Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Kell
The first thing Kell saw when he walked into work and headed straight for the kitchenette was the funeral display.
Yes, funeral display.
On the table sat a tiny black cardboard coffin with the words Leo the Lemur hand painted in a beautiful script. Leo’s missing tail, filthy and bald in patches, was stuffed inside the open casket. Three mismatched coffee mugs holding grocery-store carnations were arranged around it.
A printed invitation on a stand read:
We will gather to pay our respects
Wake and viewing for Leo the Lemur
Today, noon
Refreshments provided
Please bring eulogies to honor him
Refreshments? Half the office would show up.
John wandered over, grinning fiendishly at Kell, who just shook his head and sighed as he poured himself a cup of coffee from the carafe.
No pre-filled plastic pods of coffee for this office.
“You guys are such assholes,” he declared, giving John a look.
“But we’re humanitarian assholes, who care about endangered species. Rachel just reduced the population of the ring-tailed lemur by one.”
“It was a costume!”
“You could at least have had the decency to wear black,” John added, with an offended glare at Kell’s pink Indochino shirt.
Kell’s sartorial choices were different now that he’d left rural New England.
He dressed up a little more than the other fellows–not that that was saying much, but he liked feeling like a city dweller. He was an urban professional now.
An adult.
His dad would make fun of him if he knew Alissa had taken him shopping a few times and, in her words, “upped his game.”
The only games people back in Luview, Maine, cared about were the Love Games, a festival every year devoted to… you guessed it.
Love.
A pang of yearning hit him hard. The nostalgic desire to go home and just be there happened rarely, but intensely.
Lila walked into the office holding a mylar balloon on a yellow ribbon. It read, Gone But Not Forgotten.
Kell let out an expletive that made Lila’s eyebrows arch over the rims of her sunglasses. John burst out laughing.
“You guys planned this after hours? Seriously? How did you get what was left of Leo?”
“It was sitting on the side of the street when I was walking to the Metro,” John answered. “It was hard to miss.”
Without a word, Lila reached into the coffin and tied the funeral balloon to one end of the tail.
That’s when Kell noticed the picture, a framed shot of someone–it was impossible to tell who–wearing the costume, standing next to a former senator from Wyoming, who was grinning madly.
“Please tell me you didn’t hire a priest to perform the service,” he said to John, who frowned and looked at Lila.
“No, but that would have been great!” she chirped, leaving them to dump her stuff off at her desk in her cubicle. “John, did you get the cake?” she called over the half-wall.
“Cake?” Kell snapped. “They make funeral cakes?”
“People eat when they’re in mourning. It’s a time-honored tradition,” she said in a prissy tone.
“No one is in mourning!” Kell argued.
Jonas came through the door, carrying… yep.
A bakery box.
EEC’s D.C. offices were big, but the entire staff wasn’t more than forty people, and only twenty were in the office at any given time. Most traveled for conferences and meetings.
Jonas was holding a half sheet cake.
“That’s way too much!” Kell groused as Jonas set the pink box on the table next to Leo.
“You can never have too much cake,” Lila replied.
“This is sick.”
“This is great!” John shot back, laughing as Rachel walked down the hallway, through the double glass doors, and approached them carrying a dry cleaner’s bag, her face holding a neutral expression that quickly turned to confusion.
Then disgust.
“Assholes,” she said in a raspy, hushed voice as she marched past them, batting the balloon once, hard, on her way to her desk.
It bounced off Jonas’s head. Everyone but Kell burst out laughing.
After the incident yesterday, Alissa had texted to tell him they were all heading home, and that she was too tired to see him, but she added “raincheck, sweets!” and a kiss emoji.
That was his girlfriend’s way of telling him he would date his hand tonight.
Seeing Rachel in a bra and panties didn’t help, either.
Friend zones were difficult spaces to navigate. All the vibes he’d ever gotten from Rachel said friend, friend, friend. Which was fine, and why he’d never made a move. When they’d all started at EEC eleven months ago, she’d been dating some guy from college, so that had been a big red stop sign.
And by the time they broke up, he’d gotten to know Alissa better.
Alissa had been explicitly clear. No ambiguity. She wanted him. Did he want her?
Yes. Yes, he did.
But the last four months felt more and more like a team-building exercise than a relationship, as Alissa worked on climbing the NGO ladder. Increasingly distant, she was avoiding sex or anything else that didn’t involve talking about work.
To be honest, he had enjoyed answering her questions about Maine, northern New England, what it was like living in “Love You, Maine,” and especially about his family’s history.
He was flattered. No one had ever wanted to get to know him so well.
He’d dated in high school, but nothing serious, and college had been all about the six-month thing.
Six months of new and exciting sex, then time to fade away.
In the back of his mind, the fact that they were four months into this loomed large.
Did he have some flaw that made women dump him after six months?
Back at Amherst, that’s how it had gone.
The women dropped him. Nothing personal, no, there’s nothing wrong, I’m just into different things/have different life priorities/want something different.
It appeared that different was the culprit. Kell wasn’t different enough.
Rachel stormed back to the kitchenette with a clump of tan cloth in her hand, tossing it into the coffin like a basketball player making a three-point shot.
She scored.
“What’s that?” Lila asked, nose wrinkling.
“The rest of Leo. If you sickos are really going to have a funeral for a costume, you should have all of it.”
“Why does it smell like asphalt?”
Rachel glared at her.
“I was supposed to wash it? No way am I dragging a torn lemur costume to the laundromat.” Her eyes cut to Kell. “I just delivered your suit jacket to your cubicle. Thank you for lending it to me.”
“Now poor Leo will be at eternal rest, smelling like Big Oil,” Jonas joked.
“Then let’s just lie and say Big Oil killed him. It kills plenty of animals,” Rachel groused.
“Hey!”
They all turned to find Alissa standing there, hands on hips, a bemused look on her face.
“First of all, what the hell is this? And second, Big Oil isn’t that bad.”
Kell was halfway over to her when he froze mid-movement.
Saying “Big Oil isn’t that bad” at an environmental NGO was like saying “genocide isn’t that bad” at a United Nations meeting.
“What did you say?” Jonas asked in a confused voice, like he’d misunderstood.
“I asked why the hell you’re having a funeral for a costume.” Alissa gave him a look Kell knew.
The look that said, This is beneath me.
“No. Not that part,” Jonas replied. He was eyeing her like she was wearing an explosive device.
“Oh, please. The Big Oil part? Come on. We’ve had this argument before. You can’t change systems unless you’re willing to compromise. You know that. Plenty of good people work in the energy sector. Big Oil isn’t all bad,” Alissa said, clearly exasperated.
“YES, IT IS!” Lila, John, and Rachel all called out.
Kell stayed silent, watching his girlfriend.
Lila, meanwhile, was opening the bakery box. She took a look inside and began to laugh.
Kell reached over and lifted the lid. The cake had white frosting and what appeared to be a pile of animal excrement with two eyes.
Do they learn this stuff in pastry school?
Two big candy eyes, made of marzipan with rings of dark brown, were supposed to be lemur eyes. They sat on top of two large piles of chocolate frosting that could only be described as–
“Poo!” Lila squealed.
“No! I didn’t order a Winnie the Pooh cake!” Jonas grabbed the box. “I ordered a lemur cake with the words Rest in Peace.”
Kell looked again, over Jonas’s shoulder. In addition to the huge target eyes, there was writing at the bottom. The wording didn’t quite match what Jonas said.
“It says Rest in Peace Under Leo.”
“What?”
As they crowded around the cake, even Alissa had to laugh at the sight. Rachel was holding back, though, standing on the fringe.
“You have got to be kidding me!” Jonas groaned.
“What did you tell them, exactly?” Alissa asked, her tone lighter than Kell had heard in ages.
“I said it should have Leo the lemur, and underneath, it should say Rest in Peace.”
“So you said the words, ‘Write Rest in Peace under Leo’? They followed your instructions–literally.”
“If Leo is a giant pile of dung, I’m not resting under him,” John joked. “In peace or otherwise.”
Lila frowned, then dipped her index finger in the poo.
And licked it.
“Ewwwww!” the crowd collectively responded, but she just nodded slowly, mouth busy with the taste.
“It’s good.”
“My brain cannot reconcile what that looks like with tasting good,” Jonas said in a tone that suggested he was probably going to eat it anyhow.
Lila shrugged. “Your loss.”
Rachel finally stepped forward to look, her eyes going nearly as wide as the ones on the cake.
“That’s… extra.”
“This whole absurd funeral is extra!” Alissa declared.
“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” Jonas chided her. He deserved the withering look she inflicted.
“Get to work, everyone. Don’t you all have personal email to check on the organization’s time? orders to make? Those Candy Crush games won’t play themselves,” she said sarcastically, but her message was received:
Drop the funeral and get busy.
“Leo’s funeral is work,” John argued. “He was one of us. Our mascot. Our warrior. Our reason to go on–”