Chapter 2 Molly
Molly
When I finally scan into the IT office, I’m still muttering about the absolute gall of the man wearing half of a JC Penny outerwear department at the building entrance.
I was in the zone, doing my breathing exercises, trying to channel my most approachable self on my walk from the train where, for once, nobody smelled horrible around me.
Invite me into the building–okay, just what the fuck was that, anyway?
‘Molly,’ our secretary Devi singsongs as she comes out from around her desk. ‘You’re frowning again.’
I stop myself from rolling my eyes, but just barely. We’re friends–she’d get it, maybe even laugh, and then she’d bring it up when I complained about not getting the promotion again.
Well, maybe if you were nicer…
I’m plenty nice.
Nice like when you roll your eyes all the time?
I flex my fists at my side and do the centring deep-breathing thing. I am friendly, dammit. Just because I’m not a people pleaser who uses fifteen exclamation points per email doesn’t mean I’m not a kind person. I am plenty kind–ask anyone.
Well, not anyone. Don’t ask Kenneth.
Anyone else.
‘This is my happy face, Devi, can’t you tell? I’m beaming.’
‘You’re something,’ she muses as we reach my desk. I barely withhold a companionable glare as I set my shoulder bag on the table. ‘But today, you get to be a buddy.’
She says this with the utmost pleasantness, hands out with waggling jazz fingers even, to emphasise the most horrifying news that could’ve come to me before coffee on a Tuesday morning.
‘Do not joke about that,’ I say. Her expression matches mine in intensity for a moment to offer a solemn nod, a rare crack in her cheery veneer. ‘For who? What team?’
Devi winces and her gaze darts to our right. I follow it and see only the empty office that was supposed to be mine.
I gasp.
She nods.
‘The fucker who took my promotion?’ I whisper.
She pats my forearm, confirmation enough.
I sink down into my desk chair.
The buddy programme was instituted after too many employees complained that, at large, Drummond was shit at onboarding. I blame it on the severe lack of HR support at this massive company.
To combat these complaints, every new employee is assigned a buddy, which is just a seasoned sorry sap who–in our case–must show the newbie all the convoluted ropes of the ancient systems of Drummond’s on-site IT department.
A buddy isn’t a one-day role, either; it’s like a forever mentor. I still bother my original buddy for help on occasion, and I started here three years ago.
‘This is cruel. Literally evil behaviour. Whose decision was this?’ I protest.
‘Ryan referred you.’
I groan and do not suppress the eye roll this time. ‘Diabolical,’ Devi agrees. ‘First, this guy charms his way into your job, and now you have to teach him how to do it? I couldn’t make this up.’
‘Careful, your excitement at my torment is showing.’
Devi loves being a secretary for IT because she just processes incoming tickets, keeps tabs on the request inbox, and sometimes delivers new keyboards or mice when people need them.
This leaves many hours a week for her to write all manner of salacious fanfiction on her work desktop.
You wouldn’t expect it by looking at her with her soft pink outfits and silky, dark hair, not a strand out of place.
She looks like she should be an influencer–one who doesn’t spend her work time writing stories about non-gay characters from popular film franchises doing very, very gay things.
Sometimes, when I’m bored, she lets me remote desktop into hers and read what she’s writing. She benefits from the aforementioned lack of HR purview.
She’s also obsessed with work drama like this. Eats it right up.
‘I really am sorry,’ Devi whispers, but the light behind her eyes tells she’s more amused than morose. ‘Hey, maybe you can teach him all the wrong things until he gets fired?’
‘You’re the least ethical person on the planet,’ I whisper back, and we both laugh.
‘Mol,’ Kenneth says over the side of my cubicle, his stupid knuckles rapping on the divider. As a nickname, Mol is great, but most days I loathe Kenneth, so when he says it, I hate it. ‘New guy today. You ready to teach him the ways?’
‘Not really.’
Kenneth is not my manager, nor even my superior. He’s been here longer than I have and does half as much work as me on a daily basis. Notably, he’s never been asked to be a buddy, and this will be my third newbie in three years.
In fact, most of the men on my team haven’t had more than one, which says something because they outnumber us women four to one.
‘Why? Are you offering to be his buddy instead? Might help your resumé,’ I say.
Kenneth laughs his stupid loud laugh that I’m forced to hear on the other side of my cubicle every day (not to mention the loud chewing of his gum when he’s working on a code deploy, or the constant clacking of the metal agitators in his blender bottles–Lord, I am afflicted.)
‘I’m good, I think you need socialisation,’ Kenneth says.
I do not withhold my glare from him, but he’s past withering under my ire. He winks at me, then turns a mega-watt smile on Devi. We both already know what he’s going to say.
‘Ms Devi, can you get me some coffee?’
‘Kyle,’ she starts, and I grin. She never calls him by his real name if she can help it. ‘If you’d broken both of your legs, I’d still tell you to get it yourself.’ She smiles, sweet as ever. ‘Good luck, Molly.’
She squeezes my shoulder before leaving me to my cubicle. Kenneth retreats, bored with me or off to journal about Devi being hot and mean to him, I don’t know.
I unpack my bag and boot up my computer, waiting until the very last minute to greet my new buddy.
An hour passes before my manager, Ryan, saunters into the office with a man hot on his heels. I can’t get a good look at him, but I can only imagine it’s the new guy, whom I already resent.
It would be one thing if it was someone from another department. Like, I think it might sting less than them bringing in some rando from another company. Also, I might be sexist, because I would definitely not feel this way if he was a woman.
Ryan introduces the man to Devi, and I’m certain she just charms the socks off him, as is her way.
My eyes trail them as Ryan leads the way first down the hall with the meeting rooms, then the one that goes to our kitchen, and finally, to the empty private office with the new computer I got set up for him yesterday afternoon.
It’s a damn nice laptop, too. Like mine, but newer and with more RAM, so he can run more apps simultaneously. Makes me sick.
I set it up with hate in my heart.
Before Ryan can come retrieve me, I stand from my desk and approach the office they’re in first, giving a light knock on the metal frame. The new guy notices me first. His face lights up with recognition.
And, oh Lord.
The man who I’m supposed to mentor is none other than the man who thought a beach hat and sunglasses at 8.20 a.m. was appropriate. I don’t know shit about star charts, but in this instance, I blame mine for this.
The man looks normal now, wearing an obviously new suit with equally fresh, shiny black shoes. He’s got a coat, a scarf, and that damn hat laid over his forearm. He also carries a neon green water bottle, which really conflicts with the whole First Day At My Fancy New Job thing he has going on.
A huge smile takes over his face and, as if this can’t get any worse, he’s kind of the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in real life.
He’s got a strong nose, a sharper jaw, and floppy, brown prince hair that looks so effortlessly coiffed, it must’ve taken him an hour to get right.
His shoulders are wider than Ryan’s and, as a categorically tall woman myself at five foot nine, I resent that if I was standing right in front of him I would have to crane my head back to meet his eye.
‘It’s you!’ he says.
I turn to Ryan without responding. ‘Sorry, Ryan, can I steal you for a quick sidebar?’
Ryan smiles because he is obsessed with his team adopting the kind of corporate lingo that makes me Want To Die.
‘Sure thing. Be right back,’ he tells the man.
I offer a polite-ish nod with no eye contact, then follow Ryan down the hall.
‘You heard the good news?’ Ryan talks like he thinks this is summer camp instead of a boring job at a company with middling pay and worse benefits.
‘The buddy thing?’ I ask, and he nods. ‘Yes, actually that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. You know I’m glad to train another new employee, but I was talking to Kenneth, and he wouldn’t ever say this because he doesn’t want to come off as ungrateful–you know how he is–but he totally wants to be the new guy’s buddy.’
‘Shoot.’ Ryan nods. ‘Hadn’t even thought of him.’
‘Right. Well, you know. Not too late. I think this will give him the opportunity to really… rise to the occasion.’
Ryan scrunches his nose, which confounds me, so I scrunch mine in return.
‘Molly,’ he starts, like he’s about to let me down easy.
He pats a clammy hand on my bicep, and I try not to wince.
I hate when he touches my arm like we’re friends–we are not.
He’s a bad manager, and he’s always talking about how great it is that I’ve been able to pivot to a career in tech after my arts degree.
Most days, I hate him barely less than I hate Kenneth.
If I’d gotten that promotion, I wouldn’t report to him any more. My resentment for the new guy grows by the second.
‘There’s no need to be nervous,’ Ryan says.
He’s right, I have no reason to be nervous, seeing that I’ve done this twice before. It is an intense effort to keep my eye from twitching.
‘You’re going to do great. Plus, nothing shows the higher-ups that you’re a team player like welcoming a new team member.’
A team player.
Who picks up the slack on overdue IT tickets when the rest of the team is making fantasy football brackets?
Who doesn’t give up after a whole two troubleshooting attempts when we’re having server problems?
Who stayed all night and single-handedly set up all the C-Suite’s new laptops while the rest of the team went to a trivia night?
‘Just be friendly, yeah?’ Ryan asks.
If my mind could create laser beams, he would be incinerated. Maybe I’d get lucky and hit Kenneth too, leaning back in his chair and watching this exchange with a red Twizzler hanging out of his mouth. He probably can’t hear us, but I know he’s eating it up all the same.
‘Yeah,’ I agree.
I put on as nice a smile as I can, nothing as sweet as Devi’s, but it does the trick because Ryan pats my arm one more time and turns away from me. I don’t look at Kenneth, but I do flip him off as I follow Ryan to the new guy’s office.
My new coworker is sitting with both hands braced on his desk like the desk chair might go out from under him at any moment.
He has the same concerned look I saw when he was studying the door this morning, a crease between in his sharp, dark brows.
Without the hat, he really does have hair like ’90s Leonardo DiCaprio.
It looks soft and a loose strand rests on his forehead like fucking Clark Kent.
Admittedly, the guy is hot as hell and smiling makes it worse, his skin wrinkling at the sides of his eyes. He’s the kind of handsome that’s deeply suspicious to me. My dislike for him continues to grow.
‘There he is,’ Ryan says, like they’re old frat brothers. Maybe they are. ‘Elijah, I want you to meet Molly. Molly is an absolute tech wizard on the team, really sharp. We call her with all the high-level stuff.’
He says this last part like it’s a joke, but he’s not lying. When Ryan is assigning tickets, mine are consistently the more unwieldy, time-consuming ones. I just knew you’d do it right the first time, and we really needed this one done right, he said when I last complained about the phenomenon.
‘She’s going to be your buddy here, which means she’s going to get you started today and then you can always go to her with any questions at all.’
The man–Elijah–stands abruptly from his chair and looks at me with steady, assessing eyes.
‘Molly,’ Elijah says. His accent is nothing like mine. I might’ve guessed British, but then again, I’ve always had a hard time telling apart accents. He offers a slight smile, then belatedly thrusts his arm out in my direction.
I take his hand, shaking it; his skin is frigid, so I guess he really did need all the layers now slung over the back of the office’s second chair. Maybe he has a blood flow condition?
‘I am so grateful for your help.’
‘Right,’ I say. Ryan clears his throat, and I stretch my lips into another closed-mouth smile. ‘Welcome to Drummond.’