by Susannah Nix
He grinned as he handed her a carton of milk. “Noted.” He fished the cold stuff out of the bags and passed it to her to put in the fridge. She didn’t love the fact that he was poking through her groceries, but she didn’t quite hate it enough to turn down the help.
“Is that grocery store sushi?” His lip curled into a sneer as he held it out. “Please tell me that’s for your cat, not you.”
“I didn’t feel like cooking tonight,” she said, snatching it out of his hand.
“It’s your funeral.”
“Yeah, it is.”
He frowned. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine. You seem…”
She turned to glare at him. “What?”
His eyebrows lifted. “More annoyed than usual.”
“I had my performance review at work today.” She grabbed a handful of yogurt cups and shoved them in the fridge.
“Ah,” he said. “Didn’t go well?”
She glared at him again. “I’m fucking great at my job, okay? I’m the best design engineer on that team.”
He nodded. “Is that what your boss said in your review?”
“Yes, actually. But she also said I didn’t play well with others. She called me aggressive. Can you believe it?”
He tilted his head. “Wellllll…”
Esther’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “What?”
“You can be a little…prickly.”
“Prickly?”
“Judgmental?”
“It’s called having high standards.”
He held his hands up in surrender. “Okay.”
She unpacked the rest of her yogurt and stacked it in the fridge. They’d been out of her favorite flavor, so she’d had to settle for fucking blueberry. It was just one more way this day had disappointed her.
She heard Jonathan shuffle his feet behind her. “It’s just—”
Esther slammed the fridge and wheeled on him. “What?”
He flinched. “Nothing.”
“No, come on, you were going to say something. I want to hear it.” She probably didn’t, but she couldn’t let it go now.
“Fine,” he said shrugging. “When you first started helping me with my writing, you came off a little…”
“What?” she prompted when he hesitated.
“Mean?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Is that so?”
His eyebrows lifted again. “Yeah. Nothing at all like the warm, cuddly teddy bear you’re being right now.”
“You said you wanted honest feedback.”
“I did, it’s just—there’s honest and then there’s honest.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Sally wandered over to Jonathan and started winding between his legs, purring. Traitor.
“You were pretty blunt about it that first time,” he said, “and I didn’t exactly take it well, if you’ll remember.”
Blunt. That was exactly what Diane had said. She was too blunt. That’s why people didn’t like her, apparently.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Jonathan said, “I needed to hear it, and I’m grateful you said what you said. But it wasn’t exactly pleasant.” He reached down to scratch Sally on the head, and she purred even louder. “The second time, you were more diplomatic about it though. Kinder, I guess. You said nice stuff to cushion the blow before you delivered the bad news. In my writing group we call it a feedback sandwich.”
That was what Diane had done to her, Esther realized. She’d started out the review by complimenting her before she dropped the hammer. She’d ended on a positive note too, like a consolation prize. A feedback sandwich.
“Did you want to show me something?” Esther asked irritably. She didn’t want to talk about this anymore, especially not with Jonathan. She didn’t even want to think about it anymore.
He looked up from petting her cat. “What?”
“Your script?” He’d rolled the pages up into a tube, and was clutching them in the hand that wasn’t petting Sally. “I assume that’s why you were lurking around my parking space.”
He straightened, tapping the roll of papers against his palm. “I wasn’t lurking, I was having a smoke in the courtyard and heard your car pull in.”
“While carrying around script pages?”
He shrugged.
She held out her hand. “Lemme see.”
He shoved the rolled-up pages behind his back. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Come on.” She wiggled her fingers impatiently.
He shook his head, backing toward the door. “Nope. It can wait until you’re in a better mood. I don’t want you taking your bad performance review out on my writing.”
“Chickenshit.”
His mouth curved into a lopsided smile. “You know it.”
“Fine,” Esther said. “Come back tomorrow, then.”
He pulled the door open, pausing on the threshold. “I’ll bring pizza to properly butter you up. What kind do you like?”
“Hawaiian,” she said, just to be contrary, because most people hated Hawaiian pizza.
He grinned, unfazed. “You got it.”
When he was gone, Sally came over and bonked her head against Esther’s leg. Esther scooped her up and buried her face in the cat’s fuzzy mane. “You don’t think I’m mean, do you?”
She took Sally’s purr as confirmation of the affirmative.
Chapter Thirteen
The first Friday of the month was goulash day at the Sauer Hewson cafeteria.
Esther always made a point to bring her lunch every first Friday of the month. Beyond the special of the day, the other choices on the menu were pretty dire: a selection of sad, soggy, plastic-wrapped sandwiches that had been sitting around for god only knew how many days, and a pitiful salad bar with wilted lettuce and no sneeze guard. Someone had once found a dead garter snake in the salad bar, so Esther would rather starve than eat anything out of it.
She’d forgotten she needed to pack her lunch until the last minute this morning though, so all she had was a hastily prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was a pretty sad lunch, but it was still better than the cafeteria’s goulash. She’d console herself later with some Oreos from the vending machine.
Yemi sat down in the chair across from her and sighed at the steaming pile of goulash on his tray. “I forgot my lunch today,” he said glumly. “I have to eat the goulash.”
It looked like someone had eaten dog food and vomited it onto a plate. It smelled kind of like it too.
“Here, have half my sandwich,” Esther said, pushing the other half of her peanut butter and jelly toward him.
He reached for it gratefully. “You’re very kind. You’re welcome to have half my goulash if you want.”
“Pass,” Esther said. “But thanks.”
“I’ll bring you some of my mother’s yam pottage on Monday.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a stew made with yams, tomatoes, dried fish, and ground crayfish.”
Esther wrinkled her nose. “No disrespect to your mother’s cooking, but that sounds terrible.”
Yemi shrugged. “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it. But you’ll like it.”
She nodded, frowning at her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Do you think I’m too honest?”
“No. I like that you’re honest.”
“Thank you.” At least someone she worked with liked her.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m probably the wrong person to ask though. People complain I’m too honest all the time.”
Esther wondered if Yemi had ever been told he was too aggressive in a performance review. Probably not. He was so soft-spoken and polite, it was hard to imagine him being described as aggressive, even when he was being blunt. Also, he was a man, so he had that going for him. Although, he was a black man, which added a whole other layer to the issue. Maybe that was why Yemi was so polite and soft-spoken. So he w
ouldn’t be seen as aggressive or threatening.
“It smells like a squirrel crawled up someone’s ass and died in here,” Jinny said, sitting down next to Esther. She’d brought her lunch today too: some kind of healthy-looking quinoa salad.
“Yemi forgot his lunch,” Esther said.
“Here, you can have some of my salad.” Jinny pushed the Tupperware into the middle of the table. “I’ve got orange slices too.” She set out a Ziploc bag of orange segments.
Yemi helped himself to an orange slice, but didn’t make a move on the quinoa salad. “Thank you.”
“Do you think I’m too honest?” Esther asked Jinny.
“I’m gonna need more context,” Jinny said, taking back her quinoa salad.
“At work. Am I overly blunt and aggressive?”
Jinny frowned. “Is this about your review?”
Esther nodded.
Jinny’s eyebrows lifted. “She actually used the word aggressive?”
“I know, right? She might as well have said abrasive.”
“And we all know what that means.” Jinny shook her head as she stabbed at her salad. “Sexism blows.”
“You told me your review went fine,” Yemi said.
“It did,” Esther said, avoiding his eyes. “Except for the part where apparently I’m aggressive and no one likes me.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Jinny said. “Everyone likes you.” She looked to Yemi for confirmation. “Right?”
“I like you,” he told Esther. “Otherwise I wouldn’t eat lunch with you so often.”
“See? People like you,” Jinny said. “Don’t let one mediocre review get under your skin.”
Esther nodded as she reached for her iced tea. “It’s just…someone else recently told me I can be mean sometimes.”
“Well…” Jinny tilted her head to one side. “That’s not entirely inaccurate.”
Esther stared at her. “Seriously?”
“You’re only mean to people who deserve it.”
“Great, thanks.”
“You have a low tolerance for incompetence,” Jinny said as she stirred her quinoa salad with her fork. It had cherry tomatoes and bell peppers and something else slimy and unidentifiable in it—squash, maybe. It looked almost as dire as the goulash. “But when it’s someone you like, you’re extremely patient and supportive. Like when you taught me how to knit.”
“That’s true, I guess,” Esther said, feeling a little better.
“It’s just when you’re dealing with someone you don’t like that you can maybe be a little brusque,” Jinny added. “You’re very binary about people. You either like them or you hate them. There’s no in between with you.”
Yeah, okay. Jinny might have a point. Esther had never been much of a people person. She liked her friends and was willing to do almost anything for them, but she didn’t have an abundance of patience for everyone else in the world. Most people were an inconvenience she’d just as soon not have to deal with. She supposed it was possible she let that show a little too much in her attitude at work.
She sighed as she helped herself to one of Jinny’s orange slices. “Maybe Diane’s right. Maybe I am too blunt sometimes.”
“Look,” Jinny said, “it was unfair and sexist of her to call you aggressive—”
“Yeah, it was,” Esther grumbled.
“But I think I get what she was trying to say. Just because it’s a double standard doesn’t mean you don’t still have to figure out how to navigate it. The world’s an unfair place and sexism isn’t going away anytime soon. She should have chosen a different word, but I think you should consider that she was trying to help you.”
“So, what? I’m supposed to censor myself? Play along to get along?” The idea of sucking up to less competent male engineers to bolster their fragile egos left a bad taste in Esther’s mouth. She looked over at Yemi. “You’ve been awfully quiet. What do you think?”
He looked up from his peanut butter sandwich, blinking like a possum caught in the headlights. “This situation is outside my experience. I don’t feel qualified to have an opinion.”
“Cop-out,” Jinny said.
“Yeah,” Esther said. “Come on, you have to weigh in on behalf of your gender.”
He frowned and pushed his glasses up. “Speaking only for myself, I think it’s possible for something to be two things at once. I think you can be angry that it’s sexist, but also try to learn something from it that will help you advance in your career.”
Leave it to Yemi to be pragmatic when Esther wanted to rage against the machine. She knew he was right though. You did have to play along to get along, even when it was unfair.
“Who called you mean, anyway?” Jinny asked, frowning.
“No one important,” Esther said with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, just say the word and I will happily kick the ass of anyone who says anything bad about you.”
“You’re going to kick my manager’s ass?” Esther asked, quirking an eyebrow.
Jinny shrugged. “Maybe not kick her ass literally, but I’ll totally key her car for you if you want.”
“Let’s put a pin in that for now,” Esther said. “But thanks.”
“Anytime,” Jinny said, smiling.
Jonathan showed up at Esther’s apartment with Hawaiian pizza that night, just as promised. He even texted her first, to ask when he should come over, instead of camping outside her door or ambushing her by her car. Progress.
“It’s too early in the summer to be this hot,” Esther complained, switching on the fan in her living room while Jonathan set the pizza box on the coffee table. She’d opened all the windows as soon as she got home, but it hadn’t helped much. “I passed this cyclist on my way home today and I was like, ‘Dude, it’s hotter than the surface of the sun out here, what are you doing? How are your tires not melting into the asphalt?’”
Jonathan dished a slice of pizza onto a plate and passed it to Esther. “The wasps have started swarming around the palms in the courtyard already. They nearly got me when I came home from class today.”
That was the one downside of the courtyard—in July the trees filled up with wasps, and every time you walked past them, you risked reenacting that scene in My Girl where Macaulay Culkin gets murdered by bees.
“Well, of course,” Esther said, sinking down onto the couch. “Ninety fuckillion degrees is the devil’s perfect temperature.”
Jonathan pulled a battered Moleskine notebook out of his back pocket, grabbed the pen tucked behind his ear, and started scribbling.
“What are you doing?” she asked, frowning at him around a bite of pizza.
“I’m writing down what you just said.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s funny. I might use it in a script.”
“Don’t do that.”
He shut the notebook with a snap. “Too late.”
“I hate that.”
He grinned wide enough to show off his teeth. “Too bad.”
He never used to smile this much. She’d thought he was so arrogant and humorless before she got to know him. He was always walking around with his nose in the air, scowling at everyone. She’d hated his mouth and that smug expression it always had. She never knew it could look this playful and warm.
Esther wasn’t sure when her feelings had changed, but he didn’t annoy her at all anymore. Jonathan Brinkerhoff wasn’t so bad, as it turned out. You just had to get to know him to figure that out.
She shook her head at him, smiling as she rolled her eyes. “What did you want to show me?”
“It’s an outline.” He pulled a battered roll of papers out of his back pocket. “I’ve been reworking the sci-fi script. I want to know what you think before I actually start writing it.”
“Give it here.” She waved her hand at him. “I’ll read it while I eat.”
He handed it to her, then turned his back and bent down for a piece of pizza, gracing her with an eyeful of his backsid
e. His Levi’s were just the right amount of tight in all the right places and—what was she doing? Stop staring at his butt.
Esther looked down at the papers in her hand. It was about five pages of notes. She scanned the first page while Jonathan settled onto the other end of the couch. “This is totally different,” she said, looking up at him after a moment.
“I was thinking over what you said about genre-hopping, so I decided to ditch the action-disaster movie stuff at the beginning and make it a more deliberate crossover between two genres I actually like to watch: hard sci-fi and horror.”
“You wrote a horror movie set in space?”
“Well, I haven’t written it yet, but that’s the idea. What do you think?”
“I love it.” Those were Esther’s two favorite genres of movies. She watched horror movie marathons whenever she needed cheering up. Nothing pulled her out of a funk like twenty-four straight hours of Friday the 13th movies, or the entire Evil Dead series.
Jonathan’s face split into a grin. “Yeah?”
“Are you kidding? I love horror movies, and obviously I love space movies. It’s a perfect mashup, because space is already so scary, what with the no-air thing and the claustrophobia—”
“And the existential dread of a cold, dark vacuum stretching out to infinity,” Jonathan added.
“Not to mention the high potential for catastrophic failure.”
“Exactly,” he said, looking pleased with himself.
“Plus, there haven’t been all that many good ones—the Alien movies, obviously, being the exception.”
“And Moon.”
“Oh, yeah, Moon was great!”
“There’ve been a couple set on Mars—”
“Both of them awful,” she pointed out.
“And Apollo 18—”
“Don’t even talk to me about that movie. It made me so mad.” There were enough loony conspiracy theories out there about the Apollo program. The last thing anyone needed was some crap horror movie fueling the fire. “Have you seen Europa Report though?”
Jonathan shook his head.
“That one was pretty good. Documentary-style alternative history. You should check it out.”
He shoved his pizza between his teeth, pulled out his notebook, and made a note. When he was done, he pulled the pizza out of his mouth. “There was Event Horizon too.”