Under My Skin

by A. E. Dooland

  “About John? I already know about John!” he bellowed, slapping the printout loudly down on the table in front of me. The whole desk shook. “What the fuck is this, Mini? Did you give this idiot the impression that this was okay?”

  I picked up the printout, aware my hand was shaking.

  It was an email, and I had expected it to be from someone in Marketing to Jason about the Facebook page, but it wasn't. When I looked at the 'from' address, it was John's, and it was an email saying that he'd been struck down with a terrible bout of food poisoning and was unlikely to return until after Easter. He apologised for missing the pitch to Vladivostok.

  Fuck. This made me look even worse, and it also meant that however angry Jason was about a week's sick leave at a very critical point in the project, he was going to be even angrier about the information leak.

  “Well?” Jason prompted, at a volume that made my ears feel like they were going to burst. “What were you going to tell me about him? It had better fucking me that he's so sick he's basically in a coma. Because otherwise there's no excuse for missing a pitch.”

  I took measured breath. “Actually, it's worse...” I began, feeling his eyes boring into my skull. “He uploaded three of the test-paintings I did for the slides to Facebook. They were up between Thursday and last night. The only information about them was that they were for this project. I took screen dumps so you could see what—”

  “He did fucking what?” Jason interrupted me, and then started blasting me again. “He did fucking what? How the fuck did this happen?”

  I wasn't sure if he was asking me rhetorically, and so I didn't answer for a moment because I thought he was going to follow up. He didn't.

  “I asked you a question, Mini,” he prompted me, leaning up close. “You do speak English, right? Speaky Eng-rish?”

  I flinched; did he really just say that? “I'm sorry,” I said in perfect English. “I tried to be really specific to him about the need for confidentiality.”

  He stood back, taking a breath as he narrowed his eyes at me. “Obviously not fucking specific enough, were you? Jesus Christ, Mini, he's a brand new employee from fuck knows where, some third world country where they probably don't even have Facebook. He needs more fucking guidance than that and you've obviously been ignoring him,” Jason told me, rubbing his head for a second. “I am going to get my fucking ass handed to me over this,” he told me, and then jabbed his finger in the air down at me. “Mark my fucking words. Diane is going to fucking eat me alive—”

  Behind Jason, movement caught my eye and I saw Ian standing in the doorway with his briefcase, eyes as wide as saucers. He was listening.

  “And to think I recommended you for this project, Mini. What the hell was I thinking? Just because someone can throw some colours and shapes together doesn't mean they can lead a fucking team. I should put you back out in administration where you can just paint pretty pictures all day and not fuck up people's projects!”

  Ian's jaw dropped, and he looked at someone else I couldn't see. I shifted a little in my chair to get a better view; it was Carlos. They were watching and whispering about what was going on, and then when Jason straightened like he was getting ready to leave, they rushed off somewhere before they got caught eavesdropping. My face was bright red, I could feel it. Fuck, I thought, they will never respect me after this, and neither will anyone in Marketing when they find out Jason was blasting me. I just sat there trying to hide how much I was shaking.

  “Jesus fucking Christ. I'd better not lose my quarterly bonus over this,” he finished. “I need a cigarette. When Diane gets back from Vancouver she's going to kill us both.” He took a deep breath like he was trying to decide what to do. Eventually, he shook his head. “Just bring those screen dumps to my office,” he ordered me as he left, “I want to see what the damage is. Fuck!”

  After he was gone, this heavy silence hung in the air while I sat there and tried to digest what had happened. I should have been angry, but I wasn't; not with him. I felt sick. Sick, and humiliated, and disgusting, and, ugh, just so useless and wrong in every way. It was such a familiar feeling.

  I could hardly breathe. I had to, though, because I had to somehow get from here to Jason's office with the USB that had the screen dumps on it. My legs were weak as I made my way there, and, embarrassingly, I nearly rolled my fucking ankle on those stupid heels on the way there. I was pretty sure at least one or two people saw me stumble, too.

  Jason didn't take long with his cigarette. In fact, he finished it in record time and came back to scrutinise the screen dumps. This time, he didn't yell at me. What he did do was even worse: he stared at the screen, silent, with his heavy eyebrows low over his eyes and his tree-trunk arms crossed.

  I sat there waiting for him to say anything for a good ten minutes, terrified that at any second he was going to stand up and start shouting at me again, or worse, that he was going to say very calmly that I was fired and I could collect my personal belongings and leave immediately. My head was spinning and I was so spaced out. I did not feel well.

  “Diane is going to rake me over the coals for this,” he told me eventually, shaking his head. “That's it, that's the project blown. It's fucking obviously not a political pitch now, is it? Look at all these employees he's got friended, fucking hell. There is no way Sean won't get wind of this. God fucking knows what Diane is going to do about it. She's going to kill us both when she gets back tonight. What kind of lead are you? You need to spell everything out with new employees. They're not psychic, someone has to teach them how things work. Good fucking job with that, Mini. Great work.”

  He spent a few more minutes shaking his head at his screen. “Get out of my sight,” he said when he was done. “You'd better fucking teach those Sales boys everything they need to know to nail that fucking pitch, because if we don't get this contract signed, I'm betting at least your job is on the line.”

  I felt that last thing he said like a punch in the stomach. I wandered out of his office, dazed, and completely fucking sure it was my last day at Frost. I'd worked so hard on that project, but all anyone was going to remember, all that Diane was going to remember, was that I left some rookie to his own devices and he posted confidential material on Facebook.

  Fuck. I didn't want Diane to get back. She was fucking terrifying. At the same time, though, I actually did want her to get back—and as quickly as possible—because waiting for my sentence and having that axe hanging over me was making it impossible for me to think about anything else. Unfortunately, she was on a plane somewhere so I had to spend the whole day imagining all the terrible things that might happen while I tried to be productive. Even the five Red Bulls Sarah had actually bought me weren't taking the edge of my exhaustion or my stress.

  We only had the morning to get the materials ready—which we did, somehow—and then we sent them off to print while we had a meeting with the Sales team who were delivering the pitch for us. The Sales boys were pretty frustrated about the fact that they only had one full day to learn the material and work out how they were going to play it, too, which meant that I needed to deal with a lot of whinging, egotistical men the whole meeting.

  “Well, just don't blame us if we blow the pitch and don't get a signature,” one of the Sales boys said, ignoring that I'd explained to him we ourselves had only found out the pitch date last Friday. “You're giving us basically no time to prepare, that's all I'm saying. It's going to be a shit couple of days for us.”

  'Oh, it's going to be a shit couple of days for you?' I nearly said. 'Would you like to hear the sort of shit that's going on for me at the moment?' I kept my mouth shut though and just forged through it, packing up at the end of the day when we couldn't do any more.

  On my way out, I saw Jason had his door shut and his blinds closed, which he never did. That was over me and my team, I thought, and felt guilty about what that meant for the team. What was going to happen to us?

  I took my mobile out in the lift; Bree still
hadn't texted me, and as I was heading downstairs I wondered if maybe she'd be waiting for me outside like she often did, instead. I got out of the lift, looking around the sea of people for blonde curls and a big smile... but I couldn't see her anywhere. She wasn't inside the building, or outside the building, and no one jumped on me and gave me a big hug on the way home. I could have really used one about now.

  I had thought maybe she'd be waiting for me at home, and when the lift opened and I saw a shadow there in front of my door for a second my heart lifted and I smiled and it... was my clean clothes hamper left there by room service. I carried it inside and just left it in the doorway because I couldn't be bothered dealing with it right now; half the clothes in it were Bree's, anyway.

  There really wasn't much left I could do for either of the pitches. I suppose I could have painted graphics for the one to Sasha Burov, but it seemed a bit ridiculous to spend hours searching for references online now when I could just walk outside this coming weekend in Broome and do it. That was supposing, of course, that I still had a job this coming weekend.

  I switched into my boy clothes and just lay back on the couch.

  It was quiet. Really quiet.

  Fuck, I couldn't deal with this. I couldn't just sit here remembering Jason blasting me or worrying about what Diane was going to say and do. I went and turned on the PlayStation and settled down on the couch with the controller and a bottle of red to play Call of Duty. For the rest of the night, I alternated between drinking and checking my phone in case Bree had messaged me. She didn't message me, but Sarah did a couple of times just to check I hadn't jumped off my balcony.

  By bedtime I still hadn't heard from Bree, and I was worried enough about the fact she hadn't even come back for her school uniform that I decided to try calling again while I was waiting for my codeine to kick in. Who was going to care if I looked like a stalker, anyway? I was worried about her.

  I lay there under the doona and put the phone to my ear. I had been expecting to hear ring tones, but instead I got three beeps and an automated message saying, “Your call could not be connected. Please check the number and try again.”

  I double-checked that it was Bree's number I had selected, and then did try again. I got the same message.

  ...What?

  I put the phone beside me on the pillow, feeling sick. Why was her number disconnected? That seemed like a rather extreme reaction to being angry with me. Not that Bree wasn't capable of extreme reactions, but... no. Deep in my gut, I knew that this wasn't a result of her throwing a tantrum and changing her number because of me. Seriously, Min, I told myself, you know something's going on with that girl. No one wants their brother to go to jail and never get out without good reason. That was what she had said, wasn't it?

  Fuck. Why jail, though? Why jail? Had she been lying about not being in danger to me this whole time? Or what if she was so upset by everything that she had tried something stupid, or whatever Sarah was worried that I was going to do to myself? I shouldn't have yelled at Bree, I thought, messaging her on both Facebook and Deviant Art. I was trying to figure out what else I should do when the codeine must have kicked in and I passed out.

  Bree hadn't messaged me back on any medium when I woke up groggy the following morning, and her number was still disconnected. I tried desperately to come up with other scenarios that didn't involve anything having happened to her; I wondered if maybe she hadn't paid her phone bill or bought credit or whatever and that was why it was disconnected and she hadn't replied. Her family did have money problems, right? But even that didn't explain why she hadn't contacted me on Deviant Art.

  Nothing explained it, unless something had happened to her. That thought just churned my insides. I had to have another couple of painkillers because of it, and I couldn't even get myself into stockings until they were working, either.

  Despite the fact Jason and Diane were so worried about Sean's apparently sinister desire to tank the project, Jason was having a smoke with him on the balcony when I got to work. Jason jogged to the door when he saw me inside. “Mini, get in my office!” he called across the floor, holding his cigarette outside the door so he didn't set off the sprinklers. “I want to speak with you immediately.”

  Through the glass, I could see Sean's eyebrows go up. He finished his own cigarette, and then patted Jason on the back and slipped past him through the door. “Coffee time,” I think I heard him say, shooting me a warm smile and heading inside and off towards the lifts. Jason scowled after him. I had no idea what to make of that; why the hell would Jason choose to be friends with him—and maybe doing whatever else they might be doing—if he was that much of a problem?

  I followed Jason's instructions to go into his office, where he left me by myself to contemplate my fate for twenty minutes while he went to speak with Diane's assistant. When he finally came back, he just told me Diane would be in the office shortly and we'd meet with her straight away and find out how fucked we both were. On that note he released me to go wait for them both in Oslo, telling me absolutely nothing about whatever conversation he'd obviously had with her overnight.

  I wandered back to my office feeling completely overwhelmed, but that didn't prepare me at all for what was waiting for me.

  As soon as I got in the door, Sarah spun around towards me with a really intense look on her face. She didn't even greet me. “You're white as a sheet, Min,” she told me, “are you alright?” I shrugged as I dumped my handbag in my drawer. She looked concerned about me, but she clearly was on a mission to tell me something else, so she pushed it aside for now. “Sean's looking for you.”

  I looked up at her. “Sean is?”

  “Yeah,” she said, still with the same expression. “Min, how does Sean know Bree?”

  What? That got rid of my disorientation. “Uh, they shook hands in the foyer on Friday afternoon?” I said. “What the hell do you mean 'how does Sean know Bree'?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I don't know, he just said to tell you 'a young friend' of yours was downstairs and to go see him, and then he said he had to leave quickly before Diane spotted him here.”

  “Bree's downstairs?” I repeated.

  Sarah looked completely blank. “Yeah, that's what he said, I think.”

  Fucking hell, and I was supposed to wait here for Jason to come and get me to meet with Diane. Fuck, fuck. I couldn't leave her down there, though, could I? And goddamnit I really wanted to see her and just make sure that she was okay. I could be quick, I thought. Very quick, Jason didn't have to know. “If Jason comes looking for me can you tell him I went to the toilet or something?” I asked Sarah, who only got time to nod at me before I took off across Marketing towards the lifts, hammering the button and willing one to hurry up and arrive.

  If she was downstairs, that probably meant she was okay, right? She wasn't lying in a ditch somewhere. That was the most enormous relief, just knowing she was at least physically okay. But, then again, why would she be waiting downstairs for me before work...?

  Maybe she just wants to get her school uniform, I thought, wondering if I should run back to Oslo and grab my keycard. I decided against that because I was in such a rush, and because I could just tell reception to code me another if we needed to go back to my place for anything.

  The lift took eternity to arrive, and even longer to get down, because it was stopping on basically every single fucking floor to collect people who wanted to go and get real coffee. Next to the ride down on Friday with Gemma, it definitely topped my list of the Longest Trips of My Life.

  About four years later when the lift finally delivered us all down to ground level, I had to wait for the dozen or so other people to get out first before I could rush out into the foyer. When I did, I couldn't see blonde curls anywhere. Not in the café, not waiting in the atrium and when I rushed outside onto the street to see if she was waiting out there, I couldn't see her there, either. I craned my neck down the road and then checked around the side of the building briefly, but
she wasn't anywhere.

  I stood outside the front of the building for a moment as peak-hour traffic rushed past, wondering what next. Maybe Sarah had been mistaken about the message Sean had meant to give me? Maybe he'd wanted to say something about meeting Bree on Friday, instead? Fuck, I really should go back upstairs in case Jason was already looking for me.

  While I was trying to figure out what I should do, I noticed someone who'd pulled over in a loading zone watching me. That made me really self-conscious, especially when I looked like this, so I pulled nervously at the hem of my dress and went to walk calmly back inside the foyer. It was no wonder people were staring at me, the way I'd been running like a nutcase a second ago.

  As I approached the rotating door, though, the person in the car stopped the engine and got out, looking like he was going to come inside Frost, too. For some reason, that got the adrenaline pumping. There were a million reasons someone might have come into Frost—and even if he did want to speak to me, there was no reason it was threatening. Maybe he just wanted directions.

  The guy ended up changing his mind and going back into the car instead of following me in. As he did so, I noticed he was wearing a very sharp suit. That got my attention. Hadn't Bree been a bit weird about guys in suits? I watched him through the reflective glass of the atrium, trying to figure out why that was. He didn't seem like a businessman at all, despite the suit. He carried himself like a big, burly security guard or something. The logo on his car read Fischer Mercantile. I'd never heard of them.

  The man didn't hang around for long. When nothing happened, he ended up driving slowly down the street with his window wound down. It was creepy as fuck, and it made me worry about Bree.

  I turned away from the glass, frowning. The guy had been kind of old, though, and he was white. Maybe he was a family member? An uncle? Someone else looking for Bree? I didn't like that possibility, because if someone from Bree's family was looking for her, it probably meant they hadn't heard from her, either.