Chapter 4 #2
Simone didn’t sit so much as she collapsed. “That looks… fun,” she said, nodding at the spreadsheet.
“Oh, you know, the joys of processing paychecks for a billion different vendors and contractors, all of whom do their invoices in slightly different ways. What’s really fun is that some of them forget to invoice at all, and then they wonder where their money is, and by the time they do end up invoicing, our budget’s in a totally different place! Great times all around.”
“Hmm.” Simone tapped her chin, momentarily distracted from the reason she’d sought out Lucy in the first place. “Have you thought about ways to streamline the invoicing process?”
Lucy shook her head. “Trust me, I’d love to, but lately it’s been so much to manage that I haven’t even been able to come up for air. If your project manager brain has any ideas, I am seriously all ears.”
“I can definitely help you,” Simone said.
“Oh my God, really? That would be amazing, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“It’s no problem.” There was nothing Simone was better at than making other people’s lives easier.
“Anyway”—Lucy closed her laptop and shoved it into the corner of the hammock—“how are you?”
Simone sighed as she remembered how god-awful her day had been. “I want to crawl into the ball pit downstairs and never come out.”
“Oh no, please don’t do that. Once we open, it’s gonna smell like feet in there.” Simone could barely manage a smile. “Do you want to tell me what happened with your mom?” Lucy asked. “We can also just sit here and rock if that feels better.”
After the showdown between Frankie and Phillip on top of everything else, Simone was officially too exhausted to feel her own emotions. She ran through the conversation with Kathy, listing each line like it was an item on a grocery list. Lucy, who could still feel feelings, looked appalled.
“Gimme a break with the whole ‘I’m worried about you having a hard life’ argument. You know what else is hard?”
“What?”
“SPENDING THE REST OF YOUR LIFE CLOSETED.”
“I don’t think she’d want that, either,” Simone reasoned.
“So what does she want?”
She could tell Lucy was leading her to an answer—an answer that made Simone’s heart sink when she landed on it. “For me to be straight, I guess.”
Lucy gave her a pointed look.
“My mom does love me,” Simone countered. “She’s just worried about homophobia.”
“I have no doubt that she loves you.”
“So isn’t it fair that she’s worried?”
Lucy sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Listen, Simone, I obviously don’t know this woman, so you can take this with a grain of salt. But your mom saying she wishes you weren’t queer because homophobia exists is actually, like… pretty homophobic.”
Simone furrowed her brow. “But homophobia does exist.”
“Trust me, I’m not arguing that. She’s clearly uncomfortable with the fact that you’re queer, but she knows she shouldn’t admit that, so instead of saying it directly, she said, ‘I’m not homophobic, but some people are.
’ It’s bullshit. The biggest thing your mom should actually be worried about is her daughter’s happiness, and ideally, she would promise to do everything in her power to fight back against the very real problem of homophobia.
Your mom’s too scared to ask the world to change, so instead she wants you to change yourself. ”
Simone had barely heard the end of the sentence above the memories that were swirling in her mind.
She thought of the cartilage-piercing fiasco, when Kathy had disguised her disapproval as “concern” about Simone’s “natural beauty.” The truth was that she didn’t want her social circle judging her for having an “alternative” daughter, but instead of trying to broaden her friends’ minds, she’d pressured Simone to conform to their standards.
And it had worked—because that’s what Simone did best. She was a better contortionist than those people in Cirque du Soleil.
How much more would she hurt herself to make her mother more comfortable?
Simone remembered peering over the edge of the bridge. A chill went down her spine. “You’re right,” she whispered, shaking her head. “You’re so, so right. Last night…” Simone was choked up now. “… last night, I felt guilty for even existing.”
Lucy rubbed her back in circles. “Simone, please know that I want you to exist. Everyone who works here wants you to exist. The whole damn queer community wants you to exist. Your mom wants you to exist, too, even though she clearly isn’t capable of supporting you the right way—which isn’t your fault.
You haven’t done anything wrong. You hear me? ”
“Okay.” Simone managed a weak smile. “I might need you to remind me every so often.”
Lucy posed angelically with her hands under her chin. “Oh, don’t worry, I will.” A moment later, her face lit up with an idea. “This is random, but are you free on Monday?”
“Um, I think so?”
“Cool, ’cause a bunch of us go to karaoke sometimes at this bar around the corner from here. You should totally come.”
BY THE END OF HER FIRST week, Simone was pleased to have made progress with her desk decor.
She and Lucy had popped into a craft store on their way back from lunch that day, where Simone had bought three bunches of fake hydrangeas in blue, purple, and pink; a large mason jar; and rainbow ribbon.
She’d tied a bow around the jar, and was arranging the flowers when Frankie rapped his knuckles on her desk.
He had his laptop tucked under his opposite arm. “Working hard or hardly working?”
“Sorry!” she yelped, releasing the plastic stems like they were on fire. Speaking of being on fire: Her cheeks burned red-hot, and must have looked it, too.
Frankie snorted a laugh. “Oh my God, your face! I was just fucking with you.”
“Oh. Ha!” She forced a weak laugh through the panic that hadn’t quite left her chest. She was still scarred from the layoff last fall, terrified of once again being deemed “redundant.”
“Got a few minutes? I wanna chat about those selfie stations.”
Oh God, not the selfie stations again. “Sure!” she chirped. “Here, or a conference room, or…?”
“Downstairs.” He jerked his head toward the elevator.
Weird, but okay. Simone got up and followed her boss past three empty conference rooms that apparently wouldn’t suffice for the meeting he wanted to have. Maybe they were going to find Phillip. In the elevator, her boss pushed the bottom button.
“We’re going to the basement?” she asked, wondering if Frankie was “fucking with her” again.
“Listen, Phillip made it very clear yesterday that he didn’t have the bandwidth to give us what we need, so I need to explore other options.”
Simone felt bad that Phillip seemed to be getting cut out of the project entirely, but she was way too new here to speak up for him, so she just nodded.
“Our head carpenter, Ryan, has a good design sense, and he’s been great with sourcing materials and getting shit done. I wanna see what he thinks.”
Dread pooled in her stomach. She’d successfully avoided her work nemesis since Tuesday, when they’d encountered each other in this very spot. When she’d tried—again—to apologize for what she’d done, and he’d responded like the biggest jerk in the world.
The doors opened, and Simone took her first steps into the basement, where the air was colder, the lighting was harsh, and the walls were made of depressing white cinder blocks.
No shocker that it was miserable down here; they were entering Ryan’s evil lair.
Her arms wrapped tightly around her torso, she followed Frankie past a boiler room and an electrical closet, and into a spacious workshop that looked just like the one in the theater where she’d had dance recitals as a kid, only she had no desire to go into this one.
Because this one contained an angry giant hunched over what Simone recognized as one of the dragonfly wings she’d accidentally smashed to pieces on her first day.
She felt a pang of empathy. Then she remembered who she was dealing with.
“Knock, knock,” Frankie said.
Ryan was wearing earbuds and hadn’t seemed to hear them come in. He was concentrating on carefully regluing a delicate wooden vein, his bottom teeth worrying his top lip as he worked. She was impressed by how still he was, save for his hands and mouth.
Frankie grabbed a damp, dirty rag off the lip of a metal sink and chucked it at Ryan to get his attention.
Ryan jumped when the rag landed on his shoulder and clung to the side of his neck.
Dropping the piece of wood he’d been working so hard to position, he reached for the rag, and when he saw what it was, hurled it across the table with a disgusted expression on his face, like when she’d tried to clean his cut with her cold-brew napkin.
He took out his earbuds and turned to face them.
He looked exhausted, with bloodshot eyes and dark shadows underneath. Still annoyingly hot, though.
He addressed Frankie directly, like Simone wasn’t even there. Rude. “What’s up?”
“I wanna see what you think about something.” Frankie marched over to the table where Ryan was doing dragonfly surgery and slammed down his laptop like he owned the place.
Which, technically, he did. But Simone noticed how Ryan still winced when Frankie pushed aside some delicate pieces of wood to make room for his phone, too.
She smirked to herself as she followed her boss to the table.
She found it strangely satisfying to watch Mr. Actual Hard Work get put in his place, even if throwing the wet rag had been kind of shitty on Frankie’s part.
“Remind me: You two have met, right?” Frankie asked.
Simone decided to show her boss what a positive attitude she had, compared to the vortex of negativity that was Ryan Foley. “Yep!” she chirped, and threw in a grin for good measure. “We’ve met a few times, actually.”
“Mm-hmm.” Ryan finally deigned to make eye contact with Simone. His glare was as cold as the depressing cinder block basement. Her pulse betrayed her with a sudden skip. Probably from all the unresolved resentment.
He really must have been a demon who thrived on conflict.
Yes, she’d ruined an elaborate carpentry project that had taken him weeks to complete—and inadvertently caused him to injure his wrist, and drenched him in cold brew—but those things had all been accidents, and she’d sincerely apologized.
Meanwhile, Ryan still had no idea how much he’d offended her with his pointed remark about “actual hard work.” She was the one who’d publicly come out that very morning, who’d had to listen over the phone as her mother cried tears of homophobia, who’d peered over the railing of the bridge and thought fleetingly of letting the icy water swallow her.
Simone put on a syrupy-sweet voice, hoping that it would piss Ryan off even more.
“I accidentally knocked over these dragonfly wings on Monday morning and felt terrible. Luckily, it looks like it’s been an easy enough fix!
” She patted the frame of the wing that was on the table. Ryan’s jaw clenched.
Serves him right, she thought.
Frankie explained to Ryan that the Rainbow Museum was sponsoring Whistler Pride by providing selfie stations at all the events.
Then he opened his laptop and really got down to business.
“So, I love Phillip. You love Phillip. We all love Phillip. But Phillip came up with some preliminary designs for the selfie stations that I do not love.”
Ryan furrowed his brow. “Okay.”
Frankie pulled up a recent email. “I asked Whistler Pride to send me these photos. They show the areas in the different venues where our selfie stations are gonna go.” He aimed the screen at Ryan and clicked through the images.
“You agree we could do something better than shitty step-and-repeat banners, right?”
Ryan rubbed the corners of his bloodshot eyes. “I wouldn’t say step-and-repeat banners are shitty, necessarily—”
“But you could do something better, right? Sets with different levels, fancy backdrops, rainbow arches…?”
Ryan’s neck swiveled from the laptop to the dragonfly wing and back again, and he let out an aggrieved-sounding sigh.
Another pang of empathy cut through the loathing in Simone’s heart.
She ignored it. Ryan was probably pleased to be saddled with even more work; it would give him something else to be miserable about.
“I could send you some design ideas,” he answered Frankie in a deep monotone.
“By when?”
“How many sets do you need?”
“Five.”
Ryan scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t know. Wednesday, maybe? At the earliest?”
Frankie grimaced. “Not Monday?”
“I’ll probably be in the shop all weekend,” Ryan said, casting another one of his icy glares at Simone.
“Tuesday, then,” Frankie said with an air of finality.
“Sure.”
“Fab.” Frankie shut his laptop and pocketed his phone. “When you have the designs, send them to me and Simone, and then, Simone, after I green-light them, you’ll work with Ryan to find contractors out there and loop in the Whistler team to make it all happen. Sound good?”
Simone didn’t even like being in Ryan’s general vicinity. The prospect of working with him on a project she was managing? No, it did not sound good. But Simone was a team player, and she refused to let her new boss think otherwise. “Sounds great,” she said brightly.
Ryan grunted and popped his earbuds back in.