The Hating Game (2 page)

“Mustard today,” I observe aloud. Why do I poke the hornet's nest? “Just can't wait for baby blue on Monday.”

The look he gives me is both smug and irritated. “You notice so much about me, Shortcake. But can I remind you that comments about appearance are against the B&G human resources policy.”

Ah, the HR Game. We haven't played this one in ages. “Stop calling me Shortcake or I'll report you to HR.”

We each keep a log on the other. I can only assume he does; he seems to remember all of my transgressions. Mine is a password-protected document hidden on my personal drive and it journals all the shit that has ever gone down between Joshua Templeman and me. We have each complained to HR four times over this past year.

He's received a verbal and written warning about the nickname he has for me. I've received two warnings; one for verbal abuse and for a juvenile prank that got out of hand. I'm not proud.

He cannot seem to formulate a reply and we resume staring at each other.

I
LOOK FORWARD
to Joshua's shirts getting darker. It's navy today, which leads to black. Gorgeous Payday Black.

My finances are something like this. I'm about to walk twenty-five minutes from B&G to pick up my car from Jerry
(“the Mechanic”) and melt my credit card to within one inch of its maximum limit. Payday comes tomorrow and I will pay the credit card balance. My car will ooze more oily dark stuff all weekend, which I will notice by the time Joshua's shirts are the white of a unicorn's flank. I call Jerry. I return the car and subsist on a shoestring budget. The shirts get darker. I've got to do something about that car.

Joshua is currently leaning on Mr. Bexley's doorframe. His body fills most of the doorway. I can see this because I'm spying via the reflection on the wall near my monitor. I hear a husky, soft laugh, nothing like Mr. Bexley's donkey bray. I rub my palms down my forearms to flatten the tiny hairs. I will not turn my head to try to see properly. He'll catch me. He always does. Then I'll get a frown.

The clock is grinding slowly toward five
P.M.
and I can see thunderclouds through the dusty windows. Helene left an hour ago—one of the perks of being co-CEO is working the hours of a schoolchild and delegating everything to me. Mr. Bexley spends longer hours here because his chair is way too comfortable and when the afternoon sun slants in, he tends to doze.

I don't mean to sound like Joshua and I are running the top floor, but frankly it feels like it sometimes. The finance and sales teams report directly to Joshua and he filters the huge amounts of data into a bite-size report that he spoon-feeds to a struggling, red-faced Mr. Bexley.

I have the editorial, corporate, and marketing teams reporting to me, and each month I condense their monthly reports into one for Helene . . . and I suppose I spoon-feed it to her too. I spiral-bind it so she can read it when she's on the stepper. I use her favorite font. Every day here is a challenge, a privilege, a sacrifice, and a frustration. But when I think about every little step I've taken to
be here in this place, starting from when I was eleven years old, I refocus. I remember. And I endure Joshua for a little longer.

I bring homemade cakes to my meetings with the division heads and they all adore me. I'm described as “worth my weight in gold.” Joshua brings bad news to his divisional meetings and his weight is measured in other substances.

Mr. Bexley stumps past my desk now, briefcase in hand. He must shop at Humpty Dumpty's Big & Small Menswear. How else could he find such short, broad suits? He's balding, liver-spotted, and rich as sin. His grandfather started Bexley Books. He loves to remind Helene that she was merely
hired.
He is an old degenerate, according to both Helene and my own private observations. I make myself smile up at him. His first name is Richard. Fat Little Dick.

“Good night, Mr. Bexley.”

“Good night, Lucy.” He pauses by my desk to look down the front of my red silk blouse.

“I hope Joshua passed on the copy of
The Glass Darkly
I picked up for you? The first of the first.”

Fat Little Dick has a huge bookshelf filled with every B&G release. Each book is the first off the press; a tradition started by his grandfather. He loves to brag about them to visitors, but I once looked at the shelves and the spines weren't even cracked.

“You picked it up, eh?” Mr. Bexley orbits around to look at Joshua. “You didn't mention that, Doctor Josh.”

Fat Little Dick probably calls him
Doctor Josh
because he's so clinical. I heard someone say when things got particularly bad at Bexley Books, Joshua masterminded the surgical removal of one-third of their workforce. I don't know how he sleeps at night.

“As long as you get it, it doesn't matter,” Joshua replies smoothly and his boss remembers that he is The Boss.

“Yes, yes,” he chuffs and looks down my top again. “Good work, you pair.”

He gets into the elevator and I look down at my shirt. All the buttons are done up. What could he even
see
? I glance up at the mirrored tiles on the ceiling and can faintly see a tiny triangle of shadowed cleavage.

“If you buttoned it any higher, we wouldn't see your face,” Joshua says to his computer screen as he logs off.

“Perhaps you could tell your boss to look at my face occasionally.” I also log off.

“He's probably trying to see your circuit board. Or wondering what kind of fuel you run on.”

I shrug on my coat. “Just fueled by my hate for you.”

Josh's mouth twitches once, and I nearly had him there. I watch him roll down a neutral expression. “If it bothers you,
you
should speak to him. Stand up for yourself. So, painting your nails tonight, desperately alone?”

Lucky guess on his part? “Yes. Masturbating and crying into your pillow tonight,
Doctor Josh
?”

He looks at the top button of my shirt. “Yes. And don't call me that.”

I swallow down a bubble of laughter. We jostle each other in an unfriendly way as we get into the elevator. He hits B, but I hit G.

“Hitchhiking?”

“Car's at the shop.” I step into my ballet flats and tuck my heels into my bag. Now I'm even shorter. In the dull polish of the elevator doors I can see that I barely come halfway up his bicep. I look like a Chihuahua next to a Great Dane.

The elevator doors open to the building foyer. The world outside B&G is a blue haze; refrigerator cold, filled with rapists and
murderers and lightly sprinkling rain. A sheet of newspaper blows past, right on cue.

He holds the elevator door open with one enormous hand and leans out to look at the weather. Then he swings those dark blue eyes to mine, his brow beginning to crease. The familiar bubble forms in my head.
I wish he was my friend
. I burst it with a pin.

“I'll give you a ride,” he forces out.

“Ugh, no way,” I say over my shoulder and run.

I
t's Cream Shirt Wednesday. Joshua is off on a late lunch. He's made a few more comments to me lately about things I like and do. They have been so accurate I'm pretty sure he's been snooping through my stuff. Knowledge is power, and I don't have much.

First, I conduct a forensic examination of my desk. Both Helene and Mr. Bexley despise computerized calendars, and so we have to keep matching paper schedule books like we're Dickensian law clerks. In mine, there's only Helene's appointments. I obsessively lock my computer, even if I go to the printer. My unlocked computer in the vicinity of Joshua? I may as well hand him the nuclear codes now.

Back at Gamin Publishing, my desk was a fort made of books. I kept my pens in the gaps between their spines. When I was unpacking in the new office, I saw how sterile Joshua kept his desk and felt incredibly childish. I took my Word of the Day calendar and Smurf figurines home again.

Before the merger, I had a best friend at work. Val Stone and I would sit on the worn-out leather couches in the break room and play our favorite game: systematically defacing photographs of beautiful people in magazines. I'd add a moustache onto Naomi
Campbell. Val would then ink out a missing tooth. Soon it was an onslaught of scars and eye patches and bloodshot eyes and devil horns until the picture was so ruined we'd get bored and start another.

Val was one of the staff who was cut and she was furious I didn't give her some kind of a warning. Not that I would have been allowed to, even if I had known. She didn't believe me. I turn slowly, and my reflection spins off twenty different surfaces. I see myself in every size from music box to silver screen. My cherry-red skirt flips out and I pirouette again once, just for the hell of it, trying to shake away the sick, troubled feeling I get whenever I think of Val.

Anyway, my audit confirms that my desk has a red, black, and blue pen. Pink Post-its. One tube of lipstick. A box of tissues for blotting my lipstick and tears of frustration. My planner. Nothing else.

I do a light shuffling tap dance across the marble superhighway. I'm in Joshua Country now. I sit in his chair and look at everything through his eyes. His chair is so high my toes don't touch the ground. I wiggle my butt a little deeper into the leather. It feels completely obscene. I keep one eye permanently swiveled toward the elevator, and use the other to examine his desk for clues.

His desk is the male version of mine. Blue Post-its. He has a sharp pencil in with his three pens. Instead of lipstick he has a tin of mints. I steal one and put it in the tiny, previously useless pocket of my skirt. I imagine myself in the laxative section of the drugstore trying to find a good match and have a good little snicker. I jiggle his desk drawer. Locked. So is his computer. Fort Knox. Well played, Templeman. I make a few unsuccessful guesses at his password. Maybe he doesn't hate me 4 eva.

There's no little framed photo of a partner or loved one on
this desk. No grinning, happy dog or tropical beach memento. I doubt he esteems anyone enough to frame their likeness. During one of Joshua's fervent little sales rants, Fat Little Dick boomed sarcastically,
We've got to get you laid, Doctor Josh.

Joshua replied,
You're right, boss. I've seen what a bad drought can do to someone.
He said it while looking at me. I know the date. I diarized it in my HR log.

I get a little tingle in my nostrils. Joshua's cologne? The pheromone he leaches from his pores? Gross. I flip open his day planner and notice something; a light code of pencil running down the columns of each day. Feeling incredibly James Bond–ish, I raise my phone and manage to take one single frame.

I hear the cables in the elevator shaft and leap to my feet. I vault to the other side of his desk and manage to slam the planner shut before the doors spring open and he appears. His chair is still spinning gently out of the corner of my eye. Busted.

“What are you doing?”

My phone is now safely down the waistband of my underwear. Note to self: Disinfect phone.

“Nothing.” There's a tremor in my voice, convicting me instantly. “I was trying to see if it's going to rain this afternoon. I bumped your chair. Sorry.”

He advances like a floating Dracula. The menace is ruined by the sporting-goods-store bag loudly crinkling against his leg. A shoebox is in it, judging from the shape.

Imagine the wretched sales assistant who had to help Joshua choose shoes.
I require shoes to ensure I can effectively run down the targets I am paid to assassinate in my spare time. I require the best value for my money. I am size eleven.

He looks at his desk, his computer's innocuous log-in screen, his closed planner. I force my breath out in a controlled hiss.
Joshua drops his bag on the floor. He steps so close his leather shoe touches the tip of my little patent heels.

“Now why don't you tell me what you were actually doing near my desk?”

We have never done the Staring Game this close. I'm a pip-squeak at exactly five feet tall. It's been my lifelong cross to bear. My lack of height is an agonizing topic of conversation. Joshua is at least six-four. Five. Six. Maybe more. A giant of a human. And he's built out of heavy materials.

Gamely, I maintain eye contact. I can stand wherever I like in this office. Screw him. Like a threatened animal trying to look bigger, I put my hands on my hips.

He's not ugly, as I've mentioned, but I always struggle to work out how to describe him. I remember eating my dinner on the couch a while back, and a soft-news piece came on the TV. An old Superman comic book sold for a record price at auction. As the white-gloved hand turned the pages, the old-fashioned drawings of Clark Kent reminded me of Joshua.

Like Clark Kent, Joshua's height and strength are all tucked away under clothes designed to conceal and help him blend into a crowd. Nobody at the
Daily Planet
knows anything about Clark. Underneath these button-up shirts, Joshua could be relatively featureless or ripped like Superman. It's a mystery.

He doesn't have the forehead curl or the nerdy black glasses, but he's got the strong masculine jawline and sulky, pretty mouth. I've been thinking all this time his hair is black but now that I'm closer, I can see it is dark brown. He doesn't comb it as neatly as Clark does. He's definitely got the ink-blue eyes and the laser stare, and probably some of the other superpowers, too.

But Clark Kent is such a darling; all bumbling and soft. Joshua is hardly the mild-mannered reporter. He's a sarcastic, cynical,
Bizarro Clark Kent, terrorizing everyone in the newsroom and pissing off poor little Lois Lane until she screams into her pillow at night.

I don't like big guys. They're too much like horses. They could trample you if you got underfoot. He is auditing my appearance with the same narrowed eyes that I am. I wonder what the top of my head looks like. I'm sure he only fornicates with Amazons. Our stares clash and maybe comparing them to an ink stain was a tad too harsh. Those eyes are wasted on him.

To avoid dying, I reluctantly breathe in a steady lungful of cedar-pine spice. He smells like a freshly sharpened pencil. A Christmas tree in a cold, dark room. Despite the tendons in my neck beginning to cramp, I don't permit myself to lower my eyes. I might look at his mouth then, and I get a good enough view of his mouth when he's tossing insults at me across the office. Why would I want to see it up close? I wouldn't.

The elevator bings like the answer to all my prayers. Enter Andy the courier.

Andy looks like a movie extra who appears in the credits as “Courier.” Leathery, midforties, clad in fluorescent yellow. His sunglasses sit like a tiara on top of his head. Like most couriers, he enriches his workday by flirting with every female under the age of sixty he encounters.

“Lovely Luce!” He booms it so loud I hear Fat Little Dick make a wet snort as he jolts awake in his office.

“Andy!” I return, skittering backward. I could honestly hug him for interrupting what was feeling like a whole new kind of strange game. He has a small parcel in his hand, no bigger than a Rubik's cube. It's got to be my 1984 baseball-player Smurfette. Super rare, very minty. I've wanted her forever and I've been stalking her journey via her tracking number.

“I know you want me to call from the foyer with your Smurfs, but no answer.”

My desk phone is diverted to my personal cell, which is currently located near my hip bone in the waistband of my underwear. So that's what the buzzing feeling was. Phew. I was thinking I needed my head checked.

“What does he mean, Smurfs?” Joshua narrows his eyes like we're nuts.

“I'm sure you're busy, Andy, I'll let you get out of here.” I grab at the parcel, but it's too late.

“It's her passion in life. She lives and breathes Smurfs. Those little blue people, yea big. They wear white hats.” Andy holds two of his fingers an inch apart.

“I know what Smurfs are.” Joshua is irritated.

“I don't live or breathe them.” My voice betrays the lie. Joshua's sudden cough sounds suspiciously like a laugh.

“Smurfs, huh? So that's what those little boxes are. I thought maybe you were buying your tiny clothes online. Do you think it's appropriate to get personal items delivered to your workplace, Lucinda?”

“She's got a whole cabinet of them. She's got a . . . What is it, Luce? A Thomas Edison Smurf? He's a rare one, Josh. Her parents gave it to her for high school graduation.” Andy blithely continues humiliating me.

“Quiet now, Andy! How are you? How's your day going?” I sign for the package on his handheld device with a sweaty hand. Him and his big mouth.

“Your parents bought you a Smurf for graduation?” Joshua lounges in his chair and watches me with cynical interest. I hope my body didn't warm the leather.

“Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you got a car or something.” I'm mortified.

“I'm fine, sweetheart,” Andy tells me, taking the little gizmo back from me and hitting several buttons and putting it in his pocket. Now that the business component of our interaction is completed, he pulls his mouth into a beguiling grin.

“All the better for seeing you. I tell you, Josh my friend, if I sat opposite this gorgeous little creature I wouldn't get any work done.”

Andy hooks his thumbs into his pockets and smiles at me. I don't want to hurt his feelings so I roll my eyes good-humoredly.

“It's a struggle,” Joshua says sarcastically. “Be glad you get to leave.”

“He must have a heart of stone.”

“He sure does. If I can knock him out and get him into a crate, can you have him delivered somewhere remote?” I lean on my desk and look at my tiny parcel.

“International shipping rates have increased,” Andy warns. Joshua shakes his head, bored with the conversation, and begins to log on.

“I've got some savings. I think Joshua would love an adventure vacation in Zimbabwe.”

“You've got an evil streak, haven't you!” Andy's pocket makes a beep and he begins to rummage and walk to the elevator.

“Well, Lovely Luce, it's been a pleasure as always. I will see you soon, no doubt, after your next online auction.”

“Bye.” When he disappears into the elevator, I turn back to my desk, my face automatically faded to neutral.

“Absolutely pathetic.”

I make a
Jeopardy!
buzzer sound. “Who is Joshua Templeman?”

“Lucinda flirting with couriers. Pathetic.”

Joshua is hammering away on his keyboard. He certainly is an
impressive touch typist. I stroll past his desk and am gratified by his frustrated backspacing.

“I'm nice to him.”

“You? Nice?”

I'm surprised by how hurt I feel. “I'm lovely. Ask anyone.”

“Okay. Josh, is she lovely?” he asks himself aloud. “Hmm, let me think.”

He picks up his tin of mints, opens the lid, checks them, closes it, and looks at me. I open my mouth and lift my tongue like a mental patient at the medication window.

“She's got a few lovely things about her, I suppose.”

I raise a finger and enunciate the words crisply: “Human resources.”

He sits up straighter but the corner of his mouth moves. I wish I could use my thumbs to pull his mouth into a huge deranged grin. As the police drag me out in handcuffs I'll be screeching,
Smile, goddamn you.

We need to get even, because it's not fair. He's gotten one of my smiles, and seen me smile at countless other people. I have never seen him smile, nor have I seen his face look anything but blank, bored, surly, suspicious, watchful, resentful. Occasionally he has another look on his face, after we've been arguing. His Serial Killer expression.

I walk down the center line of the tile again and feel his head swivel.

“Not that I care what you think, but I'm well liked here. Everyone's excited about my book club, which you've made pretty clear you think is lame, but it will be team building, and pretty relevant, given where we work.”

“You're a captain of industry.”

“I take the library donations out. I plan the Christmas party. I let the interns follow me around.” I'm ticking them off on my fingers.

“You're not doing much to convince me you don't care what I think.” He leans back farther into his chair, long fingers laced together loosely on his generic, flat abdomen. The button near his thumb is half-loose. Whatever my face does, it makes him glance down and rebutton it.

“I don't care what
you
think, but I want normal people to like me.”

“You're chronically addicted to making people adore you.” The way he says it makes me feel a little sick.

“Well, excuse me for doing my best to maintain a good reputation. For trying to be positive. You're addicted to making people hate you, so what a pair we are.”

I sit down and tap my computer mouse about ten times as hard as I can. His words sting. Joshua is like a mirror that shows me the bad parts of myself. It's school all over again. Tiny, runt-of-the-litter Lucy using her pathetic cuteness to avoid being destroyed by the big kids. I've always been the pet, the lucky charm, the one being pushed on the swings or pulled in a wagon. Carried and coddled and perhaps I am a little pathetic.