Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Part two
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Connect on Social Media
Copyright © 2021 by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blackett, Laura, author. | Gleichman, Eve, author.
Title: The very nice box / Laura Blackett & Eve Gleichman.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044794 (print) | LCCN 2020044795 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358540113 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358540229 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358573814 (audio) | ISBN 9780358573784 (cd)
Subjects: GSAFD: Humorous fiction. | Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.L3252944 V47 2021 (print) | LCC PS3602.L3252944 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044794
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044795
Cover illustration by Tobatron
Cover design by Mark Robinson
Author photograph © Marie Rutkoski
v1.0621
For our very nice families
Part One
1
Even if she didn’t work at STÄDA, Ava Simon would have furnished her apartment with STÄDA products. They were functional, well-designed household items, free of unnecessary decorations and features. She owned two Simple Dinner Plates, two Pleasing Water Glasses, and two Comforting Mugs, which together fit perfectly on her Dependable Drying Rack, along with her Useful Forks, Spoons, and Knives.
Ava’s full-sized Principled Bed was made of pine and supported a Comfortable Mattress, which had a firmness factor of 8—exactly calibrated to her preference. On the other side of her studio was a Dreamy Dog Bed for her boxer mix, Brutus. She owned a Practical Sofa, an Embracing Armchair, and an Appealing Dining Table. In her closet hung seven long-sleeved shirts (three gray, two black, and two white), seven short-sleeved shirts, two pairs of pants (one denim, one cotton), two pairs of sneakers (identical, black), seven pairs of black socks, and seven pairs of black underwear. She had one lightweight jacket, one winter coat, and one rain jacket.
She liked to think of each day as a series of efficiently divided thirty-minute units. One unit for showering, dressing, and brushing her teeth. One unit for breakfast and coffee. One unit for walking Brutus along the perimeter of Fort Greene Park. One unit driving to the STÄDA offices in Red Hook.
Ava was an engineer for STÄDA’s Storage team. She took care and satisfaction in her work, which she carried out on Floor 12 of STÄDA’s Simple Tower. The Simple Tower was a neck-achingly tall architectural feat, made of glass and designed to concentrate and redirect all natural sunshine into the building, so that even overcast days supplied the Simple Tower with powerful, invigorating light. Its interior was expansive and elegant. Polished concrete floors and curved glass walls divided the workspaces from the meeting rooms. Common areas were outfitted with STÄDA’s living room collection; Plush Sofas and Cozy Nesting Tables were arranged as if they were in the showroom. The three STÄDA kitchens—the Sweet Kitchen, the Salty Kitchen, and the Wellness Kitchen—were stocked with snacks, coffee, and Wellness Water, spring water infused with a rotating variety of citrus fruits. Small atriums punctuated the space, extending all the way to the roof.
Teams on Floor 12 worked together in pods, their long black desks positioned under dropped birch ceilings. Floor 12 was quiet aside from the soft clacking of keyboards. An outside observer would not suspect the constant current of online chatter happening over S-Chat, the company’s in-house instant messenger. STÄDA employees organized chat rooms based on shared interests, and occasionally a handful of people sitting in different areas of the floor would abruptly erupt into laughter.
Ava, who engaged with S-Chat only when it was absolutely necessary, sat next to a window overlooking Red Hook’s piers. Barges came and went from STÄDA’s distribution center, a long commercial wharf with weathered brick and gigantic steel storm shutters. It extended out into the East River, reaching toward the Manhattan skyline. The wakes from the freight barges rolled up in perfect time, churning white against the limestone breakers. Ava considered this rhythm, the business of moving their products from conception out into the world, to be STÄDA’s heartbeat.
This week Ava had begun mocking up the lid hardware for the Very Nice Box, a simple but smart design that she hoped would be introduced in the coming year. The Very Nice Box was her Passion Project. It was exactly the kind of work she had come to STÄDA to do: meticulous engineering without frills or gimmicks, just the ideal intersection of geometry and utility, where each component existed for a reason. If all went to plan, the Very Nice Box would be followed by a series of shelves and hanging rails that could be configured in endless arrangements. But its most basic unit, the foundation upon which the entire strategy for the year rested, comprised six large uniform sides assembled with pegs and hinges. Ava was determined to make it perfect. It would take her 150 units to create renderings for the hinges alone, she estimated as she floated upward in STÄDA’s giant glass-backed elevator after an Outdoors Break.
The doors opened to Floor 12, where Jaime Rojas, a junior engineer, waited by the hand sanitizers with a stack of hinge sketches. “There you are!” he said, handing them to her. He wore a floral shirt buttoned to his throat. Ava admired Jaime’s maximalist spin on the STÄDA brand. His aesthetic was both complex and tidy: tucked-in shirts with bright, busy patterns, clean, short fingernails. A natural streak of white ran through one side of his otherwise dark, carefully combed hair. Jaime was not new to STÄDA, but he was new to Ava’s team. His specialty was gadgets, watches, small lamps, and clocks, but he had never complained about being relegated to Storage. Originally from El Paso, Jaime had moved to the city to attend NYU. He’d started working at STÄDA as a Customer Bliss associate after a string of service industry jobs, which he liked to joke was the natural next step for him as a comparative literature major. Ava considered Jaime a friend—her only friend—and she quietly appreciated his commitment to their standing Monday lunch.
Lunch at STÄDA was free and catered on a rotating basis by nearby restaurants. The restaurant changed every quarter based on a popular vote. But long lunch lines—or, more precisely, the company’s failure to implement an effective design solution
to solve the line problem—deterred Ava. So she prepared her own lunches, which were simple and vegetarian—equal parts protein, fat, and carbohydrates—and divided into three compartments in her Sensible Bento Box, which was one of her most enduring designs. She didn’t vote for a restaurant, and no one tried to lobby her.
Jaime walked alongside Ava as she made her way to her desk. “Maybe we can discuss those hinges after the conference room thing?”
“The conference room thing,” Ava repeated. “I almost forgot about that. What are they making us do this time?”
“No clue,” Jaime said. “Maybe they’re announcing the arrival of the Gay Tree.”
Ava shuddered. STÄDA’s new Spirit team—part of the recent corporate expansion—had just erected a tall paper tree with rainbow-colored leaves made from tissue paper. The design was terrible. The word PRIDE had been traced in black marker on the trunk. Ava knew that as queer employees, she and Jaime were supposed to appreciate the gesture. She had even received an email from a junior Spirit staffer asking for her feedback on the tree. But the tree hurt her eyes and its leaves crinkled noisily whenever anyone walked by it, so the only thing it did was provide an aesthetically offensive distraction from her work.
Ava sighed. “How do they expect us to do our jobs with mandatory orientations happening all the time?”
“Don’t ask me,” Jaime said. “I’m just the messenger.”
A reminder email about the conference room event waited, unopened, in Ava’s inbox. The subject line was a smiley face. The Spirit team hadn’t even booked an end time. Whatever this was, Ava dreaded it. The meeting or training or experimental team-building activity would come barreling through her well-organized Friday, she would be pressured to eat something sugary at a strange time of day, and she would have to interact with her colleagues, most of whom she didn’t know.
That was also by design. She had worked hard to strike a balance between pleasant and unapproachable without appearing totally joyless like Judith Ball from the People Office did. Judith Ball’s title had recently been rebranded to chief people officer. She had the warmth of disinfectant spray. She was older than most at STÄDA and was one of the company’s founding members, which meant that along with overseeing hiring and workplace policies, she had a seat on STÄDA’s board, where she was the only Black member and only woman.
Judith would often remark that she never understood why the workplace had become so casual. With more and more employees showing up in designer flip-flops and hoodies, she loved to remind them that she could remember a time when people dressed up to travel. “One must dress for success,” she would say matter-of-factly. She wore a self-assigned work uniform: a cream-colored top tucked into a skirt suit, low-heeled pumps, and a string of pearls, her hair pulled into a neat bun. She sent frequent memos about Boundless Vacation Days, Suggested Attire, and the proper protocol for leaving for an Unlimited Outdoors Break. (Feel free to take Unlimited Outdoors Breaks, she had written in a recent email, but do remember to notify your manager on S-Chat and include me on the exchange.) Judith had no apparent interests outside of obstructing everyone’s fun.
Am I like that? Ava would sometimes wonder.
But no. Unlike Judith, Ava had no interest in keeping tabs on her colleagues’ Boundless Vacation Days or Unlimited Outdoors Breaks. So instead of being resented, Ava was simply ignored, which was for the best. She didn’t invite interactions. She didn’t ask anyone about their weekends, and she didn’t particularly like it when anyone asked about hers. Her answer never changed, because her weekends, like her weekdays, were beautifully organized, uniform, and solitary. When she described them, whoever was listening would glaze over. Eventually her colleagues left her to do what she did best, which was to create useful household boxes from the six essential STÄDA materials: wood, metal, MDF, plastic, linen, and pulp board.
But a new employee had arrived at the Simple Tower and appeared to be disrupting this social contract. According to what Ava had overheard the day before in the Wellness Kitchen, he was fresh out of grad school, having earned some sort of double degree that Ava couldn’t bring herself to care about, and would be settling into STÄDA’s Marketing Department that week.
His name was Mathew Putnam, and he had gripped the attention of Floor 12, not because of his fancy degree, Ava suspected, but because he was categorically handsome. According to his STÄDA employee photo, which had been circulating around the S-Chat backchannels, he looked young—younger than Ava, who was thirty-one. Today she had noticed feverish typing when he showed up for a tour of Floor 12. S-Chat notifications dinged with higher frequency. Workers across all teams arranged their hair differently. Several men spoke more loudly. Even Jaime had messaged her on S-Chat: Um . . . it appears that a literal Adonis will be working here.
Ava saw that Mathew Putnam was making his way in her general direction, and she braced herself. A young Spirit staffer was delighting in bringing him around to every desk, as if they were the bride and groom at a wedding reception. She watched as Mathew greeted her colleagues as though he’d known them since childhood and was now enjoying a much-awaited reunion. His charisma was palpable. Around him, her colleagues smiled and laughed more. Eventually the pair made their way to Ava’s desk. She busied herself with Jaime’s hinge sketches for the Very Nice Box, slipped on her Peaceful Headphones, and tuned in to her favorite podcast, Thirty-Minute Machine, hoping that her focus would drive them away.
“Mat Putnam,” he said, sticking out his hand. “It’s awesome to finally meet you.” His voice cut through Ava’s Peaceful Headphones. She pulled them off and quickly shook his hand, which was large and warm. He clearly had not yet learned the unofficial STÄDA greeting, which was simply a hand raised, shoulder-level, as though an oath were being taken. This was to prevent unwanted touch and the spread of flus and colds.
“The badass box boss, Lexi tells me.” Mat smiled at Ava eagerly, then turned to the Spirit staffer, who blushed violently at the mention of her name.
Ava looked up at him. He had a puppyish energy that alarmed her. He was extraordinarily tall, with a well-structured jaw, a clean-shaven face, and a prominent Adam’s apple. He wore heeled leather boots, dark-wash jeans, and a thick white T-shirt whose sleeves hugged his biceps. He was the type of man who could accidentally drop a baby and immediately be forgiven.
“Excited for the big bash?” he said, drumming his fingers on her desk.
“No,” Ava said. “It’s a party?” She’d been trying to ignore the steady line of people making their way into the conference room.
“Come on!” Mat said. “I looked in the Imagination Room and I can report that there are streamers. And a gluten-free cake! It’ll be great.”
“The Imagination Room?”
“Oh, sorry,” Mat said. “You probably knew it as the conference room.”
Ava adjusted a framed photo of Brutus on her desk. She had only one photo of her dog, so as not to appear to be singularly obsessed with him, or lonely. “I disagree that it will be great,” she said.
“Well, I’m going to be there, and you’re going to be there, and cake will be there,” Mat said. “And Lexi will be there!” He beamed at Lexi, who beamed back at him. “So it’s guaranteed to be great.”
His smile had fallen, and Ava felt responsible. But she had wanted at least the details of this office “bash” ahead of time so she could know how much time it would take up and whether she would be home to Brutus later than usual. She had sent an email to this effect to the Spirit team, whose rep simply responded, Where’s the fire you little work horse . . . ! She’d hated this email because it hadn’t answered her question, because the rep had mixed metaphors, because the punctuation was chaotic, and because workhorse was one word.
Mat patted down the hair on the back of his head. “There’s something I should probably tell you,” he said. “Lexi, go ahead.”
Ava glanced around the room in case he was talking to someone else. There were, after all, at least t
wo dozen other senior engineers across the floor. Lexi headed toward the conference room, running a hand through her long hair. What could Mat Putnam possibly have to tell Ava? He had just learned her name. She felt his attention on her, and wondered if he expected her to speak.
To her relief, he broke the silence. “It’s about a shift in STÄDA’s marketing plan for Q4—”
“Marketing? I’m an engineer,” Ava said. “So whatever it is probably doesn’t concern me.” She didn’t want to hear about his marketing plan for Q4. She was sure he would discuss it with unnecessary flare. Marketing reps always took too long to make their point, and she couldn’t lose any more time to this conversation. She had one more hinge sketch to consider. It would take four units, exactly the amount of time left in her workday. Now she would have to bump that work to Monday and recalibrate the entire week. She sighed and looked at her Precise Wristwatch. “Let’s get whatever this is over with.”
Mat’s smile faltered. “Awesome,” he said.
Ava stood.
Inbox zero. Tightening a bolt. Folding a shirt. Sweeping a floor. Tracing a circle. These were the things that soothed her. She thought about each of them as Mat Putnam swung open the door to what was now, she would have to accept, the Imagination Room.
2
Since STÄDA’s expansion, Ava hadn’t seen much of her boss, Karl. But now here he was in the conference room, setting out wedges of cake and Useful Utensils. The last few years had worked on his appearance. When he’d recruited her, many years before, when the company was made of a half-dozen woodworkers, Karl had been strapping and bright-eyed. Now his tall, thin frame slumped. His shoulders were rounded, and his mop of blond hair had begun to thin.
Behind him, the word IMAGINE was projected onto the wall in STÄDA’s signature sans serif font, the letters dissipating and gathering again in a flashy loop of transition effects. Ava wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t noticed this particular addition until now; the rebranding of the company was occurring constantly, all around her, at a dizzying speed. She would be unfazed to return to her desk to find that her Encouraging Desk Chair had been replaced with a large rubber ball.
The Very Nice Box Page 1