by Wild, Nikki
Marlena ran the night crew that cleaned our section of the building. They usually didn’t get started on our floor until after two. The mere suggestion that it was so late made my bones ache.
“Hi, Marlena,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes. “What time is it?”
“Two… two-twenty-seven,” she said, looking at her phone. “Have you been here since-”
“Eight this morning,” I said, with a sad smile. “Or… eight yesterday morning.”
Marlena wore her hair tied back in a loose bun. Her cleaning uniform had seen better days, but the way she wore it made it so you didn’t care. She was really pretty, with long legs, and a bouncy chest that threatened the tired threads that held her buttons in place.
“That’s terrible! How can they make you work for so long?”
“My choice, unfortunately. They’re not holding me prisoner.”
Her brow furrowed as she snapped on my desk lamp. “You can’t work yourself so hard. I always see you here before anyone else in the morning, too.”
I worked for a nonprofit called Fitting In. Our stated mission was to transition ex-offenders back in to the community, but I felt like most of the time all we did was push around paperwork. I took this job because I thought I would get to help people, not spend all day trading documents around.
“Thanks, Marlena. How have you been?”
I watched her mouth and heard the sounds of her words, but their meaning wouldn’t stick in my brain. I’d been more than a little distracted lately with our burgeoning case load and it was affecting me in more areas of my life than just this one.
She was on a roll about something having to do with her new boyfriend—I think—and I had to bite down on the inside of my cheek to suppress a yawn. Her melodic cadence was an evil lullaby that threatened to drop me like a tranquillizer dart.
“…can you believe it?” She was looking at me with her head cocked to the side like she expected an answer.
Shit. Why couldn’t I ever focus on anything but my work?
“I know,” I said, trying my best guess. “That’s really great!”
The concentrated look that had been plastered on her face fell away like she’d just witnessed the first signs of the apocalypse. “Wh… what?”
I’d had a fifty-fifty shot at coming up with the right answer, and I chose incorrectly. “I-”
“Why would you say that?” She was wringing her hands in front of her now. There was no way out of this one.
“Marlena-”
“You think it’s really great that Ryan has been texting other girls? We’ve been together three years!”
“Oh…”
Oh!
The bearings in my chair creaked and there was an awkward bit of silence between us. “That’s… I must have misunderstood you,” I said, meekly. “It’s been a long night. Sorry.”
She nodded suspiciously and backed away from my desk. “Okay, well… okay. I should probably get back to work now.”
“Yeah, sure. I hope you guys can get it figured out,” I offered. “It’s probably just a misunderstanding.” But she was already around the corner and on to her next stop, so I didn’t get to hear her response. Oh well. If I had to add “making things uncomfortable with the housekeeper” to my list of stresses, it wouldn’t even rank in the top half.
I rocked back in my seat, looked out over the scattered mess of files on my desk and sighed. Three and a half years of busting my ass to graduate early from Northwestern should have meant the end of my paperwork days, but it was appearing to be only the beginning.
Since I was a kid, there’d been high expectations of me. Growing up in the family of a State Senator could do that to a person. From private school, to leadership programs, to high-profile internships, I’d spent more than a fair amount of my time trying to impress other people.
That’s why “Fitting In” was supposed to be different. It was my chance to make a name for myself outside of the influence and reach of my family’s wealth. I wanted to test myself on my own merit, without having to wonder if I was succeeding only because of who my father was. But at this rate, and buried under all this red tape, it was hard to tell.
I’d been going a hundred miles per hour since the day I was born. There was never time for fun, it seemed like. Maybe that’s why I always had an excuse to work so late—all my friends did it too. Maybe, I thought, that’s why I didn’t pay attention when Marlena was talking. The world of boyfriends and personal squabbles was so far from my own right now that it just didn’t compute; though, I wished it did.
The last guy I’d had any kind of relationship with at all was during my freshmen year at ‘western. He was pre-law and his family ran in the same circles as mine did. That meant he faced the same rigorous schedule as me. It also meant he was completely boring. Since then, it had been a few scattered Tinder dates that went nowhere and a handful of lame setups that some of my coworkers put me on. Most of the time those ended up devolving into work talk because it always seemed like they were still in the same “professional world” as me.
Such is the life of a recent college grad trying to make it in the city.
I leaned back in my chair and considered taking a power nap. There was no point in going home now, anyway, so it made sense to rest my head for a while before the nine-a.m. meeting with the program coordinator.
As my eyes tried to fluttered closed, something at the corner of my desk caught my attention. It was a newspaper clipping that was sticking out from the top of one of my files. It didn’t exactly strike me as unusual—the files were filled with all sorts of different information on our clients—but something drew me to it.
I picked it up and looked at the name on the tab before thumbing in open. Troy Eason. The article was only about a year old, but the print was already starting to fade. I read the title through a squint. “Local MMA Fighter Scores Knockout Victory on Regional Circuit—Viewed as Top Prospect in Sport.”
Sport. That last word caught in my mind like a fly in a web. To the best of my knowledge, MMA meant cage fighting, which in turn meant two brutish-looking guys beating each other senseless in front of crowds of roiling, angry fans with spittle flying from the corners of their mouths. Was that really a sport?
I scanned the article with extreme skepticism. At the bottom was a picture of him. It couldn’t have taken up more than a three-by-three section of the paper, but it was all I needed to see. Troy Eason certainly wasn’t “brutish-looking.”
The picture showed him perched atop one of the walls of the eight-sided cage. He wore all white fighter’s shorts and a winning smile. His built arms were flexed and the turn of his body highlighted the work he put into making his stomach tight and lean. Something about the way the camera caught the gleam in his dark eyes made the insides of my thighs tingle.
I put the article—picture-side facing up—on the small paper stand on my desk and looked over the rest of his file. It appeared as if not long after winning that particular fight, he’d been arrested and convicted on an assault and battery charge involving a couple of students at the University of Chicago. There wasn’t much information on the incident, but it said that the students had also been charged with drug possession and public intoxication. I was happy to read that, though I wasn’t sure why.
Other than that, he hadn’t had much of a past with the law. There were a bunch of minor things from when he was a juvenile, but most of our clients had been institutionalized plenty of times before they got to us. It was rare to get someone who was so relatively clean.
I tucked the papers into the file and sat back in my chair again. From across the desk, it felt like Troy Eason was going to ignite and burn up that thin sheet of newspaper. The clock ticked tauntingly on the wall and I kept staring. I didn’t get any sleep before my meeting.
Troy
I felt like I could punch right through the bag today. Each strike made it sound off like a firecracker. Ray struggled to hold it steady. “Damn, kid. I’ve been
training you for six years now and I’ve never felt you hit it like this.”
“My body’s fresh,” I said. “Feel good today.” I did, too. In fact, I felt fucking great. I don’t know if I was any stronger than normal, but I did know that I only had a few more steps to finish up before I was done with that bullshit term in my probation that said I had to have some organization babysit me for three months while I “transitioned” back into the community. Maybe that’s why I was able to bruise up Ray’s ribs through the protection of a one-hundred-pound heavy bag.
I didn’t know what I did to the judge to deserve such a pain-in-the-ass sentence, but I must’ve pissed him off something major. Either way, I’d fulfilled nearly everything they wanted. I only had to have them sign my paperwork a couple of more times, and then they wanted me to have a few meetings with one of their consultants before they could deem me a “success story.” It was all such garbage.
The blood surged in my veins as I targeted a spot three quarters of the way up the bag. I unloaded on it with a flurry of punches straight from hell. Ray called out the numbers of the combinations I was supposed to throw: “One, two! Two, two, three!” The last one connected so hard that it split the bag all the way up to the top.
“I’ll be damned,” said Ray. “It’s been a long time since anybody around her busted up a bag like that.”
“Been a long time since I felt like doing it,” I said with a wink. “Thanks for the workout man, but I gotta go.”
“You? Leaving early? There’s a first for everything, I guess.”
I hated taking off before my training was done, but I had to get down there and have them sign my accountability sheet. It was just another damned piece of paper that the judge needed to see to make sure I was doing what he ordered. Most times it could wait until after I finished, but I picked up a few extra hours at the depot and this was the only time I could do it before my shift started.
“Don’t get used to it,” I said. “But you need some time to go find enough duct tape to fix that bag. If you don’t, I just might finish the job next time I come in here.”
“Whatever you say, Champ.”
He shuffled away to work with some other young talent in that way that all old coaches did. Ray Armstrong reminded me a lot of the way Mr. Haye kept an eye on me when I was a kid. He never cared about your past, he only wanted to make sure you reached your potential. I decided a long time ago that if I ever made it to the top, I was taking him with me.
The trip this far downtown usually annoyed me. If I had to leave my neighborhood, I didn’t want it to be to go to some rich asshole’s building so I could talk with a bunch of other rich assholes about improving myself. Today, I was in a better mood. I guess knowing that I only had to do this so few more times was making it easier.
The lobby was stuffed full of yuppies in suits and ties, all of them clutching their briefcases like they contained the secret to life. The way they walked around cursing to themselves and frantically punching buttons on their cell phones made me question whether they weren’t just a bunch of robots put here for my amusement.
“Oh… ho, ho! There’s the badass.”
God, help me.
“I thought that was you! You didn’t beat anybody up on your way over here, did ya tough guy?” He pronounced it didja.
“Only here to take care of my business,” I said, just like every other time he asked me the same stupid question.
His name was Steve… something, and he worked the security desk before the building’s main elevators. You had to sign in with him and let him check your bag before you got to go up to your floor. Somewhere along the line I let it slip that I trained to fight and ever since I’d been suffering his lame jokes.
“Let me ask you something,” he said.
I can’t wait. “Go ahead.”
“I’ve seen that cage fighting stuff on T.V. Doesn’t it get a little awkward rolling around on the ground like that with another half-naked man? I mean, it seems to me-”
“You’d be worried about getting hard?” I interrupted.
His face turned as red as a strawberry. “Uh, what? No! That’s disgusting.”
“But that’s what you’re implying, isn’t it?” Normally, I wouldn’t waste two breaths on this ignorant douchebag but it was entertaining to watch him flounder a little bit.
“I… no, of course not. It just seems funny to me, is all.” He was fumbling around with a stack of papers to give his hands something to do.
I looked over each of my shoulders and then leaned in so close to him that our noses nearly touched. His eyes got as wide as dinner plates. “I’ll tell you this, Steve…” I could smell the fear coming through his pores. “We do have a little bit of an initiation ritual down at the gym for the new guys. If you ever wanted to come down, I could personally show you the ropes, you know… if you’re into that sort of thing.” I winked and the color dropped right out of him.
“Uh… no, no thank you. They keep me pretty busy down here at the Hawthorne Building. I don’t have much time for cage fighting.” He waved me through with a quick hand, but he wouldn’t make eye contact.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “I think the guys down there would like you.”
“Uh huh. Okay, then. Have a nice day, Mr. Eason.”
He was so flustered that he even forgot to make me sign his log-in sheet. I stared him down as I walked to the elevator, but he never looked up.
Fitting In’s office was on the thirty-third floor. That was the stupid name of their organization: Fitting In. It reminded me of a lazy title for a porno, but I only had to come down here a couple more times so… who cares?
The check-in desk was down the hall and to the left. They always left me waiting there for way too long. I hoped it wouldn’t be the case today because I had to get to work.
“Mr. Eason?”
The girl’s name was Casey. She was usually the one to bring me back to the office.
“Yeah?”
“Mrs. Hemlock is ready to see you now.”
My ass hadn’t even hit the chair in the waiting area before she called me back. That had to be a first. “Already?”
“Right this way, please.”
Cheryl Hemlock wasn’t the energetic, plucky-type like her receptionist. She wore dark rimmed glasses and her hair was pulled back so tight that it always looked like she was on the verge of passing out from the pressure.
“Hello, Mrs. Hemlock,” I said. Casey gave me a sympathetic nod before scooting away.
“Sit down please, Sir.”
I picked the chair closest to her office door. Sitting too near to her authoritarian aura made me feel rigid.
She peered over the tops of her frames with a flat look. Her thin lips drew a line that almost cut her face in half. “Paperwork?”
“Right…” I said, stuffing my hands into my jeans pockets to fish for the little sheet of paper that would allow me to “pass Go.”
When I shoved it across her desk, she gave a disdainful look. “You really should keep these progress forms in better condition,” she said. “I’m sure your probation officer doesn’t appreciate seeing them all crumpled like this, either.” She shook her head as she smoothed it out over her planner.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I came straight from the gym,” as if that offered her any kind of acceptable reason.
I shifted in my chair as I watched her drag her pen down the list of tasks I’d completed during the week. Each time she passed over one, she made a little clicking noise with her tongue against the back of her teeth that I supposed meant she was seeing what she expected.
“All set?” I asked.
She shot me an annoyed look as if to say “be patient”, then kept reading. After what seemed like an eternity, she painstakingly put ink to paper and signed the bottom line of my sheet.
“This’ll do,” she said, “but I’d really like to see you pursue some other sort of hobby than this fighting thing. They’re all sorts of bad
characters who hang around boxing gyms. I’d hate to hear about you getting mixed up with any of them.”
“They’re good people,” I assured her. “Besides, I stay to myself for the most part.” It wasn’t worth trying to explain to her that the gym was the only thing keeping me on the right path.
“Mmm hmmm,” she said, her voice dripping in doubt. “Other than that, I’m pleased with your work hours. You’ve been keeping a busy schedule.”
“Yes, ma’am. I think I’m ready to move on from the program.”
“I’ll be the judge of-”
A leggy blonde with the darkest blue eyes I’d ever seen walked through the open door and cut her off mid-sentence. “Mrs. Hemlock, I have the information you requested on the court proceedings.”
Hemlock’s eyes bulged and the blonde recognized her mistake. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize you had a client with you.” She looked down and quickly acknowledged me. The second our eyes met, she tore hers away and put her focus back on her boss. I could see that she was holding her breath.
“I see that,” Mrs. Hemlock said. “Please be more considerate.”
The blonde girl’s cheeks turned rosy and she hid her nose behind the manila envelope she was holding. “I apologize. The door was open and…” her words trailed off toward a pregnant silence.
“Like I said, be more considerate next time and we won’t have this problem.”
The blonde turned to leave. “Wait,” Mrs. Hemlock said. “Since you’ve already interrupted us, you may as well leave me the court paperwork.”
“Oh, of course.” Her cheeks had gone from rosy to fire hydrant red. “Here you go.”
She set the envelope in front of her and turned to make a hasty retreat. On her way, she tried to steal another look at me, but I caught her. When I did, she snapped her head straight so fast, I thought she might throw herself off balance.
Mrs. Hemlock blathered on about something else but I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. I was too focused on the girl. I leaned forward in my seat so I could watch her go.