The Assistants(6)

It was strange hearing her call me by my last name. That’s what everyone in the building called me, except for Robert, but how did she know that? We weren’t friends.

“I understand why you did it,” her lockjaw said.

She understands? This girl didn’t understand the first thing about me. She was Connecticut Barbie. I was Skipper, and not even the modern Skipper of recent years with larger breasts and a new face mold. I was the juvenile Skipper of the sixties, the one perpetually on the brink of becoming a woman. Emily Johnson and I would never understand each other.

“In fact,” Emily continued, standing up from her chair, coming around to my side of the table, and leaning her perfectly toned lower body against its glass edge, “I think you did the right thing. They wipe their asses with twenty thousand dollars around here.” Her WASP accent dropped like a curtain. Gone were the intonations of Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis. “You get me?” she said.

“Um,” I said, startled, “I’m not sure.”

“I think you do.” Emily opened the manila folder and gestured for me to read it.

She waited.

It was an account statement with her name on it from American Education Services.

“Why are you showing this to me?” I asked.

Emily tapped her French-manicured fingernail on a number. The total statement balance. Seventy-four thousand, three hundred twenty-three dollars and twenty cents.

“You think you’re the only one with money problems?” she said. “You think you’re the only one who’s trained herself not to sound like a truck driver from the Bronx?”

I stood up now, too. “Aren’t you from Greenwich? Don’t you have a pet horse named Dancer?”

“I’m from the slums of Bridgeport and my parents work for the post office. I just pass real well. Now sit yourself back down.”

I was so caught off guard that I obeyed her. She pulled her long blond hair back into a ponytail and I swear she transformed into a completely different person. Emily was still stunningly beautiful—she couldn’t not be—but her rich-girl pretension had altered to a thuggish toughness.

“So here’s what’s going to happen,” she said. “I’m not going to rat you out and you’re going to use Barlow’s expense account to pay off my student loan. Then we’ll be even.”

“Are you out of your mind?” My voice hit an octave that caused Emily to glance quickly at the glass door, forgetting the conference room was safely soundproofed. “No way,” I said. “Forget it. We’ll get caught.”

She flashed a pearl smile that resembled the Emily I knew before. “You already got caught. By me. And I’m surely not going to catch myself.”

She slapped the manila folder shut and hugged it to her chest. “Be creative filling out the reports. Scatter it around. A few thousand dollars here and there. I’ll take care of the rest and in a few weeks’ time this will all be over.”

“I can’t do what you’re asking,” I said. “It would really be stealing. It’s wrong.”

Emily fiddled with her diamond-stud earring, definitely no cubic zirconia. What of her was real, and what was fake? I no longer had any idea.

“That’s so typical,” she said. “Of your kind.”

“My kind? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Come on, Fontana. That chip on your shoulder you lug around all day? Like you work harder than the rest of us.”

“You don’t even know me! You’ve never once made eye contact with me in the cafeteria; you ignore me when we’re the only two people in the elevator.” Emily freed her golden hair from its knot and shook it down to a cascade upon her shoulders. A long-limbed man in a double-breasted suit walked by us in the hallway. Emily laughed out loud and waved to him through the glass like Miss America.

Then her face got serious again. “You’ll do it, Fontana. Because above all else, you’re a survivor, just like me. And I know you’re not really as dumb as you look.”

Before I could protest, Emily went to the door and opened it. “Enjoy the rest of your day,” she said, with her accent back on track.





3




I HAD NO IDEA how to go about this.

Okay, that is a blatant lie. I knew exactly how to go about this. Everyone who filed expenses at Titan was aware of the tiny box at the bottom of our Travel & Entertainment forms labeled Out-of-Pocket Expense, Miscellaneous. You checked this box if you paid for a business-related purchase out of your own pocket. Pretty straightforward, right?

What’s that you say? Why not just make it all up?

Because the trick with out-of-pocket expenses was that you had to provide documentation, to prove they were legitimate—those damn scanned receipts that Emily Johnson insisted all face the same direction lest she become dizzy and nauseated.

It was Friday afternoon, three p.m. I glanced at the rectangular light on my desk phone to see if Robert was on a call. He wasn’t, so I crept to his door and gently knocked on the inside of the glass.

Robert looked up and his sternness softened at the sight of me. “Tina!” he shouted, like I’d surprised him. “What can I do for you?”

“Receipts,” I said.

“Is it the end of the week already?” He shuffled around some folders on his desk, gathering crinkled slips of white and pink paper from the depths of numerous piles. He dug his fingers into the Longhorns coffee mug that he kept on the credenza behind his chair specifically for this purpose. He went to his closet and searched through the pockets of a few suit jackets. Then he handed the whole jumbled, crumpled pile over to me. One or two of the tiniest slips floated down to the floor and I let him pick them up.