Going Down: The Elevator Series (2 page)

“Karma will be your ally. Lucky numbers 9-17-26-34-41.”

I’d assumed it meant I would find a sale at Sephora. I had been praying for months that Cameron would have a reaction to his hair gel and be forced to take a permanent leave of absence. I’d hit up all the major deities to cover my bases. I even fired one off to that Good Luck Cat that wears a shirt but no pants each time I picked up my fried rice.

Oh, Karma, I wish you would take corporeal form so we can make out.

Maggie snapped me back to reality. “Yes, Grantham Media. I haven’t even told you the best part yet. Everyone talked about how you were the only one who wouldn’t play
hide the cannoli
with your boss, so they’re giving you Cameron’s job. They want someone they can trust to not get them into another lawsuit. Grantham made a big to-do about professional behavior in the workplace and his zero tolerance for fraternization. Plus, you did Cameron’s job for ages while he took the credit.”

Maggie was still talking, but I couldn’t hear a word she said. I walked over to my window to see if the world had ended. Somehow the sun seemed a little brighter, the pigeons looked less pigeon-y. The Lower East Side of Manhattan looked downright majestic. I was without words. No words did I have. I thought I might be dreaming, but Leroy wasn’t usually sitting in the corner licking his backside in my dreams.

My scattered attention turned back to Maggie. “I got a promotion?”

“Cici, are you not listening to me? Yes, you got a promotion. We’ll find out your official job title today. Did you hear the part about how they’re bringing in someone above you?”

“No, I was looking at pigeons.”

Maggie huffed. “They’re bringing in someone above you to keep an eye on things. They want a person from outside Barclay. We won’t find out any more details on that until later. Are you almost to the office? We’ll talk more when you get here.”

I looked down at my organ-grinder monkey pajama pants and slippers. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a few minutes.” I ended the call before she could offer any of her trademark farewells.

I picked up Leroy and forced him to dance with me. I always had to be the boy; he was a terrible lead. “We’re going to celebrate tonight, buddy. I’ll bring you home some of that smelly food you like.” He loved the really cheap wet food that stunk up the apartment for a week, but this was a special occasion.

***

I carefully walked down the four flights of stairs in my building, balancing one Styrofoam cup on top of a travel mug, just like every morning. This particular morning, I had been too excited to remember my walking flats. My feet would hate me later. The walk to work wasn’t short, but it beat taking the subway. Plus, it was pretty much the only exercise I got each day. The people watching wasn’t nearly as good as in the subterranean level of the city, but up here you could watch tourists dodge cabs as they foolishly gambled that drivers would slow down for pedestrians. They wouldn’t.

I cut through Gramercy Park on my way north, stopping to hand Gene his cup of coffee. I glanced at my phone. I was late. So late. I was in a fantastic mood, and that warranted flawless winged eyeliner and flowy waves in my tresses. I’d been ignoring the roughly fifty texts from Maggie inquiring if I were dead or possibly kidnapped by a misguided gang looking for a compliant hostage.

“Good morning, Miss Cici. Don’t you look chipper today?” Gene sat at his usual bench with a checkerboard set up for a game, waiting for his first challenger to arrive. He was about five minutes older than Moses and had a voice like he’d drunk and smoked his way through several millennia.

“It’s a beautiful day. How could anyone not be in a great mood?” I inhaled the crisp morning air and looked around without a care in the world or a worry on my shoulder. All was good in the world. A pigeon pecked at a cigarette butt at my feet while two squirrels wrestled over a discarded hot dog bun as a family of four wearing “I heart NY” T-shirts nearly got clipped by a taxi on Twenty-First Street.

Gene was a permanent fixture in the park. He was probably the first person to speak to me when I moved to New York. As a freshman in college in a massive city, I saw hundreds of people a day, but I didn’t
talk
to any of them. I’d spent time exploring the town during those early weeks when school pressures had become overwhelming. The first time I wandered into the park, Gene asked me how I was doing—really asked me how I was doing—and it went from there. Our mutual love of caffeinated beverages laid a firm foundation for a lasting friendship.

“What’s got you so fired up? You got a new beau or something?”

I dusted off the seat next to him and sat down. This was easily my favorite business ensemble, and I would rather lose a limb than ruin it. Not an important limb, but maybe the one I used the least. My cream skirt and silky blue top were two of a handful of splurges I’d let Maggie talk me into. Who needed money to eat, anyway?

“Gene, you know you’re the only man in my life. I’ve got you and my cat. What else do I need?”

He looked down at his ancient pocket watch. “You
need
to get to work is what you need. Now skedaddle before you get yourself in trouble.”

“I will, I will. I’m just enjoying this lovely morning.” I turned my face up to the sun. “I got a promotion today, you know. My awful boss got fired. There’s nowhere to go but up from here, Gene.”

“There are plenty of directions a person can go at any time, Miss Cici, but I’ve always believed you’d come out on top. Congratulations. How are you going to celebrate?”

I smiled at Gene. “Well, I’ve got a hot date with a real animal.”

He shook his head, laughing. “You and that cat. This is a big day for you. You should go do something special.”

I hopped up, taking my cup with me. “I’ll think about it. I do have to get to work, though. See you tomorrow.”

“Thank you for the coffee, Miss Cici.” Gene started a game of checkers against himself.

“You’re always welcome.” I skipped out of the park with the enthusiasm of a small child, leaving a trail of unicorns and rainbows in my wake.

I briskly walked the next several blocks, trying to make up some of my time. My phone dinged in my bag, no doubt with texts from Maggie. I would grovel when I got to the office. She would see my hair and understand. It was extra shiny today.

I was smiling and humming when I heard the whirring of wheels. Bicyclists were supposed to stay in the street, but they never did. I didn’t have time to react as he clipped me and pushed me into an unsuspecting street performer, knocking him right out of his invisible box. The mime, covered head to toe in gold body paint, became a metallic blur as we both tumbled ass over elbow across the sidewalk. The lid on my cheap mug popped off in the process, spraying lukewarm coffee everywhere. This was my punishment for not washing my good travel mug this morning.

“I’m so sorry! Are you all right?” Apologizing for things that weren’t my fault was the Midwestern in me. I couldn’t turn it off no matter how long I’d lived in the Northeast.

My mute victim was trying to extract my heel from his belt loop. The coffee had washed away much of the body paint from his torso. He continued to struggle with my trapped shoe while I screamed apologies in his face. It was then I realized quite a bit of his body paint had transferred onto me, making me look like a Solid Gold Dancer reject. I couldn’t reach my bag on the sidewalk while still entangled with the mime, so I used the nearest thing I could find. I picked up some of the dollar bills from the overturned tip bucket on the ground and used them as napkins in an attempt to salvage my favorite outfit.

The mime chose to break his vow of silence. “Thief! Get your own money, lady!”

“I’m so sorry!”
Again. Still.
I tried to drop the dollars, but the paint had glued them to my hand. I tried knocking my hand against the bucket, but that didn’t loosen them. For some reason, I thought wiping them against their owner’s shirt would free them. That proved ineffective.

The golden man tossed his arms over his face. “Oh my God! Why are you hitting me? Police! Help! Help!”

My shoe was still stuck, his screaming was getting louder, and I was in full panic mode now. “I’m not hitting you! Stop yelling!” I yelled. I yanked on my shoe, but my heel was really wedged in there.

“Stop kicking me! What is wrong with you?” the mime screamed louder.

A crowd gathered around the commotion and gasped in shock. I locked eyes with each of them. Most of them were tourists wearing “I heart NY” shirts. There seemed to be a two-to-one ratio of phones to people. Everyone had their phones out, recording this milestone in my life where I appeared to be assaulting and stealing from a human Oscar statuette.

You better explain before you get yourself arrested, Cici.

I wrenched my foot, freeing my heel from his pants. Unfortunately, I kicked golden Charlie Chaplin in his Third Arm of Justice in the process. I stood and faced the jury of my peers, composing an eloquent defense speech in my head.

“I… And then… There was a bike. Did anyone see the bike? It wasn’t… This skirt came from Bergdorf’s. Paint everywhere… I wasn’t… With the money… My foot was…”

Atticus Finch I am not.

I panicked and grabbed my bag, making a break for it down the street. Luckily, I wasn’t too far from my office, and I ducked inside the lobby after a short sprint. The building was old and smelled like an encyclopedia salesman’s shoe. All of the amenities never worked on the same day. Some days you didn’t have hot water; some you were lacking heat or air conditioning. Other days you might have a faulty fire alarm. Some of the Barclay employees had a daily pot going on what would break next.

The elevator creaked and groaned its way to my floor. I checked my reflection in the doors as I silently willed The Little Elevator That Could to climb eight more floors. The coffee stains weren’t really that noticeable. The gold streaks across my body were harder to miss. The big curls I’d painstakingly created in my long, brown hair this morning were still present, and my new copper eyeliner was still ever so slightly winged at the corners of my green eyes. I would take the small victories I was afforded.

Maggie stood with a cup of coffee in hand at the office suite door, where she had likely been stationed for a while.
Bless her.
Maggie was a tiny wisp of a thing with long, blond hair and eyes like those Precious Moments figurines. She was the only woman I’d ever met who had enough personality to pull off a trendy, asymmetrical haircut and was the main reason I hadn’t quit my job long ago. She was too obnoxiously lovable to ever abandon.

“Cici!” she trilled. “Where have you been? Are you excited? Of course you are! I took the liberty of ordering new business cards for you. I hope you don’t mind.
‘Cecile Carrington—Vice President and Marketing Manager.’
It has a nice ring.”

She opened her mouth to continue but stopped to look me over. “Is that a new outfit? No. Wait. Is that your Hervé Léger skirt? What happened?”

I took a small sip from the cup I’d stolen from Maggie while inspecting a tear in the carpet with my toe. “There was an incident.”

“Any chance you’ll elaborate?”

“None whatsoever.”

“I figured as much. Back to my news. I was going to make you guess, but your outfit is depressing me, so I’ll get to the point. We’re moooooving!”

She strung out that last sentence like Oprah for dramatic effect.

“We’re what?” I couldn’t have heard her correctly. It was too good to be true.

“We’re moving. Soon. Grantham wants us in a building ‘more befitting his name,’ so we’re movin’ on up. To the East Side. Okay, technically not the East Side, but I wanted an excuse to sing
The Jefferson’s
theme song.”

“You’re kidding. You’ve had quite a run of good news today.” New boss. Promotion. New building. I’d hit the karmic lottery.

Maggie clapped her hands like she did when she got excited. “I know. I’m hoping it continues and the office arrangement at the new building will get me away from Barry. That man streams the strangest videos, and you know he refuses to wear headphones since he brought in that fake doctor’s note saying his ears are malformed. I’ve picked up a lot of conversational Japanese, but that’s really not—why are you throwing off a coffee musk?” She sniffed my neck. “Does this have something to do with the incident?”

I sighed and headed down the hallway to Cameron’s old office with Maggie following behind. “Yes, and I still won’t talk about it. What else have you heard about the changes? Any news on the new senior vice president? Hopefully we won’t need cocktail lunches as often. I can’t imagine anyone as bad as Cameron, though.”

“Cici, are you going to have to find a new Starbucks again? You’re going through them faster than they’re building them.”

“Maggie. Focus. New boss. What do you know?”

“No word yet. I’ve started interviews for some of the new assistants that will need to be hired. Mr. Grantham is keeping his cards pretty close to his vest on the additions to upper management. He said he wants to bring in someone ASAP to do damage control. I’ll buzz you if I hear anything.”

“You’re the best, Maggie. And thank you for the coffee.” I turned at the fork in the hallway to walk to my office.

“Cici,” Maggie called from behind me.

“Yes?”

“Are you aware you have a dollar bill stuck to your skirt?”

The office floor was quiet and dark when I packed my bag to go home. I stuck my head through Maggie’s doorway to say good night, only to find her office empty. It was really unlike her to leave without saying good-bye, but perhaps she had a hot date she failed to mention. I usually got a play-by-play of her every thought about men, but there was a first for everything. I’d definitely have to get details about that tomorrow. At least one of us should be getting some action. I was starting to bulk up on the right side from all of my
self-help
sessions. Perhaps when work settled down I’d be able to focus on things like having a relationship, learning how not to murder house plants, and eating less of those frozen dinners that taste like sadness and gym shorts.