Work for Hire

by Margo Karasek

  Julian stopped pouring. “Right.”

  His glass stood more than half empty, the neck of the bottle resting against its rim.

  “Well, then, how did she know how to destroy the backs? I mean, that day, you said whoever did it had to have photography experience because they knew exactly what to do to cause the most damage with the least effort; that someone without the experience wouldn’t have known to spray-paint the sensors. So how could Lisa know?”

  Julian’s hand wavered, and a bit of wine sloshed out of the bottle, past the glass, to rest in a puddle on the wooden planks next to his feet.

  “Shit!” He reached for a napkin and bent down to wipe the puddle dry, but in the process overturned his drink. More red liquid trickled to the floor. “Shit, shit, shit,” he exclaimed, swiping at the wine like it was blood gushing from an open wound. As he grabbed for another napkin, he called over, “Maybe she got lucky.”

  “I doubt it. You said yourself the vandalism was very organized. How could luck have anything to do with it?”

  Julian very quietly cleaned up the mess.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said as he came to resume his seat, this time not too close to me. “By the way, did you manage to get your brief in on time?”

  The change in conversation didn’t fool me, especially since Julian refused to meet my gaze. More, his words jarred another memory loose.

  “I think you do know,” I spoke slowly, trying to wrap my brain around the implications of what Julian said, of what he did. “Oh my God, you do!” Mentally, I pointed an accusatory finger straight at him. “That’s why you were acting so strange on the train when I asked about the security tape. You know there was no way she could’ve done it. Oh my God, you framed her on purpose even though you know she didn’t do anything!”

  I expected Julian to react, to deny my words, to yell, to do something. Instead, he stayed where he was and shrugged.

  “Okay, fine, I knew. So what?”

  “So what?” I exploded and jumped from my seat. “You lied! You got her fired for no reason!”

  Julian snorted. “No reason? Need I remind you of all the reasons? Her vindictiveness, her manipulations, just to name a couple. Should I go on? Hell, you should be grateful.”

  “Grateful?” The word knocked me back a step. “Can you really not see how wrong you are?” I gasped. “You accused someone of a crime you knew she couldn’t have committed. You got her fired. You destroyed her relationship with Stephen.”

  I stared at Julian—at his magazine-cover-quality good looks—and for the first time, really saw the ugliness beneath. He was no Mr. GQ. He was Dorian Gray, beautiful on the outside but disfigured within. “Have you no morals? You’re fine with cheating as long as it gets you ahead. You don’t think twice about making false accusations, about destroying lives and careers. What next? When can I expect you to throw me under?”

  Julian blanched, but the recoil was brief. Without warning, he lunged at me, like a cobra going after its prey, and shackled my wrist, his grip so firm it was almost painful.

  “Morals?” he hissed. “You want to talk to me about morals, lady? Then let’s talk about yours. You’re worried about Lisa’s destroyed relationship with a married man?”

  “Just because Lisa was wrong,” I defended, “doesn’t make what you did right. I’m sorry, but I have to tell Stephen.”

  Julian laughed, the sound dry and lacking all humor.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “You don’t think Stephen knows exactly what I did? Hell, I did him the biggest favor. He’s been looking for the cleanest way to get rid of her, and I provided him with one. Surprised?” Julian asked, reading my face to a tee. “Lisa’s year was up, baby. Stephen likes to rotate them on a regular basis. I got a nice bonus for doing Stephen’s dirty work.”

  I was speechless. These people …

  “Grow up, Tekla,” Julian hammered away at me. “And call me when you do.” He sneered at me like I was nothing more than a slightly interesting piece of ass. “Maybe then we can have some fun.”

  He pushed me away, towards the door.

  I wanted to cry. I had never felt so out of place, so unwelcomed. I scrambled for my bag and scurried for the exit.

  “Whatever, Julian,” I said, pausing at the door only long enough to have a final say—because I would not give him the satisfaction of the last word. “But let me give you some advice. Don’t be so gullible about Monique. The minute she finds someone better than you, someone more willing to bend the rules, where will that leave you? Be careful, or you’ll end up like Lisa.” And on that, I slammed the door shut behind me and left with my head held high.

  CHAPTER 27

  URANTIA FOUNDATION v. Maaherra.

  Burrow-Giles v. Sarony.

  Penguin Books v. New Christian Church.

  I flipped through a stack of index cards and stared at the case names—at my legal precedent and Markus’s likely case law.

  I needed to summarize the holdings—to write them out on the back of the cards to prepare—so I wouldn’t sound like a stumbling fool under questioning at tomorrow’s argument. But I couldn’t make myself write a word, couldn’t hold two legal thoughts together.

  Hell, I hadn’t even written out my opening remarks—let alone memorized them.

  Because all I could do was think about Julian, and his parting words.

  Grow up, Tekla … Maybe then we can have some fun.

  God.

  How could I have been so wrong about him?

  And why, I thought as I put the stack of cards down and rubbed my face, was I still obsessing over a good-for-nothing man?

  I sighed, unable to deny the obvious: I was like all those other man-starved females who, when faced with the professional opportunity of a lifetime, would rather pine over a hopeless relationship.

  I fisted my hands, shook my head and tried to make myself focus. Winning the argument was too important.

  Judicial clerkship. Cravath associate. ACLU staffer. Tenured professor.

  I chanted the potential rewards like affirmations.

  Fruitlessly.

  Because no nebulous future—no matter how bright—stood a chance against a crushed heart, or at least a bruised ego.

  Pathetic.

  Unfortunately, my less-than-stellar studying hadn’t improved any when, ten minutes later, the intercom buzzed.

  It was Darius the doorman.

  “Miss Tekla, you gotta come downstairs. Now.”

  His voice didn’t sound right. It had none of its usual lilting banter. Actually, it sounded downright panicked.

  Had something happened? Oh God. Maybe it was my parents, and this was the proverbial late night call, and the police were waiting, downstairs, to notify me.

  Except it wasn’t that late.

  Still. I raced to the elevators as pictures of my father in a hospital bed or my mother trapped in a mangled car snapped in and out of my head.

  Calm down. You’re probably exaggerating things in your mind, I reasoned as the elevator descended to the first floor. It was nothing. Darius was just stressed. I would be stressed if I had to deal with obnoxious, think-they’re-better-than-everybody law students all day, pandering to their every whim.

  But the group of people gathered in the dorm’s lobby like gaping spectators at the scene of an accident didn’t help calm my nerves.

  “Excuse me,” I said, pushing through the crowd until I reached the front desk and Darius and …

  Gemma.

  Kneeling in the center, in an oversized white tee shirt, crying hysterically. Her feet were bare, her shirt and her loose hair were stained with what smelled like vomit, and the soles of her feet were dirty and torn—bloody, in fact.

  I could barely comprehend the sight in front of me.

  Yet this dirty, disheveled wreck was Gemma, and she was here, in my dorm, alone, at ten p.m. on a Friday, without any warning.

  “Gemma?” I whispered and moved to kneel beside her. I was uncertain what to
do and say next, as a host of possible explanations for her being here, in this condition, took root in my mind.

  Maybe she had been mugged nearby, and I was the closest person she knew? Of course she would come to me.

  Yet …

  What of her shoes, her clothes? Surely no mugger would strip her bare like this.

  But, oh God, I could feel myself growing ill … a rapist.

  Still, even that horrifying possibility didn’t explain her mangled feet. Their state suggested she had run on them quite a distance, like all the way from the townhouse to my dorm.

  In October. Through close to fifty filthy city streets.

  I leaned in to touch her shoulder. The distinct odor of stale alcohol broke through the stench of vomit. Gemma didn’t react to my touch.

  “She been crying like this since she come, Miss Tekla,” Darius offered. “Except sometimes she screams for her Maman, and then she moans your name. That’s how I knew to call you.”

  “Gemma?” I prodded, terrified. But as I looked her over carefully, it was then I realized—she wasn’t hurt by a stranger. She was drunk. Again. Drunk, and sick, and plopped in the middle of my dorm, amidst my classmates, on the night before my oral argument, crying over her anything-but-caring mother. My fear dissipated, but my hackles started rising.

  It was getting more and more difficult not to hate the Lamonts.

  I looked up from Gemma to all the snickering faces staring down at us, and I felt my own face burn, as if I were the one drunk with old puke smeared all over me.

  I was guilty by association.

  Except she wasn’t my relative.

  “Gemma,” I demanded, and I shook her. Hard.

  Gemma’s head snapped back—her tear-stained eyes shutting closed—and then she lolled forward, like a ragdoll.

  “How much did you have to drink?” I persisted in my questioning.

  And, more pertinently, what the hell was I going to do with her?

  She had to get home—and out of the lobby of my dorm, obviously—but the how of it remained beyond my mind’s grasp.

  Gemma was in no state to make it back on her own, and I couldn’t take the time to drag her home myself. The oral argument loomed bright and early tomorrow, and I wouldn’t let the Lamonts and their never-ending issues get in its way. No amount of cash would make me jeopardize my chance.

  But that left Gemma. Here.

  And there was no Lisa to call and take the problem off my hands.

  Just my luck that now she was gone.

  Of course, I should probably call one of the parents and hope for the best, but …

  “Not drink,” Gemma mumbled out, her slurred words pushing through my reverie. “Just little. Help swallow pills.” She sobbed. “Want to die,” she moaned. “Maman hates me. Want to die.”

  “What?!”

  My hands dropped from Gemma as if her skin burned. Darius and the other spectators around us got all quiet.

  “What are you talking about?” I yelled at Gemma, as her “want to die” reverberated in the hushed hall. “What pills?”

  But Gemma remained mum, eyes closed and head hanging, any further speech clearly beyond her capabilities.

  My own skin prickled; my stomach clutched.

  Pills and booze. Would Gemma do something so drastic, so final?

  I contemplated her slumped body, its loose limbs and yellowish tint.

  Would a desperate teenager seeking attention from a disinterested parent down pills with the aid of booze if she thought that would bring the parent home?

  Yes. Especially since no fourteen-year-old could really grasp the finality of death.

  And here I was, badmouthing Gemma while she lay, maybe dying, right in front of me.

  “Gemma, what did you do? What did you take?” I sobbed, reaching for her limp body and hugging her head. “Come on, Gemma, speak to me. Wake up. Please. Please don’t die on me.” I rocked us both to and fro. “Come on, what did you take?”

  “Tylenol,” Gemma finally mumbled.

  I exhaled.

  Okay. Good. She was still talking. And Tylenol. I could handle Tylenol.

  Tylenol wasn’t as bad as, say, sleeping pills. The girl couldn’t die from an overdose of Tylenol. Could she?

  “How much?” I asked, and held my breath.

  Just because the drug didn’t sound deadly didn’t mean it didn’t do serious damage.

  “Bottle,” she slurred.

  Oh God.

  I gaped up at Darius and the others around us.

  “Somebody call an ambulance. Now,” I ordered.

  “WHAT INSURANCE DOES SHE HAVE?” the nurse asked quietly.

  “I don’t know.”

  I also hadn’t known Gemma’s medical history, whether she was allergic to any medications, the name of her primary care physician, or the family’s preferred hospital—all the information a parent or guardian would have—when the paramedic had asked me on our way to the emergency room.

  “Does she have insurance?” the nurse in admissions asked, looking up from her stack of paperwork and glaring at me.

  We were in Bellevue—Gemma was in the Intensive Care Unit getting her stomach pumped, and I was in the Admissions office trying to deal with her paperwork. The ambulance driver had taken us there when it became clear I knew nothing about Gemma’s medical preferences. The public hospital had seemed the safest, and closest, bet. Plus, with the attempted suicide, Gemma would need Bellevue’s psychiatric expertise.

  “I’m not sure. I mean, she must. Her parents are very wealthy, so I’m sure they do.” I rushed to answer, my voice almost breathless.

  “And where are her parents?” the nurse asked as she tapped what surely were pressed-on nails on the stack.

  “Ahh … ” That was the question of the night. I had tried both Stephen and Monique, but neither was returning my calls, even with the urgent, detailed, and voluminous messages I left behind. And Xander wasn’t picking up either. “I’m trying to locate them now. I’m sure they’ll be here shortly. And they’ll have all that information for you.”

  “Uh-huh,” the nurse said. “And who, exactly, are you?”

  I shifted from foot to foot. “I’m the patient’s tutor?” I replied, my voice squeaking. I felt like a child telling its teacher the dog ate the homework.

  Tutor. How lame.

  “I see,” the nurse curtly answered back. She stared at me, her eyes black and unmoving, her glare almost as intimidating as Professor Johnson’s. I tried to glimpse her nametag—surely a name would make her less official, more human—but failed to see one. “Are you authorized to care for the minor in the parents’ absence?”

  “Not exactly,” I hedged. I itched to squirm away, but didn’t dare. What with a suicidal minor, missing-in-action parents, and a clearly less-than-competent, barely-old-enough “adult” trying to claim responsibility, the nurse was suspicious enough already. The wheels in her head must have been spinning, turning out three words: Child Protective Services.

  Although, I thought as I straightened, why I should care was beyond me. I had done nothing wrong. I was here in the hospital, in the middle of the night, trying to deal with the mess when the parents weren’t. If I wasn’t good enough for nurse Nazi, tough. Let her call social services. That would at least solve my problem; take Gemma off my hands.

  Pale, sad, sick Gemma.

  With tubes attached to her arms and nose and jammed down her throat.

  Lonely, vulnerable Gemma.

  I gulped. She couldn’t handle another upheaval, certainly not in the form of social workers trying to pry her away from her family, no matter how bad that family may be.

  I couldn’t abandon Gemma, even if it meant pleading with nurse Nazi.

  “I mean, I can’t like sign her medical consent forms or anything,” I told the nurse. The consent forms were an issue, especially since the doctors wanted to admit Gemma for psychiatric observation and had her on suicide watch. “But I’m sort of like the designate
d nanny until the parents get here. Okay?”

  The nurse eyed me for what felt like hours, then, finally, nodded and waved me off.

  I scurried for the door, rushing to get out of the office before she realized there had been no such nanny when Gemma drank her alcohol-and-pill concoction and ran barefoot and half-naked through a good chunk of Manhattan. Or, that had Gemma’s rich parents bothered with a real nanny, there likely would have been no attempted suicide and subsequent hospitalization in the first place.

  Everything—if anyone thought about it—indicated that Child Protective Services was probably just what Gemma did need.

  “ARE YOU FAMILY?”

  I stood in the ICU’s waiting area grinding my teeth. “No,” I bit out to the guard in charge of visitors, “but until the family arrives, I’m their surrogate, and am authorized to see the patient on their behalf.”

  That last bit was total bullshit, but the guard didn’t need to know that. Actually, come to think of it, I should’ve just said I was a distant cousin. What would he do, check?

  “Family only,” the guard announced.

  “Fine,” I seethed. “Then you can go tell the patient in area two—you know, the attempted suicide—that there is someone who really wants to see her, but you won’t let her in.”

  The guard considered my face closely. “Five minutes,” he said, and moved out of my way.

  I approached Gemma’s cot a bit tentatively, for Gemma appeared just as pale and sick as she had in the ambulance. The doctor I’d hunted down before the visit said her stomach was clear of toxins, but she would have to be monitored over the next couple of days for potential life-threatening liver damage. Apparently, Tylenol and alcohol really didn’t mix.

  “Gemma?” I asked as I sat on the edge of Gemma’s bed and touched her hand.

  An IV needle was taped to the translucent skin. Blood had congealed around the needle’s tip. The beep of a distant heart monitor punctuated the hush in the ICU. A low buzz of conversation from the other beds hummed in the background. I could smell Lysol and Clorox masking the stench of medicine and human waste. God, I hated hospitals.

  Gemma looked at me.