Loathe at First Sight

by Suzanne Park

  “You mean sons?”

  “Yes. Sons. Something I never have.” Here it was. A typical moment when my mom would remind me that she could never bear any more children because of me. When I came into this world, according to my mom’s folklore, I pulled her uterus out with me. “A childbirth placenta tear,” the doctor told her, but the way she told the story you’d think I had been born with my two little baby fists holding on to the inside of the uterine walls with all my might, clenching tightly, refusing to come out without bringing my placenta and lots of my mom’s other innards along with me.

  I changed the subject. “So why are you going to Italy? I begged you guys so many times over the last few years to travel to Europe with me and you refused.”

  “Excuse me! I need chocolate breakfast, not the ba-nilla one.”

  “What?”

  “I talking to grocery man. No chocolate Carnation instant breakfast at this store. Daddy will be upset. He need that in case he can’t eat the Italy food. And then he die from starve to death.”

  “Mom, you shouldn’t joke about that. You might jinx him.”

  “I not joke. He need chocolate instant breakfast. If he upset, the blood pressure go way up and then he shout at everyone. And maybe he die from the too much stress. His poor stressed-ful heart.”

  I asked again, “So why did you choose Italy?”

  “You don’t have chocolate kind? Chocolate malted kind be okay. No strawberry. He hate strawberry. It taste like air freshener.”

  “Mom, it’s hard to talk to you because you keep talking to people at the store about breakfast food.”

  “If you call me back earlier, I not be at the store. I am home with peace and quiet.” She grunted. “We go to Italy with church group. They have a mission trip.”

  She had finally answered my question, just as my thumb hovered over the hang-up button. “I don’t understand. Why would you go to Italy on a church mission trip? Aren’t there other places in the world that aren’t as holy that need help? The pope lives in Italy. He should have that country covered.”

  She blew a puff of air into the phone and changed the subject abruptly. “I forgot ask. Any Korean guy working at the toy company?”

  “You mean the game company?”

  “Yes, did you see any Korean boy?”

  I snorted. “No Koreans at all.” Amazing. I admired her single-mindedness. “Oh wait, there was one Asian guy who might’ve been Korean who worked in the HR department. A fresh college graduate.”

  With a few seconds of silence I could tell my mom struggled to do basic math. I helped her out. “That means he’s five years younger than me, Mom.”

  “Waaaaa! Five years? New generation it is okay for woman to be much older than husband. We see all the time in Korean drama. Men die earlier anyhow.”

  I scarfed down the last of my dinner, scraping the corners of the black container for every ounce of sodium-filled sustenance. Still hungry, I opened the fridge and stared at the barren wasteland. Old jars of pickles, shriveled apples, and almost-raisin grapes were my tastiest options. Or rather, my only options. I shook my head and shut the door. “I need to go to the grocery store, Mom. I need to restock my fridge. Send me your trip information so I know how to contact you if there is an emergency.”

  “You never call anyway. So just call in month when we back.” The Korean mom guilt, back in full force.

  “You’re really leaving tomorrow? Like, you mean in less than twenty-four hours?”

  “YES. I said tomorrow many time.”

  Damn. They’d be off on a jumbo jet soon, and even though it made zero sense to accompany them to pope-land for a church mission trip, my heart hurt with abandonment.

  I sank into my couch and rested my head back. What a long day.

  My mom asked, “Melody, can you do Daddy favor? Can you buy chocolate Carnation instant breakfast? There is none here. Name is called ‘Carnation breakfast essential, rich milk chocolate.’ You can still ship tonight so we get before our trip. FedEx and UPS still open till nine o’clock.”

  Was this a test of my unwavering devotion to my dad? A test to prove to my parents that despite me not calling, they were still the highest priority in my life? Okay, maybe I did feel guilty about not knowing their plans to embark on a huge overseas journey, so I grabbed a granola bar for dessert, put on my raincoat and boots, and headed back to my car.

  Damn it. I had forgotten all about the nonopening doors situation. The Odyssey and Escalade were still there, blocking my access. As I shimmied into the passenger-side window while pressing onto the side of the Honda to provide balance, the goddamn minivan alarm went off, and the headlight flashes pulsed to a steady beat.

  HONK!

  HONK!

  HONK!

  HONK!

  The incessant car alarm continued blaring as I contorted my body through my window. While scrambling over the gearshift, my knee banged on the steering wheel. Tears welled in my eyes from the pain as I peeled out of the garage, my shoulders finally relaxing as the minivan honking sounds remained trapped in the confines of the garage echo chamber box. I checked my rearview mirror to see if anyone tailed my car. Would anyone really follow me for allegedly burgling a soccer-mom-mobile? Seriously, who would bother to follow me anywhere?

  The Fred Meyer megagrocery store down the street had the best chance of stocking gross, processed chocolate breakfast powders. I strolled the cereal aisle and hit the goddamn gold mine of instant breakfast deals: buy one get one free! I texted my mom while in the checkout line, letting her know I’d gotten a few boxes and was headed to UPS to ship them for overnight delivery. I would barely make the nine P.M. cutoff.

  She wrote back, You wake me up. I text tomorrow when we get package. We need rest for our big trip.

  That translation, I’d like to think, was “thank you.”

  Chapter Three

  The office manager stopped by to tell me I’d be moving from the cubicle I’d been assigned a month ago to an interior shared office on the other side of the floor, closer to the executive team. They needed my work space for an intern, who also happened to be Ian MacKenzie’s nephew. Kicked out of my spot because of good ol’-fashioned nepotism.

  After stacking my office belongings into a precarious pile on my laptop, I headed to my new home. I had only been at Seventeen Studios a few weeks, not long enough to accumulate the dozens of bobbleheads, figurines, and other promo merchandise that other game veterans had littering their work spaces. The tchotchkes ranged from cute, marble-eyed animals to red-eyed, flying demon aliens with bloody razor teeth. Some of the QA testers and marketing people had so much crap in their cubicles and offices that it looked like a toy store’s unwanted Black Friday inventory had exploded all over their desks and shelves. A few senior people on my team were among the first employees at Seventeen Studios, and on their fifth anniversary, they were gifted real company-issued samurai swords and metal battle shields engraved with their names and their company start dates. These swords and shields were heavy as hell: I tried to lift one of the swords with two hands and nearly threw out my back.

  Once I unpacked, the only thing missing was my coffee mug. The one with “C8H10N4O2,” the atomic structure of caffeine, written on it in big bubble letters. A going-away present from my coworkers at my last job, and the only thing I had brought to work with any sentimental value. Other people had framed photos of dogs and babies. I had my nerdy mug.

  I passed by my old work space on the way to the bathroom. A new minifridge, Keurig coffee machine, decorative lamps, and an $800 Aeron desk chair made the transformed space unrecognizable. There was an actual red carpet runner rolled out from the footpath to the cubicle entryway.

  On the desk, the intern even had better pens than everyone else. And nonyellow Post-its cut into cool shapes. And a brand-new MacBook Air. My eyes narrowed as I read his name on the frosted cubicle wall.

  NOLAN MACKENZIE

  I pulled out my phone to find out more about Nolan. Fucki
ng. MacKenzie. There were older pictures of him online shaking hands with famous politicians. Images of his worldly travels to exotic destinations. Recent photos of him with a woman deliberately cropped out. Someone with wavy blond wisps and a very tan left shoulder. I rolled my eyes and tried not to think about how unfair all this was.

  One of the finance assistants came up to me. “You got booted from your cube already? Didn’t you just get settled in?” He glanced at the nameplate and raised his eyebrows. “Oh. I heard about that guy.”

  “What’d you hear?” I asked, mirroring his eyebrow action.

  “It’s Ian’s nephew. Some hotshot MBA guy. He’s probably just like his dear ol’ uncle. Sorry he stole your work space.” He walked away shaking his head.

  One “silver lining” about my office move, though: the room had skylights and fit two desks plus a preinstalled small sofa. The not-so-good news: I’d share the office with a TBD employee, not of my choosing. But the absolute worst news? Five life-size cutouts of busty anime Japanese women in bikini armor littered the entire space. They were the “Kaizen Five,” and each possessed a unique battalion weapon. Yoshi and Toshi, twin warriors, carried identical AK-47s, which seemed physically impossible to strap and shoot over their 36DDD chests.

  The scrawled signature across the breasts of these giant cardboard characters read “Created by Ian MacKaizen.” They were promotional relics from one of Ian’s blockbuster game launches, so tossing them into a dumpster was not an option. But was my office a storage closet? I refused to stare at these women all day long. They were distracting, not to mention grossly offensive. How was this even here, in the post–#metoo era?

  While Ian went out for his typical two-hour lunch, I dragged all five cutouts into his office. They were his, after all. Those ten boobs took up a lot of space, but in Ian’s spacious corner office he’d likely not notice the new decor. Plus, what heterosexual man wouldn’t want a boob shrine? It wasn’t until after I headed back to my desk that it crossed my mind that Ian could fire me for this. If I wanted to stay at this company and launch my game production career, I had to cool down my snarkiness, stat.

  When I got back from a postlunch budget meeting, the cardboard cutouts were back in my office and placed in a semicircle around my desk. The attached note read:

  * * *

  FROM THE DESK OF IAN MACKENZIE

  * * *

  Maybe these badass ladies can inspire you to gaming greatness. —Ian

  I rolled my eyes and let a frustrated sigh out my nose. How’d these five offensively sexy Asian women even get housed here in the first place? Did the office manager think to himself, Well, here’s the designated Asian woman room, let’s stick Melody in there?

  Rather than obsess, I made a sign on my door that read KAIZEN SIX! in slanty letters. Male coworkers passed by and chuckled. A few passersby even gave me two thumbs-up.

  I HOLED UP in my office until late into the evening uploading projects and tasks into our studio’s workflow tool. Near dinnertime, my stomach growled so loudly that it sounded like a wounded yeti was trapped behind my belly button, yelling in its native language, Time to go home! I walked out my office door and smacked into a new life-size cutout: the buxom body of one of the Kaizen girls with my photocopied face on top of it. Okay, it was a little bit funny because the grainy picture came from my name badge photo from our company intranet page, but it was also extremely vulgar and grossly unprofessional.

  I dragged my customized Kaizen cutout into my office and decided to let this joke run its course. Complaining to senior management or HR would likely get me labeled as someone with no sense of humor, or worse, someone “anticommunity.” Seventeen Studios clearly had blinders on when it came to inappropriate conduct. But I wasn’t about to take these hits without fighting back my own way.

  With a quick rifling-through of our trade show closet, I found what I needed: a floor display of one of the most-hated characters from our studio’s UFC games, Maverick “Chile” Morita, the tattooed, insult-hurling, hypermuscular cage fighter. I dragged it back to my office, printed out a copy of Ian’s face, and taped it onto Chile’s bulbous head, then faced new-and-improved Ian out toward the hallway for everyone to see. I kept the office light on so he could be easily visible to anyone passing by.

  WHEN I GOT into work the next morning, all the cutouts had been removed from my office. No more Kaizen Six. No more UFC cage fighter Ian. The lights were turned off, with no signs of retaliation.

  Yeah. That’s right.

  Good game, bishes.

  Chapter Four

  “I’m Asher. My bros call me Ash.” My new officemate barely looked up from his computer screen when he introduced himself. Apparently, I wasn’t worth his wholehearted attention. While I grabbed lunch and ran a quick errand, this guy had moved in and rearranged the entire office, pushing my desk flush against the wall. His toy-covered desk stood in the center of the room, and he still had boxes strewn all over the floor, overflowing with what appeared to be hundreds more tchotchkes. And what did he mean by My bros call me Ash? That only friends called him that, or that only GUYS could call him that?

  I heaved my desk flush against his so we faced each other. “I’m sorry, who are you again?” Because I couldn’t believe this guy was in my work space confines, I hadn’t paid attention to his uninspiring introduction.

  Asher sighed as he stood up. He easily cleared six feet tall and was a weird mix between nerdy and fratty. He had the sort of body that suggested he used to be athletic, and then he met beer and pot.

  “I’m Asher—I’m an assistant producer who worked my way up through QA. Who are you?” He had to be a foot taller than me and definitely used his height to intimidate.

  Neither of us feigned any excitement about being office roomies. Within the first few seconds together in the same room, we knew instantly that we despised each other. Insta-hate, for both of us. His massive presence would suck up most of my available oxygen with his 230-pound body. And he’d jack up the office temperature with his substantial amount of body heat. This did not bode well for me.

  “I’m Melody. The person who had this office first. The person whose name is on the door. The person whose shit you moved around without permission.”

  He laughed and held his hands up, like he was simultaneously surrendering and pushing away my crazy. “Look, I don’t want to start anything. Ian told me yesterday he’d get me an office, and this morning he sprang the news that I’d be sharing it with some new chick—uhhhh—person, and that I should move my stuff here today. I had high hopes.”

  Ian didn’t say a word about any of this to me, though. Bastard.

  Asher asked, “Are you an artist or something?”

  Nearly all the women I’d met at my company worked in marketing, in HR, or in the art department. I couldn’t fault him for assuming that.

  “No, I’m in production, too. I used to be a copywriter at an ad agency. I managed a creative and production team to develop a few game apps and also did a lot of localization stuff . . . now I’m here.”

  Asher said flatly, “Huh. I’ve never heard of someone getting into game production with your background. You’ve never actually worked in the industry.” He pressed his lips together and stared at me.

  “Well, it’s hard to break into gaming if one of the prerequisites is already having game experience under your belt. How do you get gaming experience if no one will let you get a job in the first place?” Game companies complained all the time about needing more women in the industry, but at the same time, the job requirements precluded women from actually being able to get those positions. At my first company happy hour last week (Booze Day Tuesday!), one of the women in recruiting explained to me that upper management white dudes tended to hire other like-minded white dudes. And since women didn’t fit in the white dude demographic, well, they had trouble finding women for key positions here.

  Asher shrugged and went back to rapid-fire typing. Maybe, just maybe, Asher wouldn’
t be so bad after all. He’d been on the testing team and had clearly been at the company a long time given the massive number of Seventeen Studios collectibles he had amassed. Maybe he could help me. Maybe we could help each other.

  The clicking of the keyboard stopped. He asked, “Wait, are you that girl who flooded the QA team with fluorescent lights a few weeks ago? All those testers were so fucking pissed.”

  Oh my god. How’d he know?

  “Yeah, I did that,” I said coolly.

  Asher tossed his head back and belly laughed. “That was pretty fucking embarrassing. Almost as bad as that anonymous idiot who tripped over the power cord in the war room this morning. Did you hear about that?” That idiot he referred to was also me, but I had escaped without anyone seeing my face.

  Tripping on the main power supply in our war room where we tracked all online game activity took down our monitoring system. Because of the blackout, our ops guys didn’t see there was a problem with our game servers, which pissed off millions of players worldwide when the network went down for a few minutes. I shouldn’t have even been there, snooping around in the dark, but the door was propped open with a magazine and curiosity got the best of me.

  Neither of us had anything more to say. I went back to reading email, he went back to his machine-gun typing. As minutes ticked by, Asher’s office coexistence became suffocating, quite literally. Our office had poor air circulation and the one air vent was on top of him, blowing Asher-diffused, unshowered air into our small room. Looking up from my laptop and seeing his smug face was punishment that was too much for anyone. I needed coffee breaks. Lots of them.

  THE LINE FOR coffee in the kitchen was ten people deep.

  “You’d think they could spring for at least two coffeemakers, right?” The guy in front of me had these tortoiseshell, bookish glasses that gave me major spec-envy.

  I smiled. His curly brown hair, navy-blue-checked button-down, and new tan cords gave him a Corporate America vibe, but his vintage Air Jordans threw me off. Unlike Asher, it looked like he showered recently.