Chapter 5 #3
“Have a safe drive, Samantha,” I said as cheerily as I could as I locked up. “And again, I’m sorry about my mistake. I really do owe you.”
She smiled and sighed. “It’s okay. What’s done is done.”
We smiled at each other for a small moment, and it was probably the warmest smile that had ever been shared between us. It was a magically brief bit of friendship because, in that moment, we had shared a whole day’s worth of well…total and utter disaster.
And that was when the lights flickered out.
Samantha turned to me with a look of horror on her face and suddenly began pacing around the office in nervous, frantic circles, holding her head in one of her hands.
“Look, Johnathan, let’s think this through, maybe—”
“Those files are on the computer, Samantha!” I raged. “All the writing you already did on the report is on the computer. All the data! Everything!” I crumpled up a brochure that was lying on the table and threw it at the table. After everything that had already happened today, this? This?!
Samantha just stared at me, waiting for me to calm down.
“You know,” I said, walking up to her slowly.
“If there’s any time for you to yell at me, this is it.
If I had done all this earlier, all this…
” I threw myself down in a chair. “…I wouldn’t have gotten you stuck in this mess.
” I stared at her with a hint of confusion. “By the way, why aren’t you mad?”
Samantha laughed in the kind of uproarious way that only shows itself when life has gotten truly apocalyptic. “It won’t accomplish anything anymore, I suppose,” she said in defeat. “I figure my best shot for the company is to keep the peace.”
“Well,” I said, bending a staple I had found on the table frustratingly with my fingers. “I certainly can’t argue with that.”
Samantha stared out the window at the falling snow. “So what now?”
“We stay.”
“We what?”
I felt my frown morph into the grin of a madman as I revealed my plan. “You can do what you want, Sam, but the only offline copies of the data we need are in this office, and that’s the only way we have a chance to get the report in, and that’s if the power’s back on by morning. I’m staying.”
“It’s going to snow ten inches!” Samantha exclaimed.
“Twelve,” I corrected with a smile. “And if you truly do want what’s best for Wordsworth, and your employees that you supposedly care so much about, then I suggest you get ready for a long night.”
Samantha stood her ground for a moment and watched me carefully, and eyed me up and down as if trying to decode my thoughts. She slipped her beige heels back on her feet and walked up to face me, her head held high.
“Very well,” she said with that regal smile of hers. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
Within twenty minutes, Samantha and I had both downed some energy drinks Cassidy had in the fridge that probably contained an illegal amount of caffeine, and were rolling open endless file cabinets trying to locate the data sheets that just hours earlier we had accessed with just a few clicks of a mouse.
“You know,” I said, sucking on a fresh paper cut. “I don’t know why it never occurred to me to ask Sabryna how her filing system works. Would have come in handy,” I said, shutting another drawer with a rolling thud.
Samantha smiled at me sympathetically. The office looked otherworldly.
I had left the blinds up so we could watch the progress of the snow through the windows.
Samantha and I had dug through the office to find anything that lit up, so a motley assortment of right-side-up flashlights and candles of all shapes and sizes gave the room a warm glow.
It had a very romantic feel to it, like an old Italian restaurant.
Oh, crap.
After we had collected all of the files that were pertinent to the report from their various hiding places around the office, we opened them up and organized them on the large conference room table, which was looking more chaotic than it ever had in the lifespan of our digital age company.
Samantha and I were both filled with the artificial frenetic energy only pure will and caffeine can get you, and our hands shivered with it as we stacked and passed papers around the table, and the soft glow of the flashlights made it seem as if our task had an even more extreme importance.
“This reminds me of college,” I said, copying down some data. “I can’t remember the last time I planned to pull an all-nighter to finish a project on time.”
Samantha laughed. “Not me. I had all my papers done two days ahead of time.”
“I bet you had a 4.0 GPA too.”
“Maybe,” she smiled.
“So, you never pulled any good pranks? Went to any good parties?” I joked. “I suppose you were always back in your dorm asleep by ten p.m.”
“I did blackmail the head of the math department once.”
I stopped writing. “You what?”
Samantha smirked. “Let’s just say he was behaving very inappropriately towards one of my friends, I threatened to tell the dean, and then I just happened to mention how it would be really, really awesome if she got the department’s most prestigious internship.”
I scoffed. “Figures.”
“What do you mean, ‘figures’?” Samantha laughed.
“I mean, you have the opportunity to blackmail some pervert who you probably could have gotten a couple hundred bucks out of, and you ask for an internship? And not even for yourself?” I exclaimed.
“She was probably going to get it anyway, I just wanted to secure her spot,” Samantha said matter-of-factly.
“Never mind,” I joked. “You’re just as lame as you were before.”
“Haha.”
“I’m kidding,” I said. “You’re a good friend, and clearly a badass.”
Samantha smiled, clicked her pen, and kept writing.
The work went faster than I would have expected it to.
We had spent so much time earlier that day doing nearly the exact same thing, just with the aid of computers and a different set of numbers.
Samantha and I talked as we worked to suppress our anxiety and boredom, and I liked listening to her stories and seeing her eyes light up with interest as I told mine.
The exhaustion and chaos of the day had loosened Samantha up—her stories had a different quality to them now.
They ranged from silly to self-deprecating, and I loved every word of them.
She talked about her elementary school T-ball team and the cartoons she never missed as a kid, or all the times she had to pick up her drunk sister from parties.
She told me her favorite crayon color and the cocktail she liked to order only when she was sad.
I worked along, happy to see her opening up so beautifully, and I shared my stories in return.
After the hell we had been through that day, we had silently both agreed that there was no going back: we were friends now, whether either of us liked it or not.
The clock ticked along as we worked, the metronome that kept our stories in rhythm, and we worked until our hands cramped up and our brains fogged. But as the minutes passed, a thought kept sneaking through my mind, unannounced:
You know, this really isn’t half bad…
* * *
“There!” Samantha said, shrieking with joyful laughter. “That’s about all we can do without power.”
I grinned, filled with the kind of joy you only feel after such a condensed period of stress. “I cannot believe we pulled that off.”
“Eh, not quite yet,” Samantha said. “Hopefully if the power’s back tomorrow we can get all the reports typed up and get the graphs all digitized and nice looking…
” she kicked her heels across the room triumphantly.
“We can just use the format of the one we messed up earlier. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, and then we’re gold. ”
“Oh, thank god,” I groaned, and spun my chair around in circles in a way the CEO is probably never supposed to do. “Hold on,” I said, getting up and running into my office. I rummaged through my desk drawers until I found it: my emergency stash.
I returned with a sneaky grin on my face and walked up to Samantha in her chair, who was already looking at me with suspicion. “Whiskey?” I said, smirking at her with delight.
“Jesus, I should have known,” Samantha said, grabbing the bottle from me and taking a swig. “You were definitely the handsome guy in high school who talked everyone into all their bad ideas.”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
Samantha handed me the bottle back and I took a large drink myself.
The office was another world tonight, a different place.
It was dark and glowing with a different energy that followed different laws.
It would have been a strange sight to our employees to see their bosses so friendly and so relaxed.
The two of us spun in office chairs in the middle of the room, laughing.
Laughing because the grand scheme of our negotiations didn’t matter today.
We were both thrown onto the same sinking ship, so for now staying afloat was all that mattered.
There was a lingering question in the air that neither of us dared to speak aloud just yet…
what now? Last time I checked, the snow had piled up as much as had been predicted, and the whole city had gone dark.
Samantha and I both lived in hill-covered suburbs outside the city, so getting home would be a dangerous affair for either of us.
We could be stuck here for days…and I took another sip of whiskey each time the reality dawned on me again.