Chapter 12 #2
“Because you’re mundane!” Her cheeks burned. She’d never wanted to treat Gisele as lesser because she wasn’t magical; Morgan got enough of that herself. But she needed to be protected, even when she didn’t see it. “You didn’t grow up with this stuff. You don’t know the danger.”
That didn’t look like the answer Gisele had been expecting. It only occurred to Morgan then that there might have been a different answer, and her cheeks burned even hotter.
“That wasn’t your call to make, Morgan. If you were worried about me not knowing enough, the solution should have been to teach me.” Gisele sat back, folding her arms. Only now did she relax enough to show her anger. “Why didn’t you trust me to make the right decision?”
“Because I didn’t want this random demon to steal my best friend’s soul?”
“Random?” Luke said, outraged, and then quailed under their glares. Rix whimpered a little, sensing the tension.
“That’s… I don’t know how I feel about that.” Gisele turned back to Morgan. “It feels like you undercut my agency. To save me from damnation. Which an awful lot of people try to do on a regular basis, you realize.”
“That’s…” Morgan hunched. She hadn’t thought about it like that. She continued in a small voice. “That’s not what I was trying to do, but that’s what I did and I’m sorry.”
Gisele blew out a breath. “Fine. OK.”
Luke kept looking back and forth between them.
“What?” Morgan sighed. “Oh. You’re waiting for us to attack each other or something.”
He nodded, shrinking in on himself.
“What do we want right now?”
His eyebrows creased and he said slowly. “You want her to forgive you and for you to not to mess up again, and she wants to not stop being friends just because you did something stupid when you meant well? And… that’s enough?”
“It kind of has to be,” Morgan sighed. “Because humans mess up a lot.”
“Do you actually want a Deal of your own?” Luke asked Gisele. Morgan supposed it was a sign of growth or affection or something that he looked more wary than excited.
Gisele looked off into the distance, thinking. Morgan forced herself not to rush her. Finally, Gisele sighed. “I’ll go with the ‘diminish and remain Galadriel’ option. I don’t really want all to love me, despair or not.”
“I don’t see any diminishing happening,” Morgan said fiercely.
Gisele snorted. “You got that right.”
Morgan could tell Gisele wanted the focus off her.
Her roommate had never enjoyed being the center of attention.
It suddenly occurred that it might be part of why her (much more capable) friend put up with Morgan’s Disaster Human ways.
She changed the subject. “So. Brad. He needs to know what he’s signing.
But we need to ease him into it so he doesn’t completely lose his shit like Hayley. ”
“Well, what does he want?” Gisele asked. She still sounded irritated but Morgan knew she would prefer to process the whole thing on her own time.
“Investors,” said Luke.
“A byline in Forbes,” said Morgan.
“Ruff!” Rix chimed in, continuing to be helpful.
“But why?” Gisele curled a ringlet of hair around her finger.
“Victory,” Luke added. “He wants to win.”
“To be recognized as being victorious,” Morgan added as she thought about it. “Probably by all the other CEO bros.”
Luke thought, trying to tease out the details. “He wants to be seen as visionary, but he doesn’t actually care about being visionary. What the company does doesn’t matter to him. Maybe it did at some point, but now he’d change it to whatever he thought would get the investors invested.”
“He likes to talk about how passionate he is about the customers, and about how like a family the employees are,” Morgan said, thinking about the vacation days. “But he doesn’t care about those, either, does he?”
Luke shook his head. “It’s not in the list of things he wants, no.”
She wasn’t sure that was particularly new information, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t depressing. “Gisele, you’ve worked with a lot of different companies. Are they all like this?”
Gisele tapped her lips thoughtfully. “There’s a certain amount of ruthless ambition you need to even want to be a startup CEO.
And every organization is at least a little bit dysfunctional, because they’re made up of people and people on average are ludicrous.
But some of them are a little more, I dunno, mission-oriented? ”
“That’s diplomatic for?”
“For ‘I wouldn’t want to be a full-timer at your place.’ Sorry.”
Morgan let her head thud back against the couch. “Should I have held out for something more mission-oriented? Is this my fault?”
“You still needed to eat,” Gisele shrugged. “I don’t think you really did anything wrong.”
“I did my whole life wrong.” Morgan’s throat tightened. “I should have been more ambitious. Or something. If I’d had some passion to follow maybe I wouldn’t have ended up following a guy who discriminates against pregnant people and takes all his cues from shitty podcasts.”
Gisele gave her a look of fond exasperation. “I don’t think finding out your employer is crappier than you’d realized means you need to go into existential despair. You’re allowed to cultivate your own garden and all.”
“What do gardens have to do with this?” Luke looked baffled. Morgan turned up her hands in confusion.
“Seriously? Candide? Kristen Chenoweth singing ‘Glitter and Be Gay’? Didn’t you have to read any Voltaire in high school?”
“In my high school, we were lucky to read something other than the football scores,” Morgan said. She wondered if Pendragon Prep taught Voltaire.
“I’m sorry your high school was shitty, although I’m gonna point out nothing keeps you from fixing that yourself now,” Gisele said.
“Anyway, the super short version of Candide is a guy runs around the world trying to figure out the purpose of life and finds out that everything—religion, love, the military, monarchies—mostly leads to bad stuff. And at the end, after he’s seen all human ambition be thwarted over and over, he decides the only right thing to do is to focus on cultivating his own little garden. ”
Morgan rubbed her face. “So is he saying you’re supposed to help the world by doing small stuff you can control, or you’re supposed to stay focused on small stuff because there’s no point in anything big because the big stuff is hopeless?”
Gisele shrugged. “Beats me. I get the impression scholars have been arguing over which one Voltaire meant since he wrote the damn thing. But I think the Leonard Bernstein opera thinks it’s the first one, and honestly, I know it mostly because I like Kristin Chenoweth.”
“Well, I don’t think Brad read it, either way. He probably would have gotten the SparkNotes.”
“He probably would have gotten his dad to pay his tutor to write his essay for him. Guys like that are always looking for a shortcut,” Gisele suggested. “Which means he’s gotta be a shoo-in for a Deal, if you can make him think it’s his idea.”
“Lifehack: sell your soul to a demon.” Morgan rolled her eyes. “So how do we make him think of something he probably doesn’t think is real?”
“Leave it up on his browser,” Gisele suggested.
“Pretty sure he’s got a lock screen like everyone in this century,” Morgan said.
“Whisper it in his ear while he sleeps,” Luke said.
“You’re volunteering to sneak into his bedroom?”
“It’s a pity Tim didn’t succeed so you could use him as a proof point,” Gisele said.
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, he died. Which is why we’re here in the first place.” None of this was going to work.
“Fine. How about you make a suggestion?” Gisele snapped back, annoyed.
“Sorry,” Morgan winced. “You’re right. I wish I could suggest it to him. I just… He doesn’t seem like the kind of person to take a suggestion from a person like me, you know? Younger and female and not on some board?”
“Like a whiteboard?” Luke perked up.
“No, totally different kind of board. It’s—never mind. My point is that he isn’t going to take suggestions from someone who hasn’t done, like, a TED Talk or is some kind of growth hacking expert or something.”
“What if he thinks it came from a—do I even want to know what growth hacking is?”
“Marketing buzzword.” Although—she suddenly had an idea. It was like her father’s articles. Just because she wasn’t someone important in her own right didn’t mean she didn’t know things. Or in this case, people. “Maybe it doesn’t need to come from me.”
She grabbed her phone and found the browser tab she’d left open to Stavrula’s contact info.
How are you? Would love to catch up, she typed. Lunch?
“Finally,” Gisele said. “That’s better than the wallowing, isn’t it? Now, I have a hot date with a bookmarked fanfic that isn’t going to read itself.”
“We got this,” Morgan waved. Luke watched Gisele shuffle off to her room, his eyes drawn to the cartoonish amphibian slippers whose feathery gills wobbled with every step. She guessed the Infernal Plane wasn’t big on whimsical footwear.
Morgan started the now-daily process of transforming the dubious futon into a dubious bed for Luke. They’d originally picked the frame off a curb in sophomore year; one corner rattled every time you knocked into the arm.
Luke helped her wordlessly. Their hands brushed as she tucked the corner of the sheet under what passed for the mattress, and he inhaled sharply and yanked it back. She paused.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted.
“For what?” He didn’t meet her eyes.
“For what Hayley said. About us, I mean,” she tripped over her words, aware her ears were burning. “Not that there is an us—that Hayley thought there was an us.”
“You want there to be,” Luke said quietly. “And you also want there not to be.”
How horrible to know exactly how much someone you didn’t want wanted you.
“You can want something and not want to want it,” she said, trying desperately to make him feel less hunted.
She hadn’t realized until Hayley hinted how unethical she was.
He was stuck here, literally sleeping on her couch, and constantly aware of her inappropriate desire. He must feel so trapped.
“I can’t…” he trailed off. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking, you know. Only what you want.”
She wanted to not be having this conversation.
“Me, too,” he said quickly.
Cold showers. Unflavored oatmeal. She tried to think about anything else, something that wouldn’t make him uncomfortable. “We’ll just… agree not to talk about this anymore? Since neither of us wants to talk about it?”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
She fled, wishing there was more than a cracked plaster wall between him and her shame.