The Hating Game Read Free Page A

and can faintly see a tiny triangle of shadowed cleavage.
    â€œIf you buttoned it any higher, we wouldn’t see your face,” Joshua says to his computer screen as he logs off.
    â€œPerhaps you could tell your boss to look at my face occasionally.” I also log off.
    â€œHe’s probably trying to see your circuit board. Or wondering what kind of fuel you run on.”
    I shrug on my coat. “Just fueled by my hate for you.”
    Josh’s mouth twitches once, and I nearly had him there. I watch him roll down a neutral expression. “If it bothers you, you should speak to him. Stand up for yourself. So, painting your nails tonight, desperately alone?”
    Lucky guess on his part? “Yes. Masturbating and crying into your pillow tonight, Doctor Josh ?”
    He looks at the top button of my shirt. “Yes. And don’t call me that.”
    I swallow down a bubble of laughter. We jostle each other in an unfriendly way as we get into the elevator. He hits B, but I hit G.
    â€œHitchhiking?”
    â€œCar’s at the shop.” I step into my ballet flats and tuck my heels into my bag. Now I’m even shorter. In the dull polish of the elevator doors I can see that I barely come halfway up his bicep. I look like a Chihuahua next to a Great Dane.
    The elevator doors open to the building foyer. The world outside B&G is a blue haze; refrigerator cold, filled with rapists andmurderers and lightly sprinkling rain. A sheet of newspaper blows past, right on cue.
    He holds the elevator door open with one enormous hand and leans out to look at the weather. Then he swings those dark blue eyes to mine, his brow beginning to crease. The familiar bubble forms in my head. I wish he was my friend . I burst it with a pin.
    â€œI’ll give you a ride,” he forces out.
    â€œUgh, no way,” I say over my shoulder and run.

Chapter 2
    I t’s Cream Shirt Wednesday. Joshua is off on a late lunch. He’s made a few more comments to me lately about things I like and do. They have been so accurate I’m pretty sure he’s been snooping through my stuff. Knowledge is power, and I don’t have much.
    First, I conduct a forensic examination of my desk. Both Helene and Mr. Bexley despise computerized calendars, and so we have to keep matching paper schedule books like we’re Dickensian law clerks. In mine, there’s only Helene’s appointments. I obsessively lock my computer, even if I go to the printer. My unlocked computer in the vicinity of Joshua? I may as well hand him the nuclear codes now.
    Back at Gamin Publishing, my desk was a fort made of books. I kept my pens in the gaps between their spines. When I was unpacking in the new office, I saw how sterile Joshua kept his desk and felt incredibly childish. I took my Word of the Day calendar and Smurf figurines home again.
    Before the merger, I had a best friend at work. Val Stone and I would sit on the worn-out leather couches in the break room and play our favorite game: systematically defacing photographs of beautiful people in magazines. I’d add a moustache onto NaomiCampbell. Val would then ink out a missing tooth. Soon it was an onslaught of scars and eye patches and bloodshot eyes and devil horns until the picture was so ruined we’d get bored and start another.
    Val was one of the staff who was cut and she was furious I didn’t give her some kind of a warning. Not that I would have been allowed to, even if I had known. She didn’t believe me. I turn slowly, and my reflection spins off twenty different surfaces. I see myself in every size from music box to silver screen. My cherry-red skirt flips out and I pirouette again once, just for the hell of it, trying to shake away the sick, troubled feeling I get whenever I think of Val.
    Anyway, my audit confirms that my desk has a red, black, and blue pen. Pink Post-its. One tube of lipstick. A box of tissues for blotting my lipstick and tears of