by Julia Kent
Amanda, Josh, and I squeal like the kids on Glee after winning a sing-off.
After twenty seconds of shouting, we quiet down, and I realize Greg hasn’t answered Josh’s exact question.
“Greg?”
“You get company cars!” he says again, but this time his face is…different. There’s a bit of a shadow there, a sheepishness that makes a tiny little tickle form in the place inside me where my hinky meter resides.
“We get that, right?” Amanda says, pointing. “Because that is a very cool wrap. I think of Chris Hemsworth and racing when I see that. Patrick Dempsey.”
Josh squeals again. “McDreamy!” We’re big Grey’s Anatomy fans. The entire office. Greg has admitted to having a secret crush on Sandra Oh. We’ve rearranged business meetings for season finales. We cried when Callie and Arizona got into that car crash.
Greg startles, giving Josh the side eye. But he doesn’t confirm.
“Greg,” I say, my tone made of steel. Something is off.
“You get cars,” he explains. “Fully paid by the company. You can use your company cards to charge all gas, all tolls and parking, and all repairs from now on. It’s all covered by Consolidated or the client. The contract runs for two years.”
“Okay!” Amanda chirps.
“No more mileage reimbursements,” Greg says dryly.
“Who cares? Shannon finally has a car that starts with a key!” Amanda adds. She seems starstruck. I think she’s just dreaming about a Robert Downey, Jr.-and-Chris Hemsworth-and Amanda sandwich.
“But…” I say, skeptical. Josh is frowning. He sees that I am teasing something out of Greg. Details he’s reluctant to give.
“But what? You guys have been begging for company-paid cars for years. Now I go and find a client to supply them, and you’re giving me the third degree!” Greg’s face is red and blustery, but he’s not offended or angry.
He’s deflecting. You know how there are levels in professional chess playing, like Expert and Master and Grandmaster? Well, the same levels apply in professional defecting. I am the High Princess Queen Pooh-Bah of it, with a finely tuned radar when others do it.
Greg is setting off all my alarm bells.
“Let’s go see the cars, then!” Amanda and Josh rush to the window. “Where are they?” she asks.
“Around the corner,” Greg says, reaching in his desk drawer to fish out three sets of keys. Each set is color coded: dark brown, a rusty auburn, and bright yellow.
M’kay.
Amanda skips down the hall and stairs like she’s the lead in a Disney princess movie, while Josh is giving me nonverbal looks and gestures meant to convey something in human semaphore, but I’m clueless. All I know is that Greg isn’t giving us the full picture.
“OH MY GOD!” I hear as Amanda shoots through the main doors and peels off to the right, where a bank of cars is parked just behind the building.
Then a bloodcurdling scream of “NOOOOOOOOO!”
Josh and I look at each other and take off at a dead run, bolting through the doors into the blinding sunshine, banking to the right. I’m behind him by a few feet and he stops dead in his tracks. I crash into him, but he’s so frozen he might as well be a steel support beam.
And then my eyes register the cars.
I half expect Drew Carey to appear and make that wha-wha-wha sound on The Price is Right, telling us we lost. Because what I see before me is way worse than my crappy little Saturn. The screwdriver I use to start my car seems like a gold-plated Oscar statue compared to this.
“Is that a giant turd on top?” Amanda gasps. “I am not driving a car that has a huge piece of poop as a hat!” Her voice is high and thin, a fluttering, panicked tone seeping in. She sounds like the whiny girl from that movie The Blair Witch Project.
I’m starting to think that standing in the corner would be a better fate than what’s in store for us right now.
“That’s a coffee bean!” Greg protests. My hands and feet have gone numb with shock. The car in question is one of those tiny little Toyota cars, and it’s covered in what appears to be an artistic rendering of a latte with that signature leaf pattern that baristas use to mark their specialty drinks. That part isn’t so bad, and the coffee chain’s logo is fine, but on top of the tiny little car is an enormous brown, textured thing that is about the size of a double kayak and it looks, indeed, like Goliath dropped trou and squeezed out a giant log on top.
It actually makes me imagine I am smelling poop right now, which makes me hold my nose. I look at Josh and realize he’s doing it.
The store’s motto: Coffee gets everything moving!
“I am not driving that!” we say in unison.
“It’s a coffee bean!” Greg insists.
“It looks like a giant version of the Baby Ruth from that Caddyshack movie!” Josh argues.
Greg studies it and tilts his head, examining it like we’re at the Museum of Modern Art. Or…ahem…the Bromfield Gallery.
“Huh. It kind of does.”
An argument begins instantly between me, Amanda, and Josh about who will be stuck with what quickly is named the Turdmobile.
As the two of them duke it out, I extract myself from the argument, because while the Turdmobile was the most graphic of the three cars, now I have a chance to look at the next one, and…
Well, let’s just say if I were a guy I’d get a rise out of it.
The green one is a huge wrap for a popular drug that helps men with erectile dysfunction. The wrap shows a mature (read: AARP member age) couple rolling in an intimate embrace in a meadow filled with daisies.
The logo shows two people dancing. The tagline says: Sometimes you have to be hard to please.
I make gagging noises when I take a really good look at the couple in the picture, because apparently my mother has been keeping her new career from me.
She’s the model.
Amanda and Josh shut up instantly and Greg looks at me like he needs to perform the Heimlich. Josh has met Mom a few times but doesn’t see what I see.
Amanda, though…Amanda gets my pain.
“Oh! Oh! Marie told me she was working on catalog modeling, but she never…Oh, God, Shannon. Josh is just going to have to take this one.”
“Josh is WHAT?” Josh screams. “Josh is right here and Josh is not driving a Limpmobile around town. Josh will never have sex again if he drives that!”
“Josh is talking about himself in third person,” Greg says slowly, like he’s dealing with a mental patient.
“The thought of parking the Limpmobile in my neighborhood in Jamaica Plain makes me do that, you…” Josh can’t seem to find an insult to hurl at Greg, his eyes skittering between the Turdmobile and the Limpmobile.
In desperation, we all look at car #3.
Wha-wha-wha.
The giant clawed thing on top is the color of rust and red. The actual car is wrapped with the logo for a famous crab shack, and if that was all, it would be fine.
But the industrial designer who created the two-foot-tall, seven-foot-long…thing…on top of the Smart car had created a masterpiece of a “crab.”
It’s like they took a baby crab, put it on the Island of Doctor Moreau, fed it nothing but water from Chernobyl, and for good measure handed it off to the Human Centipede dude.
“That looks like pubic lice,” Amanda says.
We all turn and look at her, mouths agape.
“We studied it in biology class!” she insists.
“Sure,” we three say in unison.
But she’s right. It looks like the angriest louse ever.
And matched with the store’s tagline: Bring our crabs home tonight and make him dance!
It just…shoot us now.
The three of us get the same idea at the exactly same time, and we run around the building to Greg’s car.
“Why do you get the cool car?” Amanda thunders. The cheerleader’s voice dissolves into Maleficent’s vibrant, threatening tones. My balls tighten. Wait—
I don’t have balls. But if I did, they would tighten.
“That’s the car the president of the ad company wanted me to drive,” he says weakly.
I think even Chuckles is glaring from my apartment.
“Nuh uh. Nope. I am not driving any of those three cars!” Josh announces.
“My mother is on one of those!” I wail. “For a little pill that makes life harder.” Mom’s been holding out. I wonder why. She’s the type to crow about this kind of thing. Something serious is going on if she’s not screaming on the town common about how she’s now a “professional model.”
“You don’t have to drive that one,” Greg says.
“So I get to choose between the Turdmobile and the Crabmobile?” I whine.
“I am not driving that piece of crap!” Josh says.
“Which one?”
“Any of them except for yours, Greg!” Josh’s voice becomes a baritone, fierce and demanding, with a predator’s tone that makes all of us stop and stand a little taller, keenly aware of his manhood.
Josh is about as dominant as an umbrella, so this catches us all unaware. A light breeze pushes clouds in front of the sun and the sky darkens as if he’s beckoned some kind of evil force to do his bidding.
Something Wicked This Way Comes. And its name is Turdmobile.
“This is really cruel,” Amanda hisses. “Company car!” She snorts. Once you lose the chipper one, all hope is lost. Greg’s face reeks of defeat.
“I know,” he says as he sits on a picnic table under a tree, the one where all the smokers in the building congregate every hour. “I tried, but trust me—these conversations are taking place at the other three marketing eval companies. It’s a joke.”
“A joke?” Josh is so angry he sounds like he’s about to throw something.
“It’s some hyper-ironic campaign designed to drive people to the URLs. There isn’t a real chain of coffee shops, or that erection drug, or that crab restaurant. They’re fake.”
Hope springs eternal.
Chapter Five
“Wait, wait wait,” Josh says, now breathless. “This is a meta-advertising experiment? Like, we are pretending to advertise ridiculously stupid companies and their bullshit products for the sake of a buried advertising campaign to drive internet traffic for a viral campaign?”
Greg looks even more hangdog. “Yes.”
Amanda, Josh, and I widen our eyes and stare at the cars. My own gaze can’t break away from my mom’s face, contorted with pleasure as her man’s hand disappears below her waist and is obscured by a bunch of daisies.
Josh and Amanda put their heads together and whisper furiously. I’m just furious. I feel like I’m being lied to by my mom, and Greg, but most of all—
Which is worse? Driving a car I have to start with a screwdriver, or showing up for a date with Declan in a Turdmobile?
It’s not exactly a choice anyone ever thinks they’ll have to make.
“This is…” Josh says, standing up and touching the “coffee bean” on top of the car. His palm caresses it and I flinch. It looks like he’s loving on a piece of feces.
“This is,” he says again, withdrawing his hand and subconsciously wiping it on his hip, “…brilliant!”
“What?” Greg and I exclaim in unison.
“It’s so post-hipster! It’s like a neo-Warhol post-modern performance art show!” Josh claps his hands like a little kid whose just been told he’s going to Disneyland.
I stare dumbly at him. Greg shakes his head slowly and squints, like he’s not quite sure we’re in the correct dimension.
“A Warhol what?”
Josh waves his hand absent-mindedly and slings his arm around Amanda’s shoulders. “Which one is the worst?” he asks her.
“Crabs,” they all say simultaneously. Even Greg.
“But the Limpmobile is the worst for me,” I say in a tone that would put Veruca Salt to shame.
“Then I shall drive the Limpmobile!” Josh declares.
“I claim the Crabmobile!” Amanda shouts.
“And I get the turd,” I say quietly. “Coffee gets everything moving.”
“It’s a meme!” Amanda says, perky again.
“Huh?”
“You know,” she adds, giving me a look that says I’m being obtuse on purpose. But I’m not. I swear. I don’t get it. “You met Declan with your hand down a toilet. Now you’ll drive a Turdmobile. It’s…a meme.”
“That’s supposed to be encouraging?” I gasp.
“It’s a car, Shannon,” Greg sighs. “It’s a free car, and you also get paid $200 a month on top of your regular salary for driving it more than one thousand miles a month in the greater Boston area.”
Josh and Amanda clap at this news. “A raise!”
“Not a raise,” I say. “We’re just getting paid extra to humiliate ourselves.”
“Pfft,” Amanda says. “I humiliate myself for free. It’s great to get paid for it!”
“Neo-Warhol post-modern art performance?” I gawk at Josh, who scowls and folds his arms across his chest.
“Shannon, sometimes you have to be hard to please.”
“Let me get the keys for you,” Greg says, turning back toward the main entrance. He seems looser, less tense. Who wouldn’t? He just got a big burden off his chest. And placed it squarely on us.
“I didn’t agree to drive that,” I hiss. My tone is more menacing than I want it to be. My head is splitting from caffeine deprivation, and all I can think about is driving around town in a car that looks like an ad for plumbers who unclog toilets the day after Superbowl Sunday.
Greg comes to a halt at the small picnic table under the oak tree in front of the building’s main entrance. Cigarette butts litter the ground around the metal bucket with sand in it. Bright red lipstick encircles every single filter. Louise, the receptionist for the wholesale lamp import firm above ours in the building, must be back to smoking.
“You can’t refuse,” he says in a calm voice. His eyes meet mine. There is no pleading. He’s stating a presumed fact.
“Yes, I can.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Is this a condition of my employment?” The idea of driving a turdmobile around town to do mystery shops, to perform my own personal errands, to shepherd my nephews around, makes my stomach turn into a pretzel.
“Besides,” I add, “it’s going to make us all huge targets when we do our shops. None of these cars is exactly nondescript.” I can’t hide the tone of triumph in my voice.
With one slow, drawn-out gesture, Greg points to my car. The paint on the roof and hood is flaking. The passenger-side door is bright red. The rest of the car is black.
“Your car isn’t exactly ‘nondescript’ either.”
“It doesn’t have a piece of fiberglass poop on top of it!”
My words carry on the light breeze that passes between us just as a long, sleek limousine pulls up in front of the building, not twenty feet from us. The rear window is open and—to my utter shock—the face of Declan McCormick emerges from the shadows.
He looks puzzled. Behind him sits his father with a horrified look on his face. Both men are dressed in suits, Declan’s arm reaching out the window to wave me over. Each step I take makes my body tingle. Once I’m close enough, I smell the heady scent of cologne and leather, pushed out by a blast of air-conditioned air.
“Hello, James.” I make eye contact and smile, just like I would in any professional setting. “Declan,” I add, as if an afterthought, then tear my eyes away from his father and give the younger man my full attention. My body has been giving him every molecule of awareness since the limo pulled into the parking lot. My eyes just need to catch up.
He shoots me a half-smile, the kind where one side of his mouth curls up with sultry amusement. The tingling turns into a full-blown blood blast, making my skin hover a quarter-inch from my body and pushing my sex to a dull throb that needs his touch to recede.
Decidedly unprofessional. But v
ery authentic. My God, the man can set me atwitter with a look. What would a night in bed do?
“Ms. Jacoby,” Declan’s dad says. “Shannon,” he corrects himself, then gives Declan a side eye that I take to mean What the hell are we doing here?
Greg comes over and gives an anemic wave. He’s clearly as puzzled as James is. Then, suddenly, both of them look at us. Or, at least, I think they look at us. All I know is that I’m looking at Declan and he’s staring right back and everyone else fades into a different world where they’re important.
But not urgent. The only urgent person in the world is making me his obsession with eyes that won’t cut away. I can’t breathe, and yet I become air. I can’t look away, and yet I see everything in his piercing look. I can’t move, and yet I feel connected to every single item in the world, as if I’m one with everyone and every thing.
James clears his throat and taps Declan’s shoulder. “The jet is waiting.” His words break the spell and Declan turns just enough to cut his eyes away from me. It’s like a dimmer switch on the sun has been spun a half-turn.
“The jet can wait longer.” Declan’s words are cold ice.
“No, son, it cannot. I need to make a series of meetings before yours.” James matches Declan’s tone. I feel a distinct chill in the air, and it’s not the car’s A/C.
The black door opens and Declan steps out. The man can wear a suit like an Armani model on a Milan runway. My mouth waters as he steps out, from classic wingtips on his feet to the heathered lavender tie that is loose around his neck. A crisp white shirt with sterling silver cuff links peeking out under an all-black suit sleeve makes me snap to attention, the top button at his neck undone, his body language tense but his overall look alluring and demanding.
Why is he getting out of the limo?
The car door snaps shut with a resolute tone. Declan’s words do, too. “You go ahead, then. I’ll catch up.”
“How?” James is outraged. “I’m taking the jet.”
“Then I’ll fly commercial.” Declan pulls out his phone and taps into it for a few seconds. “Done. Grace is making arrangements.”
“Commercial?” James says the word as if Declan had just announced he’d drive a Flintstones car to London. “Why on earth would you do such a thing?” His expression is tight and he’s angry. Deeply furious.