by Amber Burns
I nodded, and turned, eager to leave the room and the conversation behind. I began to stride again out of the room, being careful to keep my back extra straight, my head thrown back, and my strides as confident and cocky as ever. I reached the door and placed a hand on the door knob, turning the silver face to let myself free of the room.
“Oh, and Cartwright,” Offerton’s voice stopped me in my tracks.
I froze; refusing to turn around, but careful to stay in place, to suck up just enough to the man I knew controlled my income, my reputation, and my future. I could hear the passive smile dripping into his voice.
“Do find a girl that you can propose to for Friday.”
I felt the blood rush to my head, and my fingers squeezed the doorknob tightly, turning my knuckles white. I bit my lip and stared straight ahead, feeling my cheeks flush with frustrated rage, but not about to give the man that stood grinning behind me another single inch of satisfaction.
“Mr. Offerton,” I said with the most over the top enthusiastic tone I could muster. “By Friday, I will be married to the wholesome, virtuous wife that you demand.”
“Very good, young Cartwright,” I heard the voice crackle back. “Good night.”
“Good night,” I said.
And with that I twisted the door knob and let myself out of the room and down the stairs, never once glancing back.
4
Molly
After Mr. Cartwright left, I stood at the bottom of the staircase, just like that, for quite a bit of time. I just stood there, staring up at the iron spindles as they curved around each other up towards the room the men now occupied. I had been in that room only once before, earlier tonight, when the owner… or the boss… or whoever exactly he was, had asked me to bring him a drink and told me that I should ask my employer to meet him in that very room, and promptly. My fingers tangled around the banner as I stared up at the dizzying interlocking bits of iron. The curlicue of steps and banister and the ghosts of so many forgotten foot falls both tantalized and dizzied me. How many stories had gotten caught in the iron grates of this tangled staircase? I finally was forced to tear my eyes away from the swirling mass of ornate iron because I felt completely dizzied and overwhelmed by the grandiosity of it all.
I had taken just three steps away from the stairs when I was hit by the stilling fact that I had no idea where I should head to, or what I should be doing. I stopped then, paralyzed by the anxiety of realizing that I lacked purpose.
Who am I? What am I doing? Oh, God, what in the world am I doing inside of the mansion?
A woman pushed past me, smelling of expensive perfume and too much alcohol. Her laughter tinkled as she pressed her breasts against the chest of a man who wore a gold ring in his eyebrow. They fluttered past me in a rustle of hands chasing up skirts and unzipping pants, all lust and drunken foot falls and sparks of sexual tension. I swallowed and hurried back to the staircase, my fingers instinctively finding the banister and again winding their way tightly around its girth. I did not belong here. Not at all. And without Mr. Cartwright standing somewhere nearby, I had absolutely no sense of what to do. This left me with the unsettling realization that, without someone telling me what to do, I was absolutely nothing and totally no one.
I stared at my fingers wrapped around the banister as the loud music shook the floor beneath my feet and the shrieks of the party goers smashed into my ears. I felt my body begin to shiver though it was certainly not at all cold in the room; it was, after all, LA and the pressing of so many bodies grinding up against and into so many other bodies had raised the temperature a considerable amount as it was. Still, discomfort is an incredible weather master and so it was in a literal hotbed of sex and drugs that I found myself shivering and clinging to some iron banister for dear life.
“Why the fuck did I decide to do this?” I whispered to myself, staring at my fingers, trying to block the blaring music and the whimpering of a couple who had begun to undress each other to my left out of my ears. “I am not Melissa. I can try to be Melissa, and I can want to be Melissa… who wouldn’t want to be Melissa? I mean, come on.”
Melissa was beautiful. All cartoonish big eyes and bobbing breasts and flowing golden hair. She was the wet dream of every man in LA, and some women, too. But Melissa was not just buoyant breasts and plump lips. Not at all. She was smart, frighteningly smart, and that was the reason I first had befriended her. Well, she had befriended me. Back in college, on the very first day of class.
***
The classroom had smelled of sweat and sunscreen and old books. I had thought that Harvard would smell better than my public high school, but clearly, I had been very wrong. I tugged at my shirt and slipped into a desk at the side of the room. The other first years were filtering in, some of them clearly already fast friends. A boy who wore a collared shirt and a backward baseball cap was smacking his gum against the roof of his mouth and flirting with a red headed girl who looked more interested in the professor than in his jock boy antics.
A cluster of blonde haired, tanned girls chirped quickly about the benefits of mountain air quality in comparison to city air quality. Two boys pushed glasses up their noses and argued about whether or not a certain chess move was legal or not. I turned my eyes away from the crowd of chattering teenagers and watched the sunlight tickle the window. I had been looking forward to Harvard, because, well, because it was Harvard, and I had really thought that it would prove to be a lot different from high school. But the first few moments of this very first class had looked and sounded and even smelled exactly like all the things I had so hated about every single second of my high school days. And, of course, there I was again, all alone, staring out the window, clutching at the textbook that I had already read because, fuck, I couldn’t help it. I actually found Advanced Economics really fascinating, and once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down.
“Is it okay if I sit here?” A melodic voice came from beside me.
I turned my head quickly, completely taken off guard. A girl with long blonde hair stood beside me, her hand placed on the top of the chair that rested next to mine. I was shocked that someone wanted to sit beside me.
“Um… sure….” I said tentatively, wondering if this girl was just looking to sit beside me because she sensed that I might be able to help her get the 4.0 in the class that she so desired.
“Great!” she said. She slid into the seat and slapped her books down upon the desk. “OMG like, how fucking excited are you for this class?” She sputtered. “I am like, so fucking pumped to really delve into the heart of Advanced Ec, you know? Like, not just that surface level bullshit crap that they made us waste all that time on in high school. Like, seriously, I don't know about you, but why the hell did we spend two years just covering supply and demand? Pretty sure children understand that concept. Like, let’s really get, like, into it? You know? I want to create my own, revised governmental system someday,” the blonde girl suddenly said, her train of thought as electric as the light in her eye. “And I’m gonna need a bit more depth, economically, than a little bit of supply and demand. You know what I’m saying? I mean, come on, am I right? I do not just want to, like, spend another year or, like two, learning about some obvious bullshit that anyone could just Google online. I want to know the fucking industry secrets!” She huffed and flopped back in her seat, a little out of breath with passion.
I could not help but laugh. My laugh made the grin fall from her face, and she sat upright again, glancing at me nervously.
“Oh, my god, I was just way too over the top, and nerdy and shit wasn’t I? Oh fuck. I am so sorry. I do that. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head, and a half smile cracked its way across my face.
“No,” I said quietly, “it’s fine, really.”
The girl wrinkled up her nose and picked at a bit of robin’s egg blue nail polish that was peeling off of her thumbnail.
“No, I know how annoying I can be,” she mumbled, attacking the nail polis
h with a subconscious ferocity that slightly alarmed me. “Everyone always tells me to shut up and just, like, focus on… fuck, I don’t know… makeup and hair and crap. Because I’m good at that and why do I need to be good at anything else?” She huffed sarcastically.
She flopped back into her chair and shoved her books across the desk. I waited patiently for a few moments, thinking she might unleash another stream of frustrated profanities or perhaps launch into an equally animated speech concerning the faultiness of the school system in general. I would have been eager to hear her colorful opinion on that particular topic. But the blonde girl did not speak. Instead, she pulled at her top, kicked at the scuff marks that marred the floor beneath her desk, and tugged at her golden hair, sighing.
This continued for several minutes until, over the background clamor of high pitched girls’ voices vying for the attention of the jocks, I stuck out my hand across the desks and cleared my throat.
“I’m Molly,” I said tentatively, glancing at the girl carefully.
The blonde girl turned sharply in her seat, her perfect face a mask of surprise. Her huge blue eyes leaped from my outstretched hand to my face, and back to my hand again. After a moment of me awkwardly sitting there still sticking out my hand, the girl reached forward and grabbed my fingers and shook with a strength I had not expected.
“I’m Melissa,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I already fucking hate this class.”
At that, I could not help but burst out laughing. Melissa let go of my hand and leaned forward.
“What? Did I do the thing where I say too much crap again?”
I shook my head and coughed the laughter away.
“No, seriously, you don’t do that at all. I just… I have totally agreed with everything you have said so far. I am absolutely on board with you regarding all the crap they neglected to teach us in high school,” I said.
Melissa’s face lit up, and she nodded aggressively.
“Right!” She cried, her head bobbing up and down.
Several of the athletic looking boys glanced over at the blonde and grinned, running their eyes over her bobbing form. I ignored them and continued.
“Yes, completely,” I chuckled, nodding back along with her. It felt so good to have this girl, who looked like she should be scoffing at me and rolling her eyes at any sort of academic discussion, thoroughly on board with my own opinions; her passion for the academic perhaps even exceeding my own. “I just… I don’t know,” I started again, reconsidering what Melissa had said. “The class has not even started yet. I mean, the teacher is not even in the room yet. How can you hate it?” I laughed.
Melissa looked at me, and her eyes seemed to fill with excitement.
“Exactly!” she cried, raising a finger and pointing it up towards the ceiling in a ‘Eureka!’ sort of pose. “That is exactly it. We are here, on time, for class. Not early,” she added, gesturing to the clock that hung on the wall. “But on. Time. On. Fucking. Time.” She leaned forward, pressing her chipping nail polish nails against the top of my desk, her eyes alert and electric with ideas. “So where the hell is the prof? If you are a prof, should you not be so extremely passionate about what you are teaching that you basically jump out of bed every morning and run to get to class so that you can start sharing your knowledge and joy for the subject you are teaching as quickly as you can?” She stared at me, the question hanging in the air. I started to laugh again; her intensity was absolutely zany and, at the same time, absolutely intriguing and impressive. “Well?” She provoked when I did not immediately respond.
I did my best to weigh the question, despite the fact that it had just been hurled at me completely out of left field. All the while I considered what she had said Melissa sat there, maintaining her intense, inquisitive stare, her eyes boring into my own in question.
“Alright,” I said after several moments, “I can see what you are saying.” I thought for a second more and then nodded, sure now. “Yea. Yeah, completely. If you are a prof, then yea, you are literally getting paid to share what you know. And that would, for me, probably be the best thing ever.”
“Right!” Melissa yelped again, throwing her hands up into the air.
I nodded. “Yea,” I said. “Yeah! So where is the prof?”
“My point exactly,” Melissa said, slamming her fist down against the flimsy wooden desk and sending it shivering in response to her punishment. “My point exactly. And that, Molly, my friend,” she said with confidence, “is why I have decided that I hate this class.”
I nodded, still completely thrown off by the fact that this girl was choosing to sit with me and call me her friend. But by this point I had decided that I might as well go along with it. After all, she seemed like the kind of person I would really want to be around, for friendship reasons, and of course, for potential future business advantages.
“I get what you are saying now,” I said. “Yea, I guess you are on to something, Melissa.”
Melissa glanced from the face of the clock back to me and made a face.
“Well now the prof is not just not on time, but he is also late,” she announced, her lips drooping with disappointment. “And so now I have decided that I really fucking hate this class.”
“Yep,” I said, glancing at the group of students that stood at the back of the class. A girl pressed her hand against her breasts and threw her head back in a violent, over the top laugh, grazing the upper thigh of one of the muscular jocks. I sighed. “I really fucking hate this class, too.”
“Good,” said Melissa, smiling brightly. “Our mutual hatred can be the first thing we share, and from this, we can bond and become best friends.”
I stared at her for a moment, thinking for certain that she must be joking, but when I realized she was in earnest, I started laughing out loud again and ran a hand through my hair.
“Yea,” I agreed, nodding, and returning her smile. “I can be down with that. Let’s be best friends, then. Let’s do it.”
Melissa’s face changed suddenly. She turned from vivacious and passionately frustrated to serious and very grown up looking.
“Good,” she said, her vocal tone dropping, her posture suddenly resembling that of a middle-aged CEO. “You will not regret that decision. I am going places, I can promise you that, and any friend of mine, especially a best friend of mine,” she added, arching an eyebrow promisingly up her forehead, “is promised a ticket alongside me as I carve a pathway to absolute success.”
I stared at her for a moment, thinking that I should think of her words as crazy ravings. But I somehow knew, in a very weird, instinctual way, that this girl meant every syllable she spoke. And not only that, but that she would one day make good on her promises.
Before I could speak any words in return, a frazzled-looking man in a sweater vest shuffled in, running one hand through the small amount of hair that still clung stubbornly to his balding head, using his other hand to flip through a booklet on Economics that he clutched against his chest.
“Alright, children!” he called, his nasally voice bouncing shrilly off of the ears of all the first years that filled the room. Several chuckles and eye rolls greeted his cries. “Seats and ears, if you please!”
Melissa rolled her eyes at me. She flipped open her notebook and fished a pen from beneath her ear.
“Well,” she had whispered, “we can talk about that later. First, let us survive this bullshit excuse of a class.”
I had grinned, quite certain that I had just begun a friendship that I would never regret.
5
Molly
Melissa did prove good on the promise she had made to me on that very first day of our Harvard experience. Before she graduated, she had already won herself an internship and the biggest corporate head office in the city; a feat never before established by a woman her age. And then, through her great skillset of refined seduction and intense intelligence, she had somehow managed to finagle some sort of a crazy guaranteed work position for
herself as an intern to the CEO of one of the world’s most successful corporations. This employment win for her had somehow dragged me along, too, as the CEO’s paid personal assistant. So here I was, now, just twelve hours into the job, standing at the bottom of a staircase as behind me, a room full of drunken, drugged up people writhed against each other. They squealed as their clothes got soaked to the point of transparency from the ever-flowing champagne that poured from the ceiling. My employer had disappeared up a staircase and my whole job description was just a mirror of my life: lacking any definition, confused, and seemingly pointless.
“You should not have said yes to this,” I told myself again as a man staggered into me, grazing my ass with his hand as he tripped his way down to the dance floor. “You are seriously not cut out for this kind of a position. The pay is apparently going to be good, but what the hell does that matter if your employer can not even remember who you are the day after he hires you? You should seriously get out of this while you still have a chance, before he comes back.”