A list of possible reasons she would be fired shot through her head. It also fueled her fire.
She worked like a demon to get all her things together and glossed up.
The other was…she’d missed him. Which was bad. But he was funny and fun, witty and intelligent—he was on his way to becoming a friend, and she didn’t realize it until he stopped coming around.
Kate was going to punch her in the mouth really, really hard!
Turning her attention back to work, she was suddenly overly glad she’d done the table of contents! Otherwise she might have wasted time trying to find her way through all the information again. The bad news was, even with the table of contents, it was still just a stack of papers--well organized papers--but a stack nonetheless. She needed something a little more dynamic.
Once again, she headed down to Marcus.
The marketing and art department was abuzz. More so than usual. People were smiling but tense, calling off directions across the room. Someone needed some ten stock white something or other. Someone else needed those slides pronto, darling, yesterday! They worked like an anthill after it saw a boot. Complete chaos to the passerby, but probably some hidden rhythm in there somewhere. Being that Krista had heard Dell mentioned a couple times, she figured it must be presentation day.
Krista kept walking as she made her way back to the Dark Hub. As she rounded the wall of plants, she didn’t hear Marcus on the phone for once. This time he was there, quietly sitting in his chair, his nose inches from his computer.
“Hey,” she said as she walked up.
Marcus looked up distractedly. “No more ideas. I gotta get this crap for Sean’s meeting.”
“Yeah I know. I am at the same point. I need to put my stuff into a nice format. A binder isn’t going to cut it.”
Marcus leaned back. It was the first time a small amount of stress showed under his calm exterior. “What kind of format?”
“I was thinking some kind of book?”
“Hmmm.” Marcus bent over a sticky note. He scribbled something then offered it to her. “Take that to Phyllis in Art. She’ll hook you up. Now scoot, I’m a busy little boy.”
He turned back to his computer as Krista hurried out. Then went straight to Tommy for directions—he wasn’t there.
“Merde!”
“Hey baby cakes, what’d’ya need?” It was some young hipster art person Krista had never seen before. She had black, holey skinny jeans, wild, spiky hair, tattoos everywhere, and bright pink lipstick.
“Uh…Phyllis? In Art?”
“Oh right, sure. You from IT?”
“No, um, Research?”
The girl’s eyes lit up. “Oh wow, Research, huh? You seem normal, though.” She laughed as she led the way. “I heard everyone from Research was a whack-job.”
“They are, but you didn’t hear it from me. I’m working on Sean McAdams’ thing so I was able to get out for a brief time.”
“Oh! You’re Krista Marshall!” The girl looked at her again. “Right. Marcus talks about you all the time. He’s excited to see what you can do. Not often someone from Research works so closely with one of our own!”
“It hasn’t been easy, I can assure you. My brain is wired differently. But we’re making do. I think we have some good stuff.”
“Well cool. I hope to see it some time. There’s Phyllis, right through there…” She pointed through a doorway into a land of paper and machines.
“Oh great, thanks,” Krista said, not wanting to go through into more chaos. And probably gossip.
She got a pat on the back and laughter as her tour guide wandered away. She seemed friendly. Krista should have gotten her name.
Phyllis had a desk that made up a quad, two people side-by-side, facing the other two. It was hard to decipher whose work was what. Where one desk ended and the other began it was completely covered in a mass of color and art supplies.
As Krista reached the quad, she looked down at the post-it. Marcus had written, “This is Geek Girl. Help her. Luv U. M”
If she’d any doubt she had been talked about, she didn’t anymore.
Krista walked up slowly to Phyllis’s desk, sticky clutched in her hand like a hall pass. Phyllis was a thirty-something woman with a haircut that looked like she went through a wind storm and cut it without combing it out first. As Krista reached the desk and slowed further, feeling a little like a creep, Phyllis and the three others all looked up.
Krista froze, like a rabbit in the middle of a wolf pack. “Phyllis?” she asked hesitantly.
“Yeah doll?”
Even though the two women had never met, they had seen each other around plenty. Phyllis was a regular at the watering hole.
“Uh, hi. Um, Marcus said to talk to you?” She held out the note, seeing the others in the quad craning their necks to try and see what it said.
“Oh right. ‘Course, yeah. What can I help you with?”
Before Krista could answer, Phyllis turned to her chums and said, “It’s not often we get a Research person this far into the art department, you know? They’re usually all freaked out that we’ll kidnap’em or somethin’!”
They all laughed uproariously. Krista chuckled to be part of the group, but was secretly wondering if she would make it out alive. Odds weren’t looking good.
When the laughter died down, Krista said, “Well, Sean is calling a meeting and I need to get my material looking good. I was thinking--”
“Oh-oo Sean!” one of the quad interrupted. She was a portly girl with a high pony tail and a hooked beak for a nose.
“I know!” Phyllis said with an exaggerated hand movement half circling around her head. “I begged Marcus to get me on that team! Begged him. I’m serious! Bu-egged.”
“I hear Sean picked his own crew.” It was a twenty-something alternative-looking girl with dreads and a sleeve of tattoos. She was loudly chewing and popping her gum. She couldn’t be more irritating if she tried. And if Krista told her that, she would’ve tried.
“Well, I heard Sean beat out that guy Ray for a promotion at an old company.” This from a young girl with large glasses, limp, greasy hair and a splatter of freckles. “He’s doing the guy a favor by getting him hired here. Kinda nice of Sean.”
Phyllis and tattoo girl started laughing at her.
“Are you still hung up on him?” Phyllis asked.
“Sean talked to her at the Christmas party last year,” Tattoo girl yelled across the tables, “and she’s been into him ever since!”
“Shut up!” Glasses said. “I just think he gets a bad rap is all. He was a gentleman to me!”
“He was just trying to get in your pants. He ain’t no gentleman,” tattoo girl spat vehemently.
Phyllis got up and waved them away. “C’mon doll. Let’s see what you need.”
As they left the group arguing amongst themselves, Phyllis said, “Jodi went home with him after one of the events. Or wait...” Phyllis stopped walking and tilted her head. “No, I have that wrong.” She started walking again. She put a hand on Krista’s arm to steer her around some crazy-looking machine with a bunch of arms. It looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie.
“He went home to her house. He was half tossed. She won’t admit it, but she was sober as a judge. I have a feeling she lured him, but that’s neither here nor there. The next morning he apparently got up at the crack of dawn and left. No goodbye or nothing! Not that I completely believe that. I’m sure he said something. He probably had to saw his arm off to leave.” Phyllis laughed, steering Krista around a corner.
“Anyway, she’s hated him ever since. I mean, really, that man could get any girl. Why would he waste his time with her, right?” They turned another corner, getting closer to the mouth of the art department the whole time.
Just as Krista was about to nod, to go with the flow, she realized that question was a trap. Phyllis was stating the obvious, yes, but if Krista agreed she would all but sprint back to tattoo girl—Jodi—and say Krista called her ugly. Also that Sean was too good for her.
Krista almost inadvertently made her first enemy. No good! Phyllis was a dirty snake.
Instead of taking the bait, Krista said, “Well, it’s never a good thing when a guy leaves really early, that’s for sure. But I haven’t heard anything about it.”
“Well, it was big drama down here! People down here either love him or hate him. Half the floor are trying to bed him, half want nothing to do with him. Guys included, and Sean ain’t g*y. Far as I know...”
“No idea. I’ve really only talked to him about this team thing that Marcus is on.”
Phyllis deflated. Krista wasn’t winning any points with her, for which she was thankful.
“Okay, doll, what did you have in mind?”
They stopped in front of some art station. It had different types of paper strewn across all available surface, and teemed with supplies, small machines, and a bunch of crap Krista couldn’t even identify.
She had a wild impulse to start cleaning. How anyone could work in this mayhem was disturbing.
“Um. Well, I have all this information in stacks of paper and I was wondering if I can put it in a book? Or something.”
“Hmmm. That’s possible, um hum. Why don’t you run and get your stuff and I’ll set the machine up.”
Krista nodded and tore outta there. Her brain was a whirl of how she wanted everything to look. She was at her desk and back in record time, gingerly holding all her stacks to keep them in order. They were in binders, but if she dropped one, or God forbid the whole lot, they burst open… Krista did not need her stuff looking like the desks in the art department.
As she appeared behind the station, Phyllis gave a small jump. “Didn’t see you comin’!” She twittered as she finished moving things around and flipping switches.
“Okay,” she said, turning to look at Krista’s stuff. “Oh my. You’ve been busy. Okay, let me show you how this works.”
“How—uh, how the machine works?”
“Well, yes. You didn’t think I was going to do it all for you, did you? I got a million things to do!”
“Oh right, of course. Sorry, I just thought someone did this normally. I don’t really know how the art department works.”
She laughed and patted Krista’s shoulder. “Of course not. I’m surprised you haven’t run out screaming by now. Every once in a while a Research person has to spend time in here and they always leave with scowls!”
Crap! She was about to be lumped in with the rest of the stuffy people from her department!
Thinking quick she said, “Oh, hah hah, it’s not that bad. Big machines, though. Well, we’ll see what happens. I just hope I don’t completely screw the pooch.” She inched forward, trying to look like she was eager to learn.
Phyllis laughed again, then began going through how to work the machine. She pointed out levers, talked about buttons, gave one example, then patted Krista on the back and walked away.
Krista stared at the machine for a long moment. She probably should have written something down…
There was only one thing to do. She fished out her phone and dialed without thinking.
“Hello? Krista?” Ben’s voice was a barely contained frenzy.
“Hi Ben, yeah it’s me. Tell me I haven’t interrupted anything.”
“Freaking Muni dumped me off in no-man’s-land and said the bus was out of service. Damn it!”
Ben saying “freaking” and “damn” meant he was really riled up. It took a lot for that guy to get on edge. But then, Muni could give Mother Theresa something to swear about.
“Do you have a second?”
“I have a million seconds. I have to wait with a bus load of people for the next full bus to come along and try to squeeze onto that bus. I had a seat, too.” He let out an exasperated and enraged sigh.
“Well then, good timing, as it were.”
“I guess. What’s up?”
“Okay, I am standing in front of some binding machine. Some giant art book machine...thing. It has levers and buttons and I am completely lost. Tell me you have worked on one of these.”
“You are in luck. I worked on a binding machine for a time last year. It was an extra course I dropped halfway through. I thought it would be fun but it turned out just a lot of work. We mostly worked on a printing press, which was neat because--”
“Ben. Focus.”
“Oh right, sorry. Okay, tell me what you are looking at and maybe I can help.”
She did. She tried to tell him as much as she remembered about the levers and buttons. She told him the model and what it looked like. It turned out this machine was a low quality model. Being that he had worked on a top quality model at the expensive art school he went to, he had to dumb himself down to help out, but he knew enough to get her going. He then had to go because a bus was coming and he needed to shove his way on. He didn’t want to be late for his class.
She’d written stuff down that time, but she was about as good at machinery as she had been at wood shop. Not. A. Clue.
She very nearly gave up. The only thing that kept her going, that convinced her that binders wouldn’t cut it, was having a department full of crazy, smirking art people thinking they were better than Research. She’d be damned if some messy-desked morons were gonna show her up!
Plus, she didn’t give two rats about this department’s budget. If they thought leaving someone unattended on their machine was acceptable, then Krista would waste a bunch of their expensive paper without feeling bad.