Page 42

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Naughty List

Jake

“What is this place?” Dodi asks.

What this place is, is old and decrepit and dusty. I turn to see Dodi frozen in the foyer, eyes wide, and it’s impossible not to feel embarrassed. Laura and I did the best we could—garland woven through the curved banister, tinsel stars dangling in doorways—but there was only so much a Band-Aid treatment could accomplish.

She sways a little on the spot with Cat asleep in her arms and examines the crimson wallpaper and the old, dark floors, shining now from my polishing. She peers around the doorway into the music room, where a ponderous old piano sits quietly and thinks on its youth. A tarnished chandelier twists perpetually overhead, disturbed by a draft that never stops, and old bookcases line the walls.

At Grant’s, all the surfaces were new and smooth, and easy to clean, but here at Bill’s, it’s impossible. Carved wood collects dust, rugs sponge up dirt and smells. When Dodi looks up at the plaster molding around the light fixture above us, I notice cobwebs. I don’t know how I missed those. Her eyes track the stairs to the halfway landing, where a grandfather clock mutters darkly.

And then she says something that surprises me: “This place is beautiful. Who lives here?”

I try the words out for the first time. “My grandfather.” Laura hadn’t asked. She’s been conditioned not to pry.

Dodi peers at the photos of the smiling young man with the glasses hanging in the hallway, understanding on her face.

“This way,” I say, and she follows me upstairs over creaking steps to a room with a four-poster bed.

She deposits Cat between the fresh sheets, and I leave her there, tucking the old satin coverlet around Cat. I go to my room and finally change into fresh clothes from the bag I left at Dodi’s.

She’s hovering in the hallway, waiting for me. She follows me back downstairs, and we swig directly from the half-full bottle of wine together while I unpack the Halloween decorations.

“What are you doing?” Dodi asks peevishly, but I ignore her.

I spread fake cobwebs all over the tree and hang her ghost over the mantel.

“That looks stupid,” she says self-consciously when I put the skeleton in an armchair by the fire, and “You’re an idiot,” when I place Verity’s head on the mantelpiece.

But when I finish and return to her where she sits on the rug in front of the crackling fire, the ratty rolls of Christmas paper and her unwrapped gifts piled up beside her, the wine bottle cradled in her lap, she looks at me with an expression in her eyes that makes me feel warm to my very fingertips.

“I just know you have tape somewhere,” she says.

I do.

We’ve done this before, but it goes a little faster when you’re wrapping boxes instead of limbs. She’s still trash at wrapping presents, so I let her do the taping. The firelight rims her cheeks and glints in her hair while we work, and no one else will ever see her as she looks right now, privately, secretly beautiful for an audience of one, in the middle of the night, while the house sleeps and the snow drifts up against the mullioned windows.

“What’s the list about?” she asks quietly without looking up.

“What are you doing at work on your laptop?”

A small, bitter smile twists her lips, and she hesitates. “I’m afraid to tell you what I’ve been doing,” she says at last.

“Why?”

“Because it’s probably a lot less interesting than you think.” She raises her eyes to mine, dark and deep like twin wells. “You always look at me like I’m…I don’t know. Mysterious. Fascinating. Not just a tired single mom with no life. You’re going to be so disappointed to know the truth.” She presses a piece of tape over the edge of paper I hold in place for her.

“After— everything —I didn’t work for a while. I couldn’t. I had Cat and…” She stares into the fire. “Well, what do you think came up anytime a prospective employer googled my name? It was a hard time. And finally, when Cat was ready to start school, an old friend reached out and told me they’d help me get a job. I moved here to start fresh. My friend was in HR, and I managed to get in without anyone doing that Google search. But then”—she purses her lips and shrugs—“one week in, the layoffs started. My department was gutted. My supervisor got axed. Her supervisor got axed. My friend in HR was let go. I think I wasn’t laid off because I was still being added to the system—I don’t know. She told me to lie low and see if I could get another paycheck or two, and to line up my exit plan. I had no job prospects, and I had so much debt already. All I could come up with was to go back to school and live off student loans. So I got my application in. I was accepted. The loans came through. Except…the termination never came. Then the pandemic happened and we all started working from home.

“Another paycheck came in, and another, and another. An entire year went by. I kept getting cc’d to meeting invitations, so I kept making appearances on Zoom. I kept my camera off. I was never given any work to do, so I worked on my school assignments. And then one day I got an email telling me work from home was over and that I had to report to Doug. I walked into his office, and he said something about how nice it was to be back at work where the pretty girls are, and I just…I couldn’t. I turned around and walked right back out again.”

I can picture Doug sitting at his desk, damp, pink-faced, realizing he’d just created another HR mess for himself, panicking.

“And…he just gave me a wide berth after that. I got myself a cubicle, but then I stumbled upon my old annex. They were still on the hook for the lease, even though they didn’t have the bodies to fill it. I stole an office, and continued with my online studies, and now I’ve almost finished my MBA.” She straightens a little, reaching the part of the story she’s proud of.

“I won’t have to worry about finding an understanding employer anymore because I’m going to start my own consulting business. Isn’t that what everyone wants? To be their own boss, picking and choosing their own clients, working their own hours? I would have more time for Cat.”

Nothing about this confession is surprising. Dodi is resourceful and self-protective and used to figuring things out on her own. I can picture her, a one-woman show, swirling in and out of boardrooms in all black, aloof, sharp, sexy—and all those qualities only making clients want her more. She’s a natural-born shark. Hardworking, driven. Any enterprise she put her mind to would go fuckbusters.

“What will you consult on?”

She scowls like I’m an idiot. But I’m learning to speak Dodi, and I realize I’ve embarrassed her. She wanted to impress me, but instead I poked a finger right into the gaping hole in her plan: she hasn’t had time to figure out her angle yet.

She licks her lips. “Transformational change within a holistic framework, obviously.”

“Or maybe they can hire you to sniff out plainclothes serial killers on payroll.”

Her dark eyes flick up to mine, strange, mysterious. She doesn’t smile at my joke.

“And the Las Vegas winnings are seed money?”

“No. My problem all along has been how to leave my job at Spencer & Sterns without making them aware of my existence. Once they realize I’ve been taking a paycheck all this time…but I have the money now. I can pay them back.”

“But the promotion—”

She shakes her head. “I can’t stay there. I need a fresh start.” She clears her throat primly. “I’ve revealed my boring secret to you. Your ‘Terminate’ list better be equally boring. Is it a list of people who stole your lunch from the break room fridge?”

It’s even more boring.

Long before I started playing serial killer games with Dodi, I’d invented an elaborate spy game of my own. Something to make me feel like my life was more exciting than it was. Something to distract me, a mental exercise to get through the boredom and loneliness. The alternative was to stick a Bic pen up my nose and swirl.

Dodi looks at me expectantly.

“It’s literally just a list of people to be terminated,” I admit. “I do this everywhere I work. I calculate how much money the worst employees are costing the company.”

She blinks.

“And?” she prompts.

“That’s it. I compare their value to their cost—their salary and everything else—and I put them on my list.”

She leans back. “What?” She frowns. “How do you know their salaries?”

Well, this is the less boring, slightly more illegal part. “I look at payroll.” I have the urge to brag. “I also look at emails and HR records.”

She stares at me.

“I can usually get into a company’s systems pretty quick. People are idiots.”

It’s not just getting into the systems. It’s eavesdropping on watercooler gossip while colleagues complain about one another. It’s keeping my head down in the elevator at the end of the day while the C-suite assistants vent to each other about top floor perverts. It’s taking advantage of my ability to blend into the gray corporate decor to stalk the people on my list as they go about their day. It was fun, in its own way.

“You’re a recreational bean counter,” she says after a long pause. “Cool beans.” She stacks a present under the tree. “So it’s a list of unprofitable employees. Cynthia saw all that in the spreadsheet and got a massive hard-on.”

It’s the first time I’ve shared my list with someone who could implement it.

“But what’s the point?” Dodi says irritably. “Why do you care about making Spencer & Sterns more profitable?”

“I don’t.”

“Last I checked, Doug and I are on there. But maybe he and I are living the dream, pulling a salary for doing dick all, sticking it to the man—”

“It’s not a list of freeloaders and incompetents.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “So what is it?”

“It’s the bullies.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“The perverts. The predators. They’re impossible to fire in these big companies. Instead, their victims get fired, or resign.”

I hate bullies. I grew up with a bully.

“But companies care about the bottom line,” I continue. “It’s all they care about. So I make these spreadsheets to show how expensive they are to the company. Assholes are very expensive.” If they seem valuable and essential on the surface, it’s an illusion. They waste people’s time. They terrorize their colleagues. They cause turnover and intensive HR investigations and lawsuits. They steal. I add it all up: HR salaries, the cost of losing a client, the cost of training a new secretary, the cost of sick days when a colleague is too stressed to come in. The cost of stolen paper clips.

She stares at me.

I always fantasized about handing in my list when I left each office. Although sometimes the bullies took care of themselves. Three of the worst offenders on my lists were suicides. Jumpers. Usually after a failed HR investigation. They weren’t fired, but the stress from the investigation must have gotten to them. Alleged Paper Pusher victims—fuel for the urban legend, I suppose.

“I was at the top of your list,” she says, her voice low and menacing.

“Yes.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Why?”

Why, she asks. I take her in, her aggressive red lips, her sharp claws, the tension in her body even now, curled up on the floor beneath a Christmas tree I procured for her.

“Because you were being a nasty little bully to me.”

Her cheeks turn dark.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

She bites her lip. “I’m not a very nice person.”

I’ve always respected that about her. There are so many other more important qualities. Integrity. Bravery. Kindness—which is completely different from being nice. And it’s dangerous for a woman to be nice to the wrong man. I knew that even before listening to her murder podcasts.

“The thing is,” she continues, tilting her head to one side in that way she does, her voice dropping to a whisper, “you’ve always scared the shit out of me.”

It’s a dark little secret she’s been clutching tight. This is Dodi finally lying down and exposing her belly to me.

“My serial killer vibes.”

“Sure. The serial killer vibes.” There are twin flames in her eyes from the fireplace. Her voice is soft. “You’re not afraid of me, though.”

Not even a little. The thing about Dodi’s hardness is it’s brittle. Her sharpness is from all the jagged edges left from every time she’s been bumped and dropped and knocked around, when each trauma sprouted protective shards, poking out like spines. Glass-like, glittering, cold as ice, or diamonds, or some substance that will cut and freeze you at the same time, the softness inside protected from thin-skinned idiots who make a clumsy grab for it. But I’ve never been afraid of her sharp edges. When I lean into them, my own jagged edges line up with hers. I give way where she needs me to, and the gaps missing from her contour draw me out into my own authentic shape, too.

“Am I still on that list?” she asks, leaning in close.

I shake my head, and my voice is a whisper. “I took you off ages ago.”

“I’m glad,” Dodi says, her breath on my lips.

She kisses me, while the clock on the mantel ticks sedately past four in the morning and the fire crackles, Bill snores in the sitting room next to the kitchen, Laura sleeps upstairs in the room next to Cat’s, and the house is as still as a tomb. With the sort of confidence I wish I could summon at will, Dodi rests her head on my shoulder and takes my hand in hers, and it’s settled: I’m not moving an inch until my flesh peels from my skeleton and my bones turn to dust. We fall asleep.