The Assistants(43)
Mission. I bet Kevin chose that exact word. I remembered how over fondue he’d asked me that specifically, if we had a mission statement. And like an idiot I was all, oh yeah, totally, a mission statement.
“I don’t really understand why you’re so upset,” Kevin said, hands stuffed deep into his jeans pockets now.
I checked myself then. More than anything, I wanted to peg Kevin dodgeball style with an overripe McIntosh to the mouth, but I needed to chill the f*ck out.
I forced myself to take a breath. “I’m just a little shocked, that’s all,” I said. “I wasn’t ready for this. This kind of exposure.”
Kevin blinked his big brown eyes at me. “I really thought I was doing a good thing. I thought it was just the little push you needed to take the site to the next level.”
Yeah. I’d say this was definitely a whole new level.
“I appreciate the sentiment.” I silenced my phone and forced an unnatural calm into my voice. “And you’re probably right.” I picked up my bag of apples. “Come on, it’s a beautiful day. Let’s enjoy it and forget about all this for now.”
“Are you sure?” Kevin picked up his satchel hesitantly, hopefully. “You’re not mad at me?”
Of course I was mad at him. He’d outed me! Now I understood how George Michael felt, how Queen Latifah felt, how Ryan Seacrest felt—he is out, right? Regardless, there is no going back in once you are out, so what the hell was I going to do?
“I’m not mad at you,” I said, taking Kevin by the hand.
With my free hand, I sent a text to Emily, Wendi, and Ginger: Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.
Now all I had to do was figure out how.
18
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING was Titan’s workplace sexual harassment prevention seminar—the two hours every year when all mid-to-lower-level female staff had to gather in the building’s auditorium (which was actually a state-of-the-art theater) to be reminded how disenfranchised they were. Male and upper-level staff had a seminar, too, but theirs was conveniently conducted entirely online. Ours was all, We’re gathered here today, ovaries-to-ovaries, just us girls, in this safe space to air any and all grievances. I thought my period would come just sitting there.
I chose a seat in the last row and searched the crowd for Emily. It wasn’t easy picking out her long blond hair from all the other long blond hair in the room. I had to locate Ginger’s ginger first and then hone in on Emily beside her. Wendi and Lily were also sitting next to each other, but on the opposite side of the room. The four of them had all seen the piece on BuzzFeed, as evidenced by yesterday’s series of exclamatory text messages, but aside from my misleadingly confident Don’t worry, I’ll handle it text, there had been no further discussion. Mostly because I’d turned off my phone and spent the night at Kevin’s, so I hadn’t even had the chance to see Emily before coming to work.
Needless to say, I hadn’t yet tackled handling it thus far, at this point in time, etc., etc.
A woman onstage wearing a gray pantsuit tapped her microphone three times. She looked either old for twenty-five or young for thirty-five—it was hard to tell from a seat practically in the lobby. She told us her name was Carolyn and that she worked in HR.
She wasn’t the head of HR, obviously, or she wouldn’t have been stuck leading this seminar. The same woman never led these things more than once, so it was very possible she was an assistant.
“Today we’re going to go over what constitutes harassment under federal and state law,” Carolyn said, too close to the microphone. “We’ll explore Titan’s anti-harassment policy, activities that violate the anti-harassment policy, as well as some practical examples and interactive scenarios.”
I zoned out then to gaze at the audience. There must have been about two hundred women in the theater, which meant there were two hundred phones throughout the building going unanswered, and twice as many unreturned e-mails. At this very moment there were two hundred angry men who needed packages couriered, documents scanned, car services requested—with no f*cking clue how to do it.
“How do we recognize and respond to harassment?” Carolyn asked us. “Do you know how to report incidents of harassment?”
She seemed to have more questions for us than answers.
Someone from the audience who was way better at verbalizing her thoughts than I was called out: “Today I had to sop up the coffee my boss spilled all over himself, while he just stood there.”
Carolyn looked up from her notes and adjusted her microphone. “Well, technically that’s not harassment, I don’t think, unless it was sexual in nature, the sopping.”
I was not the only one to chuckle.
“Last week my boss called me at six a.m.,” someone else from the audience yelled out, “to tell me he needed a PowerPoint by nine.”
A wave of knowing groans swept across the auditorium.
Poor Carolyn had lost control of the room. Nowhere in her introduction had she indicated this was a call-and-response sort of thing. “Perhaps I should continue going over what constitutes harassment before we address individual questions,” she said.
“You think that’s bad?” A Latina woman with hair that was brown on top and blond at the bottom stood up and addressed the crowd. “Last night my boss drunk-texted me at three a.m. to ask where he’d left his car keys.”