The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  “I’ve actually thought about that. My mortgage is with Allied National. They’re huge. You’d need somebody to hack into their computer system, not their office. I’m good at figuring out programs, but I’m not a hacker. God, I wish I had never bought that stupid house. It would be easier to just burn the damn thing down.”

  The three of them sank into silence for a moment, letting Abra’s words linger in the air above the table, mixing with the sounds of Billy playing “Summertime.”

  When Margie asked, “How much are you insured for?” Katherine thought she was simply asking about insurance. Abra must have thought the same thing, because she just said she couldn’t remember the exact amount. “More than it would get on the open market if I tried to sell it.”

  “That isn’t what I was suggesting,” Margie said.

  Katherine froze. Around them there was the light applause that followed every one of Billy’s songs, the clink of silverware on plates and glasses being put down on tables, and, cutting through it all, one particularly loud male voice that kept yelling “Oh my God!” at the baseball game that was mutely playing on one of the televisions above the bar. All these sounds seemed real and normal. What Margie was suggesting sounded neither real nor normal.

  Abra’s face went from puzzled to shocked. “What? No, no! Just no,” she said.

  For a moment, Katherine figured she must have misunderstood. Margie, of all people, couldn’t actually be suggesting they burn down Abra’s house for the insurance money. As she was trying to get her head around this proposition, she had a sudden realization. “Wait, are you saying you can light things on fire?” Her voice involuntarily dropped to a whisper as she asked this. Katherine couldn’t help it. The heat was crazy enough, but the thought that her best friend could control fire was practically immobilizing.

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. Then you could help Abra. I mean, it’s illegal and probably a little dangerous and maybe immoral, but…” It was all those things. But it might also be a way out. She turned to Abra and lowered her voice. “Margie could help you.”

  “The way I see it,” Margie said, “the cost of one policy for one eleven-hundred-square-foot, single-family home is a tiny drop in the giant insurance ocean. But that drop could set you free. You could be free of the house and all the bad memories associated with it and get a fresh start.”

  Abra looked overwhelmed. Katherine swore she even saw the hint of a tear in her eye. “Thank you. Just knowing that you would do that for me means the world.”

  For a moment, Katherine felt useless. Abra’s invisibility was a shield—she could spy and practically fly when invisible. And now Margie had mastered the element arguably responsible for all of human civilization. What could she do? Fight. “If it’ll help, I’ll kick Richard’s ass,” she offered.

  “You guys are the best.”

  The Woman Who Burns shook her head as though she was speaking to someone who didn’t understand. “Abra, I’m serious. I could do this for you. I would do this for you.”

  From the expression on Abra’s face, she hadn’t taken Margie’s offer completely seriously. “Burn down—” Abra lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Burn down my house?”

  “Yes,” Margie replied.

  Abra looked down at the glass of beer in front of her for what felt like a very long time. The Woman Who Can’t Be Hurt tried to think what she would do if faced with this choice. “Do it,” she said softly. “I’ll help any way I can.”

  The Woman Who Can’t Be Seen looked up and said, “Okay.”

  IC_EstellesKid posted: My grandma says IC_SuperLadies every morning at the bus stop. Maybe she’s wrong, but I don’t know who the hell else would go running through Candlewick Heights by herself like that.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Woman Who Can’t Be Seen sometimes took her lunch to the Eastman Reading Garden by the downtown public library. It was only a ten-minute walk from her building and offered a quiet solitude that was a pleasant alternative to the noise of the office. If you sat near the Rockwell Avenue entrance, you could look out and see the spritely fountain in the middle of Mall C, a vast public space in the middle of downtown Cleveland that overlooked Lake Erie. Everything she was looking at had been designed by architect Daniel Burnham, who famously said, “Make no little plans.” Was burning down one’s house for insurance money a little plan?

  A sharp breeze blew in off the lake, making her shiver. It was time to get back to work. She wondered how long she’d be able to continue commuting while invisible. She had taken to leaving a neatly folded stack of dresses and blouses in the back of a file drawer in her office. A T-shirt and leggings or yoga pants were form-fitting enough to remain unseen. Anything not touching her skin directly was visible when she turned invisible.

  The first day she decided to ride the train while invisible, she realized she’d have to go to work commando—no bra, no underwear. It was one thing to go out crime fighting for a couple of hours without underwear; going to work like that felt downright unprofessional. She hadn’t even thought of it when she’d brought the stack of clothes to work the Friday before. By then, she was already at the Green Road station. Once she was out of the car, she went invisible and got on the train, unseen in form-fitting clothes and light sneakers (no socks). A dress worked fine over a pair of leggings, and a tailored blouse dressed up a pair of yoga pants. During the summer months, that was all she needed. As they moved into September, she had switched to long-sleeved shirts. She could get away with wearing her running tights and a thermal running shirt through the fall, but moving into winter, she’d need more clothes or would have to start paying again.

  At first, invisibly jostling for a spot on a crowded train car during morning rush hour was almost enough to make her want to forgo the entire thing. The money she was saving might not put a dent in the mortgage or the thousands of dollars in credit card debt left by Richard, but it was one way to economize. She just wasn’t sure how long she could do it. Every time she went invisible to avoid paying the fare, the idea of burning the house and starting a new life with the insurance money seemed less ridiculous and more like salvation.

  She didn’t need to be invisible for the entire trip—the only real necessity was to be able to scramble over or under the turnstiles unseen at the main station downtown. But there was something relaxing about not being seen. She could choose who saw her and, by extension, who spoke to her, who interacted with her, and who didn’t. She could observe the world without being observed. This had some perks. For one thing, it let her act on one of her pet peeves. On more than one occasion she had stood unseen behind some kid playing music loudly enough to be heard throughout the train car. Then she would surreptitiously pull the kid’s earbud cord out of his or her phone. The kid would plug it back in, and she’d unplug it again and again until the kid decided the plug was broken, stopped the music, and started texting. She considered this a public service in the interest of noise abatement.

  Riding while invisible also made it easier to intervene whenever she saw a wandering male hand touching a female body. The good people of Cleveland, Ohio, were generally well behaved, but once in a while she’d be standing in a corner of the train car when she’d notice a woman give a quick look over her shoulder. Then the woman would visibly shift an inch or two away from whatever man was standing near her. That was when Abra would start watching. Most women—most people—are reasonable and realize that bodies will accidentally bump into each other on a crowded moving train. Whenever Abra saw the second quick glance, a second shift away, she would start moving toward the offending party. Usually she would just grab the guy’s hand and twist it behind him. She didn’t twist hard. There was no need. The shock of an unseen hand grabbing his always made the guy jump. He’d give his own quick look around before moving away. There was something very satisfying in turning the tables.

  Life at Hoffmann Software
Solutions continued as it always had, although now that Arthur, Giles’s son, was in charge, the corporate culture had changed. The importance of a workplace hierarchy rests upon the workplace’s leader. Giles was, at heart, a New Age baby boomer who was big on free speech and open communication. Arthur seemed to think the company had lost its competitive edge and considered himself a Master of Some Universe. When he started showing up for work in a suit with his hair slicked back, it felt like the eighties all over again. Something about Arthur’s hypermasculine attitude also seemed to turn the office’s cultural clock back about forty years.

  Gary Sewicki and his team in Software Development had always joked that the rest of the company didn’t care how the sausage got made—in essence, how the software systems that the company sold were developed and programmed—as long as they worked. This was true to a point. What the development guys did was something of a mystery to most of the company, and they seemed to like it that way. Software Development took up a row of three large inter-connected rooms at the far end of the company’s rabbit warren of offices. A few years back, when the lone female developer left the company, one of the guys put up a sign outside the department’s main door that read “Sausage Factory.” It got a few chuckles and titters, then Giles made them take it down because it was “unprofessional” and he didn’t want visitors to the office to be offended. Two weeks after Arthur took over, the sign was back. What’s more, Abra heard rumors that a couple of the guys had less-than-professional calendars up in their cubicles now.

  With almost all of the summer interns gone, Abra couldn’t keep up with office goings-on by looking over their shoulders to read their text conversations. Instead, she had taken to regular invisible strolls through the halls. It was the easiest, quickest way to hear what was happening in the company. The first time she did it, it felt nosy. Then she realized it gave her a leg up on internal communications. For instance, the Sales Department had a contest during the summer to see which rep could get the most clients to upgrade their software package before the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The contest was only for the Sales team, so they didn’t mention it to Marketing (i.e., Abra). After she overheard a few people from Sales talking about the contest, she created a quick email- and social media–based marketing campaign that focused on the value-added aspects of Hoffmann’s various packages. At the senior staff meeting after lunch, Deepak, the head of Sales, said they’d had a bump in upgrades over the last two weeks. Nobody bothered to mention the email campaign, but the web analytics would eventually throw some of the credit her way.

  After the staff meeting, Sewicki and Horowitz shared a private chuckle in the hall outside the conference room. It piqued Abra’s interest. It wasn’t as though she was eavesdropping; they were practically standing in her office doorway. She heard Sewicki say, “You gotta see it,” followed by an unintelligible whisper, followed by a bro cackle. They tromped off down the hallway toward Software Development. Although she had a report to run, Abra went invisible, quickly piled her clothes on her desk chair, and followed them.

  Abra rarely needed to go down to Software Development. Most of her work was done in conjunction with Sales, which was near her office at pretty much the opposite end of the Caxton Building’s seventh floor. Software Development was next door to the server room and the Tech Support office, which had its own Band of Brothers mentality. But while those in Tech Support had the collective persona of a dorky, introverted younger brother, Software Development was more the overachieving, entitled big brother who liked to wail on his younger siblings for fun. That whole end of the office was fueled by Mountain Dew, Doritos, and testosterone. Still, invisible and stripped down to yoga pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, Abra gamely walked through the doors of the Sausage Factory.

  The first thing she noticed was the lighting. Most of the guys in Software Development preferred minimal office lighting. Ray, one of the few guys from the department she’d ever been friendly with, used to say that the ceiling lights caused too much glare on the screen. Only one of the department’s three rooms had windows—tall, old-fashioned ones with wooden frames like the one in Abra’s office. None of the programmers wanted to sit near the windows, so that area held a large ping-pong table that doubled as a departmental conference table. Abra had always played doubles with Ray when the company used to have its annual Ping-Pong Tournament of Glory. Ray wasn’t with Hoffmann anymore, and nobody seemed to have the time or inclination to revive the Tournament of Glory. Most of the guys in the department were younger and, presumably, less expensive hires. Abra said hello to them in the hallways and kitchen, but that was about it.

  No one was near the ping-pong table, but she could hear voices coming from the adjoining room. This larger room had no windows, which seemed to be how the guys liked it. A hub of four cubicles nested in the center of the room, with two larger cubicles in two of the corners. The voices were coming from one of the cubes in the center. Abra walked behind one of the developers to the next cube and found Sewicki and Horowitz staring at one of the two wide-screen monitors on the desk. The cube belonged to a guy named Drew, who was one of the few developers who had been with Hoffmann almost as long as Abra had. He was probably in his late thirties and, as far as she knew, still single.

  Sewicki and Horowitz were standing on either side of Drew’s chair, somewhat blocking her view. “That’s crazy,” Horowitz said in between incredulous chuckles. “Don’t tell me you did this on work time.”

  “Nah, I did it during lunch. It started with A.J. over in Tech Support. He was complaining about how his girlfriend would turn into a raging bitch when she was on the rag and he wanted an easy way to keep track of it. We joked around that there should be an app for that. It turns out there is. It didn’t take much to adapt the code to our purposes.”

  Abra leaned around Horowitz’s right arm, getting as close to him as she dared. It was a hell of a lot closer than she ever would have wanted. She leaned forward and balanced herself on the edge of Drew’s desk, careful not to move the two pencils sitting near his mouse. It was sort of like holding a one-armed plank, but at least it allowed her to see the monitor. The guys appeared to be looking at a variation of Hoffmann’s basic inventory tracking program, but instead of tracking durable goods, it was tracking people. Abra got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach when she saw her name at the top of the screen.

  Drew pointed the cursor at the calendar that took up about a third of the screen. “See, the icons tell you when the subject is safe and approachable and when you should avoid her at all costs.”

  “The little red drops are the ‘avoid’ days,” Sewicki added with a chuckle.

  “McQuestion’s schedule is a little screwed up because she’s kind of old. It may not be accurate,” Drew said, clicking on the “Next” button. Now Aletha’s name was at the top of the screen. “Here you go,” he said.

  “Aletha…” Horowitz said.

  “Yeah,” Sewicki said in a voice that sounded like he was looking at juicy cheeseburger.

  “How the hell did you figure all this out?”

  “We got the baseline data a couple of ways. First, just plain old observation. Sometimes it’s just so obvious. You can track it. Or if she’s acting like a total bitch, I’ll just say, ‘Geez, are you on the rag or something?’ If they are, they get all huffy. Sandy came right out and told me.” Drew pointed the cursor at a small text box on the left-hand side of the screen. “You see this? That’s the Bang Box. We mark that if we have independent confirmation. For instance, Richie had a thing with one of the interns last summer and was able to provide visual confirmation.”

  “In other words, he banged an intern and saw dirty tampons in her garbage can,” Sewicki said.

  “Aletha’s box is blank,” Horowitz said.

  “Nobody’s been able to get in that box,” Drew said and clicked “Next” on the screen. “Now Bree on the other hand…”

 
“Easy Bree-zee,” Sewicki said. Bree was an administrative assistant in the Sales Department. Abra spent a minute or two listening to them talk about all the people in the company Bree had slept with. She didn’t know Bree well, but she was pretty sure half of what they were saying wasn’t true. And even if it were, what business was it of theirs if somebody in the Sales Department decided to make the beast with two backs with the partner of her choosing?

  The arm she’d been leaning on was starting to tremble a little, as though she’d been holding a plank for too long. She needed to get out of Drew’s cubicle before she gave herself away.

  “Guys, this is pretty damn funny…” Horowitz began.

  “It’s pretty damn useful,” Sewicki said.

  “…but it seems kind of, I don’t know, like a Human Resources nightmare.”

  “Then don’t tell HR.”

  “Who has access to this?”

  “Just Software Development and a few others. If the program is mapped to your machine, then you can make additions. It’s open source. You want me to give you access?” Drew asked.

  Abra was pleased to see Horowitz looked less than enthusiastic. Maybe he had a conscience after all. “Naw, that’s okay,” he said.

  “It’s no trouble at all. Information wants to be free, man.” Drew began clicking through a series of windows in the network to map the program. He went too quickly for Abra to follow the path, but she suspected the program lay somewhere in a proprietary drive that she wouldn’t be able to access on her own. “There, done. When you go on your machine, look for the B drive. Any updates you make will be live.”

  Abra slipped out of Drew’s cubicle as quickly and silently as possible. She could hear the low rumble of Sewicki’s and Horowitz’s voices behind her, but he wasn’t going to stay in there forever. Still invisible, she ran out of the Software Development office and down the main hallway, sidestepping around Sandy, the head of HR, and one of her people. She thought she heard Sandy say, “Do you feel a draft in here?” as she ran by.