The Assistants(30)

“Hi,” she whispered when I reached her, in the exact voice you’d expect from someone who wore a salmon-colored cardigan over a salmon-colored turtleneck all summer.

“I think you may be confusing me with somebody else,” I said.

She adjusted her glasses. “Oh aah well.” She made sounds that weren’t quite words. She had to be a practical joke, right? “I don’t think so,” she whispered. “I’m Lily Madsen. I work for Margie Fischer.” She gestured awkwardly at the empty seat across from her. “Would you join me for a moment?”

So she was the one Margie blackmailed us for. She had to be.

I sat, because standing there for even a second longer would have gotten the entire cafeteria straining their eardrums to hear our conversation.

“I only wanted to say thank you,” Lily said. “And, oh aah well”—this was apparently a repetitive vocal tic of hers—“I was wondering if you might also be able to help my friend. Oh aah well, she’s not really my friend, but she works here at Titan.”

“Wait.” I pushed aside my untouched BLT so I could better grip the table’s edge. “So you know it was me who helped you?”

Lily nodded. “You and Emily Johnson.”

“And you know how we helped you?”

Lily nodded with more vigor.

“Margie Fisher told you all that?”

More vigor still.

“And then you told someone else?”

Lily stopped nodding.

“For f*ck’s sake!” I said, and Lily’s face went red so fast I thought I would have to smack her across her tiny mouth to get her breathing again.

“I’m sorry, is that bad?” she asked with a gasp. “I’m sorry.”

“Who is it?” I asked. “Who did you tell?”

“She won’t say anything, I can assure you. I can honestly assure you. She hardly speaks at all.”

“Who is it?”

“Wendi Chan.”

“Wendi Chan from Digital?”

“Yes.”

Wendi Chan was one of Titan’s digital assistants. Like most of Titan’s digital team, Wendi Chan was Chinese, but unlike most of Titan’s digital team, she wore black combat boots, a wallet chain, and dark eyeliner, and she regularly dyed two hot-pink “horns” into her bangs.

It was true that Wendi Chan usually said very little. She was more of a starer than a talker, a creepy, Gothic starer who always looked a little bit like she was on the brink of knifing someone to death. Once when I called her up to my desk because my mouse ball was no longer working, she leaned over me, knocking her heavy wallet chain against my hip; picked up my mouse; spit on its ball; rubbed the thing down on her combat pants; tossed it back onto my desk; and barked, “Now it works.”

“Well, f*ck, Lily,” I said. “You told crazy Wendi Chan? Is she the only person you told?”

Lily began to partially asphyxiate once more. “Yes. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I covered my face with my hands.

“Oh dear,” Lily said. “Oh aah well, I realize I’ve upset you, but would you be willing to speak to her?”

“I don’t know,” I said into my palms, which still smelled of pickle brine from the bar. “I need to think.”

“Oh aah well, but would it be all right if I give you her address?” Lily pulled a slip of paper from her cardigan pocket and passed it to me. “She wanted me to tell you that she’ll be home tonight and she’d like you to go see her.”

How was this my life? I was supposed to be an island. Hell is other people. Hell is other people!

I had lost all control of this situation, and I needed to be in control.

“That’s Wendi’s address there,” Lily whispered. “Please go and see her tonight if you can.”

—

I STEPPED INTO my apartment after work to find Emily and Ginger Lloyd on my kitchen floor surrounded by markers, glitter, glue sticks, and towering stacks of various Titan magazines. Home Beautiful, Architecture Digest, Lush Décor, Mode, French Mode, Mode Teen, Mode for Men, Yachts and Yachting, Fancy Fish.

“Are you guys making dream boards?”

“You’ve got to be able to see what you want in order to have it,” Ginger called to me while gluing down a picture of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike in a fur coat driving a red Ferrari. She had arranged it so that the Ferrari was headed straight for a picture of Glen Wiles. And she’d creatively pasted the Target logo over Glen Wiles’s receding hairline.

Emily held her board up for me to see. It was far less ordered than Ginger’s, less of a homicidal narrative and more of a Jackson Pollock–like splatter of jewelry and swimming pools.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” she said. “I got you your own piece of paperboard just in case.”

I was inexplicably touched that Emily had considered me while stealing art supplies from the Titan office supply room.

“And look at this.” She reached across the floor to a copy of Millennium Foodie and turned to a page she’d marked with a glitter pen. “This is the FleurBurger 5000,” she said. “It’s a hamburger they have in Las Vegas that contains foie gras and a special truffle sauce. It’s served with a bottle of Chateau Petrus, poured into Ichendorf Brunello stemware. It costs five thousand dollars, but we’ll be able to afford it!”