Javi cocked his head. “The ninja and the wizard and the guru I get, but the others… I feel like we didn’t specify all of that in the job posting.”
Sheila turned and went back to the intercom. “Mindy? We’re going to need a ten-minute break before the next interview. And if you could meet us back at our pod-cube for a quick chat, that would be great.”
***
“You said you wanted a Python wizard,” Mindy said, stamping one foot, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Yeah,” said Raj. “But I meant…”
“Something you saw on another engineering job listing but didn’t understand?” I suggested.
“I assumed it just meant someone who was good with Python! You know, a wizard in that sense. Not in some fucked up real magic sense!”
“First,” said Sheila, raising a finger, “you don’t even know what Python is. Second”—she put down her first finger and raised her middle one—“magic is awesome!!” Despite her return to sarcasticland, she still bounced slightly on her heels.
“This doesn’t change the fact that there are seven more people out there waiting to be interviewed, based on a job description you wrote,” Mindy said.
“You helped me!” Raj nearly shrieked.
Bad move, Raj.
Mindy’s eyes narrowed, and she dropped the flouncily-angry pinup model act in favor of a confident and scary demeanor. Raj nearly leaped backwards, and even Javier, watching us with his headphones in, flinched a bit.
“I helped you,” she said, her voice low and icy, “because I assumed you were either part of the magical community yourself or because you were a norm who was willing to help out a few marginalized folks. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get hired in Nebraska when you have to wear a giant suit made of latex? Or when you’re trying to maintain a reputation as a first-class c-sharp expert? People hate that sound after a few hours.”
“It is kind of grating,” I said.
Mindy turned her eyes on me and narrowed them further. I shut my mouth, hard.
She turned back to Raj. “And instead it turns out that, not only are you a prejudiced asshole, you’re also a complete and utter idiot.”
Raj broke. He stretched out his arms to her in a pleading motion, and looked like he was considering getting on his knees. “Mindy. Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to. I really need your help here.”
“What exactly do you want me to do?” she said, her tone growing impossibly colder.
“Make this problem go away. Send all the people home, with our thanks, and make it so no one in management even knows this happened. You can do that, can’t you?” Raj asked. “You know, with your—” He wriggled his fingers.
Mindy cocked her head for a long moment. Then she said, “Yes. I can do that. And I will. But I’ll need something from you.”
“Anything,” Raj said. “Just name it.”
Even despite the shitballs craziness of the day and Mindy’s unexpected poise, I couldn’t help noticing the thought Sexual favors? drift across my mind.
“Sexual favors,” said Mindy.
Four jaws dropped open.
“I know it’s a little unorthodox,” Mindy said, “but I have a strong interest in human sexuality, and I’d like to broaden my experiences.”
“But… you’re in HR,” Raj said.
She arched a brow at him and smiled, slowly. “We won’t allow a little detail like that to get in our way, will we?”
“N-no,” Raj stammered, his eyes wide. I could nearly see the glee rising in him at those “we”s and “our”s. He appeared to be seconds away from doing his victory dance.
As much to save him from himself as to try to steal his thunder, I asked—rather suavely, I thought—“Just to clarify, who did you have in mind for this sex research?”
Mindy jutted her chin towards the back of the room. “Sheila. If she’s amenable.”
Sheila pursed her lips. “I have a boyfriend, but if you can do magic…”
“Technically, no,” Mindy said.
Sheila crossed her arms. “My dude might get jealous. Can he join us?”
Mindy arched a brow. “He can watch, but no touching.”
“How about that Taran guy?”
“Same deal.”
Sheila took a slow breath in, and then nodded once. “Fine. Works for me.”
Mindy smiled and then touched a spot on her blouse. Creepily, she seemed to shimmer for a moment before she spoke rapidly in a harsh, guttural, really non-human-sounding language.
Not one to be deterred even by that, Raj tried one more time. “You wanted to expand your sexual horizons. I’m sure you’ve been with a girl before—but what about three guys at once?” He looked at Javi and me sternly. I shrugged, and even Javi looked game.
“Nah,” said Mindy. “Already tried that. Three weeks ago, two pod-cubes over.” She looked at Sheila. “You ready?”
“Sure. We taking your car or mine?”
Mindy laughed. “I was thinking we’d use my transporter beam.”
Sheila’s eyes got huge. “Your— Are you— Does that mean— Are spaceships—”
“Yes,” said Mindy. “I’m an alien. Why do you think I call Mr. Arabesque ‘Terran?’”
Sheila slowly opened her mouth, let out a long “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!” that contrasted harshly with the flute sound out in the lobby, and ran over to grab Mindy around the waist. “In that case, we don’t even have to invite the guys!”
Mindy laughed again, touched her shirt, and they shimmered out of our pod-cube.
Javier, Raj, and I sat in silence for a long, long time. Finally, we got up to check out the lobby. All the weird folks were gone. Our normal coworkers didn’t seem to have noticed anything strange. We silently walked back to our pod-cube and got back to work moving numbers around on spreadsheets.
After about an hour, our chat dinged.
It was a meme from Sheila. The image showed Will Smith smiling while punching an alien. The text said, “Nailed it.”
Tooth and Nail
I’m a family man.
At least, that’s what it says on my campaign website. Right under the huge, smiling, stupid-looking picture of me.
Jon Cass for Palo Alto School Board
“I’m a family man!”
“Does that even mean anything?” I wondered aloud.
A member of said family popped her head around my laptop. “Does what mean anything?”
“That I’m a family man,” I said, pointing to the screen.
Lindz shrugged. “It means you’re not a woman.”
I gave her a look. “And you don’t think the photo would be enough to indicate that?”
She squinted and looked closer at the image. “I dunno…”
I snorted. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing your algebra homework?”
Lindz’s head slowly receded from view, giving me a you’re-no-fun look the whole time.
I went back to looking at my website. My three-thousand-dollar, stupid-looking website.
“Honey?” I called in the general direction of the kitchen. “Why couldn’t I have just built this myself again? Or made a Facebook page thingy?”
Lindz sniggered quietly.
“Because a Facebook page isn’t the same as a campaign website,” my wife Amy said patiently. “And you do have a Facebook page. Click on the little blue icon at the bottom of your website.”
I looked around the website, muttering to myself.
“Bottom of the page,” Lindz repeated with exaggerated slowness. “Little blue icon.”
“Yeah, yeah, Zuckerberg,” I told her. “I’m getting there.”
I found the stupid icon and clicked on it.
Same stupid-looking picture. Same enigmatic statement.
Then I noticed something else and suddenly brightened. “Honey, someone gave my Facebook a thumbs-up!”
“Liked,” Lindz corrected. “Someone liked your campaign page.”
“Who
?” asked Amy.
I clicked things until I could figure it out. “Oh,” I said. “Mom.”
“Grandma’s on Facebook?” Lindz asked.
“All of your grandparents are on Facebook,” Amy told her, bringing a big bowl of salad to the table. “Aren’t you friends with them?”
“Nah,” said Lindz. “Facebook is for old people.” Then she turned to me. “What’s eleven divided by five?”
I frowned. “Aren’t you learning algebra?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course. But now x equals eleven divided by five. So what is it?”
“I’m so not answering that question,” I told her.
“Ms. Marle says we can’t use a calculator,” she told me.
“Oh, well that’s different, then. The answer is five.”
“Right,” she said, writing something down. “Five…”
I scrubbed my hand over my face. “Lindz, that was sarcasm. The answer is not five. How could it be five?”
She shrugged at me. “It sounded right.”
“What’s five times five?” I asked.
She shrugged again.
“I know you know that one,” I told her. “Multiplication tables were in third grade, and that was before we changed school districts.”
She made a face. “Twenty-five.”
“Right!” I said. “So if you divided eleven by five—and since eleven is a lot smaller than twenty-five—what do you think you would get?”
Lindz scrunched up her face, like it hurt to think. “Less than five?”
“Right! And what’s less than five?”
She narrowed her eyes. “One, two, three, and four. I learned counting before we changed school districts too, remember?”
“Yeah—but what about all those numbers in between the integers?”
“What’s an integer?”
Amy handed me a glass of wine.
I looked up at her.
She smiled at my expression. “Let’s eat. I’ll help Lindz with her homework after dinner.”
Lindz took one look at her mother and then said, “I think I’ll just go with three. That sounds close enough. Thanks anyway, though.”
***
“Hey, babe. It’s late. Want to come to bed?”
I looked up at Amy blearily. “Tell me again why I’m doing this.”
She smiled, shut my laptop, and sat down next to me. “Because you care about our daughter’s education. Because you don’t want to have to explain what integers are to a seventh grader any more. And because…”
“It’s cheaper than private school,” I finished, resignedly. I ran a hand through my hair. “I just don’t know if I’m cut out for this.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I think you’re forgetting that you’re a tenured professor at a very prestigious university, that you care deeply about education, and that you have some excellent ideas for how to do things better. What else could anyone ask for in a school board candidate?”
I grimaced. “A fondness for the limelight?”
Amy smiled. “What about the whole professor thing? As I recall, you love your lecture classes.”
“That’s different,” I said grumpily. “I don’t have to convince my students they should listen to me. I’m the person behind the podium. Of course they’re going to listen.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe that’s the attitude you need here too. Look, you wanted to use your sabbatical for an important cause. What’s more important than your daughter’s education?”
“A trip to Europe sounds pretty important right now. Just you, me, the Eiffel Tower…”
“And a daughter who can’t do basic division, even with a pen and paper.”
I scrunched up my face like Lindz. “Homeschooling?”
“Sure,” said Amy, “if you want to retire at forty-three.”
“Yeah, no,” I said. “Private tutor?”
“I assume that’s even more expensive than private school.”
“Probably,” I said, rubbing my chin. “Get all my faculty friends to let her audit their classes?”
Amy huffed a laugh. “Only if you want to be the one to tell Merriman that he has to start his Calculus 101 class with not-particularly-long division.”
“It’s not just math, either,” I said. “Yesterday she asked me for help with an analogy.”
Amy shrugged. “Some analogies are hard.”
“Cat is to kitten as dog is to blank?” I asked.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, that’s why you’re running. Right there.”
Her words were relighting that fire in my veins, the one that makes men do stupid things like attempt to salsa dance or run for school board. I figured I had to give rationality one last chance to assert itself before I went back to daydreaming about acceptance speeches and single-handedly rewriting the district’s curriculum. “I could teach some continuing ed classes next year. Or take on more departmental responsibilities like Mehta’s been suggesting. We could afford to send her to Harker then.”
“When would you have time for research?” Amy asked.
I put my head down on my laptop. “When Lindz goes off to college.”
Amy snorted and tugged on my arm. “That can be Plan B, okay? But for now, let’s go to bed.”
***
I swung by the Poli Sci department office after dropping Lindz off at school on Wednesday.
“Hey, Cass, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be off pretending you care about kids or something?”
I don’t usually believe in name-calling, but Erickson’s a jerk.
“Just checking my mailbox,” I assured him.
Behind the administrator’s desk, Nick shook his head sympathetically. “How’s the campaign going, Jon?”
I shrugged. “Pretty well. I’m new to all this, but…”
“Ha,” said Erickson. “Just like you’re new to computationally-intensive Bayesian inference, am I right?”
“Don’t you have a former Soviet nation’s census data to distort?” Mehta, our department head, asked Erickson as she walked into the office and clapped me on the shoulder. “Leave Jon alone.”
Mehta’s a big enough name that Erickson just grunted derisively and left.
“So, are you going to win in November?” Mehta asked.
“That depends,” I said. “Are you a Bayesian or a frequentist?”
“Don’t even joke about that,” she said.
I flashed her a grin, but it quickly faded. “Honestly, I have no idea how it’s going. There’s really no data. It’s not like they do Gallup polls for school board elections.”
“Oh, come on now,” said Mehta. “As I recall, your dissertation was almost entirely based on case studies, not large data sets.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So you want me to walk up to people in the street and ask them if they’re going to vote for me in November? What would you say if I asked you that?”
“I’d say yes, of course. But I mean it.”
“Right,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a wise assumption to make in general.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “But you’re doing all the standard things one does to get elected?”
I gave her a wry grin. “Whose standard? I know you’re an Americanist, but I’m a Latin Americanist, remember? And I don’t have millions of dollars of drug money to buy my way onto the school board.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.”
“Maybe that should be your campaign slogan,” said Nick, looking at something on his computer screen. “What’s with this ‘I’m a family man’ thing, anyway?”
***
“Can we have waffles for breakfast?” Lindz asked me on Thursday.
I double-checked the day of the week on the front page of the newspaper. “Unless Thursday is magically now part of the weekend, I think you’re stuck with cereal, kiddo.”
Lindz rapped me on the head with her spoon. “Poo
f,” she said. “Magic.”
Without taking my eyes off the article I was reading, I handed over the box of Grape Nuts.
“Ugh,” she said. She got up, went over to the cabinet, and came back with a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. She poured some into her bowl, and then added two big scoops from the sugar jar.
I pretended not to notice.
“Can Sal come over after school?” she asked through a mouthful of cereal.
“Did you ask Mom?”
“No. She left too early. Sal just texted me like five minutes ago.”
“What would you guys do if she came over?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Lindz shrug. “Homework?”
“Nice try,” I told her.
“Fine,” she said, glaring at me. “Mess around on Snapchat and do each other’s nails.”
“There’s a quiz in math today, right?”
“Yeah,” Lindz said.
“If you get an A or a B, Sally can come over.”
She was quiet for a minute.
I kept reading about the tough new education standards in Washington state. I added “move to Washington” to my mental list of options if I lost the election.
Then Lindz asked, “How about a B-?”
***
Lindz walked up to the car at 3:15 and slammed a piece of paper up against the window.
I whistled, impressed. “An A-. Nice going. Where’s Sal?”
“She’ll meet us at home,” said Lindz as she got in the car and buckled up. “Can we get ice cream on the way home?”
“Because you got an A-?”
“No. Because it’s exactly two months till Election Day.”
“Oh,” I said, gulping down a sudden wave of anxiety. “It is?”
“Yep. September 8th,” she said, pointing to the date in the corner of the math quiz.
“Let’s do ice cream after dinner instead, so Mom can come too.”
Lindz wrinkled her nose, and started playing with her phone. “Fine. Have you ever thought of taking up biking?”
I gave her a look as I turned the car on and headed out of the parking lot. “I… can’t say that I have, no.”
Saxifrage & Starshine Page 5
