Chapter 14 In Which I Educate Sahir About Wordplay #3
With a noise like an overburdened cement mixing machine, she stood up and stalked out of the room. I stood and took a few steps away from my chair.
The second the door closed behind her, I tiptoed back to my seat with absolute stealth and absolutely no grace. I slid gingerly down and tabbed over to my emails.
I opened Kayla’s latest.
Hi Miri,
I am sure you’re busy with the client but I don’t know where to start with this and am sitting paralyzed with indecision and fear at my computer. Haha.
The previous email began similarly.
Dear Miri,
I don’t want to bother you but I don’t know what folders in the server I should use to find this information.
Or what information I am looking for. Jeff is in the office but Stoneleys Gross got the mandate for the werewolf food company this morning and he doesn’t want to talk.
Levi is at home and won’t answer my calls.
I don’t want to ask Corey any questions in case he thinks badly of me.
I bit back a groan.
Hi Kayla, I typed in reply, trying to tap lightly against the keyboard. I pictured the Gray Knight standing outside my door, ear pressed to the wood, listening for the sounds of urination or betrayal.
Don’t panic. Google is your friend. So are PitchBook and Capital IQ. Just look around for companies that manufacture household goods—public companies or private companies with accessible financials—and use those to set up a valuation spreadsheet. Please ask Corey questions.
Miri
I sent it and tabbed back to the Excel model. “Ready,” I called out, and the Gray Knight opened the door posthaste. She popped in like a Jack-in-the-box, only beautiful and slightly less scary.
“You took a long time,” she said, glaring around suspiciously as she returned to her seat. I checked the clock. I had not taken a long time, and she was being quite grumpy, really.
“It wasn’t that long,” I said.
“I felt the press of the eons upon my shoulders as I waited.”
If she said it, it must have been true. So apparently she wasn’t having a great day either. Doctor Kitten and I looked at each other.
“Sorry,” I said. “I realized Doctor Kitten… needed me.”
“You detained me in the hallway in order to engage with your cat?” Her voice had gone flat.
I flinched back in my chair. “No, sorry,” I said. “I didn’t do that.”
We both shifted in our seats. Her unbound hair swung across her shoulder in silk sheets. I scratched at my hand, fidgeted with my ring. She didn’t speak. Her profile was so severe, so rigid I almost couldn’t remember her saying You are rare to me.
“Why did you tell Sahir we lay together?” I blurted.
She froze, eyes on the window.
“Why would I not?” she asked, and I thought I saw a tic, a jump in her jaw muscles. “Are you ashamed of what we did?”
Two questions for the price of one. I gritted my teeth.
“Sahir thinks you wanted me to fall in love with you so you would have more political cachet,” I said. “He thinks you think humans are all monogamous and that you wanted power over me.”
She scoffed. “I do not need more power in this Court, human,” she said, sounding haughty and offended at the same time. “I did what I did because I wanted to.”
Oh.
I’d been ready to have a confrontation, but I wasn’t ready to have this conversation.
I gestured to the screen. “We can finish up the Inputs tab,” I said. “We’re almost done.”
Doctor Kitten leapt from the windowsill to the bed in a cloud of dislodged cat hair, which floated across the desk and our laps in a majestic glimmer of sunless light from the window.
The Gray Knight opened her mouth, like she might say something else—but she clamped it shut and nodded once, that muscle in her jaw still jumping.
And we continued on.
An hour in, Kayla sent me another email. The preview showed the sentence I think this company might be worth $18 billion. This was almost certainly inaccurate.
A few minutes after that, Jeff emailed me and Kayla both, subject line: WHERE IS MY VALUATION.
I glanced at the Gray Knight, but she only shrugged. “Jeff is not your primary concern,” she said. “I am.”
We were in an operational tab of the model at this point, talking through probabilistic weighting. I was bored nearly to tears.
“Well, Jeff is my boss,” I said, striving for a reasonable tone the way we all strive: with the best of intentions and absolutely no follow-through.
“That is a fact but not an argument.”
“I need to keep this job for about nine and a half more years, as you know,” I said. I was rounding down optimistically.
“You may have different jobs.”
I hunched over, like her words were a physical blow. “I can’t have different jobs. That’s not part of the bargain.”
“If you relinquish the bargain, you can have a different job.”
I seethed. Relinquish the bargain? Give up, having barely attempted it?
“Setting aside for a moment the obvious objections, how would I get a new job if I can’t get out of Faerie?”
“The Princeling would certainly employ you.”
I choked out a laugh. “Yeah, he seems like a great boss.” I paused, tried to bite down the next words. Instead, I bit my tongue, and they came out with even greater fury. “I guess it’d be very useful to have someone on the team who can lie. What’s the monthly kidnapping quota?”
The room exploded into gray. She shot out of her seat so fast the acorn chair spun into the side of my bed and cracked in half.
“You do not speak of him this way,” she intoned in a dark voice I’d never heard from her before.
I stood as well, my knees knocking against the back of my chair. I glanced at the bed, where Doctor Kitten had leapt to his feet, back arched in shock.
Another wave of rage swept through me, so potent I was shaking.
I could feel my eyes burning with anger and hopelessness.
“Your liege has ruined my life, lady. He trapped me here, and you helped. If I lose this job, he won’t help me leave Faerie.
I will never be able to do human things.
I will not marry or have children. If I lose this job, I will lose my life.
My friends and family will forget me as I rot away in silence and in isolation and in misery, and all because of your liege, who decided to make me a poster child for happy human-faerie relations.
So if it pleases you, get out of my bedroom. ”
She ground her teeth audibly, clenched her fists. I braced for a blow. Instead, she spun so her hair hit me in the face, and swept out of the room faster than my mortal eye could follow. She’d left her weird angry gray magic tendrils behind, and they convulsed in time to a rhythm I could not hear.
I sank back into my chair, staring at Doctor Kitten.
But I didn’t have time to cry. I opened my email again to find an exchange between Jeff and Kayla, wherein Kayla had emailed Jeff a table that I could tell from four seconds’ review was vastly incorrect, with the sentence Please find attached the work Miri and I have done so far!
I was sure she was trying to cover for me. I wanted to puke.
Sure enough, my phone rang. I picked up.
“Hello?”
“Miri, it’s Jeff,” he said, like a man who hasn’t discovered caller ID yet.
“Hi, Jeff,” I said.
“This valuation is terrible.”
I pondered the appropriate response. My choices were:
I know, I’ve been tied up with the client and Kayla did it all
I know, it’s a work in progress
No, it’s not
I’m sorry
I, of course, went with D.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“How on earth did you think that this was acceptable to share with me?” he asked, disregarding the fact that I hadn’t sent it to him.
I didn’t think this was acceptable to share with you
It’s a work in progress
It is acceptable to share with you
I’m sorry
“I’m sorry,” I said, ever a consistent test-taker.
“Stop apologizing and actually do something useful, Miri,” he snapped. “I don’t even know why I go through you. It would be faster to just talk to the analyst directly.”
“Kayla.”
“What?” He sounded like a blood vessel had just popped in his forehead.
“Her name is Kayla,” I said.
“Miri, I’m giving this task to Corey since you’re clearly not capable of it. We’ll have a longer conversation later.” He hung up.
I looked at my phone and thought about my mother. I’d been avoiding her calls. If she asked me one more time whether “the Prince/King/Duke/Baron” had “shortened the timeline” I would hurl my phone into a faerie dance circle.
I thought about Thea and Jordan, too. I still hadn’t told them where I was. Jordan’s latest text to me just said, Are you alive?
In the end, I didn’t call anyone.
Weeks five and six went quickly.
My mother and I talked on the phone for three minutes every morning.
Jeff sent Kayla back to her old team. No one said goodbye. I called Corey and chewed him out for not making more of an effort to help her learn. He told me not to be such a busybody.
I called my grandma and told her I missed her. I called Thea and listened to her immensely distressing story about going on a date with a man who had a bedroom full of female Funko Pops and absolutely nothing else.
“We live in New York City,” she said, her tone a mix of glee and horror. “His apartment was probably five hundred square feet total.”
I don’t live in New York City. The words caught in my throat. “Sounds dedicated,” I said instead. “Maybe he’d be a dedicated boyfriend, too.”
“Miri, he had a hundred square feet of Funko Pop dolls. They were all girls, Miri. He could never commit to me. His attention would always be divided.”
We both cackled.
I called Jordan and we talked for over an hour about fan theories for the last book in one of our favorite trilogies.
I called my dad and told him about lunch with Lene and Gaheris, about avoiding the Gray Knight in the hallways, about my job—but never about how hopeless I’d begun to feel. One day, I told him another truth instead:
“I regret telling Mom I was trapped here,” I said, staring at the ceiling.
“Mom’s only trying to help,” Dad said. I could hear the steady beeping of a heart rate monitor behind him. He was probably between patients.
“Mom’s stressing me out by asking the same questions about it every day.”
He sighed. “Miri, if anyone can fix this, your mom can.”
“Mom can’t accept when things are unfixable.” I gnawed on my lower lip.
“You need to decide if you like that about her or not,” he snapped.
“You married her,” I said. “I didn’t choose her.”
“Don’t talk about your mother like that, Miriam. She wants to protect you.”
I sighed. “Can you ask her to lay off?” I asked, my tone bitterer than I’d meant it to be.
As always, my dad took pity on me. “I’ll talk to her. But how are you otherwise?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Teaching a class on human methods of washing dishes tonight. The faeries don’t really understand the part where we don’t use magic to clean everything.”
He chuckled, but it was tense. “You shouldn’t be teaching anyone how to wash dishes.”
“Et tu, Brute?”
My dad snorted. “Okay, I have to go see my next patient,” he said. “Love you.”
“Love you, too,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
I stared at the phone screen. The Games Games Games chat was popping off, Jordan planning a new campaign.
I missed my friends. I missed them, and, as often as I could bear it, I ignored their calls. What if I couldn’t get out? It was better to cut them off quickly than to watch them fade away over time.
Week seven was numbing.
Corey called again, to talk about Kayla.
“Miri, you know it’s easier for women to get this job than men,” he said. “You don’t have to be as qualified as we do.”
“Excuse me?” I put down the pen I’d been playing with.
“Because they’re trying to even out the numbers,” he explained, which was not the part I objected to.
“So you think that I’m not as good as you at our job?”
“No, no, you’re good,” he said quickly. “It was probably just easier for you to get hired. Lower bar, you know.”
And I realized: It didn’t matter how good I was. If I succeeded, I would be considered a fluke. If I failed, it would be expected. There would be no systemic change because I existed: I could only be an anomaly, or a data point proving why women shouldn’t be hired.
Nine and a half years. I needed to make it nine and a half years. If I didn’t rock the boat, if I kept my head down and pretended I didn’t exist—
“Sounds like you think I’m not as good as you,” I said, ignoring the blood rushing in my ears and the knowledge that I should just be quiet.
He huffed. “Miri, stop twisting my words, or I won’t call you anymore.”
My loss, I didn’t say with biting sarcasm.
“Okay, sorry,” I did say. “I didn’t mean to twist your words.”
Eventually, another month passed. I worked most days, so I didn’t know the difference.
Our buyers list dwindled as more people withdrew from the process, or in one dramatic case emailed Jeff to tell him a series of increasingly creative things he could stick into his own anus, were he so inclined. I wrote some of those suggestions down for future insults.
I went to meals, led the twice-weekly human classes teaching about everyday human monotony, and otherwise stayed in my room.
I answered questions shortly. I stopped picking up phone calls. And slowly, everything became muffled around me.
It was quiet in my head, but I didn’t mind.
I worked from eight a.m. until I passed out at night.
I traced a path from bedroom to dining hall and back.
During the day, I let Lene sleep on my bed while I sat at the computer.
Sahir came to my room after dinner and worked next to me, but we rarely spoke anymore.
I didn’t have anything to say. Doctor Kitten curled up at my side at night while I slept.
My dreams became more vivid, stranger. Vermilion landscapes where trees grew with mirrored trunks, and I sat cross-legged on the ground watching my face wrinkle like a raisin.
The ruins of a hall that looked like it belonged to an Ent, rows of fluted pillars giving way to equally stolid rows of grasping oak.
Once I dreamed of chocolate milk, and the next day, Sahir brought me a plastic bottle of Fairlife. “Humans seem to like this,” he’d said, dropping it carelessly onto the bedspread. I stared at it; I hadn’t had chocolate milk in two decades.
It was delicious.
Sometimes I imagined quitting my job, once I’d won the Princeling’s bargain. I’d call Jeff and let him have every piece of my mind.
“Hi, Jeff, you run-of-the-mill dingbat,” I’d start. It usually degenerated from there.
Time passed, as time always does. It had been eleven weeks since my sojourn to Faerie at the end of August, and I had become, to be blunt, quite depressed.