Chapter Seven #2
“Like a kid who ate a magic bean and got turned into a grownup.” But hotter. I don’t say that part out loud.
Her lips turn up into a devilish grin. “Want to look him up on the system?”
I sit up at that. “Yes, absolutely I want to do that.”
“Let’s see here,” she says, pulling up some internal employee database. “Connor Reid, right?”
“Yes.”
“Ta-da! Here he is.”
“What does it say?”
“Wow, he’s been with the company ages,” she tells me. “Like, nine years.”
“I didn’t even think Taskio had been around that long.”
“Me neither. OK, how old do you think he is?”
“Now that I do want to know.” He could honestly be anywhere between twenty-one and forty.
“He’s thirty-two,” she says, scrolling. So I wasn’t far off, then. He’s only two years older than me. “Actually, his birthday is kind of soon. May 15th. And his salary is huge. Jesus. I am in the wrong role.”
“What’s the figure?”
She prims up at this. To reveal it would be a violation of the vows she made to human resources.
“More than yours,” is all she’ll tell me.
“What else can you see?”
“That’s basically it,” she says. “His emergency contact is his mom.”
“You made that seem like it was going to be a lot more exciting than it was.”
“Nonsense,” she says. “Now we know he’s single.”
I squint at her. “How?”
“Because if he wasn’t, his emergency contact wouldn’t be his mom.”
“Or maybe he was single nine years ago when he first filled in that form?”
“True,” she concedes. “We’ll call it inconclusive.”
I catalogue everything I’ve learned about Connor so far.
He’s smart, possibly a genius, loves hot dogs, is maybe single, has a mom, is thirty-two, hangs out with creepy Brad, makes good money and has worked here since the dawn of time.
Adding to that my own observations: he is infuriating, with a dangerous sense of humor lurking beneath the surface that he will unleash on you at surprising times and in surprising ways. I must proceed with caution.
I hang around chatting with Carrie for another few minutes, filling her in on the skills test and drinks at Murphy’s.
“Which reminds me,” I say, calling to mind a past grievance. “Andy was asking if you’re still going out with the Merrill Lynch Murderer. How did he even know about that?”
She doesn’t look up from the day planner she’s flipping through. “Because he asked me out at the time and that’s what I told him.”
“Oh,” I say. So Andy does ask people out. Just not me. Cool.
“Relax,” she says, her eyes flicking up and back down again. “I said no. I know he’s your super special secret work crush.”
“He’s really not,” I promise her. Any misguided hopes I once cherished in regard to Andy died a long time ago. “Do you want to go out with him? You can, you know.”
“Like all men in this city, he is a waste of my time,” she says, slamming her planner shut. “And I don’t need another fuckboy to text with.”
This surprises me, a little. Carrie usually loves dating, and Andy fits the profile of her type to the letter. It’s not like her to sound so cynical.
“Maybe you just need to switch things up? Date someone completely different.”
“Mmm. I’ll keep that in mind.” She nods, like I’ve just given her the dumbest advice in the world, which in fairness, I have.
I drop it and change the subject, but the more I think about it, the more the idea takes hold.
When was the last time Carrie went out with someone who held her interest for more than five minutes? She’s gone out with more Andys than I can count. What she needs is someone nicer, a little less flashy. And I am going to make it my business to find him.
—
Eventually, Carrie and I run out of things to gossip about, and she still has to finish the workday, so my banker box and I make our way back home to Washington Square.
I live in a fourth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village with my roommate Sam, a situation that came to me courtesy of a message board, and to her courtesy of an uncle who bought this outrageously beautiful apartment sometime in the late ’60s and has held on to it ever since.
Sam originally lived with her sister, but when she defected to D.C.
for a job, Sam decided she needed a roommate.
It was two years before I found out her uncle doesn’t charge her to live here at all.
She uses the rent I pay her to supplement her income, which supports her pursuit of life as an eccentric, working part-time at an experimental art gallery whose claim to fame is that once a month it doubles as a nightclub.
Having never lived in New York—or tried to find an apartment in it—it was a long time before I realized how ridiculously, unbelievably lucky I was to find this place.
At the time, I was just happy to have a reference point to share with people back home.
When you’re from small-town Ontario and people say to you so where do you live and then you get to say so have you seen Friends?
Basically there…your street cred goes up by a factor of about five thousand.
I shut the door and drop my keys into a little ceramic bowl we keep by the entrance, the clinking sound disturbing the kraken currently occupying the living room.
She is—as always—dressed like a goth architect. Jet-black hair, jet-black eyeliner. Silver. Never gold.
“What’s up, loser?”
It speaks.
Sam is lying flat across the sofa, her arm draped artfully over her eyes.
I blink at her. “Are you…did you just wake up?”
“I’ve told you before,” she says, not moving at all. “I’ve hacked my circadian rhythm. Your 4 p.m. is my 4 a.m.”
“So you did just wake up.”
“I was out late last night.”
And every night, I think. “Have you eaten? I was going to make salmon.”
“Do NOT,” she says, sitting up quickly, her legs swinging out to the floor, “stink this place up with your weird salmon thing. Ari is coming over later.”
“Ooh, that’s—” I stop when I see the look on her face. Right. In Sam’s universe, relationships are strictly casual. “…not worth commenting on at all,” I finish smoothly. “Totally unrelated, I’ve decided to freeze the salmon and eat crackers.”
“Good,” she says, lying prone again.
This place is actually more of a one-bedroom.
Sam lives in the room at the end of the hall, where the bathroom also is.
Our kitchenette is divided from the living room by a small wall, making it mostly open-plan.
My bedroom is technically a closed-off dining room, but a very spacious one, and even when her uncle lived here, meals were rarely served in this space.
I don’t have a closet, but I do have a wardrobe, and a desk, and a queen-size bed, and only two of those items of furniture are touching—palatial by Manhattan standards. When I first showed it to my mother she said oh my god, how do you live in that cupboard. Go figure.
I love this apartment. I love the sloping wood floors, the uneven walls, the washer and dryer that’s not in our unit but mysteriously lives in a cupboard in the hallway directly outside our door.
My favorite thing about this place, though, is Sam. She’s like a goth version of my sister Shannon. Both of them are famously mean.
Sam, for example, savagely makes fun of me for being uncool every single day, but has a zero-tolerance policy for anyone else doing the same.
Once at a party, one of her hipster artist friends called me basic—something she literally calls me all the time—and she stopped dead in the middle of her conversation, turned slowly and said, with eerie calmness, say that again and I’ll skin your cat, then carried the cat around under her arm for the rest of the night, just to really drive the point home.
Shannon, too, is occasionally known to go to extremes.
In my first year of high school, I accidentally dropped a tampon in the middle of history and this jock called Brett McMichaels tossed it across the room and told the whole class I had my period.
I was extremely embarrassed, mostly because I did have my period, and had to walk over and retrieve the tampon, which I needed.
When Shannon heard this story, she found him outside his locker, dragged him over to a nearby water fountain, and held him under it until he begged for mercy.
I twinge at the memory. I want so badly to text Shannon and remind her of this story, but since I know all I’ll get is a big fat nothing in response, I don’t bother.
I miss my sister and her bad attitude and her brutal honesty, and have no idea if I’ll ever get any of that back, though now that she’s engaged again, maybe she’ll finally start acknowledging my existence.
At least in the meantime I have Sam, who, like Shannon, will always bravely tell me when my outfit sucks, and will almost always be right about it too.
She eventually gets up to take a shower. She’s all the way down the hall before I remember to tell her that I’m going home for my sister’s engagement party and will be gone for a week.
“I literally don’t care at all,” she says, shutting the bathroom door in my face.
“Love you too, Sam!” I call out, then head toward my room.