“It was just weird,” I continued after the drawer slid shut, “how fast he flipped. It almost felt like I was being tested or something.”
“Did you pass?”
I grimaced. The look must have been stronger than I thought it was because she squared her shoulders and put on her determined face.
“You’re not a failure, Constance Ferrer,” she said adamantly. “You are an intelligent, dutiful, hardworking young woman.”
I groaned. She continued, fiercer.
“You’re ambitious and a realist—”
“I’m a petty, paranoid escapist.”
She cringed, unable to hide the truth of that statement, even as she went on to paint it in a prettier light. “You’re dream big, hope for fairness, and are willing to compromise or sacrifice for it, all while comprehending that the likelihood is, well, slim to best.”
I shrugged. There was truth in that. Its resonance filtered some pride back into me despite my stubbornness to ignore such sentiments. My stubbornness wouldn’t let go of the fact that I had no real justification for the way I’d judged Mallory’s merits and motivations. I simply couldn’t let myself off too lightly for it. Not for that and not for other failings of mine. After all, that wouldn’t have been fair either.
She practically growled in frustration. “Snap out of it!”
I flinched at the intensity of it. I hadn’t known she had that in her. Yet, somehow, I think our bosses did.
“What will wallowing get you? Hmm?”
I didn’t answer. I stared at her with wide, surprised eyes, and maybe even a little fear.
“A great big stinking pile of what ifs and should haves and why didn’t Is, that’s what. I’m not going to let you do that to yourself. Not on my watch.”
And then she winked. And grinned.
I blinked in confusion. She ginned bigger.
“As someone who likes to get a head start on things every now and then, make a good first impression, and enjoys power enough to occasionally take advantage of it…”
Her grin got a little wicked then. But, instead of more fear or surprise, my stomach flutters sprang to life again.
“My reign here may not officially start until Monday, but I think I’ll make my first disciplinary action take place today.”
Nonsensically, the flutters grew. She mocked an aristocratically authoritative and militaristic pose: head high, back straight, posture stiff and precise. Her next words came in a crisp, emboldened, haughty tone.
“Constance Ferrer, my apparently weak-willed, fragile-minded, and pathetically-adept first officer, you are hereby temporarily relinquished of your title, status, and duties. You will leave for the rest of the day under Human Resource article six-point-three, commonly known as sick leave. As suggested by your superiors, you will use that time to research, choose, and register appointments with a therapist from the pre-approved list provided by the Health and Wellness Advocacy Program. You are advised to spend the weekend in contemplation over your behavior regarding your fellow officers, your duties, and your responsibilities, and how best to obtain proper control over them. You may return Monday if, and only if, you have completed these things to my satisfaction.”
Yeah… The flutters dimmed a bit.
That was, until her posture deflated into a relaxed, friendly, and conspiratorial repose.
“Because that is what the weekends are for. Peaceful tranquility. Docile consideration. Cultivation of yourself for the betterment of others.” Her eyes danced wickedly. “With the aid of the most sacred of spirits of course.”
“Of course,” I said, unable to keep the grin that sprang to life on my own face.
Open and warm and generously mischievous, she said, “I’m going to throw you the best thirtieth birthday party ever.”
“Pull it off,” I said, feeling a silly waggle tugging my eyebrows seemingly all of their own accord. Apparently, her mischievous attitude was infectious. “And I’ll top it for yours.”
Her expression turned mildly aghast and she swatted at me. “Don’t even think it!” She lifted her chin haughtily, playfully—I thought, hoped—and she said, “I’ll never age a day past twenty-eight.”
She spun on her heel and disappeared around the cubicle wall.
I rolled into the aisle after her and whisper-hollered, “I’d prefer that trick to a party!”
Her head popped out long enough for her to wink and gush, “Sorry. Winners only perk.”
“Figures,” I muttered grumpily, despite the smile putting the squeeze on my cheeks.
~ ~ ~
Blood Con. Blood Con. Blood Con…
“Oh, my freakin’ Hellbound!” I seethed, hopefully under my breath, while throwing a tantrum by throwing my freakin’ mouse across my desktop. Its tether wasn’t long enough to keep it from ricocheting off the padded back wall of my cubicle. Its motion blanked the screen.
Mallory’s head popped up over the top of our shared cubicle wall, thus proving I wasn’t nearly as office appropriate as I hoped I’d been.
“What’s wrong?” She asked. “And why are you still here? I told you to leave over an hour ago.”
At her words, the happy flutters increased. Images of faux mourning attire, swirling goblets of red wine, and goofy revelry flitted through my mind. As a result, my nerves calmed somewhat. I sighed.
“I just wanted to finish up the paperwork for Mr. Collier and forward them to Reynolds and Cartwright before I left,” I told her.
“You’re not done yet?” She asked. “That should’ve taken twenty minutes tops.”
“Well, tell my stupid computer that,” I retorted. Then, as if on cue, the stupid glitching screensaver popped on again, flashing Blood Con at me. Made me think of my bratty cousin Marjory sticking her tongue out at me after successfully duping all of our parents again and getting me in trouble for her antics.
“IT didn’t fix it yet?” She asked as she came around to my cubicle. “They fixed mine during lunch.”
“They did?” I asked. Surprise quickly soured into spiteful disdain. “Of course they did. You’re manager now.”
She flashed me a stern, reproachful look. “Do you need the speech again?”
I wince-grimaced. I did not want the litany, however silly it may have been, again. The flutters in my belly and the flare of pleasant party visions agreed. A sensible part of me also noted that as playful as she had said it, she had meant it as well. After the party on Saturday, I’d be emailing one of the requisite therapists about obtaining an appointment or two the following week. Had some hoops to jump through over the next couple of months if I wanted to retain the assistant manager position.
“Okay, then,” she said and scooted me out of my chair. “What’s the problem? It can’t just be the screensaver glitch because, while annoying, it shouldn’t impede the other software.”
“I repeat… Tell my stupid computer that.” I huffed indignantly and leaned my tush on my desk so I could point out the problems. “It keeps popping up every few seconds. When I clear it, all my programs are shut down. Without saving. I’ve restarted the stupid report seven times already.”
She nodded and tested it out for herself. The screensaver cleared after a quick swish with the mouse. She opened the in-house client database and records program. She initiated a new satisfaction report. She filled in random words and numbers into the client details portion and then clicked in the frame for the freestyle content, where we write up the experience, conflicts, resolutions, and recommendations in our own words. She typed in gobbledy-guck and halfway through a second paragraph, the screensaver popped on, flashing Blood Con at her.
“Hmm,” she said before swishing the mouse to clear the screen again. Sure enough, the program was closed. She opened it again and tried to open recent, which was empty.
“Well, what if we save it immediately?” She mused more to herself than to me.
“I tried that,” I said.
“Just humor me,” she said sprit
ely, even if it was a little growly.
I took it as a sign that the glitch was already getting to her as well. It was, after all, ruining her well-crafted disciplinary plan for me. I was getting the impression that, as upright and benevolent as she may have been, she didn’t accept failure much better than me. In a more dignified manner, perhaps, but not more tolerantly. I got the impression that while it spurned me to spite, it spurned her into enterprising alacrity.
A knife of envy pierced my chest at that realization. I couldn’t help but wonder, why couldn’t I be like that?
It wasn’t the first time I’d pined for such things. I doubted it would be the last. Le sigh.
Mallory opened a new report, typed in the client name and date, and then clicked save as. The hold your horses; I’m working on it icon popped up, spun, and just as the save as window opened, the glitched screensaver popped Blood Con at her again.
I snorted à la I told you so.
She raised a determined eyebrow to me. “Let’s try spawning from the original inquisition form.”
She attempted to open that as well. Like for me, it spawned, and then immediately got devoured by the Blood Con flash of the glitched screensaver.
Mallory’s nicely painted nails ticked the desktop as she squeezed the mouse.
I grinned, vindicated. See, I wasn’t a moron after all.
Her lips thinned out into a flat, diligent line. Her eyes narrowed, shifted slightly to the side. Her nails scraped the desk on their way to Mr. Collier’s file opened like a pair of hinged palms, displaying the splayed pile of handwritten notes and forms like a peaceable offering. She fingered them briefly, leafing them apart to skim them. I could practically hear those well-oiled gears in her head scrape and clink smoothly against themselves as they disassembled, reoriented, and reassembled themselves. Frictionless.
My envy piqued. It noted the exact moment she’d discovered the solution, yet not what that solution would be.
I watched her shuffle the papers together and snap the manilla file folder closed around them.
“My computer works fine,” she said smartly.
She primly stood, stepped around me with an inspiring—frustrating—wink, and marched around the shared wall and to her own cubicle. Over the wall, she called, “See you Monday, Constance.”
I fumed, wisps of green-smoke surely curling out from my eyes as I tried vainly to spontaneously manifest the ability to shoot laser beams from them. I pictured the searing, punching beams burning through the shared wall and striking her right in her back and exploding out her perky chest.
But then the flutters effervesced into a cooling mist to temper my envy. The visions of goofy mourners, poured spirits, and rapacious eulogies dissipated the images of the searing lasers. When the steam cleared, my to-do list crammed my thoughts.
“See you Saturday,” I corrected her audaciously. I grabbed my purse and bolted.
I ticked off two items from the list on my way home: liquor store and supermarket. I entered my soon-to-be-a-little-less-private domain laden with droves of antiseptic cleaning supplies, comforting snacks, and refined spirits.
Life was good.
Four
~ hic ~
“All done!” I announced proudly to myself.
I plopped the sponge into the bucket and was rewarded with a dirty splash splattering my clothes and face. I grimaced, feeling the usual well of depression rising, but battled it off with a conjuring of belly-fluttering visions of the to-die-for party to come.
“No matter,” I told myself, like the lonely, imagination-driven dork that I was. I stripped off the yellow gloves, picked up the bucket and went to the sink. “I had to shower anyway.”
Doubly proud for overcoming my penchant for easy self-pity, I pitched the bucket over the sink and dumped it out in an optimistic flourish.
Splash!
I was doubly rewarded with newly dirtied counters, walls, cabinets, floor and just-cleaned-dishes-drying-in-the-rack. I squealed, dropping the bucket, and was thusly triply rewarded with a chipped tile.
My chipped tile. My floor. My kitchen. My first house. Mine.
I couldn’t help but smile. Things were just getting good. And tonight, when my co-workers lavished me with a to-die-for thirtieth birthday party, things would be just perfect.
I ignored the ringing of my phone as I climbed into the shower. Voice mail would get it and I could check voice mail any time. Party preparations, however, had a shelf-life.
I never heard the second, third, and fourth calls too. I la-la-la’d right through them.
~ ~ ~
“Good morning, birthday—or should I say deceased—girl,” Mallory’s voice said brightly over my voice mail. “I just got called into work. Turns out that glitch we had did some damage on my side after all. All of my reports for the last two weeks have been lost so I have to go in and redo them. Don’t fret, though. I’m still throwing you that party, okay? I’ll just be a little later than expected. If you don’t mind helping me with the decorations, we’ll be ready in no time, no problem.”
Decorating might be fun, I thought as a musical montage of us laughing and throwing around crepe paper flitted through my head.
“Hey again, Cons,” Mallory said, her voice sounding tired and a little ragged on the voice mail. “I’m going to be later than I thought. IT is here and they’re being especially grumpy about being here on a Saturday. Do they think I want to be here any more than they do? Anyway, that’s beside the point of my call. I’m going to need a little more help to get the party set in time. I’m going to send a messenger over with the decorations. If you could get a start on those on your own and then stop by the bakery to pick up the cake, we can still make this work. The address is…”
Well, I thought as I jotted down the address, this is becoming less and less like someone throwing me a party and more like someone is helping me throw myself a party, but, it’s still better than my alternate plans, which were, well…nothing.
“I’m so sorry about this, Connie,” Mallory apologized to my voice mail. “IT got the bug cleared and recovered most of my files. Some of them are corrupted and have to be redone. Worse, I think that the IT guys mixed up some of their paperwork with my paperwork and either threw them out or took them with them. Whatever happened, they’re not answering their phones and I can’t find them in the trash either. I’m doing what I can from memory, but I don’t have all the contact information. I still have the old emails so I’ll send out some emails to get their details and then head on out. It’ll take me another couple hours, though, so I’ll be late. No worries, though, okay? Most people don’t arrive right at the start time, so I’ll still beat most of them there.”
Okay, I thought, It’ll be awkward at first, but once she gets here, it’ll be fine. I can do this.
“Um, Constance,” Mallory said, sounding just awful, on the fourth message. “Don’t hate me, but I’m not going to make it. I was afraid of losing the files again, so I started printing them. I figured it would only be another ten minutes, and then I’d have back-ups on hand in case it happened again. Problem is, once I hit print—What? No! Dammit. Gotta go. Sorry.”
I can’t do this, I thought with finality. I felt like an idiot. My decorating skills were atrocious. It looked like a tree with the plague had vomited black streamers all over the place. On the way home from getting the cake it had slid across the passenger seat and to the floor when some jackass in a SUV—filled with kids, no less—cut me off so closely that he almost took off my bumper on the pass. I’d used a combination of patting and smearing with a plastic knife and spoon to get the frosting looking less-mangled, but it still was pretty dreadful.
If I thought those things were bad, my social skills were many times worse. Add to that the fact that not only had I never hosted a party before, but as the guests were almost all co-workers, and thus probably knew I’d lost the promotion to Mallory, who had supposedly planned the party, sent out the exuberant email i
nvitation, but who would be suspiciously absent, and I basically wanted to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, and hide.
Or maybe just die.
Melodramatic much? Nah. I reacted appropriately in every situation. That was why I was the sleek, sophisticated, handsomely married, professionally successful modern woman rather than just a mundane, mediocre manager—ahem, assistant manager—of a customer service department of the sales and distribution division. And even that was a crock of farce.
What the Hellbound did Blood Conscience, a freakin’ biotech and pharmaceutical development corporation need with a customer service department? We rarely got the complaints about some pharmacy’s order being filled incorrectly. Truth was, we were a trumped up excuse for the executives to avoid answering the nitty-gritty questions that got filtered through the underlings of other executives and supposedly humanitarian fancy pants. Sure, the deals began and ended with the meetings of all the fancy pants themselves, but the grunt work of the in between bits all came through us mundane minions of mediocrity.
It was all a sham.
Just like this party was a sham.
Just like the invitation was probably a sham. It would be easy enough to erase it with a simple click of a cowering, tethered li’l mouse.
I grabbed a bottle of…something brown, unopened, and featuring a fantastically deranged man in flamboyant pirate garb complete with a long, fluffy feather in his hat… And trudged dejectedly over to my computer.
To my lack of surprise, my inbox was pretty full. I didn’t typically get a lot of friendly emails—discounting advertisements and other spam—so I figured these wouldn’t be of the happy lot either.
I clicked one from Casey, Reynolds’ personal assistant. It read:
I’m unable to attend. Problems with the computers at work. Maybe next time. Happy Thirtieth! P.S. The funeral theme sounds great. Wish I had thought of it for mine!
The one from Cartwright’s intern, Amy, was similarly worded:
Funeral birthday? How fun! I am totally stealing that when my time comes. Only ten years away! Ugh! Time flies in the real world, doesn’t it? Well, unfortunately, this real world girl has two major projects due Monday (on Halloween, seriously?! And I just got that connection to the party. So cool!) so my weekend is completely blown. No parties for me. But, you have a great time. Live it up while you still can! The liver goes almost as quickly as the looks do, I hear. lol.