He followed languidly behind me, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder next to me. I moved a couple inches to my right so as not to accidentally bump him.
“Kiss Cam Nora.”
The elevator door closed.
“Hey, you can’t call me that here.”
He furrowed his brow. “Where? Here? The elevator?”
I gave him a look. “In the office. If I’m going to be taken seriously, you need to forget you know me. Just call me Nora.”
“Why can’t I know you here?”
“I don’t want anybody to think I had a leg up.”
“You didn’t. Are we going up?” He pointed toward the button pad, and I noticed neither of us had pushed any button yet.
“As soon as you promise me you won’t interfere with anything I’m doing up there. I have to earn my spot, Duke. No special treatment.”
He seemed distracted. “The second somebody pushes the button on the outside, it’s going to open. And we’ll be waiting here again forever.”
“Promise me.”
“I won’t do anything to help you in here.”
“There.”
“What?”
“You said, ‘in here.’ Like the elevator. Don’t think I didn’t hear that.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Promise me you won’t help me in—“
The door opened and we were swarmed by a group of people dressed in business clothes headed upstairs to their various offices. Duke seemed a little too smug as he allowed himself to be pressed into the opposite corner of the elevator wall than mine. We then endured the awkward kind of silence that happens when nobody wants to finish their conversations while trapped in an elevator. A handful of people got off on the ninth floor, then the thirteenth, and finally the fourteenth.
Duke smiled at me as he moved to step off the elevator, following a man who must work for us. “Hey, Troy. Your wife have that baby yet?”
I didn’t hear the man’s reply as they walked toward RDM’s office door. The elevator started to shut before I bolted forward.
Up ahead, Duke glanced over his shoulder and gave me a smile before opening RDM’s doors. I vowed to find him later and run over a few rules.
A woman named Holly with a friendly smile, long blonde hair, and dimples greeted me at the reception desk.
“Hey there. How can I help you?”
“Hi. I’m Nora, I’m here for the internship.”
Her eyes widened, and she took me in once more. “Of course. Great. I’ll show you to your desk, and I’ll get the guys in IT to set you all up. Welcome to RDM.”
“Thanks,” I said, sucking in a deep breath as I followed her down a hallway that broke out into a large room with cubicles strewn about in the center. A healthy mix of men and women milled about, and the conversations seemed full of happy chatter as the room buzzed with the sounds of phones ringing, coffee mugs clanging, and the copy machine humming. And for the first time in my life, I stood in the middle of it all, not with a vacuum or a mop, but with a laptop. The urge to both cry and dance across the room to the loudest version of Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” hit me hard, though I resisted. Even if I was fired tomorrow, I had lived through two romantic-comedy moments this morning, and I couldn’t help the smile that crossed my face.
Also, off the record, I must take note of how clean the office looked this morning. Not a speck of dust in sight.
The next couple of hours were a blur of new faces and setting up my cubicle, all while trying not to feel like a stranger. Others around me were bustling about with assignments, while I set up my desk, signed more paperwork, and waited for my manager to get out of her meeting and show me the ropes. While the IT department set up my computer, I met the other two interns occupying the cubicles next to mine.
Shawn and Anita were both younger than me by a few years. Shawn seemed nice enough. Standing tall and lanky, he had flaming-red hair and freckles covering his cheeks. Ifendearingcomputergeekhad a picture in the dictionary, Shawn’s face would pop up. The same could be said for Anita and Cruella De Vil. Her long, jet-black hair and the over-the-top cartoonish way she laughed sent chills straight down my spine. With a laugh a little too fake, eyes a little too calculating, and the way she’d stare at me with a blank expression after I finished speaking was enough for me to gather that we’d probably never be great friends.
