“Don’t tell me what I think, Aiden. And don’t tell me how my own head works.”
“I’m just—”
“You’re just sitting in Seattle, while I’m here. I’ve got a few jobs, and you damn well know it. There’s Forage Education—”
“Harper will manage the Education group,” Aiden interrupts.
“Harper is plenty competent but he’s never run a team this big, and it’s not established. There are too many unknowns.”
“It’s not the COO’s job to manage one little divisional team.”
“Which is why it’s just one of the reasons I’m here,” I counter. “But it’s still part of it, and you know as well as I do that Education matters to our future. I mean, hell, if you’ve got this whole ‘indoctrination’ idea—”
Aiden cuts me off, finally satisfactorily annoyed. He once suggested — offhand, surely as a joke — that one of the things we could offer Ross’s grand plan was a bit of false history a la George Orwell’s 1984. “Forage is the new Ministry of Truth,” and all that … and Orwell didn’t even know there’d be an Internet, where history would be a giant wiki with no paper evidence to burn when it contradicted the past’s previously preferred version.
Aiden had been spouting off when he’d said it, as he often does. I’m sure he doesn’t plan to manipulate records as a way of folding Forage into Ross’s plan — being the big, planet-saving philanthropist the world sees him as — but that hasn’t stopped me from jabbing him with it when he gets superior and starts pissing me off.
“Obviously I didn’t mean that,” he snaps.
“I’m just pointing something out. If you did want to indoctrinate anyone and/or change the way people see the past, Education would be the perfect place to start.”
Aiden makes a small grumbling like sound.
“Beyond that, there’s just Anthony Ross,” I say.
I can almost hear Aiden mouthing words, desperately wanting to respond. We both know I wouldn’t have moved to Inferno for half a year or more on the off-chance that a rumor about a potential visit from Anthony Ross might turn out to be true, but right now I fucking dare Aiden to say so.
I pick up my own ball, now that his complaints are silenced. “If Ross visits, I’ll find a way to talk to him,” I continue, my voice now calm. “If he doesn’t, I’ll find other ways to present our case. My presence in Inferno has nothing to do with it.”
“Except that you are in Inferno Falls.”
“Back to my old stomping grounds,” I agree, ignoring Aiden’s implication.
Just say it, Aiden. Just say that if I don’t intend to use my old relationship to possible advantage, I’ve moved across the country for nothing. Just tell me that, Aiden. Tell me that if I wanted to “just talk” to Anthony Ross, I could have picked up the goddamn phone. Ross is in the Syndicate. We both are. Ross’s plan is the most likely candidate for what the Syndicate will do with its pooled wealth, so the table is set for a discussion. Point that out, Aiden. Point it out and tell me I’m a liar or on a fool’s errand — I dare you.
But for now, Aiden says nothing.
“I assume you’ll survive without me?”
“It’s Seattle,” he says. “I have an umbrella and I can afford coffee. I think I’ll manage.”
I consider another jab, but I might as well quit while I’m ahead. Aiden isn’t the kind of guy you push. Even as partners, we sometimes cross swords; one-upping him further right now isn’t worth it.
We hang up with mostly cordial goodbyes.
I set the phone aside, then slip my graphite-and-gray calfskin Fendi billfold from an interior blazer pocket. The row of cards when I open it is a gallery of the inaccessible. Most people have never seen buying power like mine, with colors of the credit rainbow that the larger population isn’t even aware of.
I reach behind the cards, into a pocket, and withdraw a small piece of glossy paper that doesn’t match the wallet’s luxury at all.
It’s a photo, worn fuzzy and cracked at the edges. It shows an awkward black teenager with a pretty white girl, eyes wiser than her eighteen years. The couple is dressed in rented finery, looking as awkward as any prom-going teens ever have.
In the picture, I’m wearing a blue bowtie and matching vest over my tuxedo shirt, beneath my bright white jacket. It’s an awful combination, and the tux doesn’t fit well. Mia, by contrast, is radiant, wearing a dress that matches my tie and vest, but with a cut that perfectly suits her. It’s a plain dress — not ostentatious (like many of the other promgoers) or slutty (like the rest). It’s the sort of thing a First Lady could wear to a gala— if she was bold and had Mia’s legs.
“I was over you a long time ago,” I tell the photo. “I was a kid back then. I don’t do regret. I’ve made my bed, and I’m happy to lie in it. I owe you nothing, Mia Stover. Maybe I hurt you. But that’s life, and I have nothing to apologize for.”
The photo doesn’t respond.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MIA
I’m fired up for the entire day. Everyone avoids me, though whether it’s because they heard what happened on the street or because I’m radiating intensity, I have no idea. Inferno Falls, when I was a kid, used to be the kind of place where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Today it’s a whole lot bigger, and you can get lost in anonymity. Now the busybodies have to work a lot harder.
Simon asks me how I’m feeling, and I can tell from his hesitance that he believes he’s skirting a lady-parts issue. He doesn’t act surprised when I’m pissy. Girls get cramps, girls get PMS, girls’ vaginas do things the guys like to forget they have to do once a month.
In a way, I’m glad Simon is afraid of my vagina right now. It gives me immunity. The guy wouldn’t fire me anyway — not just for missing half a day and now being kind of irritable — but he’s definitely not going to do it over what he thinks is period stuff.
Instead, he acts like most guys. He ducks and covers, waiting for my monthly storm to blow over.
And I think: Fucking men.
They’re all over us when they want something, but when push comes to shove they back right off. Simon won’t confront me for insubordination (I told him I didn’t get to the Rivas sketches because I just didn’t feel like it), and Onyx didn’t even try to defend himself. I’m secretly convinced they’re all afraid of us.
Oh, yes … we’re all soft and sweet sometimes and we cry over things men would never shed a tear about. But when we’re pissed? When we say no and mean it? Then they don’t know what to think. So they turn tail and run.
Fucking Onyx with his flowers. Why didn’t he just bring me a teddy bear? Like I’m some brainless ditz without any sense — someone with no memory who can be easily bought. Has he forgotten the way we left things? Is he stupid enough not to know that his actions in the past were reprehensible, or naive enough to believe I’d simply forgive him if he brought enough posies?
The more I think about it, the angrier I get. It’s the glossing-over that bugs me. The total and complete non-acknowledgement of his wrongdoing is infuriating. If he’d come up to me apologizing, maybe I’d have listened. If he’d come penitent, on his knees, I might have stopped to listen before shooting him down. But he only had the barest threads of apology after I was laying into him.
It’s as if he thought he could come up, bribe me with girl-stuff, and I’d let it all go.
Like I’m a dog that can be distracted with a ball, or the fool in a movie who gets distracted when the hero says, “Hey, look over there!”
Well, fuck him and his attempts to make nice. We’re too far gone for that, and have been for years. He took my virginity, then had sex with all my friends. When I forgave him like a chump, he went off to summer camp, became a counselor, and had sex with all the girl counselors. That, I didn’t even know about until after he went off to college, promising to stay true, and screwed every hot girl on his floor. One was in his camp back in the day — small world. I met her after Onyx jilted her and she came
to find me.
We practically formed a club. He lied to everyone — except when he was getting his dick sucked in front of an audience at a college party, of course. That got recorded. It’s even out there on the Internet, but somehow it’s made Onyx more adorable to his female fans — probably because broken women see him as a mischievous cad.
All day, Jamie tries to talk, but I’m not interested. She doesn’t try to get me to run at lunchtime, though she does offer to buy lunch. When I decline, saying I need to catch up, she asks if I want to get dinner, drinks, anything. I’m a swinging single with nothing on my schedule. I tell her I’m busy anyway, because frankly today I need to do something that’s just as little-girly as Onyx seemed to feel was appropriate when he brought me flowers instead of logic and well-earned guilt: I want to see my mother.
I’m twenty-five years old, and there’s a large part of me that wants to deal with this solo, just to prove I can. And there’s a reason: as three o’clock nears, I start to have a hard time holding onto my anger. Fury is a hot, intense emotion. Keeping it in your heart is like trying to keep a fire crackling at full-bore for hours. I can’t keep my fury by mid-afternoon, and so it starts to slide into softer emotions.
There’s resentment, of course.
There’s indignation.
There’s hurt, which forms the foundation of my anger.
And there’s something else, too. Something that feels worse than hurt. I don’t like the hurt; it implies that as much as I want to lash out at Onyx, it’s only because he’s lashed me already.
But I’m afraid the something-else might be nostalgia.
As three o’clock becomes four and as four becomes five, I find myself remembering our good times. I don’t want to, but they sneak into my mind anyway.
I remember the times we laughed. The times we loved.
Then I remember how Onyx betrayed me, over and over and over again.
I remember the pain. The crippling, curled-into-a-ball spells when I didn’t feel powerful as I did today on the street, but felt helpless instead. That sinking, free-falling sensation. That sense that this pit had no bottom, and that I’d keep on falling forever.
I remember how I never quite knew what to do with my limbs. My arms and legs were wild cards. If I tried to walk, I’d fall. If I tried to reach for something, I’d knock it over. I wasn’t just emotionally crippled after a go-round with Onyx’s adolescent cruelty; I was physically crippled. I couldn’t function. Every motion — in body or thought — ended in confusion.
So I cried. For days.
The looming, deeply hidden corner of that old feeling is a threat at the end of my workday. And as I feel the creeping panic of those memories — the sense that if I let them free, they’ll leap from the shadows to consume me all over again — I realize that I don’t want to handle this alone.
I can’t.
I handled Onyx on the street. Unless he’s stupid, he won’t try talking to me again. But it seems that, in my head, he’s just getting started.
I don’t want to be alone.
Mom was my biggest champion back in those days, as a good mother should be. Together we weathered the Onyx storm. Mom liked him when I liked him, loathed him when I loathed him, and fought for me when I couldn’t fight for myself.
After he hurt me, she never trusted him again — and that made her the rock I was too stupid of a little girl to be. I forgave him; Mom was strong enough not to. She wasn’t blinded by his ample charm. She let me continue to make my own mistakes, always counseling against them. But out of everyone in the world, I know she’ll have my back now.
I call her, tell her I was thinking we could have a good old-fashioned sleepover, me spending the night in my childhood room.
And Mom isn’t fooled at all. “On a weeknight?” she says.
I’m starting to lose the composure I’ve held so tightly all day. I’ve been gripping a ledge since eight this morning, and now it’s only my fingernails keeping me from the fall beneath me.
I try to hide it, but I know Mom can hear the change in my voice. I don’t tell her what happened. I just tell her I’d really like to stay there tonight.
“I’ll get a pizza,” she says.
CHAPTER NINE
MIA
Mom placates me with pizza and girl talk, and I say nothing whatsoever about Onyx. It’s a nice evening, as far as evenings following encounters with ex-boyfriends go. Mom lives right in town and I see her often, but as I settle into the couch I spent my teenage years on, it suddenly seems as if it’s not remotely often enough. We used to be best friends, and really still are. But it’s different, now that I don’t live upstairs.
It was nice to be a kid and know she’d always carry the burden of protecting me from the world. But now I’m an adult, and I’m supposed to take care of myself. It’s a subtle shift, but I feel it tonight, as the pendulum swings backward for a few hours and I’m my mother’s baby girl again.
I do stay over, despite wafflings that my own bed is only five miles away. Mom insists. I don’t even have to run home for things to sleep in. A bunch of my old stuff is still here, and even though I shouldn’t be surprised that it still fits, everything does. I guess I haven’t ballooned up despite Jamie’s warnings about my lack of exercise. Mom even has an unopened toothbrush.
It’s easy to stay, almost as if I never should have left.
But when my head hits the pillow, my mind betrays me.
Gone is my righteous win over Onyx, victory over my former oppressor.
Gone is Mom’s placation. In dreams I’m no longer a kept little girl. I’m on my own. Even inside my mother’s house, the dreamscape opens and pours me into an unreal world where no one can protect me.
Gone are my walls, my impermeable defenses.
I know I’m helpless as the dream begins. At first I’m in fog, like early morning mist. It burns away as the dream dawns, and I find myself standing on the stop outside my place with the sidewalk ahead.
It’s only a stoop. A sidewalk. But even in the haze I know something is different, and the difference is chilling.
The feeling evaporates as I walk. My heels clack the sidewalk, just like in life. My mind capitulates to the dream: this is life. I stop thinking about whether it’s real because I believe that it is. I know it is. This is just me, walking my usual short stretch to work.
People mill around me. They’re all going about their business, careless of the short brunette in her no-bullshit work suit. My mind turns to what awaits at the office, and some part of me realizes this is today I’m re-living. I have a ten o’clock with Abigail, then I’m under deadline to get the Jackson project specs to the engineers by end-of-day. These are things I’ve already handled, but the dream doesn’t know it. And as I walk the dream street, I think of my day as I watch the people.
The thin crowd parts. Onyx is standing just down the street, in the middle of the sidewalk, holding an impossibly large bouquet.
He comes closer. He says my name.
I’m suddenly angry — a familiar rage, as if I’m reliving it, even though I haven’t seen this man in six years. Jamie warned me he was back, but that was yesterday. I had my freak-out. I’ve shed my pointless tears. Now I’m better, and a part of my mind is a bit surprised that Jamie didn’t come to see me this morning to improve my mood — bring me coffee and a muffin, perhaps.
But Jamie isn’t here. It’s just me and Onyx.
He’s in front of me, carrying the bouquet and wearing a smile that’s dropped a thousand pairs of panties. His smile makes me remember his body. A work of art, chiseled and hard. I remember the way he swept me off my feet — literally, in many cases. I was always little to Onyx. He could pick me right up. Carry me to bed.
And do whatever he wanted, because I believed his lies.
But he does lie. I remember that he hurt me, and my first instinct is to be offended by his pandering offer of flowers. So I push them away. I grab them, thrust the bouquet back toward him, and shove
the mess into the gutter.
Onyx looks at me, shocked. Then his devious smile returns and I feel something shift inside me. Where my anger was hot, this new feeling is like ice. Where I was pushing him away, part of me calls out to him.
Remembers him.
Don’t you dare try to apologize to me after all you’ve done.
And Onyx replies, Okay. I don’t apologize.
His eyes rake the length of my body. I’m wearing something conservative — maybe even prudish. But the way he looks me over, I might as well be naked. It’s like I’ve come to Onyx as an offering, down on my knees.
Fuck you, I tell him.
He smiles wider. If you insist.
His hand comes out — his big, broad, strong hand. His fingers touch my stomach, giving me a thrill I don’t want. He applies just enough pressure that I move backward. My butt strikes something hard. One of the big stone benches along my street, the surface coated to make it smooth enough to sit on without scratching.
When I stop, Onyx pushes a little harder. I’m off-balance now, so all I can do is sit. He pushes me back until my shoulder blades touch the back of the bench. I’m slouching like a teenager, my head against the back.
People have stopped around us. I see a woman holding groceries. An old man with a cane. Watching. Wondering what this is.
You’ve got some nerve, touching me, I tell Onyx.
But he’s getting to his knees. He puts a hand on each of my knees and parts them.
What are you doing?
You’ll see.
He pushes my legs back together, then reaches under my skirt. His fingers hook around the waistband of my panties., and pull. For some reason, rather than resisting, I lift a little so they can slide away from what they’re supposed to cover. They appear beneath the edge of my gray work skirt, right out there in the sunlight. Onyx drags them the rest of the way down and leaves them dangling at my ankles.
Trillionaire Boys' Club: The Internet Giant Page 4
