It’s not like I haven’t told him a few dozen times.
He tries to get me to make a call to the SEC and go over my monthly numbers as some part of our firm’s latest investigation that I still don’t quite understand, but I have no personal numbers to go over. To make the conversation go more quickly, I just tell him that it’s already taken care of.
He smiles, and I only end up getting coffee for him and half the floor, emptying his wastebasket, calling his wife to tell her that he won’t be home until after midnight because he’s slammed with work and then call his favorite drinking buddy to tell him that they’re still on for 6 o’clock, water his plants, place his picture of the Great Wall in a more feng shui-friendly position, explain to him yet again that I don’t know anything about money laundering, but reassure him that I’ll look into it, tell him which tie is most appropriate for a trip to a sports bar, and organize his stack of subpoenas by date of appearance.
This is my job.
And college was so exciting.
I stayed up every night before an exam to make sure I’d always be at the top of my class. A social life was a concept that I only became aware of in a sociology class, and then only as a study of human behavior. It was never a participatory topic for me.
Now, I’m the office bitch, and this is somehow supposed to prepare me for life as a big time broker.
“Hey, Lei-Lei,” Annabeth says.
She’s the only one here who knows the hell that is this job. By that, I mean she’s also an intern.
“Hey, Annabeth,” I sigh.
“Bad day?”
“I don’t know if I remember what a good one is to make a suitable comparison,” I answer. “How about you?”
“Well,” she says, “I tried slapping Mr. Kidman, thinking maybe that would get him to shut his fucking mouth without getting him fired, but that only seemed to turn him on.”
“What the hell is it with men, anyway?” I ask. “I get that he wants the severance, but even in his position, with that much money riding on it, I would never treat anyone that way.”
“You and me both, girl,” Annabeth scoffs. “Smoke break?”
“Please.”
I don’t smoke, but going out on the roof with Annabeth is about the only time on the job where I can pretend like I’m making some kind of a difference.
Annabeth blows out her first puff before we’re out the door and I’m holding my breath.
“Have you gotten any offers yet?” she asks.
“Nothing yet,” I tell her. “I would say that I hope I can get something here when my internship is up, but I really don’t know that I could handle working in this hellhole for the rest of my career.”
She takes a drag. “I know what you mean. If it wasn’t for Kidman, I’d say we could make it work, but sometimes…”
“Have you heard back on anything?” I ask, walking to the other side of her to avoid the cloud floating by me.
“Not a damn thing,” she says. “I always thought that summa cum laude meant I could walk into any job I wanted. Too bad everyone else had the same idea and we all moved to New York.”
The problem with Annabeth is that she tries to work how she got summa cum laude and I only got magna cum laude into every conversation. Still, other than Mike, she’s the closest thing to a friend that I’ve got in this city.
“Things still bad with your roommate?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe,” I tell her. “Last night, he came in at like 4 in the morning, drunk and knocking over just about everything that stands upright on the way to his room.”
“Well,” Annabeth says, blowing her drag out, “at least he was alone this time.”
“Oh, did I forget to mention that every time he crashed into something, I could hear the chick behind him running into the same thing?”
Annabeth laughs.
“It could be worse,” she says, but doesn’t offer any proof to back the theory.