Pink Slip Party (12 page)

“You had an interview,” I accuse, pointing at her fitted black blazer. I feel like I’ve walked in on a boyfriend having sex with my best friend. I’ve not even had a telephone interview, much less one that required business attire.

“It was a wash,” Missy says. “They’re only paying seventy. It would be a step down.”

“Seventy
thousand dollars?”
I spit.

Missy shrugs. “It’s beneath me,” she says.

The phone rings.

“Are you ready to get plastered? I am,” Steph declares on the phone. “My mobile phone died on me. My plane was late. The conference was a mess, and, well, I’ve got some serious news to tell you, but I think I should do it in person.”

I have $20. I try to tell myself this is enough for a night out on the town, like back in college when I managed to get the change in the couch cushions to support a night of pitchers and cheese fries.

“I’ve got news, too,” I say. “Missy’s moved in.”

“What? Are you
joking?”
Steph coughs. “You let the klepto into your apartment?”

“I sort of didn’t have a choice, and besides, you said you didn’t even think those rumors were true,” I say.

“OK, well, what the hell. I’m feeling generous. She can come along if she likes.”

“She might have to. Of the two of us, she’s the one with cash.”

We all gather at the bar at Red Light, because Missy won’t be seen in one of our “local dives” and she insists that she’ll pay for our ten-dollar mango martinis rather than be seen in an Irish pub sucking down Harp.

“So? What’s the news?” I ask Steph.

“Well…Ferguson has lost weight,” she says.

Ferguson was my old supervisor at Maximum Office. Everyone called him Fat Ferguson with no sense of irony. He was probably nearly three hundred pounds, and because of this, Fat Ferguson had a sweating problem. He carried a ring of sweat around his armpits and a spot on his belly even on the coldest of days. I never saw him without his sweatbands. I kept thinking that perhaps they meant something, like the rings in a tree, but I never found any correlation. They were just there. Pit stains.

“You don’t know pain until you have to work on that man’s computer,” Missy says. “Do you know he once got an entire French fry stuck in his keyboard? Don’t ask me how he did it.”

Steph laughs.

“So how much weight has he lost?” Missy asks. Fat Ferguson had already started the Subway diet well before I left, and was already less of Fat Ferguson and more like the incredibly Shrinking Ferguson. His pants always seemed in danger of falling down.

“You wouldn’t even recognize him. He looks almost normal. He’s lost fifty more pounds,” Steph says.

“Are you stalling?” I ask Steph. “Surely your big news isn’t that Fat Ferguson is still on his diet.”

“OK, well, do you want the bad news or the good news first?”

“Good,” I say, without hesitation. Missy snorts.

“I quit my job!” Steph beams, looking proud.

I drop my cigarette. Missy pats Steph on the back. “Nice work,” Missy says.

“You quit! Do you have any idea how crazy that is?” I can’t believe Steph would willingly embrace a life of squatting, bill-evading, and bad credit. It doesn’t seem possible.

“I’d taken all I was going to take,” Steph says. “I quit on the last day of the convention, after I’d not slept for nearly three days.”

“But, Steph, maybe you could still get your job back,” I start. “You don’t know what it’s like out there. The job market is terrible.”

“I’m not too worried. I’m going to freelance,” Steph says.

My mouth drops open. “Freelance? Are you crazy?”

“Don’t listen to Jane. You don’t need those cocksuckers,” Missy says, tapping out some ash into my empty martini glass.

“Steph, I think you need to think this through,” I say. I am beginning to sound like Todd.

“Too late. I told Mike that he was a low-life asshole and Ferguson that he smelled like Vienna sausages.”

“You told Fat Ferguson he smelled?” I know I should find this funny, but since I am channeling Todd, I seem to have misplaced my sense of humor.

“Worse, I told him he should check out the new modern invention called deodorant,” Steph says.

Missy starts laughing. “Now that is the funniest damn thing I’ve heard all night.”

“At least someone appreciates it,” Steph says, sending me a look.

“It’s funny,” I say, but I’m not laughing. Selfishly, all I can think is that most of my friends are now unemployed. My only free beers will have to come from Todd or Kyle. “You’re sure you can’t get your old job back?” I ask, hopeful.

“I wouldn’t take it if they offered it to me at twice the salary,” Steph declares.

“Amen, sister,” Missy echoes, holding up her martini and clinking it against Steph’s glass.

“So if your quitting is the good news, I hate to even hear about the bad news,” I say.

“Right,” Steph says. “Well, I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m just going to come right out and say it.”

I wait, expectantly.

“OK, well, the thing is —” Steph pauses and gives me a worried look.

“Just
say
it,” I say.

“Right. OK. Well, it has to do with Mike.”

“OK,” I say, cautiously, trying not to hope too hard that he’s been fired, or that something awful happened to him like he somehow contracted leprosy.

“Well, it seems that, Mike, sort of, well…” Steph coughs. “Mike has a fiancée.”

“No shit,” Missy exclaims.

I can’t seem to speak. I have lost all feeling in my tongue, and my ears are ringing like I’ve just come back from a Metallica concert.

“What do you mean, he has a fiancée?” I manage to say, slowly and carefully, pronouncing each syllable deliberately, so that I don’t start shouting.

“Well, she was there. In New York. She lives there, or she did until a couple of weeks ago when she relocated to Chicago.” Steph pauses and coughs. “And, she told me that they’ve been engaged for more than a year, dating for three.”

Missy is slapping her knee. “Son of a bitch,” she breathes. “I
knew
he was an asshole, but damn.”

I feel like I’m turning three shades paler than white. He has a
fiancée.
Of course. It all makes sense now. The fact that we always sat in the darkest corners of restaurants. How he never gave me his home number, just his mobile. How he kept making unexpected trips to New York. How he never suggested that I meet his family, or his friends, or anyone who might be able to expose his double life. It’s no wonder he was so quick to end things with me. His fiancée was moving to town.

I am the dumbest girl alive.

“This calls for another round of drinks,” Missy says.

“I second that,” Steph shouts.

The bartender plops down three more martini glasses. My hand is shaking, but I manage to pick up my drink and down it in one long swig.

It is only by some miracle that I do not drunk dial Mike.

Steph stops me at the bar by locking her mobile phone and refusing to give me the pass code. Both Steph and Missy stop me from using the pay phone in the bathroom.

Missy and Steph bond over this, and they both shake their heads at me when I’m too drunk to actually walk myself up my own stoop. I don’t know if it’s Missy or Steph, but somebody hides all the phone cords in the apartment, so that when I try to pick up a phone at 3:00
A.M
., I get no dial tone.

I wake up the next morning feeling like sometime during the night someone hit my head with something hard and flat. Repeatedly. I sit up and groan, rubbing my eyes and pushing back the mat of hair that has formed into the consistency of a Brillo pad sometime during the night. My tongue feels furry and sour.

I stumble into the bathroom, my ears a roar of white noise. I drop my toothbrush several times in the sink, my coordination gone along with all ability to concentrate on anything for more than two minutes at a time.

It is then that I realize that Steph has spent the night. She and Missy are drinking coffee in my living room.

“Look,” Missy shouts from the living room, “Fat Ferguson!” She’s pointing to a picture of a man on
Ricky Lake
who’s confined to his bedroom and can’t get out because of his excessive weight.

“Don’t you just love this girl?” Steph asks me.

“There she is, the queen of martinis,” Missy says when I enter the room.

I groan and head to the kitchen to pour myself a much needed cup of coffee. My head is splitting.

I notice that Steph and Missy act as if they’ve known each other all their lives, instead of only for twenty-four hours. Steph didn’t even really know Missy, except by reputation, before last night. Now, they act as if they’ve always been the best of friends.

“I want to kill Mike, the smug bastard,” Steph sighs.

“Me too,” Missy says.

The two pause, staring at the television screen.

“I want to break into Maximum Office’s computer system,” Missy says, after a moment. “It wouldn’t be that hard. Take down email.”

“Could you do that?” Steph asks.

“Yeah, I was the system administrator, so I can do just about anything,” she says.

“You could?” I can see the wheels in Steph’s head turning.

“All I need is a keycard to get into the building,” she says, her nose ring catching the light. “I wouldn’t be able to do it remotely. I’d have to be in the cage.”

“The cage?” I ask.

Missy snorts and rolls her eyes, as some techies do when dealing with lay people.

“The
server
room,” she sighs.

“Oh,” Steph and I both say at once.

I look at Steph, but she doesn’t catch my eye. She’s seriously considering Missy’s proposition, whereas I think it confirms my fears that she’s crazy.

“You can’t be serious.”

“What else could you do?” Steph asks Missy.

“I could send out emails to upper management saying they’re fired. I could probably even freeze their paychecks for a month or two.”

“You can’t do that,” I say.

Missy snorts and shrugs.

“What else?” Steph asks, eyes bright.

“Lots of stuff,” Missy says.

“You guys are insane,” I say.

“OK, somebody is crying out for attention,” Steph sighs at me. “Give us a status report. Are you OK? About Mike?”

I shrug. “I can’t do much about it, can I? Missy’s hidden the phone cords. I can’t even send him a Fuck You email.”

“It was for your own good,” Missy says. “Besides, I put back the phone cords this morning.”

“If you want to talk about it we’ll listen,” Steph offers.

Missy grunts and rolls her eyes.

“No thanks,” I say.

Talking about it will only make me want to cry, and that’s the last thing I need to do, cry over Mike.

Besides, how can I explain that Mike was special because he was the first guy I dated who had matching furniture? He had more square-footage in his Hancock Observatory condo than my parents had in their house. He had a full-service bar, complete with matching mixer and martini glasses. He was in all senses a grown up. He was a man who would never be thrown by the sudden appearance of a cocktail fork at his place setting or a French wine list. He knew how to cook. He had a full set of pots and pans and a cabinet full of herbs I’d never heard of. He took me to the best restaurants. He ordered in French.

And he had a fiancée. I’m not sure why I should be surprised. You can’t assume smooth, sophisticated men go around telling the truth.

My phone rings.

It’s Mom. She has a sixth sense about me, I think. Like she knows when her offspring are in trouble.

“Is this a bad time?” she asks.

“You have no idea,” I say. I want to tell her about Mike, but instead, I just say, “I found out an old boyfriend cheated on me.”

“Which one?” she asks me.

“I’d rather not say,” I say.

“Was it Ron? I never really trusted him,” she says.

“No, but it’s OK.”

“Well, what are you going to do about men, anyway?” she sighs. Mom’s voice wavers, and it sounds like she’s going to abandon her official “phone voice” — a high sing-song bursting with goodwill.

“What’s wrong?”

“Why do you think anything is wrong?”

“Mom, what’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just your
father,”
she says, using the voice reserved for talking about Dad, a strained, low-pitched sigh.

“Oh,” I say, relieved. Dad is always doing something wrong.

“He’s being a bit of a pill,” she says.

“When is he anything but a pill?” I say, and she laughs.

“He’s pretending not to know how to work the washing machine. And, he says that if I don’t do more of his laundry I’m forfeiting our marriage vows. I mean, he’s now home on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, so you think he could do a little housework.”

“Ouch,” I say. Dad is always sinking to new lows. “Did you tell him that you’re going to donate his body to science? That they’ve never seen a live Neanderthal before?”

Mom laughs again. She must really be angry, because normally she’d feel obligated to say, “Jane, be nice to your father, he works hard.”

“And, money’s really tight now that your father is only working two days a week,” she says.

“Do you need money?” I ask her. Though I don’t have any to spare, I’d lend her the $5 I just got for Grandma’s Christmas sweater on Ebay.

“No, that’s OK,” she says. “We’ll be fine.”

Steph and Missy are suddenly shouting.

“What’s that noise, dear?”

“Oh, I’ve got friends over.”

“Don’t let me keep you,” she says, sounding more cheerful.

I find Missy and Steph screaming and pointing to the television, which is set to CNBC. On the screen Mike is bobbing his head and talking with what seems like conviction. Underneath his giant head, are the words “Mike Orephus, CFO Maximum Office.”

Since when did he get a promotion?

“Shhhhhhhhhh,”
I hush them.

I turn up the television’s volume.

“So, our profit share is up, and we foresee extended growth in the next quarter…” he’s saying. I think he’s highlighted his hair. He’s also gotten his teeth whitened.

“Cocksucker,”
Steph breathes.