Mixed Signals

by Alyssa Cole

  We entered the building, which was much nicer than the dorms but still rinky-dink compared to the marble columns I’d seen when I’d visited my older sibs at Burnell. There were two middle-aged women at the door greeting students. They clutched clipboards and flashed us the brief smiles of those who prioritized efficiency over small talk.

  One of them, who wore glasses that needed a visit from the scratchproof–coating fairy, hurried over to us. “Hi, ladies! Are you here for your job assignment?” She knew the answer, since she was already pulling forms from her clipboard and handing them over. “Fill these out, and we’ll take them to be processed. You’ll be notified of your job placement in one to two days.” She said the words with relish, as if she’d waited a really long time to feel like she was doing something worthwhile again. Or maybe that was just me projecting.

  We took the forms and I jogged to slide onto a bench just as two guys got up to turn in their forms. Danielle followed close behind me. She was staring at the paper in dismay.

  “Skills? None. Aptitude? Reading manga.” She sighed. “My uncle told me I should be more serious.”

  “Oh, come on.” I stopped scribbling “badass guitar player” under the skills column and looked at her. “You’re not shy, you like engaging with people and you’re completely nosy.” I glanced at the list of job positions, from which we were supposed to choose four top possibilities. “Here. Student health center receptionist. Check that. Umm...student activity center welcome desk attendant. Gymnasium monitor...”

  “And library assistant! Don’t you want to work in the library, Maggie?”

  I scrunched my face up. “Uh, no. Why would I want to do that?”

  Her delicate brows furrowed. “Because you’re smart. You would get to read books all day. And maybe meet a boy who loves them as much as you do.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Reading is cool and everything, but I just spent years of my life cooped up in one place reading a bunch of books. The thought of being stuck in a quiet library for hours at a time...” I shuddered. “Plus, I can’t even listen to music there. I’m not allowed to just start belting a song if the mood strikes, because I might disturb someone with their face stuck in a book. No thanks!”

  I crossed out the option on my form, just in case they assumed someone with the name Margaret Seong would prefer a library position.

  When I looked up, Danielle was staring at me. “But intelligent women enjoy reading books and other academic endeavors.” She said the words like someone had ground them into her. I thought about her room covered in manga posters that certainly didn’t fall into any high-brow reading categories.

  “Some do. Others prefer reading music. And others want to get their hands messy. No one fits into a neat little box, Danielle.” I scanned the form and checked off the last of the things I thought could work for me. “Okay. So I chose farm assistant, dining hall worker, student security guard and maintenance crew. I’m hoping for dining hall because that means I get prime food access.”

  I turned in my form and glanced over at Danielle, who was scribbling much more than seemed necessary. In the “Additional comments/concerns” box at the bottom of the form, she was doing a quick sketch of an anime-style cat, a scared one with the hair raised on its back and its tail straight up. Next to the cat, she’d written I cannot work in tightly enclosed spaces. Thank you in neatly blocked capital letters. She finished the drawing and looked up at me with a grin. “People listen better when you make them smile.”

  I gave her a nod and watched her skip off to one of the clipboard women. Danielle said something and tittered behind her hand, and then the woman nodded good-naturedly and gave her a pat on the shoulder.

  “What should we do now?” she asked as she approached me.

  “Go eat again?” I ventured. I’d botched my first attempt at using the waffle maker that morning and wanted another go at it.

  “No, Maggie. Let’s go explore the campus. I want to go see the lake.” She skipped ahead and then turned to look at me. The day was just warm enough to pass for late summer, although autumn seemed eager to move in. Soon it would be cold enough that just walking to class would be a danger to all of my extremities.

  “Smart. With the way weather works up here, it might be frozen over soon,” I said.

  The college area along Lake Ontario had once been beautiful, with walkways and metal benches and manicured shrubbery. A few years of neglect, and the lake had scrapped all of that. We found a wooden bench that was so new it hadn’t been painted yet and took a seat.

  “It feels weird being here,” Danielle said. “But good weird. I thought I’d be stuck with my uncle forever.”

  “Was he an asshole or something?” My family often annoyed me, but even being stuck with them hadn’t felt like a bad thing. It was the leaving that’d felt weird for me.

  “He’s a brilliant man,” she said. “Everything I did was wrong to him, though. Now I can be myself without getting a lecture every five minutes.”

  I thought about how I’d immediately shut her down when she’d walked into my room, and how Devon had treated her. I made a mental note that perhaps I could use a less abrasive approach if she did things that annoyed me. Not everyone communicated the way my family did.

  “Was living with your uncle something that happened after the Flare?” I asked, trying to be tactful.

  She nodded. “I think in a weird way he was sad I left. He thought he could make me into the same person my mom was. I got a special scholarship here because he has a little bit of post-Flare celebrity. Well, that and some stuff with my parents. I don’t feel like talking about it. “ She shifted around on the bench and crossed her legs beneath her. She gave a nervous laugh, one that almost covered the sadness of her words. Almost. “What about you?”

  “I lived with my parents and brothers,” I said, feeling that strange guilt that always wormed through me when I talked to those who’d suffered more than me. “I didn’t want to leave them, but I’m glad to be here too.”

  It was true. Despite the Devon drama and being in an unfamiliar place, I was starting to feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I thought of all the things I was supposed to have experienced by now in the normal timeline of things. I always came back to the idea that I’d been cheated somehow. But so many others would never get this opportunity. They were stuck in terrible situations or, worse, dead.

  “I’d forgotten how beautiful the lake is,” I said. I didn’t want to focus on the bad things in the world right now. Not when the sunlight was skipping off the waves and hitting the prism of optimism in my soul.

  “It’s so big! I can’t believe Canada is over there,” Danielle squealed. “Do you think we could row a boat across?”

  “With these string beans?” I poked her arm, and she glanced down at herself judgmentally. “I’m joking, Danielle. Your arms are lovely. And, yeah, we could totally row across. You’d do the work, and I’d recline in the back of the boat with a parasol, because I’m a lady.”

  She sat upright on the edge of the bench and mimicked rowing for a moment before leaning back and staring at the waves rolling into shore. “Sitting right here, you can pretend it’s the ocean,” she said. “You can just stare out there and imagine that whatever you want most is waiting in the distance. I figure that’s what it’s like to look out at the ocean, at least. I’ve never had the chance.”

  “I’ve seen the ocean once,” I said. “I grew up not too far from here, but we went to visit a family friend in New York when I was about five, and someone decided it was a great idea to go to Coney Island.”

  “You’re lucky.” Danielle turned on the bench to face me. “My parents said I had to wait until I was eighteen to travel the city alone, and I had a whole trip planned out. I’d go to the big comic book convention they have every year, and before I came home I’d take the subway to Con
ey Island. I turned eighteen this summer, but the boardwalk burned to the ground years ago, apparently.”

  Despite her impressive makeup skills, Danielle was two years younger than me. The Flare would have happened during her first year of high school or last year of junior high. And now she was here with all of us, expected to behave like someone who hadn’t been a child when the world had gone dark. I felt a sudden tenderness for her then, a desire to shield her from people’s curious looks and rudeness, even my own.

  “Did you go on the roller coaster?” she asked. “Or check out the sideshow acts? I wanted to see the sword swallower. I watched a video of her once, and she had tattoos and cool hair and would have made the perfect superheroine.”

  “That, I would have remembered, but unfortunately the only thing I can recall is the beach. It was dirty and super-crowded, and a seagull stole my last French fry. Garbage was blowing everywhere, and I’m pretty sure one dude was swimming naked. I prefer the placid shores of the lake. You’re not missing out.”

  There was the sound of grass crushing beneath boots behind me, followed by a deep voice. “Maybe my ears are ringing from using a power drill all morning, but did I just hear you talking shit about Coney Island? I know that couldn’t have been what I heard.”

  “Hi, Not-Maggie’s-Boyfriend,” Danielle chirped.

  I leaned my head back over the edge of the bench and discovered that Edwin was gorgeous upside down as well as right-side up. He stood over me, a fake scowl on his face, and I hoped my nose was clean. I pulled my head up so I was facing away from him again, unsure if my head was spinning from the change in blood flow or his presence.

  “Oh, it’s the city boy,” I said. “I was just explaining how that beach was a filthy trash pile. Nothing to be offended about.”

  The next moment seemed to be picked up by my senses in snippets. More crunching grass. The heaviness of Edwin’s presence was a tangible disturbance in the air behind me. His hands gripped my shoulders, but not too tightly. The spicy smell of his gum as he leaned over me, and the way his eyes met mine when my head snapped up. His expression was serious, but not like it had been when we’d stopped at the checkpoint. Something flared in his eyes. Anger? No, but whatever it was made his gaze go warm.

  “Danielle, say goodbye to your friend.” With that, his grip on my shoulders slid to my arms and tightened, and he lifted me out of my seat as easily as if I were a munchkin like Arden. He clutched me to his chest and stomped toward the lake. The freezing lake. “This is what happens to suckers who blaspheme my hometown,” he growled as he stopped short at the edge and his arms kept going. I screamed and clutched at his neck before realizing he hadn’t thrown me into the water. It was simply a ruse.

  I peeked up from the crease of his neck and shoulder where I’d planted my head as I held on for dear life. He was giving me one of those white-teethed, big-dimpled grins and, fuck, he smelled good. His mouth was so close I could kiss him, just once, to see if it was the same as when Devon had kissed me. My whole body went tight and hot because he was holding me way too close for someone who’d turned down my advances. And then I realized something mortifying—he could hold me like this because he didn’t see me as anything more than a friend. Meanwhile, I was getting all lathered up about it.

  I pinched his neck, a ridiculous reflex as my libido’s personal fight-or-flight response kicked in, and he dropped me.

  “Ow! What the hell?” He rubbed at the spot I’d pinched. “What was that for?”

  I looked up at him from where I’d landed on my ass. “You scared me.” My calm voice didn’t sell that line, but what was I supposed to tell him? The truth?

  He gave me that weird look again, and then shook his head. “You’d better not pull any stuff like that when we’re working together. I have a reputation to uphold. And if this develops into a bruise, I’m telling the rest of the crew you gave me a hickey.”

  I was starting to get back up but flopped down at his words. “Excuse me?”

  He walked over and held out a slip of paper, staying as far away from me as possible like he thought I’d reach out and pinch him again.

  I snatched it from his hand.

  “Apparently, you were easy to place. I guess a couple of positions for a surly, needlessly violent agent of annoyance opened up.”

  The sheet of paper almost got snatched away by the wind, but not before I saw the words Job 1: farm (Agriculture) Job 2: maintenance (construction crew). I’d thought maintenance would be, I don’t know, going down to the basement and banging on the boiler with a monkey wrench. Instead...

  “Looks like we’re going to be co-workers,” Edwin said. I couldn’t tell if he thought that was good or bad, or what I thought of it either.

  Chapter Ten

  The day of my first maintenance shift, it took me entirely too long to find the facilities building, a feat that seemed impossible on such a small campus. I was still groggy from the unplanned nap I’d taken in my first period class, Resilient Hearts: Disaster and Recovery in American Literature. Given the wide variety in age range and educational experience among the students, and the limitations of the staff, there weren’t many 101 courses. I thought the idea behind this class in particular was good, but forcing a group of people who undoubtedly had some level of PTSD to talk about disasters probably wasn’t the greatest idea.

  I had no idea what the class had been like, though. After staying up late working on another song, this one a ballad about a modern highwayman posing as a cop to provide for his family, I’d taken my seat at the back of the class. I’d nodded along to the soothing-voiced female teacher’s discussion of literature as therapy and had promptly fallen into the most delicious nap of all—the forbidden classroom nap. My notes had started out as intelligible, then became chicken scratch, then simply a squiggly line that ran off the edge of the page. I’d jumped awake as my fellow students stood and started filing out.

  Professor Grafton, a woman in her later forties with a shock of pink hair, had given me a disappointed look as I slunk past her.

  I showed up at the facilities building well rested and hoping my first shift would go better than my first class had.

  “Margaret Seong?” A man who looked like a rock creature that had been transformed into a human hurried over to me. His voice was gravelly to match, but his eyes had a kind light that immediately warmed me to him. His hair was graying, and as he held my work assignment sheet, I could see that the middle and ring fingers were missing from his left hand.

  “You can call me Maggie,” I said. My two older brothers had Korean names on their official documents that made each bureaucratic encounter bothersome. Each such situation required them to explain that, yes, they went by Gabriel and John, but also to judiciously avoid that it was because people inevitably treated them like they couldn’t speak English if they used their Korean names. By the time my parents had to name me, they’d decided on a fully American name. I never told them how it made me feel left out because I knew they’d done it to save me, their only daughter, trouble.

  “Okay, Maggie.” He made a note in a notepad that appeared out of the pocket of his quilted flannel jacket. “I’m Joe. I thought you were gonna be a little slip of a thing, but you look solid. You might actually be useful.”

  He said the words in such a friendly way that I couldn’t even be offended.

  “It says here that you have basic carpentry skills, can use a circular saw and a drill and have helped build houses. How much of this is bullshit? I’m not asking ’cause you’re a girl, but because I don’t want to put you in a situation where you could get hurt as a result of you overstating your experience. Don’t worry, your job is safe. I just want you to be safe too.”

  “Why would I lie?” I asked, drawing my shoulders back. I’d done way too much backbreaking work over the years to have this guy question my cred.

&
nbsp; He glanced around, and when he spoke his voice was lower, like he was sharing a secret. “Listen, hon, I’ve already got three guys with broken thumbs and another who nailed his foot to the bench I had him building. Guys see maintenance and assume because they have something swinging between their legs this is the job for them. It’s not just you—I’m asking everyone to give me the real deal on their experience. I don’t want to file another report with Human Resources. They scare me.”

  I’d never known my grandparents, but Joe hit some sweet spot that had been hardwired in me from a lifetime of commercials and sitcoms. He was the perfect blend of gruff but sweet, and I had to fight my desire to hug him.

  “Everything I listed there is true. I’ve worked with my dad over the last few years, maintaining our house, renovating the family store after it was ransacked and doing odd jobs for neighbors. I’m not an expert and I don’t have any kind of licensing, but I can hold my own.”

  Joe gave me a craggy smile. “We’re going to start you off with inventory first. I’ll walk down with you and go over all the different tools the contractors will need and where they’re stored. We have a project coming up that we might be able to use you for, but it doesn’t start until next week.”

  We walked down a set of steps to a level that was belowground. The hallway managed to be dark despite the fluorescent lights lining the ceiling. In the few doors that were open I could see that there were no windows. I briefly thought of Danielle’s scrawled note about enclosed spaces and felt a millisecond of panic on her behalf. I didn’t know what had compelled her to sketch that scared cat, but I hoped the library, where she’d been assigned, didn’t require her to go into any sub-basements.

  Joe pulled a jangling set of keys from his pocket when we reached a thick metal door. Just as he moved to push the key into the lock, it opened, and Edwin and another man walked out. The other guy was shorter, his skin slightly fairer than Edwin’s but still darker than my deepest tan.