The following short story is excerpted from Daniel Orozco's debut collection Orientation and Other Stories. Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That's my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can't find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He'll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.

Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia's MFA program. Her writing has been published in Paper Street Press, The Portland Review Literary Journal, Tantalum, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours. Tupelo will be filming Girlchild's book tour for a short documentary, "Hardbound: A Novel's Life on the Road." Her website is www.tupelohassman.com. Girl Scouts are inexhaustible creatures, and so it shouldn't have surprised me to find precisely the advice I needed today in my friend Rory Dawn's tired old copy of the Girl Scout Handbook. An entire section detailing "How to Introduce Your Friends" waved at me from the Handbook's index, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Friend, I'd like you to meet someone. "That's very forward," you might think, "we've only just met. I don't even know how to pronounce your name!" And to yourself, because you are invariably polite, "What is a Tupelo?" But we are now acquainted, via our mutual friends and hosts, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You've caught me wondering where I'm meant to deposit the sword-handled toothpicks at the hors d'oeuvres table at this monthly cocktail party that is the Work in Progress. I've admired your wrinkle-free ease in conversation and put down my growing collection of petite plastic swords to shake your hand. We've shared the awkward "let's be alone at the party together" moment that has birthed many a friendship, and in that spirit, I'd like to introduce you to Rory Dawn.