As I check my phone for a text message or an e-mail that will never come from Kevin. I notice my phone has dialed Adam Benavides’ number and realize the phone call is already a minute and twenty-three seconds in. So either he answered the accidental phone call and is listening to the morning sounds and voices of the law office I work at, or, it went straight to voice mail and his phone is waiting for me to leave a voicemail.
I ended the callg and went straight to my contacts and erased his number. I don’t talk to him anymore and I’m done texting him random things just to see what his reaction is. He says, I’m immature. But everyone knows this.
I turn my phone off out of fear that he will call me back demanding to know why I called him at 8:08 a.m., but what he won’t know is that it was an accident, an aftereffect of spilling beer on my BlackBerry three weeks ago and since he’s the first person listed alphabetically in my contacts, my phone randomnly decided to call him.
So I sit here at my desk that sits too low and touches the top of my knees, drinking my cold coffee in the effluvia of so many different perfumes permeating the air, making me a little more nauseous, with each breath I take in.
It doesn’t matter that I dress up most days in this law office or that I’m wearing knee socks with Mary Jane shoes and a baby doll dress that matches. It doesn’t matter because no one is here to witness it, except for menopausal women and their receding hairlines and secret feelings of failure and regret because they still have to work past age sixty to pay off that house mortgage, instead of happily being retired already.I’m not sure what keeps all these women working here, besides having to pay bills but I do know that the lawyers here like making money and making lots of it.
My boss in particular is a Jew (not literally, he's Caucasian I think) and is in his sixties and at any moment he could have a heart attack and die. Or maybe he will throw yet again, another temper tantrum in all of our presence, when he gets another bill for removing viruses off my computer or if he doesn’t get (to Jew) an applicant’s attorney out of a Settlement.
Maybe, if he didn’t slur his speech when he dictates into his voice recorder (and he gave me that raise he promised me that was supposed to be every six months) I could like him. But he doesn’t speak more clearly in his dicatation and he doesn't spell out those medical terms, even though all four of us secretaries have asked him politely to.
It doesn’t matter that I can type 8 words per minute or that some of these old women here are jealous of me, because I have a shape that they never had when they were my age or because I’m only twenty-three years old and not jaded yet and I still have my whole life ahead of me to live.
Maybe, some of them don’t like me because last year for April Fool’s day, I hid a few of these secretaries’ (only the ones I despise of course) staplers and name stamps and replaced all of the missing items with photocopied pictures, instead.
The UPS guy knows what I’m going through, he always comes into the office every day with a smile on his face and says to me, "Hi, Lovio" and I always reply in a flat, monotonous tone, "Hello". I still do not know what his name is, to this day even though he knows mine.
He knows that I don’t belong here under these neon lights, sitting at my desk in the sea of dark, green, carpet that looks like grass. That I'm out of place and I’m dying slowly too in this office like all these other old, bitter, people.
Maybe this year for Christmas I will bake a special batch of cookies laced with Ex-Lax for everyone to eat, but I'm not sure yet, December is two months away.
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