Pink Slip Party

by Cara Lockwood

  Gail the Office Manager materializes at the front desk, eyeing me suspiciously. She has a way of doing that, as if she can magically transport herself from place to place in a cloud of Jean Naté perfume.

  “Everything OK, here?” she trills at me.

  “Fine,” I say, nodding, and when she turns the corner, I put my head down on my desk because it suddenly feels too heavy to keep up a moment longer.

  The phone lights up again, and when I answer, it’s the same man looking for Barbara.

  “I got disconnected,” he tells me, sounding accusatory, as if I did it on purpose.

  “Please hold,” I say, hitting hold-extension-transfer, and hanging up.

  The phone lights up almost immediately. It’s the same man again, this time not bothering to be polite.

  “Just give me her extension,” he shouts at me.

  I want to tell him that I do have a bachelor’s degree, but I’m not sure that will really help my cause at this point.

  Sometime midmorning, a blond paralegal walks by my desk and this reminds me of Caroline. Right. Caroline. Evil Caroline. It’s all coming back to me now.

  * * *

  When Jean Naté goes to lunch, I sneak a call to Todd. I need to know the status of their relationship.

  “I got a job,” I say, right off.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, it’s temp work, but at least it’s work.”

  “See? I knew you could do it. Persistence pays off!” Todd sounds legitimately proud of me. Temporarily, I feel warm and fuzzy inside.

  “So?” I say.

  “So?”

  “So what’s up with Kyle and Caroline?” I sigh, frustrated.

  Todd gives a long sigh. Todd and Caroline don’t get along that well. This probably stems from the fact that when Caroline and Kyle were seriously dating, Kyle never had time for Todd, always claiming to be busy doing things for Caroline (like remodeling her kitchen).

  “I don’t know, but whatever it is, I hope it’s temporary,” Todd says.

  “Do you think it is?” I ask, for the first time hopeful.

  “God, I hope so. At this point, I’d be happy to buy her a plane ticket to Australia if it would help things,” Todd says.

  Todd hates picking up a bar tab, much less a two thousand dollar plane ticket. This shows how serious he is.

  Jean Naté comes back early from lunch and finds me on the phone. “No personal calls,” she barks at me.

  When I get home after a long day of hold-number-transfer, my apartment smells like a circus, and there are three more people here than when I left in the morning: Ron’s three muses.

  The muses are sitting in a circle, flipping through my old In-Style magazines. Ferguson is willingly rubbing Ganesha’s feet. Ron is squeezing Missy’s butt while she makes ham sandwiches, and Steph is sleeping in the spare bedroom, wearing a pink, silk eye mask.

  “You’re out of Diet Coke,” one of the muses informs me.

  “Oh, and peanut butter,” Heather says.

  “Oh, and your landlord came by looking for his rent,” Vishnu says. “What’s his name? Bob? I couldn’t quite understand what he was saying, but he said he’s going to charge you late fees.”

  “Why the hell are they here?” I ask Ron.

  “The police raided my apartment,” Ron says, matter-of-factly. “The muses and I are homeless.”

  “Oh, no,” I say, shaking my head. “Absolutely not. No way. You cannot live here.”

  “It’ll only be for a couple of days,” Ron says.

  I think my face is turning purple.

  “Maybe one day — just one? And Russ and Joe may come by later.”

  “Besides, we can help you with that Maximum Office thing,” Ganesha says.

  I stop and stare at her, and then at Missy.

  “You TOLD them?” I ask Missy, who’s sticking a knife dripping with mustard into my mayonnaise jar.

  Missy shrugs.

  “She had some good ideas about how to word the emails we’re going to send out,” she says.

  * * *

  I almost hear the veins in my temples popping.

  Pop. Pop. POP.

  I am tired of pretending that everything’s OK.

  Everything is not OK.

  Everything is not even remotely OK.

  I am losing my shit.

  I’m facing financial ruin, and my once pristine apartment has turned into a halfway house for every lazy degenerate within a scope of three miles. Even if a new job came through tomorrow, and they doubled my previous salary, there’s no way I can even cover my minimum credit card payments, not to mention the thousands in back rent I owe Bob the Landlord. Short of winning the lottery or marrying Ted Turner, I see no way of avoiding declaring bankruptcy. My best romantic prospect in years, Kyle, has hooked up with his old girlfriend, and I am losing it.

  Oh, sure, I’m not living on the street. I’m not homeless. I’m not in the middle of a campaign of genocide. I’m not a ten-year-old boy going blind weaving rugs in Pakistan. I know there are worse things in the world. I know that in my head. That only makes it worse. Because this is the worst thing that’s happened to me so far in my short life, and I’m not handling it well. I’m not really handling it at all. So what happens when someone dies? When something really bad happens? I’m not the strong, independent person I want to believe I am.

  In fact, nothing in my life is what it seems.

  Nothing is in my control — not my job, not my love life, not even my own apartment.

  * * *

  “I’m going to my bedroom and then counting to ten,” I say, in a voice that’s shaking as I try to keep it steady. “And when I come out, I want everyone out of my apartment.”

  I slam the door, so they all know I’m serious.

  “One.”

  I can’t believe I’ve let this go so far.

  “Two.”

  Is it possible for my life to get worse?

  “Three.”

  What on earth did I do in another lifetime to deserve seven squatters in my own apartment?

  There’s a knock at my door.

  “I hope whoever that is, you’re coming to tell me goodbye,” I say.

  “Jane,” says Steph. “Jane, let me in.”

  “Four. I’m not going to, Steph, I’m sorry.”

  “Jane, we’re not the people you should be angry with,” Steph adds. “You know who’s to blame in all this, and it’s not Ron, and it’s not Ferguson, and it’s not me.”

  “FIVE,” I practically shout.

  “It’s Mike, and you know it. Don’t you want to get him back? Don’t you want to imagine the look on his face when he finds out he’s fired?”

  “Six,” I say, but softer this time.

  “Come on. It’ll be cathartic. You can do this one thing and move on with your life. Don’t you want to move on, Jane?”

  I pause. “Seven,” I say.

  “Come on. You need closure. You had a bad breakup. You lost your job. You need closure.”

  “I’m fine. I don’t need closure. I just need everyone out of my apartment.” I pause. “Eight AND NINE,” I add.

  “Come on. You’ve been moping around for months. You’ve been pretending that you were unfairly singled out, when we all were handed bad deals.”

  I shake my head.

  “You’re not the only one suffering here,” she says. “We’ve all suffered.”

  I nod.

  “So, are you going to help us or are you going to sit and feel sorry for yourself for the rest of your life?”

  I consider this a moment. Either my brain is still muddled by shrooms, or Steph is starting to make sense.

  I have been stuck. I do need to move on. It’s more than time for me to be over this.

  “You think if we do this one thing, then I’ll have closure, and I’ll be able to move on?”

  “Definitely,” Steph says.

  I think about this for a second.

  I open the do
or.

  Missy has some duct tape in her hand and a baseball bat.

  “What are you doing?” I ask her.

  “Well, if Steph didn’t convince you, I’m afraid we were going to have to tie you up,” Missy says.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not joking,” she says.

  I stare at her, but she doesn’t blink.

  “We’re breaking into Maximum Office tonight,” she adds, after a moment. “Are you in?”

  I look at Steph and then back to Missy. Steph’s right. I need to get Maximum Office out of my system.

  “I’m in,” I say.

  To: jane@coolchick.com

  From: Headhunters Central

  Date: April 9, 2002, 10:35 A.M.

  Dear Jane,

  In response to your email, we do not systematically discard resumes of people with art degrees.

  We understand that answering phones in a temp job is “destroying your will to live” but we’re afraid we can’t place you in jobs that we don’t have.

  Please stop emailing us.

  Sincerely,

  Lucas Cohen

  Headhunters Central

  13

  I tell myself that breaking into Maximum Office is a harmless prank. Missy will send out emails to the top management and maybe take down Maximum Office’s Web site. We’ll throw a little toilet paper around, and then we’ll be out of there. In and out. Nobody gets hurt. No felonies take place. And the most they can do to us if they catch us, according to Missy, is charge us with trespassing, since Ferguson is still an active employee (for the time being) and we are technically his guests. Missy, who has gone over our severance agreements with a magnifying glass, says that there’s no clause specifically barring us from the premises of Maximum Office.

  The parking lot at Maximum Office is brightly lit by high-wattage fluorescent lights beaming out over the wide expanse of asphalt. There is a security guard circling the parking lot in a mini pickup truck, which looks like a cross between a golf cart and a Jeep. It has a yellow light on top that’s flashing.

  Missy and Ron are in the front seat of Ron’s Impala, and Ferguson, Steph, and I are crammed into the backseat. The muses decide to stay home, since they claim to be only good for the planning stages of a project and not the execution.

  Missy is cursing.

  “You didn’t count on security?” I ask her.

  “Shut UP,” she hisses at me, clearly peeved. She spent so long trying to memorize the building floor plan that she didn’t count on how we would actually get in undetected.

  “Why can’t we just walk in?” Steph asks, annoyed. “Just pretend to be with Ferguson.”

  “That’s a last-resort excuse,” Missy says. “We don’t want to be seen if we don’t have to. Besides, that guy’s got to leave the parking lot sometime.”

  We sit in silence, safely hidden behind a large shrub with our engine and lights off, watching the security guard doing donuts in his golf cart in the parking lot.

  “He looks like he’s having a lot of fun,” I say.

  “Shut up, I mean it,” Missy says.

  I’m quiet. I’m beginning to think that perhaps I was a bit hasty in agreeing to this little escapade. I’ve never been one for acts of stupendous courage. I’m more like Kenneth Lay — hiding from Congress for weeks, and then finally showing up only to plead the Fifth.

  I look over at Ferguson, who is taking our stealth mission far too seriously. He has painted his face commando-style and is wearing black combat boots and a utility belt, complete with tape measure, knife, flashlight, walkie-talkie, and keys.

  “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a tad?” I ask Ferguson. “I mean, what’s with the commando make-up?”

  Ferguson refuses to speak to me unless I speak into a walkie-talkie, even though I’m sitting right next to him in the backseat.

  “You’re a dork,” I say into the radio.

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘over,’ over,” Ferguson whispers.

  “You’re a dork, over,” I say.

  As we watch, the guard finally stops doing wheelies and pulls around to the other side of the building.

  “Now’s our chance,” Missy says, opening her car door.

  It takes Ferguson a few minutes to extract himself from the back of the Impala. His flashlight gets tangled in the seatbelt, and he spends a second disengaging it.

  “Hurry up,” Missy is hissing at Ferguson. Once free, he clambers over to us and we begin our twenty-yard walk to the door. Ferguson, who has been crouched low and giving us all hand gestures like a Navy SEAL, stops midway there, winded. He bends over and puts his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Missy hisses.

  Once at the front doors, Missy uses Ferguson’s key card to slip inside. Ferguson does an elaborate spin move, as if he’s a SWAT commander trying to avoid laser light triggers. I walk normally over the threshold, giving him a look. He gives me the “OK” then “thumbs-up” signs.

  “Strike Team is in place, over,” Ferguson says into his walkie-talkie.

  “We’re all on the same team,” I hiss at him. “There’s only one team.”

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘over,’ over,” he whispers back.

  “Come on,” Steph says, dragging him away.

  We take the stairs up to the second floor, and almost immediately come upon Steph’s old cube. It’s now covered in framed pictures of someone’s Scottish terrier, along with a terrier calendar, and an oversized postcard that says “Dogs Are People, Too!”

  I have to wrap both arms around Steph to prevent her from actually dismantling the cube.

  “Let me break just one framed picture, just one!” she pleads with me as I wrestle her back into the hall.

  “That wouldn’t be very obvious, now would it?” I ask her, trying to settle her down.

  “Well, let’s go visit your cube, and see how you like it,” Steph whispers.

  My cube is two sections over from Steph’s. It faces a window, so I know someone’s bound to have moved into it the very afternoon I left.

  What I am not prepared for is to see that the entire IT department has moved into my old space. Part of me was hoping for the poetry of the lone empty cube, a standing memorial to the significant loss of my leaving.

  Instead, my old desk is nearly unrecognizable. It has been converted into a South Park mecca, every available surface covered in pictures of Cartman and cows.

  It’s like I never existed at all.

  Steph shrugs. “Well, on the bright side, at least it’s not decorated entirely in Scottish terrier,” she says.

  * * *

  Missy takes two wrong turns before we’re in the server room, which is really nothing more than an oversized janitor’s closet, with lots of dusty shelves containing stacked electronic equipment like some sort of storage room for Star Trek props. Wires hang out everywhere.

  Ferguson knocks over the trash can in the corner with a clang, causing us to stare at him.

  “Sorry, over,” he cackles into the walkie-talkie.

  “Is someone going to take that from him, or do I have to do it?” I ask the group.

  Missy sits down in front of the only computer screen in the room and begins typing.

  “Commander, permission to secure kitchen area, over,” Ferguson demands of Missy.

  “Permission denied,” Missy says.

  “But I’m hungry, over,” Ferguson whines.

  “Why didn’t you eat before we left?” Missy hisses.

  “I did eat before we left.” Ferguson is holding his stomach and making a pinched face. “Over.”

  “We’ll eat later,” Missy says.

  With chilling precision, Missy takes a crowbar out of the bag she’s carrying and jimmies the lock on the file drawer in front of her. She picks up a notebook inside, containing, she says, all the system’s passwords. With ease, she gets into the email system, and times the email, which will fire a
ll the executives, to go out the next day. Then she starts on payroll.

  “One month or two?” Missy asks me. “Should we suspend their pay for one month or two?”

  “Two,” Steph says.

  “Where’s Ferguson?” Missy asks me.

  Steph and I find Ferguson crouched in the corner of the office kitchen, trying to eat someone’s Dinty Moore stew.

  “Kitchen secure,” he says, jumping up and wiping his mouth.

  “Over.”

  “Give me that walkie-talkie,” I hiss, jumping at him. We get into a tug of war before Steph pulls us apart.

  “Stay focused, people,” she commands.

  “Copy that, over,” Ferguson says into his radio.

  On our way back from the kitchen, we pass by Human Resources. The door is open, and a couple of desk lights are on.

  “Let’s do it,” Steph says.

  “Do what?”

  “See what other people make,” she says.

  The personnel files are locked, and so it takes us a little while to get them open using nothing more than a ruler and the leverage of my Doc Martens. Unlike Missy, we are not seasoned in the techniques of larceny.

  “Look at this,” Steph says, pulling out the file on Mike.

  He has three documented counts of sexual harassment against him, and one pending lawsuit. Looks like he tried the old let’s-have-an-expensive-dinner-and-sex trick with a few other people in the office. But not all of them had been as willing as I was to accept it. I am strangely peeved. I thought I’d been special.

  “The company settled two cases against him already,” Steph says, flipping through a few other pages in his file.

  “How much?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “Give me that,” I say. I’m copying it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but I’m taking it with me.

  “Come on, we’re done,” Missy says, clamping a hand on my shoulder.