by Anita Claire
Hita looks at me with caring eyes. “I’m so sorry. We all thought you were having this romantic summer in London. You never said anything to any of us. We had no idea what was going on.”
“Well, nothing was so bad that I needed a girlfriend’s shoulder to cry on. It was just awkward, uncomfortable. The situation made me feel paranoid. I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m new, and they’re just checking me out, it will get better.’ It didn’t really hit me that I was unhappy until I had to make a decision to renew my visa. That’s when I realized I just wanted to come home.” Giving Hita a thankful look, I add, “That’s when I contacted you to see if that job had been filled. I can’t tell how much I appreciate your help.”
Caroline interjects, “I’m surprised they hired you so fast.”
Hita and I both smile at each other as I tell Caroline, “Hita had me interview here in the spring. Before I left for London, my boss, Roger, gave me an offer letter. At the time, I was just so caught up in Stephan that I turned the job down. When I graduated, all I wanted to do was to move to London. I’m just lucky that three months later there was a position open and I was still needed.”
Hita adds with a cocky look, “Analytics is where it’s at; we math geeks get a lot of job offers.”
We all nod our heads in agreement.
With a smile, I tell Hita and Caroline, “The only thing I feel that I lost out on was my summer. The weather really sucks over there. Next time I follow a guy to another country he will be an Australian, and I’ll miss our winter.”
Caroline and Hita laugh, the three of us high five at that comment.
Chapter 3
Starting as a five-year-old, I played AYSO soccer, playing on a club team by the age of ten, and then on my high school’s JV and varsity team. My college was too competitive, so I played on a fun club team instead.
Moving back in October meant the adult soccer club season had already started. Isabelle—one of my fellow Princesses who played soccer with me in college—got her coach to agree to let me practice with them. He told me he would let me play in games only if they needed a fill-in player. After a day of sitting in front of a computer, I just love the camaraderie at soccer and the release I get running around the field.
Since I’m new to the team, I’m just starting to get to know the other women. After pulling my car into a spot right near the field, I lace up my cleats and look around for Isabelle. She’s already warming up, dribbling the ball up and down the field. Isabelle was the princess, Belle, back in college. Her dad is white and her mom is Chinese. She’s a morph of the two, with her brown hair and light brown eyes. At barely five feet tall and weighing maybe 100 pounds, she surprises our opponents with her speed and how aggressively she goes after the ball. As I enter the field, she gives me a big smile and passes me the ball. We both start running down the field, dribbling and passing.
After a few minutes Isabelle starts to laugh, “I hear you got an eyeful this morning.”
“God, what is it with Meredith? Did she blast it to everyone?”
Isabelle continues to laugh, “No, Hita told me.”
“I work ten feet from Hita. When did she have time to gossip?”
“You know us Princesses; we always find time to share.”
We run toward our coach and the other players as he gathers us up so we can start on our drills.
By 8:00 p.m. I am beat. While heading home my thoughts turn to Cassie. I hope she doesn’t have a guy over tonight. It’s not that I mind her socializing; it’s just that I want a good night’s sleep.
Chapter 4
At home, I find Cassie watching reality TV. She doesn’t look at me. She just continues to watch while stating, “I almost made it on this show.”
This doesn’t surprise me. Cassie is physically beautiful. She’s tall and slim, with a flawless curvy figure, shoulder length straight, shiny, blond hair, and big aqua-blue eyes. Her facial features are ideal; high cheekbones, sculpted full lips, and aquiline nose. She has a cool, classy look; like Grace Kelly at twenty-four. She’s the knockout blond that stops guys in their tracks. Cassie spent the last six years in LA, where she modeled bathing suits and worked in a high-end boutique. She told me that super models make a lot of money, but everyone else doesn’t.. The competition for jobs is brutal; you spend most of your time going for interviews and callbacks.
Cassie has been in a number of catalogs. Her big break was when she was featured in a nationwide beer advertisement that included a very popular poster. Still in college when it came out, it always freaked me out to walk into a bar or go into a guy’s room and see the poster featuring Cassie in a bikini. Rejection and perseverance were Cassie’s Achilles’ heel. If she were tougher, she could have made it into the top leagues of modeling. She’s easily as beautiful as any of the Sports Illustrated models. Cassie also tried to break into acting. Unfortunately, her acting ability is cringe worthy.
While in LA, Cassie ran with the Fast & Beautiful. She married a handsome LA guy with a large trust fund—though I thought he was conceited and arrogant. Not surprisingly, he was a big time player. The only time I met him was at their wedding. Once, when he was out of town, I came down for the weekend and stayed with her. They had a huge, modern house in the best neighborhood in the hills that overlooked LA, with a fancy swimming pool, and every amenity possible. When they divorced, she took some furniture and got to keep her car, clothes, and jewelry. Since he didn’t have a job—and trust funds aren’t part of community property in a divorce—she didn’t get much cash. The court ordered her ex to pay her a small monthly allowance for two years. That’s what she’s currently living on. The divorce soured her on LA. I don’t know the details of what went down, but I am assuming they weren’t good. Her parents convinced her to move back up to the Bay Area and live in her grandmother’s condo. Cassie is now enrolled in junior college, studying interior design. When jobs come up, she still does some modeling.
Curious as to why she’s home and who last night’s guy was, I sit down on the sofa and put my feet up on the ottoman.
“Not going out tonight?” I ask while keeping my face focused on the TV.
With a droll tone she answers, “Last night’s guy has been blowing up my phone.”
I look at her quizzically, “And … you don’t want to see him again?”
Cassie turns her head to look at me too. She pauses, then makes a face that reveals she thinks I’m a big idiot. “I met him last night, he was hot, we hooked up. I might be easy, but I’m not stupid. I don’t chase. He needs to have a little angst. If he’s still blowing up my phone tomorrow, I might respond to one of his texts.”
When it comes to academics I blow Cassie out of the water, but when it comes to guys Cassie is a savant. She always knows how to play a situation. Too bad she never focused on the academics; she is so cool and calculated that she could have been a masterful negotiator.
Realizing I still don’t have a name or any other information on this person, at the next commercial, I decide to pry a little more.
“How did you meet this guy?”
With a dismissive shrug, she tells me, “At a thing.”
“What’s a thing?”
“You know, a private event; they invite a lot of rich old guys and professional athletes. I chose a hot athlete.”
Living in Silicon Valley my entire life, I have never been invited to a “thing” with rich guys and hot athletes. She’s back one month and she’s invited to an event. Knowing Cassie, she took her time choosing the pick of the litter.
“How do you get invited to ‘things’?”
Her look tells me she thinks this is a stupid question. “They like having models attend high-end events.”
“How did you know he was a professional athlete? He could have been someone’s body guard.”
Cassie picks up her iPhone and waves it at me. “Why do you think they invented Google?”
Shaking my head at her lifestyle and what she takes for granted, I contemplate
how very different her life is from mine. At work, I get to look at hairy Ian. She gets invited to “things” with hot professional athletes. Yawning I tell her, “I’m heading to bed.” It doesn’t look like I’ll be woken in the middle of the night by any music or bedroom activity tonight.
Chapter 5
Five thirty in the morning comes way too soon. Today I swim since running was yesterday. I’ve always loved working out. It would have been great being a professional athlete; too bad I was never talented enough. Spending the day sitting in front of a computer makes me want to work out and stretch my body. The local master’s swim team, which comes complete with a coach, meets daily at the city pool located near our condo. With my swimsuit on first, I dress in my work clothes while placing my underwear and towel in my swim bag. From the ages of five to fourteen, I swam competitively, stopping when I got serious with fencing. In high school, I choose fencing over swimming since I didn’t have time to do both sports. Plus, I was better at fencing.
There are eight lanes in our pool. The slowest swimmers are in lane one. Elite athletes are in lane eight. I’m in lane five. After jumping in and warming up, we start a set of two hundred yards freestyle followed by 50 yards kick using a board. As I use the kickboard to head back to where we start, I see the coach over with the fast guys giving them the next set. Michael Phelps at 6’4” is on the small side of elite swimmers, most Olympic swimmers are over 6’5” tall. Our fast guys are also huge. A big guy pulls himself out of the pool with one fluid movement and walks over to the tall bin where we keep the pull buoys and paddles. This guy is definitely in his twenties, long and lean, with slim hips and wide shoulders, chest, and neck. Oblivious to me watching, he leans in to grab a couple pull buoys, his abs just ripple. Then turning to throw the buoys to the other guys in the lane, he reaches in to grab a few more. I’m mesmerized by his abs. Man, has it been that long? I can barely breathe from the sight of his body. Watching him jump back in the pool, my mind has completely lost focus. Who in the hell is Abs Guy?
As I swim, I wonder how to meet him. Does he have a girlfriend? Is he as interesting as he is beautiful? Cassie would know what to do. The problem is that Cassie would want to check out Abs Guy—which brings up my big issue with Cassie.
Cassie and I were inseparable best friends in elementary and junior high school, spending all our weekends sleeping at each other’s homes. As a kid, she was tall and painfully skinny, with long, thin, stringy pale brown hair, glasses, braces, and a face too angular to be pretty. Both of us loved sports. From age five to fourteen, we were on the same swim team, soccer team, and rode horses together. The summer between eighth and ninth grade she turned from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. She filled out, got her braces off, started highlighting her hair, and got contact lenses. Cassie’s summer transformation turned her into every teenage boy’s wet dream.
Unfortunately, once the beauty kicked in she lost interest in sports and school. She chose what was easiest, using her beauty and charm to get ahead. In high school she ran with the “beautiful people” crowd, a clique of arrogant, fast moving, hard partying, good looking kids—that group always made me feel awkward, innocent, and nerdy when I was around them.
Somehow, Cassie and I managed to maintain our friendship. We always had a good time when it was just the two of us. While she was dating and partying with the handsome and popular boys, I was practicing on the math team, the debate team, the fencing team, and the soccer team. I was a geeky jock. Our lives really diverged when I went off to college to study electrical engineering and computer science, and she went to LA to be “found.”
In high school, I was a late bloomer having plenty of boys that were friends, but never a boyfriend. Cassie was always going on about one guy or another. About half way through our sophomore year Cassie kept on pushing me to tell her who I thought was cute. Finally getting up the courage to confide, I confessed to having had a crush on a senior named Beau Bradley. His locker was across from mine. He had a look I really liked—dark eyes, dark shaggy hair, chiseled features, a tall lean body. He didn’t strut down the hall like the jocks; his attitude was more brooding and hipster. We had a large high school, about 450 kids per grade, which was merged from three different middle schools and my jr. high. Cassie had no idea who he was because he didn’t run with her beautiful people crowd. Confiding in Cassie, I told her Beau Bradley always stopped at his locker after third period, and that I had arranged my schedule around his so that I would be at my locker then too. At that point, I hadn’t yet gotten up the guts to even say hi to him. He was a senior, which intimidated me.
The next day Cassie made a point of going back to my locker with me after third period. Like clockwork, Beau strolled to his locker to pick up his books. Cassie struck a pose and “coyly” stared at him until he looked her dead in the eyes. She then flashed him one of her award winning smiles and giggled. By the end of the day, he had asked her out. They dated for about a month. Cassie was never one for keeping a guy long-term. She didn’t see that flirting with—and then dating—someone I had a crush on was wrong. At the time, I was too shocked to say anything. When I finally got my thoughts together to tell her how hurtful that was, she justified it by saying, “He had no idea you existed; anyways you weren’t going to do anything about it.”
Cassie has always been competitive. After her summer transformation, she stopped competing with me not only athletically, but academically as well. Still, I think Cassie wanted to prove that she could always beat me in one arena—with guys. That incident has always been painful for me since he was the first guy I ever crushed on. It was the first time Cassie had ever broken my trust. Since then my feelings towards her have been torn. She was such an essential part of my childhood, but that betrayal has undermined my trust.
All these thoughts flutter through my mind as I pull a long set in the pool. Resolving to stop ruminating on high school and focus on today, I decide to find out more about Abs Guy. My mind spins with questions. At the end of the workout, I do another kick set just so I have the opportunity to watch Abs Guy walk across the pool deck. Sitting in an open office with Abs Guy wearing a wife beater and running shorts would be wonderful. Then again, I’d never get any work done.
It’s interesting to listen to the women talk in the locker room as they shower and dress. I am probably the youngest person here. There are a lot of women in their thirties, forties, and fifties. They talk about kids, husbands, schedules, food. Some coordinate getting together for a run or a bike ride. This would be the only group who knows Abs Guy…. But, I sense it’s probably not the right place (or time) to ask any of them about him. I’m on my own with that. Well, at least I know where he is at 6:00 a.m.
Chapter 6
Here at work, all of our conference rooms are named after Yosemite Valley campgrounds. Sitting in the Porcupine Flat conference room with the nine other members on my team, my boss, Roger, goes on about schedules, deliverables, feature sets, and bug reports. The senior men have been trying to solve an intermittent technical problem. Our sales team has been pushing hard for our next release.
Roger looks to be in his late twenties, early thirties. I’ve never seen him smile. He’s from New Jersey and talks like Tony Soprano, which is intimidating. In his tough New Jersey accent he says, “The New York sales office has demanded that someone from our team be on the big Monday 8:00 a.m. conference call.”
He looks at me and forcefully points his finger, “Juliette, what time do you get in?”
This makes me feel like a deer in the headlights; it’s the first time he’s singled me out. “I’m usually at my desk by 7:30.” I manage to squeak out.
One of the guys grumbles, “Isn’t that still the middle of the night?”
Under his breath, another guy answers, “Only if you go to bed a 3:00 a.m.”
Roger ignores the comments. He looks down at his iPad and proclaims, “You’re to attend the meeting. It’s in the Tuolumne Meadows conference room.” I’m shocked as
I wonder what I’m supposed to do. I’m not involved with schedules, time lines, or the technical issues the senior guys are working on.
Staring at my boss who’s intently looking at his iPad, I finally manage to say, “How do I prepare for the meeting?”
He finally looks up, squints his eyes and in a commanding voice says, “Don’t say anything, don’t commit to anything. If they ask you any questions just tell them our best people are on it. They’re close to a resolution. Tell them that they will be the first to know when we get things working.”
On the way out of the meeting, I find myself walking next to one of the senior guys—Mark—the owner of the annoying German Shepard. Mark’s probably four or five years older than me. He dresses in jeans and a company T-shirt, wearing his dark hair short. Periodically, he forgets to shave. He’s been very helpful, navigating me through the company’s culture and explaining expectations. I’m perplexed, telling Mark, “I don’t understand why Roger can’t just conference into the sales meeting from home. Why does he need me to go?”
Mark explains, “Roger hates getting up early for meaningless meetings. There’s no good reason for any of us to be at the meeting except to calm the sales guys down. We also have that new expensive video teleconferencing set up. There’s a big push these days away from telecommuting to face time. Upper management probably wants to make a show of us being there.”
Yikes, one more thing to worry about, being sure I look appropriate for the teleconference. In an attempt to add humor to the conversation, I tell Mark, “If Roger doesn’t want New York to ask us to be on teleconferences he should send Ian.”
