Pucking My Biggest Fan (Silver Fox Hockey #4)

1. June

June

The box used to hold printer paper. Now it holds a plant, a phone charger, and a stapler I’m stealing on principle.

“That’s company property,” Bex says, watching me pack it.

“The company stopped existing forty minutes ago. It’s nobody’s stapler. I’m giving it a home.”

“God, I love you when you’re ruthless.”

At two o’clock this afternoon, the founders called all nineteen of us into the conference room and said the word “sunsetting” with straight faces.

Both of them wore fleece vests. One of them cried, and it wasn’t the one you’d think.

Harlow Creative is out of runway. Payroll might clear Friday.

The doors lock at four. Nobody asked questions, because what would the questions even be?

We filed out past the good espresso machine they leased two months ago.

A girl from accounts was already on the phone in the stairwell, saying, “No, tonight, I can pick up shifts tonight.”

Eleven weeks — that’s how long my first real marketing job lasted. Eleven weeks, one order of business cards, and a holiday party I will now never have to attend. You can’t even learn where a building creaks in eleven weeks. I was still finding out which conference rooms got warm in the afternoon.

There’s a man stationed by the elevators in a polo shirt that still has fold marks in it, holding a clipboard with our names on it.

They hired him this morning. The company can’t make payroll, but somebody looked at what was left in the account and spent it on a stranger to watch us carry our plants out.

Bex hoists her own box, which is mostly candy and a framed photo of her cat. “Drinks. Tonight. I’m buying, on the theory that my card still works.”

“Can’t. I have rent math to do.”

“Do it at the bar. Bars have napkins.”

“You’ve seen my rent math. It needs more than a napkin.”

She looks at me too long when I say that.

Bex is the only person on this floor — the only person anywhere — who knows how I paid for the last two years.

She has never once brought it up in a room with other people in it, and she doesn’t bring it up now.

She bumps her box against mine like we’re toasting.

“What are you going to do?” she asks, quieter. “For money. Because if you’re about to say what I think you’re about to say—”

“I’m going to do rent math.”

“June.”

“Bex.” I fold the box flaps down. “Let me get through Tuesday before you make me promise things.”

She lets it go the way she lets anything go, which is temporarily. “Text me tonight. I mean it. Not a thumbs-up. Words.”

The man with the clipboard finds my name and draws a line through it. He holds the door with his foot. “Good luck out there,” he says, and the worst part is he means it.

Outside, it’s an ordinary Tuesday for everybody else.

The bus takes forty minutes. I ride with the box on my lap and my dead badge still clipped to my shirt.

It stopped working at two. I wear it anyway, all the way to my stop.

Then I drop it in the trash can outside the vacuum repair shop, which is always closed.

My studio is two floors above the shop, in Greenwood, with a slanted ceiling and a kitchen the listing called “efficient.” Four hundred square feet, and I know every one of them. It’s the first address in my adult life that is only mine, and it costs $1,395 a month for the privilege.

I sit at the counter and do the math on the back of a Harlow envelope, which feels appropriate.

Checking: $1,612. Final paycheck, if payroll clears: $1,730.

Rent lands on the first. After rent there’s the phone, the bus pass, groceries if I’m realistic about it.

If the paycheck comes, I make September and most of October.

If it doesn’t, rent clears on the first and leaves me two hundred dollars for everything else there is.

I run the numbers again, slower, in case they come out different the second time. They don’t.

The window fan died in July, and I’ve been pricing replacements for a month without buying one. That’s my twenties in one sentence: knowing exactly what everything costs, and waiting.

I know how this goes from here, is the problem.

I know how long a bill can float before the phone calls start.

Which billing departments will take forty dollars a month, and which ones sell you to a collections agency by Halloween.

What it sounds like when a stranger who has your account number says your first name warmly.

I learned all of it at twenty-four, the year my mother died and left me her medical debt.

I finished paying off the last of it in April.

Forty thousand dollars. Every cent of it mine.

Every cent of it earned at night, in this apartment, with the door locked.

A real job search takes five weeks. I did one in the spring — five weeks, forty-one applications, one offer, and today the offer handed me a box.

September I can make. October I can’t promise. Nobody is calling back tonight. Nobody is calling back this week.

I know something that pays.

The ring light is in the closet, under the winter blankets, exactly where I put it four months ago.

Assembly takes no thought at all. That’s the part I’d warn somebody about, if there were anybody to warn — not the deciding.

The remembering. My hands know the tripod.

The lamp goes on the floor, aimed at the wall, never straight on.

There’s still a strip of painter’s tape on the floorboards marking where the back foot goes. Four months, and I never peeled it up.

The mask is in the bag with the cables. Black, soft-edged, covers me from the hairline to the tip of my nose.

Twelve dollars online, three years ago. It has out-earned everything else I own.

Everything above my nose stayed hidden, always.

Everything below it — mouth, chin, smile — was on camera for two years, because a mouth and a chin can’t be matched to a stranger on the street.

That was the theory, and for two years it held.

Velvet keeps a closed page in cold storage for a year, in case you change your mind. They know their business. The password autofills. Two taps in, a screen comes up that I never bothered reading the first time around:

REACTIVATE JUNO? Your page and archive will be restored. Subscribers from your previous run will be notified that you’re back.

Restore.

Good, I think. Saves me the announcement.

And there it is, loading the way I left it.

Two years of work — masked, cropped, careful, never my face, never my name, nothing that ever showed the window.

I had rules, and I never broke one. Shoulders down was fine.

The little mole on my hip got cropped, every time, because anyone who’d seen it in real life could recognize it.

I checked every frame twice before it posted, and in two years, nobody found me.

It’s 3:40 on the worst Tuesday in recent memory, and the person who built all that is back in business.

I’m not sad, looking at it. That’s the thing nobody would believe. I’m efficient. On the envelope, under the rent numbers, I start planning a comeback post for Friday. That should scare me. It doesn’t. Being good at this is the only thing that has ever paid my rent on time.

I’m reaching for my phone to draft the caption when it rings in my hand. Unknown number, local. Four months out of debt, and my stomach still drops at unknown numbers.

“June Ashby,” I say, like a person whose badge still works.

“June! Deanna Cobbs, Evergreen Placement. Tell me you’re still on our books. Tell me the marketing thing didn’t take.”

Deanna placed me in four houses over five years, back when houses were what I did. She has a voice like a school principal who likes you. “The marketing thing took eleven weeks,” I say. “It ended at two o’clock today.”

A pause. “Are you all right? That’s — today, of all days—”

“No.” It’s out before I can dress it up. I straighten the envelope against the edge of the counter. “I will be by tomorrow. What do you have?”

“A live-in, up in Queen Anne — the nice old neighborhood on the hill, north of downtown. Widower, two kids — nine and five. Full-time, room and board on top of salary, immediate start. And June, listen, the client needs discreet. There’s an NDA before I can even tell you his name.”

“What happened to the last nanny?”

“There’s never been one. There was a grandmother, and then a run of housekeepers, and now there’s him doing all of it himself and pretending that’s going fine. The five-year-old will interview you harder than the father will. The nine-year-old won’t look up.”

“Discreet like a felon, or discreet like famous?”

“Discreet like you sign first.” She lowers her voice, as if we’re being overheard. “I’ll say this much. It is the saddest nice house I have ever stood in, and I’ve stood in all of them. I’ve sent him three candidates. All three were wrong before they got their coats off.”

“Wrong how?”

“They performed. Big warmth, big resume, presenting to the kids like a cruise director. He went gray in the face every time. Whatever the opposite of that is — that’s what you do.”

“I got laid off at two o’clock and I’m doing arithmetic on an envelope. There’s no performance left in me this week.”

“That’s why I called you first,” Deanna says. “It pays eighty.”

I stop straightening the envelope. “Eighty. Thousand.”

“He wants someone who’ll stay. When I brought up the rate, he said — this is a quote — “whatever the fair number is, go past it.”

“What’s the schedule?”

“Six days to start, until everyone’s settled. He knows it’s heavy.”

“What’s he like?”

“On the phone, polite. In person, tired.” She pauses. “Kind, June. Kind, not okay, and very committed to looking like both. Can you interview at ten tomorrow?”

“It’d be easier if it was ten tonight.”