“My Girl Friday,” Hardy says, sweeping past.
Jade has no idea what kind of pornographic pet name that might be, and doesn’t think she wants to know.
Hardy stops at the hall, loosening the brown tie she’s only now realizing he’s got on.
“You were supposed to start tomorrow,” he tells her, his voice booming through the station.
“Early bird gets the maggot,” Jade says, flashing an evil smile.
“Eat what you will, eat what you will…” Hardy says in farewell, fading down the hall, still working on his tie.
“Very proper for a young lady,” Meg tells Jade without having to look over to say it.
“I’m a woman, hear me roar,” Jade says back, and licks the next envelope with as much attitude as she can pack into it, imagining her tongue lacerated by a thousand cuts, her teeth coating in blood.
An hour later Jade’s on stack seven of infinity, and every time she looks up, her vision is stained pale green. The corner in the wall over by the copy machine is actually a giant fold in-process, and Jade, inside that white envelope, has checkboxes for eyes. The stool she’s stuck on has a sticky surface some greater tongue has already licked. Meg is a greasy black hair that’s fallen into the works to mess everything up, one Jade can’t quite pinch up or flick away.
She raises her hand and Meg calls on her.
“Yes?”
“Bathroom?”
“Complete sentence, please?”
“May I visit the single stall women’s restroom whose toilet I know better than I want to already?” Jade says with full-on defeat. “The one I’ve been scrubbing already for the past—”
Meg chaperones her down the hall.
“Receptionista and ladies’ room attendant,” Jade says. “This is a full-service station, isn’t it?”
“Feel free to wiggle out the window in there,” Meg says.
“It’s rusted open.”
“The night is an embryo…” Jade says, leaning in. Washing her hands, she catches a flash of herself in the mirror.
“Nightmare Girl to the rescue,” she says, “up up and—”
Meg escorts her back to her station that feels like a cell, in the town that’s definitely a prison.
This is such a great plan for glomming onto information about whatever happened in Terra Nova, yes. But, on the sulky way past Meg’s desk, Jade does at least clock that wire-screen pencil holder that Hardy deposited some thing into: TRANSCRIPTIONS.
Well well well.
“There anything else I can do instead?” Jade whines to Meg.
“When you’re done with the referendums you can apply postage, yes,” Meg says, her eyes holding on to Jade’s, maybe to see her flinch.
“More licking, yay,” Jade says, and takes her stool.
For the next two stacks she imagines going fast enough that she sweats, fast enough that she can rub the tacky backside of the eventual stamps into her swampy armpits before applying them to the envelopes.
Get your entertainment where you can find it, right?
For now Jade has to make do with the grey smudges her stained fingers are still leaving on the pristine white envelopes, which she guesses will make the people of Proofrock aware these are hand-stuffed, not machine-.
Like that matters. Like any of this does.
This time when Jade lowers her forehead to the desktop for just a moment’s escape, she forgets that she’s awake, so that when she comes to, she’s all alone in the front office, like she’s been sucked into some Freddyfied version of where she just was.
She looks to the doorway for a bleating lamb, to the other doorway for a bodybag sliding away, and then to the water cooler, to see if it’s just water in there.
It is. For now.
Jade taps her right foot on the ground, testing it.
Not oatmeal. Same old floor.
Maybe this isn’t a dream. Meaning… meaning Meg didn’t wake her this time? Jade dials her hearing up, can just make out Hardy in lecture mode in his office, Meg’s attentive burble filling in the empty spaces, and some quiet stretches between the two of them that’s probably some official on speakerphone.
When Jade tries to glide over to the Important Pencil Holder on Meg’s desk, she finds, moments too late, that her legs are asleep, so it’s more of a stumbling lurch, one that dislodges an inbox of metal-case clipboards, sends them sailing over the edge.
Jade dive-falls, just keeps them from rattling to the floor.
She sets them gently back in their place, checks the hall again because Meg can appear at any moment, and then she’s in Meg’s chair, is fumbling for the digital recorder Hardy dropped in the pencil holder.