Bee-Loud Glade Read Free Page A

wasn't able to share. My co-workers seemed to enjoy that I knew things they didn't, so they deferred to whatever I told them even though I made it all up. Maybe it had been more satisfying to know me as “the tennis guy” than to wonder who I actually was, and then it became easier not to know me at all.
    Once he had exhausted the tennis chat I'm sure he'd planned out in advance, the submanager asked about my role at Second Nature, and I knew where the conversation was headed.
    We sat for a moment, neither one of us speaking, and perhaps he was hoping as hard as I was for silence to carry the message. I couldn't tell him what I did at Second Nature because I didn't do much of anything, not anymore, and the file wouldn't say otherwise. He might have been hoping to avoid firing me in his own voice. So we played our game of silent chicken, avoiding each other's eyes until the awkwardness had done its job and I grew tired of waiting to be told what I already knew.
    “Ah,” I said, and rose from my chair.
    The submanager spoke without showing a hint of surprise or acknowledging that a long silence had passed. “You have two weeks of vacation pay coming, and a generous...,” he paused to shuffle some papers and find the one he was looking for, “a not unreasonable severance package.” He stood and reached a hand toward me across his desk, and his forearm knocked over a framed photograph of an ugly little girl who, for some reason, was facing the visitor's chair instead of his own.
    “It's not you, of course, Finch. Tough times. You know how it is. And you should be proud that you've done such a fine job with...,” he scanned his papers again, “at brand awareness. You should interpret this... readjustment as testimony to how valuable you've been to the Second Nature family. How effectively you've fulfilled our goals. And if there's anything we can do for you in the future, naturally...”
    I nodded as the submanager pumped away at my hand, grinding my knuckles against one another like a fistful of marbles. Then I walked back to my cube, past co-workers intensely interested in computer screens flickering with meaningless spreadsheets, conspicuous in their casual attempts to avoid looking at me as I passed. I sat in my chair for a moment, rolling back and forth on the semiopaque plastic carpet protector, wondering if there was a way I could steal it. It was, in fact, a very comfortable chair; the carpet protector I could do without. Of the things in the cube I might actually be able to take out of the building, there wasn't much I wanted to keep. There weren't any photographs tacked to my walls, no figurines, statuettes, or novelty trophies standing on the desk or on the adjustable shelves. Not a single piece of promotional swag from the sales conferences I never attended, not even a tote bag or obscenely outsized golf umbrella. I kept no extra shoes under my desk and no spare sweater for days when the office was cold—and the office had never been cold, I realized then for the first time, and it had never been hot for that matter; it was always generically, uncomfortably tepid. There was just the computer, not actually mine, and a filing cabinet overstuffed long ago with paper versions of all the same documents stored on the computer and backed up in several locations both on-site and off. And there was a plastic model of the company logo, which I suppose was some sort of plant but had always looked to me like a Martian.
    In the end I took only my miniature fountain, in its gray basin made to look like concrete, whatever the material actually was. I pulled the fountain's plug from the overcrowded power strip under my desk, and the whir of the electric motor had never seemed so loud as when it went quiet. The water flowed for a split-second longer due to leftover force from the tiny vacuum the pump had created, then settled into the basin, becalmed.
    The computer had fallen asleep during my meeting with the submanager, but