There I was
Just an uninvited black box on the screen
Little did they know how much I could do for them
Alas, I remembered that I spent the last four years working with these same kinds of guys, saving them from their bad graphics and terrible pitches and watching them be promoted over me until, finally, I was let go with a paltry six-month severance
Preach it, sis
And I just got so mad suddenly that I gave so many ideas to the company and they took them, signed accounts, handed out bonuses to everyone at the level just above mine, and then let me go when I complained to HR that I was overdue for a promotion.
I’m just over here cheering out loud
Like screw these guys and their basic Keynote template slides and their recycled ideas!
I don’t think anyone noticed I’d joined, so I carefully changed my username from my email to just my initials and unmuted and told them their slides were absolute garbage, but about ten times more brutal, and then logged off.
My younger sister: my hero.
Chapter One
Veronica
Ihaven’t felt this good in weeks.
It’s pathetic, maybe, that it’s not because I have a job offer on the table—even better would be two offers I could pit against each other—but simply because I gave some tech bros a lashing and then peaced out. Whatever, I’m putting a tick in the win column anyway.
I’ve been carrying so much pent-up frustration and bitterness about the terrible years I spent at my previous job and how they then ended my four years of employment: in a flaccid HR meeting with a representative expressing all the concern of a bot reading a script, which concluded with me sighing a defeated, “Thanks for the mehpathy, Chad.” The resentment had been building and building, but after today’s Zoom mishap it’s just ... evaporated.
My sister, Clara, says I could maybe have anticipated that a job with a marketing firm douchily named PitchSlapped would go south, but I swear it wasn’t terrible at first. I was spring green out of my MBA and was the dangerous combination of idealistic and buried beneath student loans when they offered me a marketing associate position. PitchSlapped came to me with a six-figure offer, includingfree lunches for all employees, a game room for break time, an in-house gym, company ski retreats to Vail, and five weeks’ vacation. No other job offer even came close.
They promoted me quickly to marketing manager and then associate vice director of marketing, a meaningless title created by some idiot being paid way too much money and which I hated seeing on my business cards. I languished there, giving all my best ideas in the higher-level meetings while not being invited to the higher-level salary, stock options, or bonuses. Company retreats turned out to be full of coke and misogyny. Vacation time was granted but not expected to be taken. The game room had a pool table, aGrand Theft Autoarcade console, and a pinball machine calledWhoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons.
It begs the question: “But, Veronica, you stayed for four years?” Perhaps not the best evidence of self-preservation skills, but even if I have a chip on my shoulder from the experience, at least after those four years with the PitchSlapped salary, I don’t have any student loans.
I put a heart over Clara’s last text and set my phone down, leaning back in my home office chair. It immediately lets out a concerning crack, and I need to hurl my weight forward, palms slapping onto my desk to keep myself from falling backward. When I stand, the chair flops over on its base with a groan, like it heard bad news and needed to lie down.
Amazing. Another thing I’m going to have to replace, including my ancient personal laptop (had to turn my work computer in when I was laid off), my AirPods (they were tumbled and humbled when I left them in my pocket on laundry day), and my refrigerator (it was a hand-me-down from my grandmother and honestly lived longer than it should have, but damn).
Instinctively, I glance at the clock, wondering,Is it too early for a beer?The small hand on the two gives me a definitiveYes, too early, but it does make me realize that Larry, the most consistent postal worker ever, will have just delivered the mail, and this day could be improved by the arrival of my final paycheck with my six months’ severance.
I find it obnoxious and stupid that Payroll insisted that, due to the need for paper trails as well as the date of my termination, my final check couldn’t be direct deposited like all the other ones. It’s meant that I’ve been on high alert for over two weeks now, paranoid that this money—the only thing keeping me from having to move in with my sister—will somehow vanish into the logistical tangle of the USPS.
Trust in Larry,I tell myself.
Downstairs it is, predictably, a gentle swarm of the work-from-home contingent, who all know Larry’s schedule and probably also want an excuse to get away from their screens. There’s Catalogs from 2A, who gets dozens of glossy catalogs crammed daily into her small mailbox; Loud Kevin, the mid-twenties day trader from 8G, who is so thundering during calls from his balcony that I can often hear him from my place on the fourth floor; my silver fox next-door neighbor,Mad MenRoger Sterling, from 4B, who always has at least one AirPod in his ear and continues his call no matter how many of us are listening in; and Velvet Rope, the sleazy guy just below me in 3C, who dresses exclusively in very loud, but very clearly knockoff, Versace.
Obviously, I have no idea what anyone’s real name is (other than Kevin, because we all hear “Hey, man, it’s Kevin” a hundred times a day). Perhaps not surprisingly, ours is not the most social of buildings in downtown Chicago.
At the wall of mailboxes in the marble-and-brass lobby, we all shift around each other, apologizing under our breathlike a group of moms retrieving their shoes from the cubbies at the yoga studio. I open up my mailbox—4C—and my heart sinks.
No check.
I tilt my head back in frustration, and that’s when I see him walk down the curved wooden staircase.
He lives in 2C, that much I know. I think he only moved in about a month ago, and although it isn’t the culture of the historic Grand Fir Estates apartment building to get very chummy in the lobby, I’m not sure I would even want us to have a conversation if it was possible. He’s the kind of beautiful man to be admired from a distance, because there’s no way when he opens his mouth that whatever comes out can live up to the exterior.
In a move that I will never admit to anyone other than my sister, I’ve taken to calling him Friday, because seeing him is what I look forward to. After glimpsing him only once as we passed in the lobby, Clara named him Lava Lamp because, according to her, “He’s hot and mesmerizing.”
