She texted Matt. Need a name for a girl band.

He replied instantly. Flaps. Brazilian Wax. Thigh Gap.

SERIOUSLY Piper replied.

Sorry. My Starbucks Lovers. Smooch. The Maybes.

God Piper replied. If I suggest Smooch, I bet they’ll love it.

The band or the bigwigs?

Bigwigs. The band called themselves Feminine Hygiene

Matt replied with a series of laugh/cry emojis and I love them already.

---

Piper set her phone down on the desk and pinned the memo up on the board next to her. It would actually be pretty cool to come up with the name they gave the band. And even cooler to prevent them from being called something gross like ‘Smooch’ or ‘All Things Nice’.

She didn’t want to stay in Legal forever. It was fine – it paid pretty well and her colleagues were great and the work was interesting – but repetitive. The problem was that she was too good at it and she’d made herself indispensable. John got into a flap whenever she took any time off, insisting that the temp replacements were worse than useless.

The problem was, Piper didn’t know exactly what she did want to do. When things weren’t quite as busy she liked to go and hang around the other departments a little, asking questions and trying to get to grips with exactly what they did. She thought Press might be an interesting fit. Or International – that way she’d get to travel – but she hadn’t been brave enough to actually do anything about it yet. One day. Maybe.

She scrolled quickly through her emails, looking for anything that seemed important or urgent, but it was mostly standard stuff: people chasing contracts and invoice requisitions, producers looking to clear music samples, inter-office nonsense about the cleanliness (or otherwise) of the kitchen. She actually scrolled past the one unusual message, but something about it caught her eye as it disappeared off the top of the screen and she scrolled back up.

The subject line said You should be ashamed!

Piper’s stomach was already churning when she clicked on it. It started ‘Dear Fat Bitch’ and then told her how disgusting she was, how they couldn’t believe she’d even dared go on TV looking like she did. How dare she promote obesity when people were dying? And how much better Naomi had been than her. ‘You need help’ it ended.

Piper had received quite a few similar messages over the years. But not to her work email. Hands shaking, she double-checked it hadn’t been forwarded from her Gmail or something, but no, it was direct.

She archived it and then immediately unarchived it – she should probably keep it somewhere, in case something happened. Or maybe she should reply and tell him to get fucked. No, she definitely shouldn’t reply. She starred it so it would be easier to find and archived it again, then headed to the kitchen to make herself a tea.

‘I saw you on TV yesterday,’ Lee, one of her colleagues, said. He was just finishing making his coffee, stirring the mug and then dropping the teaspoon in the sink. ‘You were good.’

‘Thanks. It’s all a bit of a blur now.’

‘You haven’t watched it back?’

Piper shook her head and faked a shudder. ‘God no.’

‘You should. You looked good.’

‘Um,’ Piper said. ‘Thanks.’

Was he flirting? She didn’t think he’d ever flirted with her before.

Lee leaned backwards out of the kitchen and looked behind him, then said, ‘Actually, I’ve been wanting to ask you something?’

‘Yeah?’

He drank some of his coffee and then said, ‘Yeah. I was wondering if… um. Would you want to go and get a drink some time? After work maybe?’

Piper hadn’t seen that coming. At all. But Lee seemed nice enough and it had been a while since she’d been on a date. And Matt always said that even bad dates were good practice, so. ‘Yeah, actually. That sounds nice.’

Lee smiled. He wasn’t great-looking – he had a bit of a monobrow going on and a shaving rash across his jaw – but he looked a lot better when he smiled.

‘I can’t do this week,’ he said. ‘I’ve got gigs every night. But how’s next Monday?’

‘Sounds good,’ Piper said.

He left and she finished making her tea, taking it back to her desk and sitting down to stare at her screen again. She wasn’t shaking any more. And she actually felt fine. It probably wasn’t difficult to find her work email online; someone just had to have too much time on their hands and access to Google and that described plenty of people. And she’d got way more positive than negative messages this time, which she appreciated. Something definitely seemed to be changing since she’d started blogging. Although the worry was that it was all just a trend – body positivity was having a moment –and that things would eventually go back to how they’d been before.

She spent the morning working on amendments for a contract, had lunch sitting on a bench looking out over the river listening to a podcast, and picked up some prawns and a loaf of fresh bread on the way home.

Matt wasn’t home – he usually got back about an hour after she did – so she showered and changed into her favourite pyjamas before pouring herself a glass of wine, cutting off a chunk of cheese and curling up on the sofa to watch an episode of The Crown on Netflix. Perfect.