Page 2

CHAPTER TWO

I stared at the calendar on my screen, watching the timeline creep closer to 4:15. Anybody who scheduled a meeting this late in the day should genuinely be charged with a crime.

It was with Dale, a boss who I’d learned over the last year didn’t really care about whether I was doing good work, but rather how good my work made him look.

Even worse, because he was gay and I’m a lesbian, he thought we had some kind of kinship, like we were in a secret club. We weren’t: he was a vain, petty man who clearly had disdain for most other people around him, including other queer people. I’d heard him say so many cutting remarks, so many terrible things about Lark, a non-binary graphic designer who occasionally worked with us, that I almost quit the last time he did it. So, us being united in the LGBTQ+ spectrum didn’t make us friends and didn’t make him a better person to me. It wasn’t just me, the other queer people in the company despised him too.

Plus, one of the gay programmers I worked with said that he would pitifully hit on men he knew were married whenever he went to business conferences, and he always struck out. That last bit gave me a bit of glee that I kept with me.

My phone buzzed. I looked down at it and saw a text from Emma.

Are you back at your place yet?

No…I’m in the office today

But it’s after 4 and I know you’ve already written twice as many lines of code and crushed more bugs than your male counterparts. By the measure of your labor, you should have gone home hours ago.

I smiled at the message. Emma’s methods of praising me were always oblique, but they were genuine.

I have a 415 meeting, I’ll probably leave right after that.

4:15? What kind of an asshole schedules a meeting at 4:15?

I smirked and opened my company chat program and pulled a picture of Dale he shared today, a testament to just how boring he was.

This guy ??

He lives in LA and goes to Outback Steakhouse to celebrate his birthday? Vi, please promise me we’ll never get that boring

I don’t think we could even get remotely boring even if we tried ?? - I’ll call you when I’m done for the day.

Please do, and when you do, I’m going to tell you to come over to my apartment so I can suspend you from the ceiling and make you come so hard you’ll forget what day it is

?? fuck, Em, I will definitely call you the moment I’m free ??

I put my phone away when I saw the time had hit 4:13. As fun as it would be to flirt with my girlfriend right now, there was nothing fun about being unbearably horny in a meeting…well, at least not when Dale is involved.

I walked down the hall to the conference room. The lights were dimmed at this part of the day as most people had already left and the motion-activated fixtures decided we didn’t need illumination.

From the moment I entered the small conference room, it was clear that the vibe was off. Dale sat at the far end of the conference table next to a woman I didn’t recognize. She had an envelope in front of her and that practiced neutral expression that all HR people seemed to be experts in. Dale always had his laptop or an iPad in front of him because he had to pretend he was busy at all times…but this time, he didn’t.

My stomach became lead, and I found it impossible to walk normally. I could tell what a meeting like this was from a thousand miles away.

“Take a seat, Violet” Dale said, his tone hushed. I think he was attempting to be soothing.

And he called me fucking Violet. This man who made efforts to remember everyone’s pronouns would regularly call me Violet no matter how many times I told him I went by Vi. He had to be doing it intentionally, especially right now.

I sat down and put my laptop in front of me. The aluminum body clunked against the glass of the table and echoed on the off-white eggshell walls.

This wasn’t what I was thinking. I was just being paranoid.

“Uh, hi.” I said, settling in to my seat.

“Violet, have you met Genevieve?” Dale said, indicating the woman. She was small and vibrant, dark curls cinched back to reveal a pair of ruby earrings dangling from black hardware.

“No” I said, my mouth dry.

“Genevieve is from HR, and she has some things for you today” Dale kept a quiet, measured tone to his voice, a tone I’d never heard from him before.

“Ok…” single syllables were all I could muster.

“So, Violet, the reason I called you in here today, I think you know the reason”

“I genuinely don’t, Dale.” I said.

“Violet, your performance and appearance lately has been…”

My eardrums filled with a drone of static flowing over the entirety of my senses. My neck prickled with adrenaline and sweat, and the muscles at the small of my back hardened to granite.

“You…told me I was doing fine. Last week…” I stammered, trying to form the words. I touched my hair, which I’d started dyeing various shades of shocking pink about a year ago, maybe causing envy in Dale, whose baldness was a counterattack to his disappearing hairline. I ran my fingers along the tight braids Emma had wrangled my hair into using her expert-level tying skills, leaving two beautiful looping spirals at the back of my head, “And…what is it…the braids? The color?”

“Now that you mention it, we’ve also had multiple complaints about your appearance.”

This was absolute bullshit, as I wore nice, clean clothes, something some of our senior programmers couldn’t manage…unless the dress code suddenly ca lled for stained and distressed video game t-shirts.

“Ok, whatever, literally last week, Dale, you said I was doing fine and my performance was…I think you even said admirable!”

“I don’t really recall telling you that, Vi.” Dale admonished, glancing over at Genevieve, “The truth is, the last few mon?—“

“—no, Dale, you fucking told me just last fucking week that I was doing fine.”

“There’s no need for that language” Dale said, his inner schoolmarm slipping out. This lying motherfucker.

“I’ll use whatever fucking language I want because I know what you’re doing to me right now, Dale…I’m not stupid, you little fuck.” I seethed, the savage and pointed Vi coming out that for so much of my life had been suppressed, had laid dormant, and as a result I let people like fucking Dale walk all over me. Not anymore. If he wanted to hurt me, he’d have to do a hell of a lot more.

Genevieve leaned in, trying to gain control of the situation. “We have some formalities, Violet, pl-“

“—My name is Vi. Vi is what’s on my employee ID that I’m going to be turning in to you in the next few minutes if I know where this is going, Genevieve…or is it Ginny…or Gwen, or Gene? You see, some people go by nicknames and have very deep-set feelings about people respecting them.”

“It’s…ah…it’s Genevieve, and I’m sorry Vi…” the woman shrunk back in her chair, clearly stunned by my behavior. I was a little bit too, honestly, but I didn’t regret one bit of the venom. Why was it that people expected you, especially when you were a woman, to just be OK with them doing the shittiest things to you as long as they were calm about it? Why did they get to inflict harm and ruin your life, and you were just supposed to sit there and understand it was just part of life?

I looked over at Dale, and he had an expression of frustration and latent anger on his face . I knew he thought this would be easy, because he thought I was a docile lamb that he could lead to slaughter…but he was remembering the Vi from six months ago, not the one who took life by the horns, who had gained unknown depths of confidence and self-worth, and, hey, not to mention nabbed an unbelievably sexy girlfriend that helped her in discovering all of those things.

Genevieve leaned forward again, restarting the routine she had to do for all these things. “Vi, your performance has been noted by Dale to be lacking,” Genevieve said. “That’s why we have you here today”

“Yes” Dale said, picking up the slack from his lackey. “And today we have made the very difficult decision to terminate your employment.”

It was a lie, clearly. I outperformed other people, all men, on my team constantly. The difference now was that during the last six months, I started taking more credit for the work I did. I didn’t let Dale soak up the praise and adulations, didn’t let the senior programmers who mostly coasted by on ‘you have to keep me here, I built this’ bullshit, never concerned with innovating, never concerned with making anything better.

“You…can’t….” Is all I could muster. It didn’t feel like I was in reality any more.

“We actually can and we are,” Dale said, seeming to take more than a bit of glee in this exchange, “so we’ve had your desk packed up while we were talking and everything from that is probably already sitting by your car.”

“No, Dale, legally, you fucking can’t . I have a contract, I just signed on for another two years less than a month ago.”

“And Violet, if you had taken the time to read that contract, if you had…the attention to detail required to perform this job to the level we expect, you would see that there are breach clauses in there that say if you’re not meeting the performance threshold in all KPMs, we can terminate the contract without penalty.” Dale rolled his shoulders back and straightened his small, weak frame, pasting a self-satisfied grin on his face. It felt like he’d rehearsed that last bit, said it in the mirror to himself this morning, asked his even more boring husband if it needed any tweaks.

I realized now that he’d been planning this for a while, probably ever since I’d started speaking up and wanting to get credit for the work I did, and all the cleanup I did for those lazy senior programmers. I thought back to my evaluations over the past few months, and even though they were based on quantifiable data, there was always one metric just slightly below the threshold. Not by much, but just enough that if he strung them together over six months, he had the narrative he needed.

It was subtle and calculated, pure spite. Bump a figure down by a couple percentage points, conveniently forget some things when putting reviews together. It was so easy to do without raising suspicion, even suspicion from the employee whose career you were assassinating.

I sat in silence, slumped back in my chair, venom boiling in my veins. Three years of playing along. Three years of acting like I gave a shit about this company, and I was good at acting like it. Now, all of that evaporated.

I stood up, my ears ringing and my heart skittering like a seismometer. I wanted to jump across the table and grab Dale by his stupid tie, throttle him, externalize the internal pain he’d inflicted on me?—

“Vi, we just need you to leave your badge here on the table, it’s already been deactivated” Genevieve said, as if I was going to come back to this place and try to get back in.

I reached into my purse and pulled out the badge, attached to keys to unlock…whatever, I didn’t even remember. I threw them down on the table, the metal scraping against the glass and leaving a decent chip in the surface. I pointed to the door behind them that lead toward the lobby. “This fucking door?” I said, knowing the answer, so I began walking before they could reply.

“Thank you for your time here, Violet” Dale said meekly

“Yeah, absolutely go fuck yourself, Dale.” I said. I opened the door and slammed it behind me so hard it rattled the TV on the wall.

—

When I got to the parking lot, everything from my desk was gathered into two haphazardly packed boxes sitting by the bumper of my car. Who did this? Did HR have some army of goblins running around doing their bidding?

The how didn’t matter, not now at least. I popped the trunk open and placed the first box in, then the second. So many hours of my life, so much time spent, so much useless shit accumulated for no real reason, now shoved into two cardboard boxes that previously carried cleaning supplies.

Before I closed the trunk, a shimmer of blue caught my eye. At the top of one of the boxes was a fist-sized glob of dark blue glass, a paperweight to celebrate my first year here. “CONGRATUALTIONS VIOLET” engraved on the top, the disregard for my chosen name something that at the moment I saw as maybe a little silly or forgetful on their part, but now knew as a sign of utter disdain for me. The typo in ‘Congratulations’ was yet another bitter irony after being fired for not having attention to detail. Detail was all I had, the only thing I paid attention to.

I picked up the paperweight, felt it in my hand. It was heavy, solid. The glass was cold in the late-day heat and felt good against my palm. Also, what the fuck use does a fucking programmer have for a goddamn paperweight?

I looked up and saw Dale’s shiny black SUV, front facing outward because he’s the kind of asshole that backed into parking spots. It was too much vehicle for anyone, but Dale bragged about it as a status symbol for months after getting it. He still mentioned at least once a week tha t it cost $179,653, a figure he had seared into my mind.

I weighed the solid chunk of glass in my hand and gauged the distance to Dale’s monstrosity. About twenty feet. Much shorter than the forty feet I used to regularly scream fastballs from the softball pitcher’s mound to the batter’s box. I squared my shoulders and faced the SUV head on. It had been years since I stood on the mound, but I felt the muscles loosen and awaken like I’d just gotten out of the bullpen.

I swung my arm back and let the paperweight fly in one fluid motion. The blue orb spiraled forward in a corkscrew, the perfect fastball. I don’t think I had even thrown a fastball that vicious when it was literally my job to do it. I felt a prick of pain in my rotator cuff, but I was relieved to see I hadn’t lost any speed. A second later, the paperweight slammed into the glossy windshield, punching a clean hole through it and sending a shockwave that made a spiderweb pattern across the rest of the glass. The rearview mirror bounced around on a tether of wires before coming to a limp hanging stop. The ball went through the cabin, cracking the rear windshield but not going through it. Damn.

It felt like an hour before I finally registered the sound of the alarm going off, blaring loud, the headlights flashing in sync.

I allowed myself a smirk before I shut the trunk and got in my car, driving away just as Dale emerged from the building with his hands gripping his bald head.

Good fucking riddance.