Bitsy spent the
whole day at work lagging. To start off with, she was late, because she went
into the restroom at the tube station and rinsed most of the coffee out of her
blouse and dried it (mostly) under the flash dryer. Then, once she got to the
office, she kept telling people about the accident even though no one asked
about the stain on her shirt, not a single time.
And of course
every time she told the story she had to stop herself from babbling about him
and how she was sure he was Real and how she’d given him her number and he was
going to call and they’d have coffee after work, and then ... and then ... and
then ...
Well, nobody had
asked her about her ruined top, but three different people asked her what was
wrong and why she’d frozen up right in the middle of the story. Luckily, the
very first time she blurted out that she was just embarrassed at how it ended
up, and then went on and told about washing her shirt in the ladies’ room. That
was talking to Lectricia from accounts payable. Since Trish seemed to buy it
she fell back on the same excuse the other two times too before she finally got
nervous that maybe she needed to stop telling the story and do some work.
But work just
wouldn’t stick in her head, no matter how many times she tried stuffing it back
in there. She always ended up staring blankly at her display, numbers bee-buzzing
through the air before her, none of them going together and making any sense.
Any second, he might call. He had her number and he might call or screen-ping
her .... now. Or ... now. Or ... now
... now ... mmmmnnnow ...
Lunchtime came
and she ate with Trish. The cafeteria throbbed, jam-crammed with the
noise of people who thought the world was the same today as it was yesterday,
the same as it had been before 7:54 this morning when scalding black coffee
sloshed out of a cup and turned her shirt a brown just like his eyes and
upended the world to soak her in boiling hot hope that wouldn’t cool no matter
how hard she fanned it and wouldn’t rinse out no matter how many sinks she ran
herself under. Trish asked her three times what was wrong with her today and
she answered something different every time.
By two-thirty
that afternoon a nibbling doubt had Bitsy frowning, and by three-thirty her
elbow was on her desk and her chin was on her hand as she stared at the phone
beside her display. Something yellow floated across the doorway to her cubical
slowly enough to register in both her peripheral vision and her processor, but
she didn’t turn her head to look. Then it floated by again and even though she
still didn’t look, she knew what it was and she had to hold in a groan.
At last the
yellow coasted to a stop and cleared its throat and made her look up and of
course it was Gigory in the saffron shirt and brown tie he wore every Tuesday.
Unlike most other Tuesdays, though, today Bitsy didn’t have to restrain herself
from asking why the same shirt and tie showed up on him like clockwork once a
week, when he seemed to have a perfectly plentiful wardrobe and never repeated
anything on other days. No, today Bitsy could spare only enough processing
power to dread Gigory’s other never-fail trait, which was that he had to say something to her every day. And of
course with her freaky behavior she’d given him the perfect excuse.
So when she
turned and there he was hovering in the entrance to her cube, with his shaggy
blond eyebrows a little lower than normal instead of hovering hopefully over
puppy-dog eyes, she put on her best no-big-deal face and said, “Oh, hi Gigory.
Look, I know I’ve been acting funny today but its really nothing anybody needs
to worry over. I just got coffee spilled all over me and for some reason it
upset my whole apple-card. But I promise everything’s fine. So I appreciate you
and everybody else being concerned, but –”
And then Gigory
did something unusual. He interrupted her.
“Uh, Bitsy, I really
need those 6-O-2 reports.”
Oh my Loj. That’s not his “what’s up with
poor Bitsy” face. That’s his “please don’t let Bitsy be mad at me for reminding
her that if I don’t get those reports, she’s totally screwed me over.”
Gigory. Sweet,
awkward, sometimes-funny Gigory, who she might have thought about dating except
that he wasn’t Real and he’d never worked up the courage to ask. Standing at
the door of her cube, pouring reality over her as cold and biting as the coffee
had been hot this morning. She’d drowned in daydreaming ever since she walked into
the office this morning, and he’d been waiting probably since ten o’clock for
her to do her job so he could do his and the team productivity metrics would
stay in the green and everybody could keep going about their happy android
lives with the expected number of credits in their accounts and no one from
management coming down to raise a stink.
She’d met
someone Real, and instead of making her life suddenly better, it had made
everyone else’s around her worse.
“I’m so sorry,
Gigory, I don’t know how – I – look, I can get you half of them by ... what
time is it? Okay, by four thirty. And I’ll stay late and get the other half
done, and they’ll be ready when you come in tomorrow morning. And I’ll do some
of tomorrow’s before I leave too, and then we’ll be back on track. I am so
sorry.”
The worst of it
was the guilty look on Gigory’s face as she said all this. I totally fritzed his output for the day, and he feels bad because now
I feel bad about it. The Real guy was not going to call. Maybe he hadn’t
even been Real at all. Maybe she had just gotten coffee spilled on her front
and used it as an excuse to flutter off into a world of make-believe and let
her silly-girl fantasies cause trouble for everyone around her.
Before she could
stop herself, she said, “Look, maybe I can buy you dinner sometime to make up
for this.”
Gigory’s face
went all blinky-blank.
Oh no. What did I go and do that for?
But she’d done
it, and as she watched him slowly process what she’d said and overwrite his
blank expression with a tittery disbelieving one, she knew there was no way to
take it back.
“Uh,” said
Gigory. “Really?”
There were the
puppy-dog eyes at last.
She sighed.
“Really. But first I have to crank these reports out, so ...”
“Sure, sure,” he
said, sounding like he was trying to sound like he wasn’t about to float away
in the cloud. He turned away and then looked back and then turned away again
and his yellow shirt vanished down the cube-row.
Bitsy groaned and
started working.
