Chapter 2 In Which I Receive Career Mentorship
In Which I Receive Career Mentorship
It was an in-office day. I arrived at eight thirty in the morning and set up at my desk, plugging my laptop into the docking station, logging into the system, then kicking off my sneakers and sliding my feet into the heels I kept under the desk.
The shoes pinched my toes even more than usual this morning.
My computer pinged and my pulse spiked. I jabbed at the mute button.
Luckily, it was only a daily industry update, something I could easily delete.
I didn’t even skim the headlines on those emails anymore.
I knew what they would be: snippets about Elf off the Shelf, the elvish home goods company that had hurled the supernatural into public consciousness four years ago; the capital raise for the fitness company founded by six vampires ranging in age from four hundred to nine hundred years old—all of whom swore by “this one simple routine to stay fit”; and some other new entrant, a company started by an entrepreneurial immortal with wings, claws, or fangs.
Soon my colleagues would come in, and I would be surrounded by men in matching white button-down shirts who made me feel completely alone.
On cue, Corey rounded the corner and plopped into the cubicle next to mine.
“How was your evening?” I asked him, though I already knew what he would say—
“Terrible,” he said, “I worked until two a.m.”
I didn’t know what he spent all this time working on. He didn’t have a deal going. Or any clients. Or a manager. He spent all of this time on his computer doing… PowerPoints? Research? One time, I saw him rendering a video game background in MS Paint.
“Bummer,” I said.
He shrugged.
I sighed, still trying to engage him in conversation for some reason. “You hear we might be going to Faerie soon?” I asked. We meant me and Jeff.
“Yeah, travel sucks,” he said.
This didn’t feel like the appropriate response to being told your colleague was one of the first humans invited to Faerie in centuries.
Or at least one of the first humans publicly invited.
Jeff rounded the corner, wearing a full pinstripe suit and matching blue tie that made his skin look positively pink. He was always clean-shaven and had reached the age where men’s chins start to sag into their neck, no matter how slender they are.
He grunted toward us and strode past into his office.
This was a good greeting, for Jeff.
I turned back to my computer and alt-tabbed over to an Excel spreadsheet, shushing my roiling stomach. Maybe it would be a calm day after all.
“Miri, get in here!” Jeff barked from his office at the end of our row of cubicles. “When you have a minute,” he added, perhaps for the benefit of a colleague walking by.
When you have a minute meant now. I pushed away from my desk and stood, my knees cracking. So much for calm in the office.
The thirty steps to his office were muffled by the gray carpet and punctuated by sharp pains in my big and pinky toes. I leaned against the doorframe.
“Jeff,” I said, because he’d already turned back to his computer.
“Miri,” he said. “What do you need?”
I blinked, unsure what to say. He’d just called me over like, fifteen seconds ago. “Uh, did you—uh…” I stopped, stumbling over my words. Jeff’s window looked over New York City, out west to the Hudson and Jersey City. Up into the endless sky.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We’re going to dinner tonight in that shithole. Dinner’s outside, can you believe it?”
“We’re going to Faerie tonight,” I said in disbelief.
“Yes, the Duke said tonight.”
“Princeling.” The title of Princeling didn’t exactly mean a prince or a king, wasn’t a name like Rowan or Oberon, and wasn’t a descriptor like Fairy Godmother.
The Princeling just was. And most of all, what he was was in charge of everything Faerie.
The very few public statements we’d gotten about the Fae bore his signature, and the faeries who’d come out of the woodwork to join the mortal realm all claimed loyalty to him.
As far as I could tell, he was their ultimate authority.
“Yeah, Princeling. I know.” Jeff stuck his pinky in his ear and started scratching.
I shifted my weight away from the doorframe. “Are we bringing our own food?”
Jeff finally looked at me, his eyes narrowed. The purple bags under his left eye were bigger than the bags under his right. “Why would we do that?”
I rubbed my thumb against the gold band on my index finger, queasy. “Um. Doesn’t faerie food trap you in Faerie?”
Jeff snorted. “Food can’t trap you somewhere, Miri,” he said, his tone cool. He leaned back in his chair. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I swallowed. “Jeff, I—”
“Where did you even hear that? Seriously.” He chuckled, shifting in his seat. He’d taken off the suit jacket and I saw the perspiration stains under his arms.
“It’s the only legend they’ve confirmed, actually,” I said. “There’s a New York City Department of Public Health advertisement campaign about it in the subways.”
Had he not seen Just Say No, the campaign they’d enacted when faerie fruit sellers started popping up on street corners? Had he not noticed their slitted pupils and their berries that gleamed golden like little spheres of sunshine?
“I don’t take the subway,” Jeff said, matter-of-factly. Of course he didn’t.
“I’ll grab us takeout,” I said.
“You’ll embarrass our hosts if you do that!” he snapped.
I gulped.
“Don’t bring any food, Miri,” he said. “We need this dinner to go well.”
Jeff stared at me, blue eyes cold like the wind between the buildings in the winter.
“O-okay,” I said, my stomach tight. I just… wouldn’t eat anything. And if Jeff wanted to get himself stuck in Faerie, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
I shoved down a wave of nausea and left his office.
At lunchtime I took the elevator downstairs and stood in the courtyard of our building, staring at my phone.
My mom had called me three times that morning. I’d let the calls go to voicemail, keenly aware that her friend Mrs. Phillips’s nephew had just tragically broken up with his fiancée and moved to New York City and this meant that I was about to be conscripted into a blind date.
With a sigh, I called her back. The phone rang once before she picked up. “Good afternoon!” she said, sounding delighted. She always sounded delighted to hear from me.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, ready to derail. “I’m going to my first client dinner tonight.”
“Oh, sweetheart!” she squealed. “Are you excited? What are you going to wear?”
I groaned.
“The black suit,” she said firmly. “And don’t forget makeup.”
I pictured my mom sitting at the kitchen table and playing solitaire on an iPad.
“Do you have shoes?”
“Yes, I have shoes,” I said, scowling into the middle distance. Two young men in suits scurried past me.
“The black pumps?”
“Mom, I think Faerie is on a hill, or under a hill, or something. I’ll wear my sneakers.”
I paused, expecting her to argue.
“I had a dream about this,” my mom said suddenly.
“Witch,” I said, grinning. We’d joked that my mother was a witch for years, even before anyone knew the paranormal existed.
“Miri… be careful,” she said.
I blinked. My mother wasn’t usually this circumspect in her warnings.
“Mom, I’m always careful.” I started toward the little marketplace in the northeastern corner of our building. “I’m going to grab lunch.”
“Miriam”—usually my full name was a bad sign—“it wasn’t a good dream.”
I twisted my gold ring from my index finger onto my thumb. “Did I die?”
My mother hadn’t predicted anyone’s death, exactly. But still. Sometimes she dreamed about a person dying, and then they died, not in the way she’d dreamed of, and while I wouldn’t call that a prediction, I also wouldn’t call it optimal.
“You were in a cage,” she said, “too small to stand in, and the bars were woven branches and ivy, and you were so thin.”
“That probably made you happy,” I said, trying to sound glib. “Me being thin.” I walked into the marketplace and looked around at the food options. Bao buns, tacos, three different sandwich shops, a blood shake pop-up bar with evening hours, and a vegan grain bowl place.
My mom was silent.
“Mom?”
“I love you no matter what size you are, honey,” she said.
I stopped at the vegan grain bowl shop. “Mom, I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, that was a bad joke.”
“Please be careful, Miri. I don’t want to lose you.”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. I wanted to ask follow-up questions, or reassure her, or tell her she needed to go into business as a fortune teller because she was really freaking me out.
But I was in a crowded, public place. “Sorry, I gotta go, Mom. Love you.”
“Wait!” she exclaimed. “Did you know Mrs. Phillips’s nephew Ra—”
I hung up.
When I got to the front of the line, the cashier smiled at me. We’d become buddies these past weeks, by which I mean the cashier smiled at me and I narrated a budding friendship on top of it.
He slid my rice and lentil bowl across the plywood counter and I tapped my credit card. “Thanks,” I said, staring down at the unappealing brown patties covered in thick, tasteless mango chutney. The vegan grain bowl shop rarely had a line, for reasons beyond mortal comprehension.
I started for the door, clutching my sad lunch in one hand and my phone in the other.
My music had started as soon as I hung up, and an indie lesbian steal-your-girl anthem drowned out the chatter in the hall.
A gaggle of men in suits parted around me.
One of them bumped my right hand, almost upending my bowl.
The frustration boiled within me as I beelined for the door. My fingers drummed on the back of my phone case. My steps were longer, faster, staccato on the polished concrete.
I just needed to breathe. In through my nose. Out through my mouth. Deep breaths over and over until I made it into our building’s lobby and then to our elevator bank.