Chapter 11 #2
“Me!” Morgan chirped, trying to project cheer and great ability at marketing, whatever that looked like.
“Hi,” said Luke. She was pleased because it would be good to have someone on her team who was actually on her side. That was the only reason.
“And I’m the last,” Hayley declared with satisfaction. Morgan was proud that her own cheer didn’t falter.
“All right, Zabloomers! Let’s kick some shuffleboard butt!” Brad clapped.
Morgan had never played shuffleboard before.
Her high school had had the triangles painted on the blacktop, but no one had been interested in giving teenagers unsupervised access to sticks and the gym teacher clearly though it was beneath him, so everyone ignored it except as a landmark to help figure out where to find the smokers.
She’d spent most of her time in gym class trying not to be noticed.
She’d grown up failing to play skirmedge and broomstick racing and underwater polo and other mage athletics, and had had no idea how to fail to play basketball and field hockey.
Fortunately, most of her coworkers seemed equally clueless.
The nice equipment manager who worked at the bar came out to try to explain.
Since at least half the attendees were more interested in comparing drink orders and gossiping to listen, Morgan anticipated that no one would be breaking any records today.
There were two triangles across from each other on a polished wood floor, with point values written in the different sections of the triangle.
The tiny bit at the top of the triangle was worth ten points, the lower sections worth less, but then the broad base at the bottom was apparently worth negative ten points.
The goal was to use your stick—no, your tang—to slide your pucks—except they were called biscuits for no reason Morgan could explain except pretentiousness—into the highest point value sections of the triangle on the far side of the court, without hitting the negative section.
“What if you hit someone else’s biscuit?” Kelly asked. “Do we put it back?”
“Biscuits are left in place and aren’t scored until all biscuits have been played,” the equipment manager started to say.
“Enough with the mansplaining,” Brad declared.
“That’s not what mansplaining means,” Kelly said under her breath.
“What’s mansplaining?” Luke whispered to Morgan.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Yes, you’re allowed to hit other people’s biscuits,” the manager finished to Kelly, more quietly.
“This is going to turn into a free-for-all of ignoring scoring yourself while focusing on knocking the other team’s pucks all over the place,” Morgan whispered to Luke.
Luke had that listening look on his face he got when he was checking other people’s desires. “I bet someone loses a tooth by the end,” he predicted.
“The pucks aren’t ever supposed to leave the floor,” Morgan pointed out. Then she looked at Brad, who was happily trash-talking Kelly. “No bet.”
“Uh… do human teeth grow back?” Luke asked.
“No.”
“Oh. Well. This could be bad, then.”
She took another sip of her drink. She was going to enjoy this. Somehow. She’d wanted shuffleboard and a fruity drink and meaningful work and absolutely nothing else. She had the first two and a shot at the second. This was her, enjoying the things she wanted.
“How did the investor conversations go?” Hayley asked as they took their places next to Team Four, which included Ronaldo, Vijay, and two more of the developers Morgan barely knew.
“Great, great,” Brad said. “People are really vibing with our concept, you know? It’s going to be a whole new paradigm.”
Luke’s eyebrows creased. Hayley handed them each a tang.
“Normally this is played by single people or teams of two,” Brad was lecturing, as if the facility employee hadn’t given them a whole spiel a moment ago.
“But since there’s four of us on each team, and four biscuits per side, we’ll each do one biscuit per round, and we’ll play one direction and then the other as a game. ”
“That’s mansplaining,” Morgan couldn’t help whispering to Luke.
“What did you say?” Hayley asked, looking confused. Her drink, which looked like a kombucha that a more potent alcohol or three had been added to, was also already more than half empty.
“Don’t worry about it,” Morgan told her. Stay focused. Impress Brad. Enjoy drink.
“Let’s make this interesting,” Brad declared.
Her stomach dropped. It was already too interesting.
She didn’t know how much a CEO of a mid-stage startup made, but it surely had at least one more zero than the salary of an interim marketing head who hadn’t gotten a raise from her SDR salary.
“One extra day of PTO for whichever team scores the highest!”
She let out a silent sigh of relief. An extra day of vacation would be nice, and at least there was nothing to lose.
Luke’s entire focus was on Brad. She drifted next to him while Brad strode confidently to the head of the court and lined up his shot. “What’s up?” she asked softly.
“He was lying,” Luke murmured back. “He didn’t want anyone to ask.”
“About the PTO?”
“No, about the investors.”
She needed the place not to fall apart long enough for her to get the marketing experience to parlay into another job. But there did seem to be an obvious solution to multiple problems here, if only she could win Brad’s trust.
Brad’s biscuit slid into the eight-point zone and he preened. Morgan cheered. Why not? It was dorky, but winning was fun and she wanted him to like her.
“Can you do me a favor?” she asked Luke, grateful that the music and the sound of other teams cheering echoed off the wood courts.
He raised an eyebrow, smiling. Her heart fluttered. Was it so bad to enjoy a cute smile? Yes, her mother would have reminded her that he was a demon, but her mother also would have said shuffleboard was stupid.
“Not a miracle,” she said quickly. “Can you tell me what else Brad wants? Besides investors?”
“He really, really wants to win this shuffleboard game,” Luke offered.
That wasn’t much of a hint. It was easy enough to tell from how intensely Brad was staring at the court.
Vijay’s black biscuit slid right into Brad’s yellow one, knocking it out of the triangle entirely before sliding to a stop neatly in Team One’s ten-point zone.
Team Four burst into cheers. Brad glared before forcing his face back to neutral and clapping with ill grace.
It wasn’t even like Brad needed a PTO day.
He was the CEO: he could take a day off any time he wanted and no one would say anything.
It was inherent in the personality of the type of person who became a CEO in the first place, she guessed.
He couldn’t stand to lose. But was that a sin worthy of losing one’s soul?
“It wouldn’t be hard to ensure the win,” Luke offered.
Morgan shook her head. “It wouldn’t get us anything. He’d never believe he hadn’t won on his own.”
Before Morgan could ask for something a little more useful, Hayley prodded her.
It was her turn, she realized with a start.
She lined up her shot and gave the biscuit a push.
She didn’t want to end up in the penalty zone, so she didn’t push too hard.
The court was thoroughly waxed, the biscuits seemed to slide very easily.
She shouldn’t have worried. She’d completely miscalculated and the poor puck didn’t even make it across the dead line. Oops.
“What else does he want?” she whispered when she got back to Luke.
He sighed. “Umm. A… I don’t know even know what this means. A byline in Forbes? And for other CEOs to react to his LinkedIn post about the byline in Forbes?”
Forbes was a magazine. And it was familiar. Why was it familiar?
One of the developers—Josh? Justin? She couldn’t tell them apart, and they were standing right there in nearly identical ironic t-shirts; maybe if she’d understood the programming jokes emblazoned on them, she’d have been able to keep them straight—hit his own biscuit into the eight-point zone, increasing their lead. Brad’s eyes narrowed.
He seemed to walk through life with the assumption that he had a right to expect to get the things he wanted, while she didn’t feel entitled to even want things.
It all seemed so petty, compared to what her mother had always faced.
How much of her feeling like she didn’t deserve things was because her own skills felt petty and small as well?
But Brad couldn’t slay a zombie, and he still felt like he deserved success. He just went for it. So could she.
She flicked through LinkedIn on her phone, searching.
There, she did have a connection at Forbes.
Stavrula. Who was that? She remembered and winced.
Well, it would be a bit humiliating. Maybe.
After all, the girl she remembered playing duck-duck-cockatrice with on the playground also ended up at a job in the mundane world the same as Morgan, despite going on to Pendragon Prep.
She imagined that sphinxes made very good investigative reporters, especially now, when Zoom calls could be shoulders down.
And as journalism contracted, even an excellent interviewer could find themselves happy to get any reporter job available.
She sidled up next to Brad.
“Need to work a bit on that push,” he said with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He really was upset not to be winning.
“Oh, I’m just getting warmed up,” she tried to bluster the way he did. It sounded fake to her ears, but she’d fake it until she could make it for once. “I was hoping to make a proposal while we’re waiting for our next turns. You know how I’ve taken over temporarily? For, ah, for Tim?”
It still felt weird to say his name.
“Oh?” For a moment, he looked genuinely confused. Then the pleasantness was back and she couldn’t tell whether he’d remembered or decided to bluff. “Right, right. Great of you to step up there, real team-player material.”