by Holly Hart
Stan doesn’t look up as he speaks. “Thirty seconds, maybe less.”
The operations room feels soaked with a nervous energy. It’s like someone has doused every surface with gasoline, and we’re just waiting around for the spark.
I feel myself getting ready to say something, but I bite my lip. I’m big enough to know that this isn’t my area of expertise.
The high school home page flashes up on Kim’s screen. I’d like to say it brings me back, but it doesn’t. I was a military brat. I followed dad around a dozen schools, maybe more.
“Bring it down,” I mutter. “All of it.”
Natalie shoots me a withering look. “If we take the whole site down, Kim will just go search somewhere else. We can’t hack the whole Internet, Nate.”
I sit back on my heels, reduced to looking on impotently. Kim’s mouse pointer moves to a link titled: “Archived Yearbooks.” She clicks it.
“How long, Jake?” Natalie asks in a calm tone of voice.
“Ten, nine…”
7
Kim
“Well…” Frankie says, pausing for a second. “Is he hot?”
I grit my teeth. I know Frankie – I know that when she’s got that tone of voice, I’m not going to like what she says. I’m not wrong. I’m half minded to throw the phone across the room.
“Frankie! That’s not the point! You know how much this means to me – what he did to me. It’s him, Nate – I know it is,” I say, tapping irritably at my keyboard.
The mouse pointer isn’t moving. “Damn thing’s crashed again!”
“Kim – girl chill. You’re acting crazy.”
“If you tell me to take ten deep breaths, I swear –.”
I break off. Frankie’s right, though I sure don’t want to admit it. I kind of wish she was here, not an ocean away. I could use a shoulder to – not cry on, but hug while I figure things out.
“So what if it is?” Frankie says. “You don’t even know if he had anything to do with –”
“With me getting bullied for years?” I spit back. My voice is acid: cold and bitter.
“Hey! I’m not the enemy here. Don’t take your mad out on me.”
I sigh, and the air seems to stream out of my lungs forever. When I’m done, I feel completely deflated. “I’m sorry, but –”
“But nothing. It’s fine. Seriously, though Kim. You told me London was going to be your fresh start. Was Nate the one that bullied you?”
“No, but –”
“Do you know it was him who wrote that letter?”
I bite my lip, I want to scream down the phone and drown out Frankie’s reasonableness.
“No, but –”
“Do you even know it’s the same guy?”
“Frankie!” I hiss. I just want a moment of silence; a moment to think; and Frankie’s not helping.
“Anyway…” Frankie continues, as if she’s not spent the last couple of minutes raking up every bad memory from my past and throwing them into the air like scattered leaves. “You never answered me. What does he look like: tall; big hands? Because you know what they say –”
I groan. “Frankie, you can’t boil everything in the world down to whether someone wants to sleep with you…”
“Well, sure,” Frankie giggles, “that’s one way to look at it. But I try and think about things differently – how can you be sure if you don’t find out?”
“No,” I say. I’m surprised by the firmness in my voice. “Trust me, Frankie, there is absolutely no way that I will ever sleep with Nate. First, he’s a colleague – you don’t shit where you eat. Second – he lives right next door! So that goes double. And third –”
I paused, distracted by the cursor finally starting to move on my screen. It goes haywire for a second, and the hard drive makes a screeching sound before everything settles back down. I was just about to hold my finger down on the power button, but I pull it back – almost guiltily.
“And third?” Frankie echoes. “Let me guess? You’re…”
I hold my breath. I have a funny feeling that I know what Frankie’s going to say. It’s not like we haven’t talked about it before…
“Scared.” She finishes. “You still haven’t –”
I can’t help but glance around the empty apartment before I speak. It’s stupid – it’s not like anyone could be watching, but I’m embarrassed. “Frankie, do we really have to go over this again? I’ll sleep with someone –”
"– when you find the right guy,” Frankie says, plucking the words right out of my mouth. “The thing is, Kim, your twenties are passing you by quickly. I’m starting to think that you might dry up down there before you find the perfect guy.”
“He doesn’t have to be perfect,” I groan, moving the mouse pointer, and clicking. “Just… right. Trust me; I’ll know him when I see him.”
When Frankie replies, her voice is quiet. “Are you sure?”
I don’t answer.
I scroll through the list of surnames quickly, trying to take my mind off the awkward conversation with Frankie. I wish the damn laptop hadn’t crashed – or whatever happened – because if I could go back in time and never have that conversation with Frankie, I would.
Alfreds, Bettys, and God-only-knows how many more suburban names, flash by as I scroll all the way down to Nate’s.
“Foster…” I breathe. It doesn’t sound right, but there’s no mistaking that face. “It’s him, Frankie, it’s actually him…”
Frankie’s keyboard strokes echoed down the line like hailstones on a tin roof. I barely hear them, though. The world is closing in around me. I thought I was escaping to London to get away from everything that had held me back in the past, but it all just caught up. I thought this was my second chance.
“Oh, fuck that, Kim,” Frankie whistles. “No way. NO way! You’ve got to be kidding me, Kim. This guy’s a God. He looks like he should be in the Olympics, or something. Ask him out on a date,” she begs. “Please, just do it, for me – hell, do it for all of us…”
Frankie’s excited babble barely breaks the surface of my becalmed mind. I feel like I’m underwater, with waves breaking on the shore above my head.
"… Don’t you dare screw me on this, Kim,” Frankie says, still talking. “Ask him out on a date. If you don’t, you’re setting feminism back two decades. You want that on your conscience, girl?”
“Frankie!” I shout, surprising myself. “Will you just shut the hell up for a second and let me think?”
She goes dead silent. I don’t blame her for her excitement. Even looking at this high school photo, even in thumbnail size, it’s clear how goddamn attractive he is. But none of that matters, not to me. He’s a symbol of everything I am trying to leave behind.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” I say. “I know you’re only trying to help. But you know me – you know there’s no way I’m going to ask him out. It’s just not… me.”
Frankie keeps her mouth shut for a few seconds, and I’m almost tempted to speak when she gets there first.
“Maybe…” She said slowly, “this is what you need? Maybe he’s what you need? Did you ever think that?”
“Frankie,” I groan, “you’ve been trying to get me to open my legs to all takers for as long as I’ve known you. This is just another –”
“Not true! I’ve only put a word in for the pretty ones!” Frankie jokes. Then her voice turns serious. “Besides, I’m not doing it because I’m trying to mess with you. I’m doing it because – hell – you need to, Kim. You need to loosen up a bit. You know that. And…”
I hear a few more mouse clicks bouncing down the phone line.
"… Judging by Nate’s high school football pics, he’ll more than loosen you up…”
“Frankie!” I giggle, closing the lid of my laptop and tossing it aside. I don’t need Nate’s face staring at me off the screen. It’s too damn tempting.
“I’m serious, Kim. Think about it, ok?”
“Think about what?”
“You know what I mean. So what if he’s your neighbor? You could have a no strings kind of fling; it would do you a world of good.”
“So what if he’s my neighbor?” I repeat, dumbfounded. “So, if something goes wrong, I’ll still have to see his face every day!”
“Yeah,” Frankie laughs. “So, who wouldn’t want to?”
“No way; ‘ain’t gonna’ happen.” I insist.
“So you were lying to me?”
“Huh? Lying about what?”
“About making a fresh start. Nate has no idea who you are. If he really is what caused you so much pain over the years, maybe he’s exactly what you need to make it all better. You can trust me, girl – he’d make it allllll better…”
“What’s that “mean girls” quote, Frankie? Stop trying to make it happen – it’s never going to happen.”
“Okay, okay,” Frankie says. “But remember, you were the one who wanted to make a fresh start. You were the one who said you were going to throw yourself into your London life. Just think about it, okay?”
“I’m not promising anything,” I mutter.
Frankie laughs. “I’ll take that as a win.”
8
Kim
“I’m sorry Peter,” I mutter.
“I don’t need you to be sorry,” my boss growls, “I need you to be right. Can you do that for me, or can’t you? It’s that simple.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t bear to look around the small conference room and see the smirks on Boris and his friends’ faces. This is so not what I expected when I took this job. I thought MIT was bad for chauvinists. Landwolfe, though, is ten times as bad.
“It’s just…” I say quietly, pushing through my body’s desire to just curl up and hide. “Some of the code … I just don’t understand what it’s supposed to do. Whoever programmed it –”
I see a black look flash across Boris’s face. Crap! I shouldn’t have said anything.
"– I mean, I’m probably just not getting it,” I say. God, I hate how I have to temper everything I say, just in case I hurt a man’s feelings. “Maybe someone can explain it to me. Because right now all I’m seeing is money going in and out of the market hundreds of times, but for no apparent reason; at least, none that I can see. It just seems…” I pause, searching for the right word.
“Inefficient.”
Peter stands up, and his chair falls away from behind him. He doesn’t even look around. I feel a growing sense of dread in my stomach. He flattens his palm and lifts it up to his eyes.
“You see this?” He growled.
I nod.
“This is me. Understand? And this…” He lowers his palm, inch by inch, holding my gaze the whole time. I can’t look away, but my cheeks burn up with humiliation. When he finally pauses, his back is hunched over, his fat belly compressed, and his hand hovering somewhere half way down his thigh.
"… This is you. Up here –,” his hand scoots back up to his eyes, “we make important decisions: decisions that actually matter. We ask questions that fucking lead somewhere. But down here,” his hand falls back down, “we do what we are fucking told, can you understand that?”
I nod dumbly. It feels like my tongue is caught in a bear trap.
“Good,” Peter smiles. It’s a fake, sickly sweet expression that looks false. “Maybe you can go, I dunno; get a cup of coffee or something. Leave the boys here with me.” He pauses. “I mean the team…”
He stares me down, and I’m left under no illusions that he meant what he first said: the boys.
“Of course,” I say in a voice that’s barely above a whisper.
It’s all I can do to blink back tears as I run from the conference room, folders pressed up against my chest. I feel like I’m running away instead of confronting the problem face on, but I don’t know what choice I have. I know with a guy like Peter, and his cronies, standing up to him would only make things worse.
So if I can’t do that, then… What the hell am I supposed to do?
I catch a glimpse of myself in the plate glass window of another – empty – conference room.
“Jesus…” I whisper. “What the hell were you thinking, Kim?”
I look like – hell – I don’t even know. All I do know is that the girl in that reflection isn’t me. Frankie’s words from last night still echo in my brain. When I woke up this morning, part of me – a silly, girlish part – thought that maybe if I dressed to impress, then Nate would notice.
So I guess that’s how I ended up here, dressed in a tight pencil skirt that – you know it – Frankie bought for me, and a tight white blouse that leaves nothing on my chest to the imagination. It’s an outfit I wouldn’t have picked myself in a thousand years, but one Frankie begged me to wear a hundred times. “You can’t not,” she said, “especially with those curves!”
I’m still burning from the humiliating dressing down I just received, and the memory makes me feel even more of a fool. I’m feeling like a little girl, who should have stayed at home to play with her toys, instead of playing dress-up, and pretending that she knows how to do her job.
I tear myself away from my reflection and head for the coffee machine. It’s not doing me any good to wallow in self-disgust.
As the water pressure builds and the machine whistles, I mutter to myself. I don’t care if I look like a crazy person. There’s no one around to see me. “This ends here. No more wallowing.”
Also, and most definitely, no more dressing up to impress a guy who wouldn’t have looked twice at you in high school…
No, I decide that I’m done. I’m done with Boris’s cutting remarks, and Peter’s humiliating demonstrations. I’m done turning red when a guy so much as looks at me. I’m going to make something of myself here. That does not include I’m opening my legs to some guy just because Frankie wants me to.
I put a lid on my cup of coffee and feel a reassuring burn against my palm. I hang on to it. It feels real, not just office drama, or boy drama, or any drama at all.
At least, I think, heading back towards the conference room. If I’m not going to hit on Nate, I can give up wearing these stupid heels.
Of course, those are my famous, last, Murphy-just-got-you, words. Seriously: the stiletto on my right heel catches on a carpet square, and then everything falls apart. I drop the folders clutched against my chest to the floor as I throw out my left arm to get my balance, and the coffee –
“Damn!” I swear. It’s everywhere.
I look down to see papers scattered across the floor, or speckled with dark splotches of coffee. The skin on the back of my hand is red and smarting from the pain of the scalding liquid. And worst of all?
My tight, white blouse is covered in goddamn coffee.
I kneel down, scrabbling to collect every single last one of the documents I just scattered across the floor in my near-hurricane-disaster before someone sees what has happened to me. I feel like the kid in the lunch room who drops their tray.
Of course, there is worse to come. There’s always more to come…
I hear a sound coming from the corner at the end of the hallway – the gentle thud of feet treading upon the thin carpet, and the murmur of voices. I freeze for a half second; then pull the last of the documents into an untidy bundle. I pick the coffee cup up, and scuff the wet puddle with my shoe.
“Come on, come on…” I mutter, leaning down to pick up the last scattered sheet of legal paper.
The voice is clearer now. I can hear two people, and –
I know that voice.
It’s Nate.
Now this is a really big problem. For a second I’m paralyzed again. Somehow, I manage to pull myself together, again. After all, it was only a couple of moments ago I decided I was done with being meek, and done with being timid: almost.
I might be quiet, but I’m not stupid. I know what the sight of his steel-gray eyes does to me, and that sharp spicy scent. It befuddles me, bewitches me. I can’t put myself into his presenc
e. That would be playing into his hands. I know that, just because I’ve decided he’s out of my plan, doesn’t mean I’m out of his.
Nate’s deep, rumbling voice is coming from in front of me – the direction in which I was headed. I pull a sharp about-face.
Options, options.