Ajay puts off answering by eating all the snacks in my office. I don’t know when he got my bag of mini brownies, but it’s a lot lighter than it was when he came in.
“I think you should stop asking me questions that we all agreed were Sonia questions.”
“Youwalked intomyoffice. If you don’t want to participate in what’s happening here, you can leave.”
All day, the charity banquet loomed in the back of my mind. It wasn’t enough of a distraction to stop me from getting work done on the Harrison catalog and other assignments, but it was enough to make everything take longer.
It’s also enough to make me annoyed, which doesn’t seem like the best head space for a charity event.
Ajay takes my words to heart and gets up to leave.
“Wait, you still have to answer the question. I invoke twin bond.”
“Oh, didi.That’s not a thing.” He walks out, hardening his heart against my pleas.
“At least send Sonia in then,” I yell after him. “Useless,” I mutter to myself.
“You bellowed for me?” Sonia magically appears.
“No.” Honestly compels me to add, “I bellowed for Ajay to bellow for you. You just heard because you’re a stalker, like a CIA operative loitering around my office hoping I’ll give up state secrets.”
“No, I’m not. And make him eat his heart out with the good shit,” she says, proving she was listening like the aforementioned CIA operative. “Now can we discuss some emails from Ajay’s team that we apparently need to handle?”
Sonia doesn’t say how frustrated she is with that, but her tone is doing a lot of heavy lifting to let me know her feelings on the subject.
“He’s going to talk to Dad after this upcoming gallery show. He promised.” I defend my baby brother, feeling the knee-jerk reaction to protect him.
“I hope he does.” Sonia doesn’t sound convinced.
I sigh, looking at the amount of work we have with Ajay’s show. I take a moment to imagine myself in the president and CEO’s office. Goal firmly in mind, I put out small fires with Sonia for the next few hours.
“It’s quarter to five!” Sonia bursts into my office.
I jerk my head up from my computer screens, fingers still typing. “No. No, it can’t be. I still have work to do.”
“I’ll make a note to learn how to stop time, but in the meantime, I’m going to need you to obey the laws of time.” She starts to tidy my desk around me, closing books and catalogs as she keeps my place in them. Hah! We’re mostly paperless; I don’t need anything on this desk but the computer.
“I obey no laws!” I’m still typing, but a little faster now.
She nudges my arms aside, saves the work and shuts down the computer. Well, that might stop me.
“Taking care of you Guptas is exhausting.” Sonia covers the power button on my computer so I can’t turn it back on. Which I was planning on doing.
“That’s what you get for being born in this family.” Computer shut down, my mind goes to other pressing issues. “Oh shit, I don’t have anything to wear.”
I was going to go home for lunch to get the “eat your heart out” outfit, but then I got distracted by a shipment of art in our storage room I wanted to pick through for myFemale Gazeshow and I kind of lost track of time.
Sonia throws cloth over my head, and I have no idea where she got it from.
“Wait, how do you know this is what I wanted to wear?” I move it off my head and look at it while she finishes collecting things off my desk that need to be signed and delivered.
“It’s not. It’s better than what you wanted to wear.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” I hold it up. Oh. It’s better than what I was going to wear. It’s a tea-length dark green dress that is both comfortable and elegant. It also swirls around me when I move and has pockets.
I can’t put anything in the pockets because it would break the line of the dress. But it’s good that designers are beginning to realize how amazing pockets are and adding them on more things. And one day I’ll actually be able to use the pockets, in a future utopia where donuts don’t have calories.
“What shoes do I wear?”
