Look at You

Chapter 30

30

Doug's latest project is a big one. The world's most popular internet search company has decided to plant its Midwestern headquarters in Baker. Our Baker. This wouldn't affect me on any normal day, because I'm the furthest thing from electronically inclined, and I don't care much for the next big thing. But as it happens, Doug does. And this isn't any normal day.

Doug's already two months into the project of redoing the entire building—hold up—with all employees still inside it. The lobby is done, and it's spectacular. White marble as far as the eye can see with perfectly contrasting iron accents. It makes me forget how useless I feel waking up in Riley's spare bedroom every day. It makes me, for once, enjoy the fact I have free will again. I feel like I'm anywhere else in the world except for Baker. That is, until I head upstairs to any of the other floors.

They're all the exact same. None of them have been touched since the 80s, which is on trend with the rest of this town, and saying the place needs work is generous. The place should have been torched the second they bought it.

I'm supposed to be getting a feel for the building so I can provide Doug with my very best opinions, although we both know the only ones that matter are his own. I've been walked around the building by one of the receptionists, and have now been deemed suitable to explore without parental supervision. Joy.

I decide to start top down, jamming my finger into the elevator's 8th-floor key.

I step out of the elevator and wrinkle my nose. The entire building just reeks of mothballs. And up here, on the eighth floor, it's clear why that scent overpowers everything else. The place is a ghost town.

The floor is huge, with three long working desks and cubicle dividers separating the rows of computers on top of them. One desk could probably fit 25 people alone, but in total, there are five. Five people across all three tables. It's easy to do my assessment without a hassle. I take in the orientation of the tables, do a quick half-lap around the room, then head to the floor's communal kitchen.

Even the kitchen is uneasily empty. No coffee pot, no used grounds dusting the counter. I pull open the fridge and see one item in it. A handful of tinfoil-wrapped pizza and that is all. I snort.

I had cut myself a few sheets of draft paper this morning at Archer's, so I pull it out from my toolbelt and lay it flat on the kitchen counter, getting to work on a quick sketch of the current layout.

I'm almost through with a rough draft when I hear footsteps, and then, the fridge is opening in my peripheral vision. It's a man, but that's all I can tell before he's ducking out of my line of sight. I focus back on the draft.

"I know you," a voice says from behind me. It's a little shocking because it's the deepest voice I have ever heard. A voice for a man named Clarence, or Wolf, or Knox. I spin a picture in my mind of what he looks like. It's giving me hipster lumberjack. 

I suddenly remember he's talking to me. I know you, he had said. Like my God damn name and felony record were printed on the back of my t-shirt in red ink. Fucking prick. I don't bother turning around. "No, you don't." Because no one knows me. They've read an article or looked me up in the yearbook. They don't fucking know me.

"I do, though." I can't even think about what my pencil's doing because now all I want is to break out my old genetics textbook and figure out how I can get these vocal genes passed down to my own sons.

I give him the satisfaction of a single look over my shoulder, mostly because I need to glue a face to this lumberjack ass voice.

My eyebrows shoot upwards because it's him. Unemployment agency O'Malley's kid. He's wearing the same uniform as always. Unblemished crew neck sweatshirt, just-off-the-rack jeans, perfectly worn-in Nikes. It's the first time I notice his shorter eyelashes, the dark lining of his eyelids, his olive skin tone in the middle of February. He tilts his head slightly and his eyes—already almond-shaped—grow narrower.