Vanessa gulped, glaring at the clock behind her manager. “No,” she said, deciding that whatever punishment she received was going to have to happen. She could only stand here for thirty-seven more seconds until it was too late. Vanessa didn’t care if Christina yelled at her, gave her an undesirable shift, cut her hours, or wrote her up. None of that mattered. Only Emma mattered. Only this evaluation.
Christina sighed. “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
Vanessa glared at her, willing the time to stop. “Christina, there’s nothing to say. The delivery went fine. I don’t know who this Desiree person is. I don’t know what she told you that makes you think I did something, but you’ve got to believe me.”
Christina locked eyes with Vanessa, sighing again. “You’re lying to me,” she sliced through the air with a voice like razor blades. “Desiree is the personal secretary to the CEO of Kümertech. That’s our largest and most loyal customer. Do you know how many years we’ve been delivering to them?” Christina shouted at Vanessa, who watched in horror as the clock struck 12:01.
“No, but Christina, you’ve got to believe me,” Vanessa stammered, noting each passing second with agony. “Whatever she said I did, she’s lying!”
“She wouldn’t lie to us. She’s been ordering catering from us for four years,” Christina snapped back, getting in Vanessa’s face. “You, however, have only been working here for a few months. I never should have hired you. You’re lazy, you’re inconsistent with your work, your mind is always elsewhere. You’re always asking to leave early, and you never work the night shift. What good are you? What else could be so important to you? Why even have a job if you’re not going to give it your all?”
Vanessa held back tears. She never wanted to tell her manager about the untimely death of her parents, that she’d had to care for Emma, that she dropped out of law school to work in a restaurant because it was her only choice. Vanessa didn’t want the pity. She didn’t want the scarlet letter of weakness. She didn’t want to be The Girl With The Dead Parents. And yet, the pressure mounted up around her; suffocating her with the vapor of demand in everyday life. One day, in a swirl of tension, she cracked. The truth came bleeding out, confession by confession, to her manager’s face. Christina glazed over with nonchalant indifference.
Today, and every day since she’d revealed her plights to her manager, there was no winning in Vanessa’s situation. She’d either be the girl everyone pitied, or the girl everyone considered lazy.
“Christina,” she sniffled, the mental dam blocking her tears on the edge of bursting, “you know my situation. How could you say I’m lazy? Don’t you understand how hard each day is for me?” It was no use to hide the tremors that snaked through her vocal folds at this point. She was collapsing again; keeling over in the ocean of her own anguish.
“Vanessa,” sighed Christina. “It’s hard. I know. I understand that your parents died last year, that you are the sole caretaker and guardian of your little sister, that you are doing it all on your own. I get it,” she lectured. “But there comes a point in time when you have to just move on. You have to grow up, you have to do what’s required of you. You can’t play the victim forever. It’s not the company’s responsibility to cater to you. You’re here to work.” Her words were jagged and blistering in their cruelty.
Vanessa couldn’t hear anymore. Her mind was melding shut with the glue of this malice that Christina spewed so effortlessly at her. It was now or never to get Emma to her appointment on time. That was the only thing that mattered.
“My shift is over,” Vanessa said, forlornly looking at the clock. 12:05. The bus comes at 12:06, on the dot. “I have to go. Right now,” she said, her voice quavering.
“Of course,” Christina roared back at her. “When things get hard, you just want to leave. Let me tell you something, Vanessa. You’re not cut out for this job. Go ahead, but don’t bother coming back. We can find someone much less lazy and more personable than you. Get out.”
Vanessa didn’t have time to process what she’d just heard. What mattered most was utilizing the minute or so that she did have, the precious time that she needed to catch this first bus from work. It ran every fifteen minutes, meaning that if she missed this one, she’d most certainly miss her transfers across town. There was no choice but to make it on time. Emma’s appointment would come and go if she couldn’t manage to take this specific bus.
Running maniacally, Vanessa could see the bus as it rolled to the small glass hut at the stop across the street. She could hear the hissing of the door opening. She took in the rumbling of the engine as it sat idle for a few seconds, passengers creeping on and scanning their tickets. Cars were racing across the four lanes of traffic, so fast and unstoppable that Vanessa couldn’t manage to run across to the bus stop. She clenched her fists and waited with billowing impatience for the light to turn red, for the walk sign to illuminate, for even the tiniest beacon of good luck. Maybe the card reader on the bus would malfunction. Maybe an elderly person would move slowly getting on board, causing the bus driver to wait until everyone was seated to pull away. Maybe a line of passengers snaked along the side of the bus that Vanessa couldn’t see.
As Vanessa wrapped herself in fantasy, hoping and wishing that she could magically transport herself across the street, she heard the grumble of an engine waking from a temporary nap. The doors whirred to a close and the bus began to shake with motion. Cars slowed to a halt on the street and the walk sign lit itself, but it was already too late. The bus—Vanessa’s one hope toward a possible reprieve of her financial woes—was rolling off, away, into the distance.
Sighing, Vanessa’s eyesight began to blur. Tears bloomed in her eyes, clouding everything around her in nondescript, unshakable despair. She missed the bus. She’d miss the appointment. She’d have to shoulder the already impossible burden of her little sister’s medication for even longer while she waited for the appointment to be rescheduled. Now, because of all of this—all of the weight she had to carry, all of the responsibilities that she couldn’t handle alone—Vanessa was out of a job.
Fishing around in her pocket for her phone, Vanessa reached into the back pocket of her unwashed jeans, where the receipt from last night still sat. She fumbled with the buttons on her phone and called the number as cars began to speed up around her, jetting off under the trail of green lights on the street. The air smelled like gasoline, and it felt like she was breathing in red dust from the tires of the cars.
“Talisha?” Vanessa asked into the phone, her voice shaking with desperation. “It’s Vanessa.”
Chapter 5
Mr. Lee did most of the talking. “You’ll have to excuse our new CEO,” he gushed to the investors in his fake, buttery tone. “His father, the founder, is incapacitated right now.” A hush of sympathetic noises scissored through the air of the room as investors nodded in Aaron’s direction, offering their condolences on an event that hadn’t even occurred yet. Aaron said nothing, glaring at Mr. Lee.
As the meeting churned along, Mr. Lee’s charisma and charm saturated his words. His talk of stocks and profits were lustrous with wild and fantastical claims that Kümertech would see an upsurge in prosperity in the near future. Mr. Lee illustrated a picture of success that only existed in his mind: this whimsical, sunny view of the company’s expansion that thoroughly bored Aaron, almost conspicuously so. He was thinking about that girl, about the way she had only one dimple when she smiled, about the curve of her face and the tattoo behind her ear. Vanessa, she said her name was. Vanessa from Reynold’s.
A surge of energy raged through Aaron. It felt like someone had injected him with a drug, a pang of euphoria gone intrinsically awry. He was sitting at the head of the table, toward the back wall of the conference room. All the investors were paying attention to Mr. Lee, who was too wildly concerned with promoting this idyllic fantasy of where the company would be in the next fiscal year to notice that Aaron had begun shaking. Trying his best to mini
mize his distress and not completely foil the meeting, he brought a hand to his face, only to discover that his nose was beginning to drip blood. As his shivers grew into full-body convulsions, heads began to turn toward the back of the room, much to Mr. Lee’s chagrin. Aaron was jerking and jolting, barely retaining the strength to sit up anymore.
“He’s seizing!” one of the investors cried out. “Someone pry his mouth open!”
Just then, Aaron thudded to the floor, unable to understand what was happening to him. Mr. Lee walked over to where he was writhing on the ground. “Let’s all give Mr. Ridley some privacy. Please, everyone, clear out of the room,” he said, his voice caked over with gentility. “I’ll call 911, and stay with him until the paramedics arrive.”
Dutifully the investors obeyed, immediately evacuating the room and pooling outside the closed door with a cloud of curious murmuring, whispers about what could have possibly overtaken Aaron so swiftly, and at seemingly nothing at all. In what felt like just a matter of moments, Mr. Lee appeared again, a smile dotting the landscape of his genteel face. “Mr. Ridley has asked that we all reconvene sometime next week,” he said in a saccharine tone. “I’m sure you can all understand.”
The investors puffed out and away, awash in concern for Aaron. Behind the closed doors of the conference room—in what felt like a completely different world—Aaron’s eyes were clenched shut. An empty syringe lay on the floor besides him, and his face was white with pressure. It felt like a watermelon was growing inside his stomach—gripping his insides and expanding with rapid force—and all Aaron could do was lie down and take the waves of discomfort.
* * *
Aaron didn’t know what came over him. His thigh radiated pain from a small wound he didn't remember sustaining, but aside from that, he was fully functional. To have been disabled on the floor during the investors meeting seemed incomprehensible to him, so much so that he wondered if he’d just daydreamed the whole ordeal. He was totally fine now, to the point that he actually wondered if some part of him was slipping, going insane with the grief of his father’s slow and unending decline. He was sitting at his desk, completely exhausted. “Desiree,” he said into the phone on his desk after dialing her extension, “please bring me some black coffee.”
A few moments later she appeared with a mug, the steam dancing through the air and around her as she walked toward Aaron’s desk. “Anything else?” she asked him, getting a little too close. She smelled like chemically engineered flowers.
“No, just… thank you. Oh, please hold all my calls. I need some privacy right now.” He said, sipping the coffee, not looking at her.
“Okay,” she said, her pumps clicking along the floor as she walked. “Oh,” she added, turning around to face him. “I called Reynold’s to cancel the invoice and let them know about their employee’s ineptitude.”
“You did what?” Aaron snapped, nearly spitting out his coffee.
“I… canceled the invoice,” Desiree laughed, incredulously. “We weren’t going to pay for food that ended up all over the floor, were we?” Her face was twisted into a look of unmatched skepticism, her eyebrows raised with a skeptical smile across her lips.
Aaron inhaled, looking around his desk in agitation. “I specifically told you that we’d talk about it later,” he said, controlling his anger. “And you undermined me.”
Shocked, Desiree put a hand to her billowing cleavage. “Sir, I… I didn’t mean to undermine, you, I just… I wanted to save the company some money…”
“And yet you did undermine me. You deliberately disobeyed what I told you. You went behind my back, you called Reynold’s, and you probably cost that girl her job,” Aaron whispered, his voice laced with muted rage.
“Sir, I… you know I never meant to—”
“Desiree,” Aaron cut her off, shaking his head. “Desiree, you’re finished. If I can’t trust you in a situation as small as this one, how can I trust that you’ll carry out more important tasks for me?”
“Mr. Ridley,” Desiree began, more skeptical than worried. “Sir, you’re not thinking clearly. After your seizure earlier, I think it’s best that we just take a little bit of time and revisit this issue later. Now, in the meantime, I’m very, truly sorry for what happened.” She walked over to him, behind his desk and placed a hand on his shoulder. Leaning over to put her face to his, smirking her glossed lips, she continued, “I’m very, truly sorry. It’ll never happen again.” Her breasts quivered in front of him with every word she spoke.
Aaron turned away from her. “That’s incredibly unprofessional,” he quipped.
Desiree kept smirking, “You’ve never had a problem with it before.”
“I’ve always had a problem with it,” Aaron said, getting up from his chair and turning to the window. “I’ve never said anything about it, because to acknowledge it is part of the problem. But Desiree, it’s gone too far. Pack up your desk and go downstairs to HR. I’ll call them now to get your termination paperwork ready.” His hands were in his pockets and he had his back to her, lost in the air outside, in the to and fro of people walking on the sidewalk below.
“Mr. Ridley… I… I can’t believe this,” she replied in a voice shaken by consternation. “How can you do this to me? And just because I snapped at one girl? Why do you care so much about her? I’ve been your secretary for almost five years now. Shouldn’t that be significant to you?”
Aaron turned to face her. “Desiree,” he began in a lackluster tone. “Your incessant flirting with me, your subpar work performance, and your inability to follow even the simplest directions has led me to this decision. Don’t make it worse for yourself. Stop crying and follow directions for once.”
Desiree raced out of the room as her voice was swallowed by sobs. The sound waves ricocheted down the hallway as her weeping grew further and further away. Aaron sighed, standing in the silence of his office for a solid minute before picking up his office phone and dialing the number for Human Resources.
After the paperwork to terminate Desiree had been squared away, Aaron lingered at the window, realizing he didn’t have very long before his paperwork began to pile up and his meetings went unscheduled. Should I take a leave of absence? He pondered to himself, thinking of his father wilting in his hospital bed.
Aaron banished the idea almost as soon as it slipped through his mind. There was no way he could leave the entire company on Mr. Lee’s shoulders. Though he’d been working with Charlie at Kümertech since before Aaron was born, it was simply too much to ask that he should take over right now. Aaron didn’t have the budget to increase Mr. Lee’s salary, and there’s no way he’d take the job (even just temporarily) without a raise.
Sighing, Aaron took his cell phone from his pocket. Following a quick Google search, he placed a call and held the phone to his cheek, smearing mid-afternoon grease over the glass display.
“Thank you for calling Reynold’s, this is Christina, how can I help you?” a woman answered, flatly and rushed.
“Hello,” he replied, not knowing how to begin. “I… uh… is Vanessa there?”
The voice on the other end hesitated for a moment, faltering between keeping her professionalism in the forefront and decreasing her bubbling agitation. “Employees aren’t allowed to take personal calls at work,” Christina replied. “And anyway, we had to let Vanessa go today. What can I help you with, sir?”
Disconcerted, Aaron pressed on. “Oh, I’m… sorry to hear that. Listen,” he said, leaning to hold his phone with his shoulder and grabbing a pen from his desk, “…is it possible to give me her contact information? It’s imperative that I speak with her.”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but that’s a violation of our company policy,” Christina spat at him.
“I see,” Aaron replied, crestfallen.
Chapter 6
Vanessa’s misgivings about the job she’d signed up to do were on full blast in her mind, parading themselves across her brain with unyielding clarity. She had become nothing
more than a stereotype, a monstrous hyperbole of the person she always pictured herself to be. With two dead parents and a small, disabled sister to care for, Vanessa turned to the only way she knew to get ahead in life: playing on the sensualities of men who have nothing better to do than to ogle at women on poles.
What choice did she have at this point? Her spat with Christina (or rather, the other way around) and the subsequent passing by of the bus she needed to catch caused her to miss Emma’s appointment. No evaluation from Emma’s pediatric epilepsy specialist meant no application for a grant. It struck Vanessa with such violent force of injustice that a simple piece of paper held so much relief; and the lack thereof caused an insurmountable bulk of strife. That piece of paper meant that she’d not only be able to equip her baby sister with the medical care she needed, but to fill her stomach with nutritious food, put clothes on her back, shoes on her feet, and heat her home in the winter. A flimsy piece of paper, at this point, spelled out the difference between prosperity and poverty.
And because Christina took the time to berate Vanessa, her fate toppled toward poverty.
Grappling with the reality that she was too late for the appointment, Vanessa realized at an instant that she’d be forced into this underworld of a profession alongside Talisha and her unsavory cronies. Before her first night on the job, Talisha had warned Vanessa that she probably needed to buy some new lingerie. The upfront expense would be a hit in the wallet, but it would pay for itself after a night or two of dancing.
“These men are hungry,” she told Vanessa, whose vague expression of distaste didn’t convince Talisha that this was the job for her. “They’re starving, and you want to be their favorite food.”
Vanessa still had the $200 that the CEO of Kümertech had slipped into her pocket two days beforehand. Standing on the street corner, just before she called Talisha, she’d had the idea to use it for a cab across town. She’d be able to pick up Emma from school, then take the busses to her appointment as planned. But then, of course, there was the empty refrigerator at home, mocking her. The bills, layered in various shades of pink distress, were covering the dining room table where the family used to sit down for dinner every night. Vanessa didn’t know what to do with the money, how best to spend it, or if she even had a right to keep it.
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