Chapter Six #2
The rest of the team responds similarly when they trickle into the office and stop by my desk.
They laud our progress in a detached sort of way, but when I ask if they’d like to help, they shrink away and mutter an excuse.
At first, I think it’s laziness—they’re used to spending their days at their leisure, after all—but more than once I spot Tessa looking up from her phone to peer at us, Jen pausing her show for minutes at a time like she’s listening, Randy chewing his lip in thought.
Arun strolls past our desk once, twice, then finally stops.
I stop typing, waiting for him to just come out with it and ask for a second bagel.
“I think your vendor minimum might be too low,” he says.
I almost fall out of my chair. “What?”
“You have to assume every vendor’s going to bring in a dollar figure, right? Pay a participation fee to cover your festival costs?”
“I thought Ryser would cover the festival costs,” Marina says.
“Our budget’s been almost nonexistent for years,” Tessa replies.
“Barely enough for a decent Christmas party,” Randy says mournfully.
“Oh.” My chest deflates like a popped balloon. Their uncertainty yesterday starts to make more sense. I glance at the slide deck Marina and I spent all morning working on. “So…we can’t afford to throw a festival? Is that why you don’t think it’s a good idea?”
“I didn’t say it’s not a good idea. You can afford it.
” Arun pulls a chair from the desk next to us and scoots in.
“That’s what I was saying about the vendor minimum.
If you get enough vendors, their participation fees will cover the festival costs.
Things like applications, permits, table rentals, tents, liability insurance—”
“Insurance?” Marina repeats.
“How do you know all this?” I say with an incredulous laugh.
“I used to help run events,” he says. “Back at the DC office. But…that was a while ago, before they transferred me. I’m sure you’ve already thought of all this.” That note of morose self-deprecation has returned to his voice. He starts to inch his chair away.
“No!” Marina and I both shout. Arun does a double take, looking back and forth between us.
“We could really use your help,” I insist.
He eyes us almost sternly, like he thinks we’re playing a joke on him. “The last event I ran for Ryser, I took a chance on a new caterer and ten thousand people got food poisoning.”
“ Oh ,” I say as the memory washes over me.
“I remember hearing about that.” It happened while I was interning at Ryser in college.
I’d been interning for a different department—marketing—but I remembered Amanda looking particularly frazzled when our paths crossed.
The event made headlines and spurred our CEO to email all employees with somber assurances that the problem had been dealt with. Arun, apparently, was the problem.
But he’s also our best hope.
“Is that why you didn’t want to help?” I ask. “You think you’ll screw it up?”
“Well, yeah. I have a pretty good track record for screwing up. No sane person would let me—or any of us—near their festival.”
I wait for the others to refute his claim. But the office is silent. Randy, Tessa, and Jen are avoiding eye contact. “You don’t agree with him, do you?”
Jen shrugs. “I accidentally live-tweeted all my thoughts on the Bachelorette finale from the CEO’s account instead of mine,” she says. “I used some…phallic GIFs. Not something anyone wants in a social media manager.”
I clamp my lips together to suppress a smile at the mention of phallic GIFs . But there’s nothing funny about the shame on Jen’s face. “Do you all feel this way?” I ask. “Like you can’t contribute anything?”
“I put botulism in salad dressing and blew up a multimillion-dollar partnership, remember?” Tessa reminds me.
“Don’t forget me losing a million dollars in a phishing scam,” Randy says.
Marina’s head swivels from one person to the next, taking in these revelations.
I wonder if she’s having doubts about coming to this group for help.
But their dejected faces pull at me. No wonder they’re so content to stay here, wasting away in this useless office in a comatose town.
They think they’re not capable of achieving anything better. They’re afraid of repeating history.
“So what?” I say. “I threatened to murder the CEO.” I meet their confused surprise with the full story, detailing the elevator incident, my deaf ear, Bill. “Security had to escort me from the building.”
A silence follows. I’ve never told anyone the story until now.
I’d glossed it over as a misunderstanding, put on my headphones, and shut out the world.
But it’s occurring to me now that, no matter how superior I felt, with my stiff blouses and my webinars and my stubborn refusal to be one of them, I am one of them.
It’s why I’ve been hiding away in my childhood bedroom since I’ve been back, afraid of running into anyone who knows me.
It’s why the thought of facing an assembly of local business owners this afternoon makes me break into a sweat.
But I can’t let that fear rule my life. None of us should.
“Damn,” Tessa says, giving me an amused once-over. “They must really not give a shit about us if they sent us a whole-ass murderer.”
Arun’s laugh lights up the room. Jen’s comes next, then Randy’s deep rumbles of laughter.
“The geese were trying to warn us!” Jen exclaims.
I sit there, smiling the widest I can remember in months, feeling so exposed I want to throw myself under my desk. But what stops me is this camaraderie I’ve tapped into. I didn’t realize how good it would feel to share a part of myself with them.
I turn to Marina, curious to see how she’s taking it. She’s looking distant. Thoughtful. Almost like she’s reconsidering her idea to work with us.
“What?” I ask her, resignation seeping into my voice. Already I’m bristling at the thought of her taking issue with our mistakes just as I’ve started to get the others to loosen up.
“I almost burned the school down,” Marina confesses.
That gets everyone’s attention. “When I was a student teacher, they had a bearded dragon for a class pet. I was cleaning its tank, and when I finished, I forgot to put the heat lamp back over the tank. So…overnight, the heat lamp burned a hole in my boss’s desk.
The bearded dragon was fine!” she adds when Jen gasps.
“But the classroom smelled like smoke for a week.” She glances at me.
“If you’re a murderer, I’m an arsonist.”
A surprised laugh leaves me. “I guess we make a good team,” I say, then regret it immediately. Is that too forward? Too trite? Too reminiscent of the years when we very much were a team?
But Marina just smiles, and I feel the distance between us lessen the tiniest bit. It emboldens me to turn to face the others. “Now that we’ve established none of us can be trusted to do anything…do you want to try anyway?”
The looks that go around the office aren’t doubtful this time. They hold interest. Curiosity. Maybe even excitement.
The ideas start pouring out. Tessa proposes diverting our paltry claims budget to the festival, adding that hardly any claims meet Ryser’s increasingly strict criteria anyway.
Randy offers to contribute all fifty dollars from the Christmas party budget toward the festival costs.
For the rest of the day, our presentation prep is more cooperative, with all of us brainstorming out loud, tossing out ideas for winning over vendors.
Arun suggests offering free advertising space on the festival website.
(We make a note to create a festival website.) Jen offers to set up social media accounts promoting the festival and highlighting vendor goods (and assures us there’s no chance she’ll repeat her account mix-up mistake, because now she exclusively uses Twitch to discuss her Bachelorette opinions, and I need a minute to conceive of this sweet, fiftysomething woman as a Twitch streamer, of all things).
Their suggestions turn from logistics to things they’d like to see at the festival.
Arun wants an apple cider dunk tank. Tessa muses that a pie-baking contest could be fun.
Randy asks if live music could be a possibility.
Jen says a history-loving friend in her crochet circle would probably love to do a display on the history of Greenstead.
I write down every single idea, getting lost in the fantasy that this just might work.
Four o’clock arrives just as we’re finishing up the final slide.
The energy in the room intensifies as people start gathering their things.
Arun’s telling Marina we’ll easily reach the minimum number of vendors he thinks we need to participate—thirty-five—and Jen and Tessa toss out higher numbers, forty, fifty, one-upping each other in optimism.
Randy offers to drive, jingling his car keys on his way to the door.
I stare out the window as Randy drives us through Greenstead’s barren fields, down a stretch of highway, and into the exquisitely manicured downtown area of Falls Point, the next town over.
Every time that Chamber of Commerce scene I’d imagined earlier passes through my mind—jeers, boos, tomatoes galore—I need only to look around me to assure myself we can do this.
My new colleagues have the good ideas, Marina has the passion, I have years of experience giving presentations.
We’ll win over the vendors. We’ll get the thirty-five we need to participate so we can afford to throw the festival.
We’ll save the community center, I’ll prove I have a heart, I’ll get my old job back, and the world will keep on turning.
Still, when we step out of Randy’s van and head up the stairs toward the Falls Point Civic Center, a modern, two-story building with large windows, I feel my resolve slipping with each step I climb. But when Jen tosses me a nervous look, I shoot her a reassuring we got this grin.
And if that smile succumbs to doubt the second we pass through the civic center doors, no one needs to know.