“What would your reality show be called?” Sandy asked.
“Paul’s Hour of Power.”
He grimaced. “That sounds like you’d spend your whole time getting fisted.”
I threw a paper clip at his head. It didn’t even make it halfway across the aisle. It was a good thing I never wanted to play baseball, because I threw like a girl. Who didn’t have arms.
“What time’s the new guy getting here?” Sandy asked, not even bothering to make fun of me for the paper clip.
“Nine. I don’t know why I have to be the one to show him how to do crap. He’s coming from the Phoenix office. It’s not like they do things differently up there in Hell.”
“Maybe he’ll be way hot,” Sandy said, waggling his eyebrows.
“Have you seen where we work? Knowing my luck, he’ll be straight, won’t have any teeth, and will spend the entire day telling me how pretty and perky he thinks his stepdaughter is.”
“Oh, Paul,” Sandy said sympathetically. “You are brain-damaged.”
“I love you too.”
I didn’t even notice the next twenty minutes going by. Time supposedly flies when you are having fun, but time also jumps around weirdly when you’re trapped in the limbo that is an office job. Some days, I’d look at the clock and be surprised about how quickly the time had passed. Other days, time slowed down so much that it moved backward and I could feel myself breaking piece by piece until I was nothing but a pile of corporate American sadness.
Paul’s Hour of Power: speaking the truth, doing it fabulously.
So I wasn’t really paying attention when I heard my boss call my name. I said, “Yeah,” but I didn’t look up from my computer while I tried to pretend the new system that they’d made us start using weeks before made sense and wasn’t a train wreck like the rest of us knew it was (“This will make your jobs so much easier” turned out to be code for “We may not have known exactly what we were doing, but we put too much money into it, so you’ll kind of have to suck it up and work with it, even though it’s so broken that it makes your jobs ten times harder.” I thought about writing to the ACLU to complain and have them intervene, but then Sandy reminded me that it wasn’t civil rights related. We tried to think of a way to spin it that the new computer program was homophobic, but then we got distracted by the UPS guy, who happened to have a different kind of package we wanted to sign for, and the ACLU was forgotten. Cock tends to make things bearable).
So I was distracted. I kept getting a stupid error message on my screen, and I was about to chuck the keyboard across the room when I heard Sandy begin to choke. I looked over at him, ignoring the two people standing in front of me. Sandy’s eyes were bulging from his head as he stared up at our boss and the other dude. I frowned at him. “Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded as he started coughing, his face turning read. I didn’t know what the hell his problem was, but he didn’t seem to be dying, so I figured he was okay. I swiveled in my chair to face my boss and my nine o’clock distraction.
My boss, Chris, smiled at me. “All right. This is—”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I almost shouted.
Chris took a step back. “Pardon me?”
But I wasn’t even listening to him. He ceased to exist. All I was aware of was the sharp buzzing in my ears, how my palms became instantly sweaty. I knew I was turning red and I was fighting a losing battle to curl up in on myself. I knew when (if) I spoke next, my voice would be soft, so much so that my words would be unintelligible. My shyness and awkwardness were trying very, very hard to take over, and I was fighting against them in a losing battle.
Because, oh because, standing in front of me, dressed in expensive-looking slacks, a crisp white shirt adorned with a silk tie and suspenders (really? Really? Suspenders?), looking like he just walked out of a photo shoot for a magazine called I Look Better Than Anyone Ever, stood the man I’d spent the last two nights fantasizing about. Mr. Yes Please. Dimples, of course, on full display.
“Paul,” Vince Taylor said, his voice deep and looking inordinately pleased about something. “How nice to see you again.” He grinned at me like we shared a great big secret.
My boss looked confused.
Sandy continued to sound like he was dying.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
Chapter 4
I Am Going To Freddie Prinze Junior You So Hard
“GOD hates me,” I groaned to Sandy at lunch later that day. We sat at some restaurant that was supposed to be a hip and trendy vegetarian place. So, of course, all I could think about was how hilarious it would be if I went next door to Burger King and got the biggest bacon cheeseburger they had and ate it in the vegetarian restaurant in front of all the hip and trendy vegetarians. I suck like that sometimes. “It’s like he got bored and thought, ‘Hmmmm. I don’t want to mess with Africa today, and I don’t want to send Hurricane Ebonica to wipe out Florida, so I’ll just fuck with Paul.’”
“Hurricane Ebonica?” Sandy asked, his lips twitching.
“I thought the hurricane could use a bit more ethnicity,” I muttered. “They always sound so white. It’s not fair to other races. You always hear about hurricanes called Carl or Diane, but you never hear of Hurricane Rodrigo Sanchez or Ji-Ting Kao.”
“Only you would fight for the civil rights of hurricanes,” Sandy said, smiling sweetly at me.