Chapter 7
Chance
I already know I like my new boss. He’s got muscles, but not height, making him confident but not cocky. He’s also casually dressed, which sets a good tone for the office. The vibe here is jeans and short-sleeved button-up shirts. Christopher takes it to the next level by ironing his jeans, evidenced by the line running down each pant leg. His shirt looks like it’s been run under a hot asphalt roller, minus the tar and rocks. I’m not going to judge. Some people are particular. It probably makes him good at his job.
After the onboarding is complete, Christopher walks me to my desk. Heng gets a cubical—if you want to call it that. I get a desk in a forgotten corner that’s surrounded by flimsy lime green dividers that aren’t high enough to block a sneeze, let alone provide any privacy.
PanTech didn’t warn me that I was walking into an open-concept office. I like the feel of the place. The white ductwork and pipes add an industrial vibe. The polished floors and the lime green accents against gray furniture are a nice touch. Glass walls everywhere. I can get used to it.
But I have a clear view of everyone, and they have a clear view of me. How will I surf the net and check my socials during the famine phase of the software development feast-famine cycle? Especially with my back to the walkway where people come and go.
And then there’s the other surprise. The dark-haired, dark-eyed annoyance named Danni. She’s wearing high-waisted jeans with a short-sleeved mint blouse covered in white flowers. Not the hardhat, flannel, and steel-toed boots she should be wearing as a general contractor. This office space is fully renovated. No construction workers are pounding on walls or running electrical conduit. She lied. And she was mad at me for using an avatar.
I scan the room for her silky, shoulder-length hair but come up short. Then it hits me. It’s like reality is skipping. Danni. Danni. Danni. That’s all I see.
Danni on the Carolina Excursion. Danni at my apartment. Danni at my consulting gig. And now, Danni sitting right beside me.
I push my chair back and lean over to inspect my neighbor’s desk. Sure enough, her purse is sitting next to the monitors—the fringy one she carried on our date.
My mom’s voice booms through my auditory cortex. (Amazing how phantom voices from the past can do that.) There is no such thing as chance. The universe has a way of getting what it wants.
I press my palms to my forehead. Is the universe some shriveled old guy in front of a switchboard moving wires from one jack to the other? Or are we living in a virtual reality and the universe is some kid with a Nintendo Switch, playing fast and loose with our lives?
Neither seems reasonable. The idea of an inanimate universe making chess moves doesn’t jive with my definition of reality. I’ve never seen a rock roll over onto its back for pets. Except for that movie Frozen , when the rocks tumbled over to Anna and Kristoff and turned into little pebble people. Or maybe they were gnomes. Or dwarves or something.
I roll back to my desk. A moment later, Danni returns. She didn’t see me gawking at her purse. But she does see me based on her pronounced frown.
She drops into her chair, rolls it forward until her ribs touch the desktop, leans onto her right elbow, and uses her hand as a shield.
This is worse than my school days. Everyone crammed into one room. No privacy. Sitting next to Sachi who thought she was somebody’s gift to the old guy at the switchboard in the sky because her dad was the municipal minister of Karnataka.
“General contractor?” I say.
Danni lifts her hand and peeks at me. “Blond, White guy?” She’s in full snark mode. I hope. What if she’s only in half-snark mode? If so, I’m in trouble.
“Do you supervise your builders in the evenings then?” I probably shouldn’t talk to her at all. Really. Why am I talking?
“You...” She can’t think of a retort. I smile. “I’m not a general contractor.” Danni lowers her hand. “I’ve never painted a wall in my life. Are you happy?”
“Yes.”
“What you did is a lot worse.”
I’ve had time to think about not telling Danni over text that I’m not actually Thor. (She should have known something was up.) In my quest to find a soulmate, I got sloppy. I’m man enough to admit it to myself. But not to Danni.
Her right eyelid is twitching like she wants to spout a curse word. She blinks to stop the spasm. “We can just sit here and not look at each other and not talk. Okay?”
“We’re three feet from each other.” I’m not sure I like the never-looking, never-talking idea. The execution would be difficult when we’re crammed together like this. And I might want to bother her sometimes to see if I can make her eyelid twitch.
“Hey guys.” Christopher walks up and splits the distance between our desks. “Are you two getting along okay over here? This corner is pretty cozy.”
Danni has enough control in the presence of our boss not to roll her eyes.
“We’re getting along great,” I say, my eyes fixed on hers.
She wants to roll them so bad, I can tell.
“Great,” Christopher says. He has no idea Danni wants to rip out my throat. “Danni, Chance doesn’t get his computer until tomorrow. Once he’s logged in, can you help him load the development environment and give him an overview of our apps?”
“Sure,” Danni says with a stiff smile.
Christopher leans toward me. “She’s one of our best,” he whispers, “but I can’t say that too loud.”
I lean back in my chair and tuck my thumbs into my pockets. “Good to know.”
“She’ll show you around.” Christopher turns to leave and then pauses. He rests his hand on the back of Danni’s chair. “How did your MatchAI date go? That was Saturday, wasn’t it?”
Danni clears her throat and opens her mouth to speak.
Christopher’s phone buzzes. He grabs it from his pocket. While he’s checking the notification, Danni narrows her eyes at me.
“Spam,” Christopher says. He chucks the phone back into his pocket.
“What’s this about a MatchAI date?” I ask, my eyes as innocent as Puss in Boot’s when he’s making sad-cat-face.
“Danni ended up with my gift at our Christmas in July party. I know the owner of MatchAI, so I scored a coupon, and I threw in two showboat tickets. Danni used them on Saturday.”
So, she wasn’t lying when she said MatchAI was a one-time thing.
“Did Cupid choose your perfect match?” Christopher asks.
“Actually, no. She didn’t,” Danni says. “My date was self-centered, stuck-up, and arrogant.”
I open my mouth to say something, a natural defense mechanism, but I quickly close it.
“Oh. Ow,” Christopher says.
“Maybe he was misunderstood.” So much for keeping my mouth shut.
“No. I understood him perfectly. The only communication barrier was his lies.”
Brown stems connect with the white flowers on Danni’s shirt. The color matches her eyes. And her hair, which has a metallic sheen. If we ever get along for five minutes, I need to ask her about her haircare products. I’m not against using women’s products to tame my waves.
“He lied?” Christopher asks. “How do you know?”
“In his profile picture, he’s blond. In real life. He’s a brunette.”
Are you sure about that? My hair is black, not brown. (I manage to keep the comment to myself.)
“Did he dye it?”
“Nope. Just full on lied. Tried to catfish on MatchAI. A serious offense if you ask me.”
“There’s no law against it,” I mumble.
Christopher widens his stance and crosses his arms. His pecs bulge, getting in the way a bit. “Did you provide feedback?”
“You can do that?” Danni asks.
“Sure. You can rate your date and leave a review.”
“You can review people ?“ My face scrunches. You’re rating your dates in your spreadsheet , a phantom voice says. It’s not my mom’s.
“Yeah,” Christopher says. “It helps the AI learn. Also, Cassie doesn’t want a database full of jerks. If your rating gets too low, you lose access.”
Danni smirks at me. “I’ll be sure to leave my feedback.”
“So will I,” I blurt.
Christopher looks at me, confused.
I grab my phone and dive into a Wordle session.
“I’m just a one-timer,” Danni says. “I’m done with online dating. It’s just not for me. Unlike some people.”
That doesn’t burn nearly as much as she thinks it does.
“Maybe your date won’t be going on any more either after you leave that nasty review,” Christopher says with a laugh.
I keep my eyes glued to my phone and resist pursing my lips because I know it would make Danni happy.
“Well. I’m sorry my gift sucked. Hopefully the showboat cruise was fun, at least.”
“Yeah, it was nice. The food was great.”
“Good.” Christopher thumps Danni’s desk. “Well, I’ll let you get back to work.”
When he’s gone, I squint at Danni. “I thought the food gave you intestinal ‘stuff.’ You spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom.”
“No. You caused that.”
“It wasn’t the shrimp?”
“The shrimp was great. Your ego was putrid.”
When I was breaking out in a flame-ball on the dance floor, Danni’s bowels were churning with disgust over my putrid ego? “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Which part?”
“An ego can’t be putrid. That’s reserved for rotten food and sewer water.”
“Tells you how much I enjoyed our dance.”
Words aren’t things. They aren’t made of matter. But somehow her last sentence was made of flesh and blood, a fist that rammed into my stomach. Maybe her no-lookie, no-talkie idea isn’t so bad.
I look down at my phone to avoid the smug look on her face. It’s not smart to trade punches, especially with women. Instead, I rewind to our slow dance on the Carolina Excursion and imagine myself stepping on her feet a few times.
There. That feels better.
I don’t have a computer. Handbooks aren’t printed on paper these days. There’s nothing to do, nothing to look at but my phone. I settle for four hours of Jelle’s Marble Runs and DaksDominoes on YouTube broken up by a bathroom break to stretch my legs and a visit to the breakroom to poke around and buy a can of Coke Zero from the vending machine.
After sticking my fingers in my ears a few times to make sure they aren’t stuffed with cotton, I ask Danni, “What’s that noise?”
She looks at me blankly. “What noise?”
“The ‘shhhhhhhh.’”
“Oh. It’s white noise.”
I glance around the office.
Danni points up.
I look at the ceiling and notice a few mounted speakers. “Explain,” I say after refocusing on Danni.
“The white noise is to cover the noise so people can concentrate.”
“How does noise cover noise?”
Danni shrugs.
“I didn’t notice it this morning.”
“It comes on at one o’clock. Some people like it. Some people hate it. The people who hate it complained, so our old boss came up with a compromise. From eight to one, it’s just noise. From one to five, it’s noise on top of noise.”
I lean over and rub my face while I try to parse Danni’s logic. Not her logic. Some old boss’s logic. After a good effort, I determine the riddle is unsolvable.
“I don’t like it,” I say.
“Chance is on Team White No!” Danni hollers.
I hear a few “Woo’s” from the rows of cubicles to my right.
“What team are you on?” I ask.
“Team I Don’t Give a Flying Squirrel.”
I sink back into a palpable state of boredom as the noise over the noise turns a screw in my jaw ever tighter. Noise-canceling headphones go into my Amazon cart. I hit Buy Now. They’ll be at my door by Friday. Until then, some cheap earplugs might work.
Around three thirty, I have to break out. I head downstairs and take a walk, pop into the ice cream shop and buy a scoop of chocolate in a waffle cone, eat it in five minutes, and then head back up. When I enter the office, people are standing, grabbing purses, looking determined to leave.
One of my new coworkers—the young one with blonde hair and a pretty face—is standing next to Danni.
“We can leave now,” she says to Danni with a hint of authority. “Christopher is giving us a free hour for Jeb’s party.”
“I need to finish this block of code. I’ll be down.”
“Don’t work too long.”
“I won’t,” Danni says robotically, fingers typing away, her face glued to her monitors.
The blonde notices I’m standing there. “Are you coming? If you don’t, you’re stuck here until five.”
“Yeah. I’ll come.”
I let people file out before me, not sure where we’re going, and not wanting to ask. We head downstairs and out the main doors, and then swing to the right and do a U-turn back into the building under a neon sign that says “Stinny’s Bar.”
“Rustic” best describes the place. A century of wear has softened the brick floor and eroded the main walking paths. The ceiling is aged wooden beams contrasted against modern lighting and ductwork. Behind the bar, the antique tin signs create a patchwork around the shelves of liquor bottles.
The group chooses a spread of tables beside a long booth. The five tables fill up quickly, leaving me alone next to the window. A waitress comes around and takes our drink orders. I order a Sprite. Switching things up.
Bruce, who’s sitting at the table next to me, shoots me an odd look. “No alcohol?”
“None for me, thanks.”
“So that’s how you maintain that complexion.”
I don’t know how to answer. I give him a half smile. It was a compliment, I guess. A weird one.
Bruce is a large man. Thick arms, thick hands. A bit of a belly. Permanent valleys line his forehead, deep wrinkles frozen in time. His black and white paneled bowling shirt complements dark wash jeans, the ensemble upscaled by stiff black dress shoes. The guy knows fashion. I need to own a pair of those shoes.
I pull up Amazon on my phone and type in “men’s dress shoes.” Some scrolling brings me to wingtips. For kicks, I search for wingtip cowboy boots. Unsatisfied with the search results, I type in “men’s cowboy boots.” All right. Now we’re talking.
“Where you goin’?” Bruce hollers over to Jeb who is two tables away.
There’s noise on top of noise here too. The continuous garble of conversation is layered beneath a blast of house music. I can’t hear a word of Jeb’s response, but I gather it went something like: “Home.”
“Not tonight,” Bruce says. “I mean where is your new job?” He over-enunciates.
Jeb answers while I’m scrolling through cowboy boots, wondering how smart it is to order two-hundred-dollar shoes through the mail. I bought three pairs while I was in Austin. That’s probably enough.
I don’t have a pair of black ones, though.
I keep scrolling.
“Oh. I worked there during my early contracting days,” Bruce says. “Strange thing I observed. None of the employees had worked there over fifteen years. I was suspicious of that. I half wondered if corporate was killing people off.”
I pause my scrolling to observe Jeb’s expression.
“They worked us overnight more than once,” Bruce continues. “I slept in a sleeping bag under my desk. Woke up with a cockroach on my face. Seventy-hour work weeks for months on end. We upgraded their loan processing application in under two months. They had their little award ceremony, all proud and stuff. Boss said we were being recognized. I thought, monetary award maybe? You know, for almost eating a cockroach. Nope. The Site Director handed us some fuzzy blankets that were so small they barely covered my right leg.”
Jeb’s complexion pales. He reaches for his drink that isn’t there. The waitress hasn’t brought them yet.
“Who knows,” Bruce says. “I’m sure you’ll love it there.”
If I had my drink, I’d be spitting it across the table right now.
Jeb sinks into his seat. It seems almost cruel to drag this out. But I’m thirsty.
To my relief, the waitress soon brings our drinks. Five minutes later, Danni walks in. She eyeballs the seating options. There are none. Her eyes rest on me, her eyelids tightening around her irises. I wave to the chair across from me in offering.
Danni spins slowly. No one has seen her but me.
“Get over here, girl!” her young blonde friend says. “Pull up a chair.”
She stops mid-spin, looks around for a chair, finds none except the one I just offered, and then grudgingly heads my way. She’s stuck with me again. How will she manage?
Danni. Danni. Danni.
I thump my temple to stop the skipping. Where am I going to see her next? At the grocery store? In the locker room at the gym? In my shower?
A tingle shoots through my body at the thought of water droplets sliding down her silky hair. I look out the window and focus on a barge floating in the harbor, counting the shipping containers until the tingling subsides.
While I’m counting, Danni slides into the chair across from me. She leans against the window and points her knees at Bruce’s table.
“What about you, Lance?” Bruce asks.
“Chance.”
“Where did you come from?”
“India,” I answer.
“I know that . I mean, where did you work last?”
“Oh. Circular Solutions.”
Bruce’s palm thunks to the table. “Is that for real?”
“The name?” I take a swig of Sprite. “Yep.”
“Circular Solutions. What kind of name is that? Infinite Loop?”
The waitress stops by to take Danni’s drink order. Her beverage of choice is water on the rocks with lemon.
“Basically,” I say. “Management spent most of their time running in circles.”
“Is it a Chai house?”
“A little bit of everything.”
“I’d hate to see their code with a corporate vision like that.”
“You would. You really would. I’m glad to be out of there. A little sad to leave Austin. I liked the vibe down there, but it’s nice here too.”
“A guy needs a new town to conquer now and then,” Danni quips with an eye roll.
I’m the one who should be rolling my eyes at her. Miss This-is-America-We-Have-Dryers-for-That. Yet here I am. The one trying to be civil. “That was a joke.”
Danni acts like she doesn’t hear me. She squints across three tables and nods at a conversation I know she can’t hear. In the meantime, Bruce has turned his attention to Heng, asking him where he came from, to which Heng answers, “Laos.”
“Are we just going to sit here and not talk like we did on the boat?” I ask.
Danni turns her head to give me her full attention. “We don’t look at each other and we don’t talk to each other.”
“Oh yeah. The no-lookie, no-talkie rule.”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“You have to set up my dev environment tomorrow. Are we going to mime the process with blindfolds on?”
Twitchy-eye makes another appearance.
I did that.
I stick my straw in my mouth to keep from smiling.
I think Danni realizes the gig is up. Her coworkers are ignoring her. She reluctantly spins ninety degrees to face me. The waitress brings her water. Danni sets her purse on the table before taking a drink.
“Do you have scoliosis?” I ask. “You sit crooked.”
“That’s rude.”
“Why? It’s an observable condition.”
Danni takes another sip of water and fiddles with the tiny silver heart pendant on her necklace. She was wearing it on our date. I noticed the way it rested on her...clavicles.
“For your information, my crookedness is your fault,” she says, anchoring three fingers around the chain.
“It’s my fault that you have scoliosis? When is your birthday?”
“Why does that matter?”
“When is it?”
“February 7 th .”
“Year.”
She scowls before answering. “1999.”
“I was born two months after you. There’s no way I could’ve given you scoliosis.”
“Do you listen to yourself when you talk?” She squeezes her lemon into her water, drops the wedge in, and begins stabbing it with the end of her straw. Outside the window, a happy couple walks by. Their open smiles tell me they’re laughing, but I can’t hear it over the layers of noise.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I say.
“I don’t remember your question.” She rests an arm on the table and frowns at her water.
“Why are you always so cranky?”
“Why do you think?”
“Chronic back pain?”
“I’m sitting crooked because when I took your trash to the dumpster for you, your trash bag split open, and all your banana peels fell out, and I slipped on one and caught the edge of a step with my right butt cheek.”
I stifle a laugh by taking a long swig of Sprite.
“It’s not funny,” she retorts. “My butt looks like Uranus!”
My gut spasms. A powerful laugh bursts up my esophagus and ejects the Sprite from my mouth in a spray of droplets. They hit Danni’s face and her...clavicles.
She looks like she just smelled something putrid. It’s not my ego. That’s way over here on my side of the table.
She grabs the small square napkin underneath her glass. It’s wet from condensation, but she still wipes her face with it. “I’m glad you think it’s so funny,” she says after she’s all cleaned up. “I’m tempted to ask you for worker’s comp.”
“I’m not your employer, and I never asked you to take out my trash.”
“Putting your trash in a proper receptacle is basic sanitation. Apparently you grew up in a pigsty or a sewer pipe.”
Again, words are not made of matter, but they can sure feel like it. The punch sets me off kilter for a moment. Anger wells in my gut. It helps me regain my focus.
I lean forward with my elbows on the table. “Excuse me?”
My sternness flusters her. She dabs the napkin to her lips and then something in her head clicks. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she says hurriedly. “You said your parents are rich—“
“I know what you meant. I know what a dryer is. We have them in India.”
She looks confused now.
“Yeah. I read your little note. I hang my clothes on the deck railing because I like them to smell like fresh air.”
“I had no idea you were Indian when I wrote that note. I thought you were a White guy with poor musical tastes and horrible manners. I only wrote the sentence about dryers and America because it sounded punchy. I was on a roll. And I wasn’t implying anything about India when I said you grew up in a pigsty. Not at all.”
“And yet, it was highly inappropriate and culturally insensitive, wasn’t it?”
The muscles in Danni’s face harden. She lets out a huff, grabs her purse, and stands. As she’s sprinting out of the bar, her friend calls her name.
“Danni! What’s wrong?”
I feel a meaty hand on my shoulder. Bruce gives me a couple of pats. “I think you made a good first impression,” he says.
I chug the rest of my Sprite, swallowing down my regret. I didn’t mean to chase her away. She just struck a reflexive nerve. Maybe I could have handled it better.
The party breaks up soon after. I’m not sure if my tiff with Danni caused it. Regardless, I’m relieved. The pleased look on Jeb’s face tells me he’s relieved too.
Once again, I drive from downtown to my apartment with visions of Danni dancing in my head. This time I relive the moment she glared at me and then ran out of the bar.
When I pull into my parking spot at Wild Oaks, her car is already there, empty. I peer up at her living room window after I cut the engine. Her vertical blinds are closed.
They’re usually open.
I slowly ease out of my car, wander up the stairs, unlock my front door, and head to the freezer for a Ham therefore, her comment about me growing up in a sewer pipe might not have been culturally motivated. She was going for a hardcore burn, and it worked. Just not in the way she intended.
I sigh and head back to my computer.
JustInCase.xslx is still open. I bend over my keyboard and change Danni’s Racist column to negative five. It doesn’t totally absolve her. And it only takes her total to 47, which is still under my callback threshold. Nothing has changed.
As I cross to the bedroom, I notice my overflowing trash can, promptly walk over to it, stuff down the trash and remove the bag, carry the bag outside and plop it beside my door. I’ll take it down to the dumpster when I feel like it.
After brushing my palms together a few times, I hop back inside, slam the door behind me, and whistle my way to bed.