Chapter 24 #2
Once Nina had arrived, they ran through the agenda items Frankie had sent over in advance, Simone making sure to be extra vocal with her feedback this week.
She didn’t care about impressing her asshole of a boss, but she did need the aforementioned asshole of a boss to listen when she brought up Glen’s charity.
“Anything else?” Frankie asked, a little impatiently, when they’d reached the end of the agenda.
“Actually, yes.” Simone sat up straighter in her chair. Her heart was thumping, but she tried not to let it shake her voice. “There’s one more thing I wanted to run by you. A possible charitable side to the event.”
“Oh.” He blatantly glanced at the clock on the wall. Asshole. “What did you have in mind?”
As Simone spoke, she could already tell her pitch was doomed by the expression on Frankie’s face.
He was half smiling, half grimacing, like a wedding guest enduring a drunk groomsman’s ten-minute-long toast. The old Simone, who twisted herself into pretzels to make other people comfortable, would have cut herself off by now.
Instead, she did what any drunk groomsman would do—hell, what any confident man would do. She kept talking.
“On a personal note, being bi, I’ve had straight people and queer people say mean stuff about me, and it’s definitely taken a toll on my mental health.
” She looked pointedly at Frankie, and then at Seth, who gave her a supportive nod.
“I think of all the other queer people who could be feeling the same way, and how awesome it would be for the Rainbow Museum to help them.”
“Thanks for that, Simone.” Frankie still had on that infuriating pained smile.
“We certainly do want to support the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in everything we do. However, given how new we still are as a business, and where we’re at revenue-wise, the finance team has unfortunately advised that we hold off on making significant charitable contributions at this point in our journey. ”
“But we sponsored Whistler Pride,” she pointed out.
“Well, technically, we provided a service in exchange for an incredibly valuable advertising opportunity. It was more of a mutually beneficial scenario than what you’re describing.
Listen, I know it’s disappointing. I wish we could donate to charities left and right!
But look at it this way: Running the Queer Makeover Extravaganza as a strictly for-profit event will help bring in the kind of money we need to support philanthropic initiatives in the future. Does that make sense?”
Simone wanted to push back, but Seth was giving her a wide-eyed look that said, Wait. That’s when she remembered there was something he still had to tell her about their boss. “Yep, that makes sense,” she replied, feigning obedience.
After the meeting, she and Seth went straight to Lucy’s desk. When Lucy saw the two of them together, she furrowed her brow at Simone as if to ask, Do you need me to rip him a new one? “We talked it out,” Simone said, before Lucy could go into mama bear mode. “It’s all good.”
“Well, not good, per se,” Seth chimed in. He turned to Lucy and whispered, “Frankie’s been shit-talking everyone to me, trying to make me his little partner in crime. It’s been awful, but I was just telling Simone, I think I know why he’s been doing it.”
The three of them took the elevator downstairs and slipped through the employees-only side door.
They went around to the alley behind the building where people sometimes took smoke breaks, and where they could talk in private without risk of being overheard.
They checked to make sure that no one was lurking in any of the nooks in the brickwork, then stood in a tight circle with their heads together.
Seth spoke first. “So, Frankie’s even more fucked-up than I realized.
” He told Lucy how Frankie had just shot down Simone’s idea on the grounds that the Rainbow Museum couldn’t afford to launch any philanthropic initiatives that weren’t “mutually beneficial” in some way.
He made air quotes with his fingers and rolled his eyes.
“He claims this is all on the advice of the finance department.”
Lucy’s jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me?”
“Apparently, your department said we’re still not in a place revenue-wise to make any significant charitable contributions.”
Lucy pinched the bridge of her nose. “What. The actual. Fuck. As I’ve been telling him literally forever, we have money for all of it: paying the staff overtime, charitable donations…”
“And what does he say?” Simone asked.
“He always blames someone else—like, ‘Well, we can’t spend that money without the board’s approval…’ ”
“So with us, he blames the finance department, and with the finance department, he blames the board,” Seth recapped. “When the board asks what he’s doing with all that revenue, he probably blames someone else for why he can’t give them a straight answer.”
Simone had a feeling this was what Seth had tried to tell her earlier. “And what’s the actual reason he’s being so shady about money?” she whispered.
Seth looked up and down the alley, making sure they were still alone, and pulled his phone from the pocket of his windbreaker.
Wincing, he opened his messaging app. “Before I show you this,” he said warily, “please keep in mind, once again, that I’m going to work on setting social boundaries with my boss.
” Seth scrolled back through his text message history with Frankie, to an exchange from the week before last. He handed the phone to Simone, and the two women huddled over the screen to read the conversation.
When they were finished, they looked up, and Simone saw her own shock and dismay reflected in Lucy’s face.
“He’s secretly investing in Crushr?” Lucy’s voice dripped with disdain. They’d both heard Seth’s horror stories about the popular queer hookup app, where racism, fatphobia, transphobia, and other forms of hatred were permitted under the guise of “sexual preferences.”
“That’s right,” Seth said, “you know, the app I literally had to delete because of how many guys wrote ‘no Asians’ on their profiles.”
Simone reread his messages with Frankie, shaking her head the whole time. “Frankie says he knows the app is ‘super problematic,’ but he doesn’t care because he’s making a shit ton of money?”
“Correct,” Seth replied.
“And he’s promising you a raise at the end of the year as long as you keep it on the DL.”
“Also correct.”
“And beyond fucked-up,” Lucy added. “You should take this straight to HR—oh wait! We don’t have HR, because of course we don’t.” She craned her neck, looking up at the building that loomed over them in the alley. “Why the hell did we decide to work here again?”
“Because you were traumatized from Bay Street, I’d just graduated, and Simone had just been laid off, so we all desperately needed jobs,” Seth reminder her. “Also, we’re all higher than a zero on the Kinsey scale.”
Simone looked up at the building, too. Wistfully, she added, “It seemed like a good place at first.” A queer oasis.
Those were the words she’d thought of when she’d first toured the office.
When she’d seen all the bright colors, and the conference rooms named after queer icons, and the company-wide Slack messages about the bisexual giant tortoise in Ecuador.
She realized now that those were all surface-level expressions of queerness.
That when it came to actually supporting their community, Frankie Marlow talked the talk, but he didn’t walk the walk.
Simone saw now that there had never been any hope of convincing Frankie to partner with Glen’s nonprofit out of the goodness of his heart.
He supported the queer community insofar as doing so made him money.
How fitting that when it came to the Queer Makeover Extravaganza, Frankie seemed to be sending the message that your outside appearance could dictate exactly how queer you were.
He wanted Seth giving consultations on how to make sure your social media was giving off “maximum queer vibes,” for God’s sake!
Yes, presentation was obviously important—she could still remember the joy in Phoenix’s voice, back in Whistler, when they’d talked about the euphoria of chopping off their hair—but it wasn’t what made you queer.
Phoenix would have been nonbinary regardless of how their hair looked, the same way trans people were still trans regardless of whether they medically transitioned.
The same way gay people were still gay if they’d never had a partner before.
The same way bisexual people were still bi, regardless of their partner’s gender.
In a way, Frankie reminded her of her mother, eternally fretting about the way things looked to outside observers.
Glen’s words from the day before came back to her now: “My dear, bisexuality isn’t about who you date—it’s who you are.” Simone thought about who she’d been, who she was now, and who she wanted to become.
Simone had always believed she wasn’t a big ideas person. That she was born to make other people’s visions come to life. The truth was, she could make big ideas of her own. She’d just never been brave enough to try.
“We should probably start looking for new jobs, ’cause this place sort of sucks,” she said. Seth and Lucy both nodded. “But in the meantime, how would you feel about helping me plan a Pride event?”