“You certainly have,” Becky said.
Was that a pleased tone? In her delirium, Sarah smiled, sure that it was. “Those are all the packets,” she said proudly, “and these are the graphs and the reports and sales figures and media charts you wanted. And here’s the presentation.” She handed Becky the chart, the pièce de résistance. And now, can I please go home and go to…
Becky looked at the disk like it held the plague. “What the hell is that?”
Sarah stared at her. “It’s…the presentation,” she said. Seeing Becky’s blank stare, she reminded her, “You said you wanted it to be really snazzy, remember? You authorized us to bring in a temp from CompuPro to add animations and…and music, and…”
“Yes, yes,” Becky said, with an impatient wave of her hand. “But where are the slides?”
Sarah stared at her like she’d lost her mind. “They don’t come with slides,” she said, trying desperately not to add you stupid slut. “You use the LCD projector…it runs right off the laptop.”
She should have known better. Becky’s eyes rolled back in her head like a terrified cow just at the mention of laptop. “Oh, no, I’m not,” she said, angry and accusing. Jacob, Sarah noticed, vanished. “I’m not using a goddamn laptop to give this presentation. Why didn’t anybody mention this earlier? I’ve got to give this fucking thing at two o’clock, why didn’t somebody mention it earlier?”
How precisely Becky thought that you could add moving images to a piece of plastic with ink on it, Sarah wasn’t sure. But obviously that’s exactly what she thought. “I…didn’t realize that you didn’t know about the LCD projector,” Sarah said slowly, feeling that delicious euphoria start to fade and the cold hard reality sink in.
“Listen here. I want slides printed up. SLIDES!”
Sarah did mental calculations. The meeting starts at noon. Presentation at two. It was now eight. It took about a minute a slide…there were one hundred and twenty slides…she could get them all printed out with an hour to spare. Plenty of time.
“All right, Becky,” she said. Peace within the storm, peace within the storm…
Becky had picked up one of the booklets…one with the printed stills. She glanced through it quickly and to Sarah’s horror, picked up a pen.
“Also, I’m going to need some changes.”
Sarah quickly saw the mountain of velo-bound presentation folders, the slides, all of it, getting shot to hell. Peace within…oh, suck.
By noon, Sarah had moved from euphoria to hysteria. She had already burst into spontaneous tears at her keyboard not once, but twice. Jacob was her godsend, fetching her Jolt and Mountain Dew. He would have set up an IV if he’d known how. She flashed through the changes Becky made, then sent him with the prints to make the note pages and velo-bind the presentation stuff. She printed out each slide, removing the animation stuff that would leave the little icon. Stupid cow, stupid cow, stupid cow, she thought. The “peace within” mantra just wasn’t working, and the stupid cow one at least gave her enough fuel to continue going. She was seriously considering taking a cab home…or saying fuck it, and going to sleep under her desk. She’d probably go with the cab. At least she’d be away from Becky…
“Sarah, how’s it coming?”
Sarah glanced at the printer, which was moaning like it was going to die a horrible electronic death. She picked up the last sheet of acetate. “Last slide,” she said, putting it over the last white sheet of paper with a flourish. “And the overhead is all set up in the conference center.”
“And you ordered lunch, of course?” Becky’s eyes narrowed. “I know I didn’t ask you to, but I figured you should know…”
Sarah smiled with an exhausted sort of smugness. “I ordered lunch. Maria’s. They delivered at eleven forty-five.”
“You’re tired, aren’t you?” As if she had only just noticed, Becky squinted her eyes, studying Sarah’s face.
And about to remedy that, Sarah thought. “Yes, I am.”
“You shouldn’t stay at that keyboard.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“You should get up,” Becky said thoughtfully. “Walk around. Definitely pick up some lunch. I’ll be out of my meeting at three, and maybe we could go over the Veggi-round TV spots they’re shooting next month.”
Sarah didn’t believe she’d heard correctly. “You mean…you want me to stay?”
Becky looked at her like she was from Pluto. “It’s noon, Sarah. You did a good job, and all, but I wasn’t going to give you a half day.”
“A HALF DAY?” Sarah felt like she was channeling the voice that was yelling. “I was here all night!”
Becky blinked, obviously not expecting her docile A.A.E. to start shouting. “And I appreciate it,” she said, in that sickly smooth voice that Sarah hated.
“I am going home,” Sarah said, grabbing her coat. It tangled when she tried to stick her arm through it…she slowly realized she was putting it in the wrong hole. She straightened it out. “I am leaving here. I’ll be lucky if I don’t wrap my car around a telephone pole from here to Santa Monica Boulevard. Are you out of your mind? I am going home!”
Becky sighed wearily. “Oh, all right. There is just one more thing I need you to do, though. It’ll be quick, and it’ll be on your way.” She shot her an accusing glare. “You said you’d do anything to make my job easier, you know.”
Paying your dues, peace within the storm…
“What did you want me to do?” Sarah said instead. Sainthood, here I come.
Becky rummaged around in her pockets, pulling out a key. Sarah stared at it. “This is the key to my apartment. I just need you to take care of Charlie. You remember Charlie, right? The cat I asked you to feed over the July Fourth weekend, when I was out of town?”
Sarah sighed. “You want me to feed Charlie.”
“Not…well, no.” Becky shrugged. “His litter box is just behind the…”
“NO.”
Becky looked at her. “Well, it will get you out of work early, won’t it?” she said like she was conferring a favor.
Sarah stared at the key, at the pile of presentation booklets, at Jacob who was staring at Becky like she was possessed. She didn’t even have any inflection in her voice when she spoke.
“Becky, I quit. I completely, utterly, totally quit.” She grabbed her purse. “I’m through paying my dues, I’m not growing up, and fuck peace within the storm!”
Sarah made it home safely, guessing that it was probably due to whichever saint it was that watched over drunks, tramps and stupid twats who stuck to jobs long past the point of abuse. Martika was blessedly still at work when she got home at twelve-thirty. She took off her clothes and burrowed under her covers naked. She wandered through the living room at around three naked, to pee, then promptly went back to sleep. She finally emerged at around seven, realizing she was hungry. She’d been crying in her sleep…she’d left makeup on, and there were rings of mascara around her eyes. She looked like she’d been beat up.
She rummaged through the fridge. There was some Chalula, the hot sauce that Martika used on pretty much everything, and a few takeout containers. God knows how long they’d been in there. There weren’t even any ingredients to cook anything. She rattled through the cupboards, finally producing mushroom-flavored ramen. She cooked that on the stove, yawning as she tied her terry-cloth robe more tightly around her. She then picked up the phone, dialing Benjamin’s work number.
“Benjamin Slater.”
“I quit my job.”
She heard him sigh, and she sighed in return. “What happened?” he asked, in an exhausted tone of voice.
She went through everything, from the copying to the litter box. “I can’t believe she asked me to do that,” she finished, repeating “I can’t believe” for about the fiftieth time in the whole story. She still reeled from the shock of it.
“Well, it’s obviously a done deal,” Benjamin said, still with that tired note in his voice. She knew he’d been w
orking hard, but dammit, a little more righteous indignation was called for, a little voice told her. “So now what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said woodenly. “Find another job, I suppose.”
“That would seem like the best course of action.”
“You could be a little more…I don’t know, helpful,” Sarah complained.
“I don’t know how I can be,” he said. “I mean, you just quit your job with no notice and walked out saying something about ‘fuck inner peace’ or whatever. I don’t know how I can help you out of something like that.”
This was so him Sarah thought, then she was starting to fume. “Why don’t you try telling me something cheerful, then?” she suggested acidly. “You know, like ‘I really miss you’ or ‘I’ll see you soon.’ You know. Boyfriend-fiancé kind of stuff.”
“I miss you,” he said. “And actually, I will see you soon.” He took a deep breath, and his voice took on an intonation of pride. “I got it. I got the promotion.”
Sarah shut the burner off with a click. “What?”
“I got the promotion. I’ll be head of the L.A. office.”
Sarah beamed. “Oh, honey! That’s wonderful!” This was it! Her shelter…no, her peace within the storm. This was the answer. He’d move down, and Martika would move out. No more noisy sex bouts to put up with, how ’bout that? And she would have the financial resources to rest with…she could look for a job she liked, since Benjamin made more than enough to pay the bills. And he’d said once they got married that she could stay home with the kids…rather insisted upon it, in fact, since he appreciated the upbringing his mother gave him as a stay-at-home mom. At any rate, she could use the break until then. “So when are you coming? I’ll need to give Martika notice.” She said it, almost crowing.
There was a pause. “Um, Sarah…I’ve done a lot of thinking.”
“So have I. I figure we don’t have to have both desks in the second bedroom, just yours would be fine. It’s a lot bigger than mine, anyway and…”
“Sarah, I’m not living with you.”
He might as well have been speaking Swahili. “What? What?” Her mind went numb.
“I’m not going to live with you.” He sighed. “You’re just a little too much of a distraction, and frankly, I’ve gotten a lot done…I can’t afford to screw this up. I really need to focus.”
The peace she envisioned shattered like a glass bottle dropped on a hard tile floor. “You need to focus,” she repeated carefully.
“I figured I’d get my own place, and you could visit me every weekend, just like you used to do when you lived up here. Hell, we could probably see each other more than that. We practically lived together our final year of college, remember?”
But never in actuality, she thought, again with that sheen of numbness. It reminded her of her state at five that morning. “So, you’re moving down here, but you’re not going to live with me, so you can focus on your job.”
“That’s it,” he said encouragingly, since she wasn’t reacting with any emotion. He sounded relieved. “That’s it exactly.”
“Martika was right,” she said, with a voice of growing wonder. “You are a dick.”
“What?”
“You…are…a…dick.” She said the words slowly, with exaggeration. “Which word don’t you understand?”
“Thanks a lot, Sarah,” he said, his voice freezing cold. “Thanks a fucking lot. I tell you about my promotion, and this is the best you can do? Thanks for being happy for me, I mean, what else could I expect from my girlfriend?”
“Oh, don’t play that shit with me,” she said, leaping up from the chair she’d sat down in. “Don’t even try to guilt me. I pulled a twenty-nine-hour straight day working for an idiot. I could have been killed. And your idea of boyfriend-type support is that I should grow up and pay my dues? And now, after being engaged for four fucking years, you’re going to move to the city that I moved to—” she took a deep breath “—JUST TO GET YOU A PLACE TO LIVE, AND NOW YOU’RE GOING TO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE? JUST BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING DISTRACTION?”
“Don’t yell at me. I mean it, Sarah,” he said, his voice full of dire threat. “I don’t have to put up with this shit.”
“No, you don’t. Not ever again.” Her voice wavered, and she knuckled her tears out of her eyes, smearing the liquid down her cheeks with the back of her hands. “Go find someone else who knows how to be your girlfriend, dickhead. And fuck off!”
She hung up on him. Within a moment, the phone rang again. “What?”
“We’re through, Sarah,” he said. “And don’t ever hang up on me again.” With that he promptly hung up on her.
She sat, shaking, unable to believe what had just transpired. She was now unemployed, she thought, and now single again, a state she hadn’t been in…God, had it been five years? She’d been twenty. And she hadn’t been much good at dating, even then.
She realized she was rocking back and forth, and stood up, walking around. She felt like screaming, or doing something similarly crazy. She felt like vomiting, but nothing came. She cried a little more—it helped, but not enough.
She needed to vent this. She needed to get a grip on it. Somehow.
What, she thought, crazily, would Martika do?
After a moment’s thought, she went to the freezer, and got out the bottle of Stolichnaya Vodka that Martika kept stored there. She then got out the cranberry concentrate which was also in the freezer. Then, with the care of a chemist, she poured the vodka directly into the pitcher of cranberry concentrate, and mixed it. She got herself out a glass and filled it to the rim.
“Peace within the storm,” she said, with determination, and emptied the glass in one long, extended swallow.
I am sick to death of that tight-assed prig.
Martika got back to the apartment around ten or so. She was trying to stay away from it more and more lately, which was usually a sign that she’d be moving again, fairly soon.
She didn’t know what Taylor had been thinking. “She’s sweet,” he’d gushed, in that oh-so-Taylor way of his. “She’s like a little doll. You just want to stuff her in a backpack and take her home, put her under glass on your mantel. And a voice like a little cartoon girl…you know, one of those Japanese ones, where every other word they say is ‘Oh!’ with eyes as big as dinner plates.”
“And I would be interested in continuing to live with her why?” Martika had responded, smoking her Dunhills outside Tacos Tacos after a night of clubbing at Revolver.
“You’d be a good influence, darling,” he’d purred, knowing that her maternal instinct was a weakness, damn him. She was the goddamn “den mother of Santa Monica Boulevard,” self-appointed. The idea of training a real daughter instead of her wanna-bes was a little appealing.
When she first met Sarah, she really thought she could do something. She was so…so funny, in a clean, prepackaged kind of way. She was a lot of good raw material. She had to ditch the Eddie Bauer catalog crap that she was wearing, to start, and she had to have that stick up her ass surgically removed, but otherwise, Martika had some high hopes.
Those hopes had diminished over the past few months. Now, going back to her apartment was like going back to Bosnia, when her home was supposed to be her refuge from the pricks, both literal and figurative, of the outside world. She had gotten nowhere with the Bitch, as Martika now called her. It was time to give notice.
She got home, and there were no lights on, so she almost jumped out of her skin when she heard Sarah’s voice. “Tika? That you?”
Martika made a sharp gasp, then grumbled. “You scared the shit out of me, Sarah,” she said. One more thing to add to the Bitch List, as she’d referred to Sarah’s various flaws when speaking with Taylor. “Why are you sitting here with no lights on, anyway?”
“There aren’t any lights on, are there?”
Was it her imagination, or was Sarah slurring? Rummaging around, Martika turned on a light, and gasped again.
There was a pool of red on the table, around an empty glass, a pair of scissors, and Sarah’s arms. To her relief, it was too thin to be blood. One sniff suggested it was her emergency Stoli.
“Sweetie, what…” Martika started, then gasped again as she got a good look at Sarah. “Oh, shit. Sarah, what did you do?”
“Huh? Oh.” Sarah’s fingers went to her head. Her hair was now shorn unevenly, sticking out in comical waves and tufts. “Did you know that there are Native American tribes that cut their hair to mourn people?” she asked, as if she were merely discussing a casual topic of conversation. “I always thought that was sort of cool.”
All thoughts of leaving fled Martika’s head. From the looks of it, this little girl had done some serious damage to a fifth of strong vodka, and cut off all her hair. This was some deliciously juicy trouble, and the type that was right up Martika’s alley. Man trouble.
“Don’t worry,” Martika said, sitting down while shutting off her cell phone. The Bitch was dead, thank God—and Martika had some work to do with this poor little girl. “Just tell me everything, and I promise, we can make it all better.”
Chapter 6
The Changeling
Sarah woke the next day, with her mouth tasting vile and her head pounding. She seemed to recall waking up and staggering to the bathroom to throw up, which she did with enough force and momentum that the toilet seat fell on her head. She also seemed to remember Martika being there, like a watchful mother hen—which was strange, since Martika didn’t even like her. Did she?
Well, if she didn’t, she’d probably like her even less, now…flashes of last night came back to her in bizarre, disjointed cuts that reminded her of a really bad art house movie. Her, telling Martika about how she met Benjamin, and then proceeding to tell her entire life story and how it related to men and sex and oh God, why hadn’t Martika shut her up? Probably thought she was psychotic—best to humor her, Martika had probably been thinking, or else Sarah might have gotten violent. Sarah rubbed at her temples. Of course, that might have happened. She’d never been in quite the state she’d been in last night.
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