More barking through the phone. Ian sighed again. “What women gamer group protests?” More muffled man yelling. “Well, we actually do have a pro-woman game that is being led by a girl . . . I mean female employee. Its working title is, uh, Ultimate Apocalypse.”
Oh. My. God. He was pitching my game idea!
My satire/joke/parody game idea. I almost popped up from my seat to yell at him, NOOOOOOOOOOO! but my circumstances were precarious at that moment. What good reason did I have for why I’d been in my car with the seat fully reclined during work hours?
“I loved the idea when it was pitched to me!” Ian exclaimed. “It’s a shooter game, but it’s an all-male team of, um, strippers, fighting off zombies, vampires, aliens, and guys like Kim Jong-un. We want to get more women playing shooter games, and we think sex appeal is the way to do it. We may make it a mobile game instead of a console game, to help us diversify.”
The yelling subsided and the man on the phone talked for a while. What was he saying? Hopefully he was giving Ian a sorry, it is with mixed emotions that we need to fire your ass speech. Pitching the world’s most absurd game idea to a key member of the board out of sheer desperation could be grounds for termination, right?
“You think the other board members will go for this strategy, too? We want to diversify, for sure, especially if it draws in a bigger female audience. I’ll make sure we have our female producers lead this effort and get some good PR out of it. Thank you so much for calling. We can’t wait to get started! Goodbye!”
After a few seconds of silence, Ian screamed, “Shit! Fuck me! Fuck-fuck-fuck!,” which echoed throughout the garage. He paced around his car a few seconds and cussed all the way to the elevator. It dinged open, and Ian’s grating voice finally faded away.
Well, fuck me, too.
The only good thing to come of this was that I wasn’t tired anymore.
THE FIERCE, HAIR-TANGLING wind nearly pushed me into the Belle Towne Tavern. For once, I had arrived early enough to be the one to negotiate our trio’s seating situation. Belle Towne had become our regular stomping ground because it had everything we wanted: Candace had her complimentary serving of truffle-salt popcorn, Jane got a wide selection of top-shelf imported vodka for her martinis, and I got what I wanted most out of a bar experience: half-price happy hour till nine P.M. And bonus, they had five stalls in the women’s restroom. For me, just this warranted an automatic five-star Yelp review.
The hostess seated me near the front window at a small circular table with barely enough room to hold a tealight candle.
“This table looks a little small for three people. Any chance we could get seated over there?” I asked, nodding my head toward the side of the room with several empty booths.
She glanced in that direction and then looked back at me. “There’s less ambiance there. And it’s dark.”
I didn’t think I looked like an ambiance kinda girl. I grabbed the tiny tealight. “This’ll help. I can bring it over.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. You’ll get less action in a booth. But the seats are more comfy.”
Before I could ask her why she thought I needed some “action,” Candace breezed through the door and chirped, “Oooh, good job on the booth!” while Jane slid in across from me.
Candace and I had gone to college together and were best friends then, and had been since. Jane was Candace’s childhood friend and former postgraduation roommate, which was how I had come to know her over the years. Jane was like the Anti-Candace, an ice-queen-triathlon-foodie-juice-cleanse type who worked at an investment bank. Candace, whose cheery demeanor and warmness made you feel good as soon as you saw her, took Jane under her wing and over the years had managed to soften her to the point of tolerability. We were all three just so different. We probably looked like a band of misfit superheroes whenever we walked into any downtown bar.
We peeled off our wet coats and the hostess handed us dinner menus. “Could we have the happy hour ones?” I asked.
She shrugged apologetically. “New owners, new hours. Happy hour ended at seven.”
I looked at my watch. It was 7:01.
Before I could protest, Jane said, “We’ve been coming here for, what do you think, two years now?” She glanced at Candace, then me, then at her Cartier watch. “I’d love to continue our frequent girls nights out here. Could you please ask the new owners if they could stop by our table so we could introduce ourselves?” She pulled out her Gucci wallet, leafed through a few hundred-dollar bills, and pulled out her business card from one of the slots next to her visible AmEx Centurion card.
Jane was one of those friends I hated at first and thought I’d never like. She exuded beauty, success, and good fortune. She had a world-renowned doctor boyfriend. Her job paid more than double my salary. But over the last few years, she’d proven to be a reliable friend, even though my pendulum of feelings toward Jane usually swung between modest like and extreme dislike. I hadn’t seen her in a while despite the fact that she had moved into my apartment building last year, so my current like-to-hate ratio for her was about 80:20, which was an all-time high.
The hostess swept her hand toward us. “Oh, you know, that won’t be necessary. I’m sure we can squeeze in your happy hour drink order. I’ll send over your server and let the owners know you stopped by this evening.” After she took off, I realized that she never even got our names.
A new-on-the-job waitstaff took our happy hour orders: Candace had a Moscow mule, I asked for a half carafe of red house wine (an indeterminate pinot-merlot-cabernet-zin blend). Jane requested a hibiscus dry martini.
When the drinks came, we toasted and took our inaugural sips.
Actually, Candace and Jane sipped. I glugged.
Jane eyed Candace’s copper mug. “You’ve been drinking Moscow mules since I’ve known you,” Jane scoffed. “Do you drink that with your PR clients, too?”
Candace smiled into her brass mug. “I like my mules. Not all of us want to drink overpriced thrice-distilled paint thinner.” She took a sip. “Although this tastes bitter and too sweet. Ew.”
“You want some of this?” I lifted my small carafe and tilted the rim toward her.
“Nah, it’s okay, I’ll tough it out. So how’s the new job?”
Ugh. Job.
I shrugged. “Eh. It’s worse than the last one. But the pay is better, though I work longer hours so maybe it’s a wash.”
“If you hate the job, why don’t you just quit?” Jane asked, pulling out the hibiscus flower from her drink and placing it on her cocktail napkin.
Candace nodded. “I’m with Jane on this one. You shouldn’t stay there if you hate it so much. And you’re probably doing what you always do . . . you take on everything by yourself, keep piling on responsibilities, and then burn out in the process.”
Jane took a slow sip. “You could use some beauty sleep, too.” Thanks, Jane.
I sighed out of my nose. “Look, I have to do a lot of things myself, or it won’t get done. I’m in a new industry now and want people at work to respect me. The only way that’ll happen is if I don’t look weak.” It did beg the question, though, why I gravitated toward careers where I was always sprinting against an escalator always set on “down.”
Just as I thought this let’s grill Melody conversation couldn’t get any worse, Jane asked, “So are you actually dating anyone?”
Midswig, I coughed, and red wine burned the inside of my nose. “Nope.”
Not reading into my one-word, curt reply, she continued with her line of questioning. “No one? Isn’t there that cute guy on the first floor who just moved into our building? Or maybe someone your mom can set you up with? Or anyone at work maybe?”
I shook my head. First-floor guy was gay. Mom’s blind date setups—ugh. And the guys at work? Big nope. Asher was flat-out gross, and Mr. Nepotism Nolan—oh hell no. No elitist jerks. I’d only run into him that one time in the kitchen, and trust me, that encounter was plenty. “My parents are still traveling, probably scouring the planet for a suitable husband for me. And definitely no one at Seventeen Studios fits the bill.”
Jane and Candace exchanged glances.
“Well, maybe before you get too overcommitted at work, you should find time to, uh, get out there more,” Candace said in a concerned tone.
“And not be so picky,” Jane added, her judgy eyebrows peeking over the rim of her wide-rimmed martini glass.
“Hey, I’m not picky!” I practically yelled. “First of all, guys never ask me out. Ever. Never happens at the gym. Or at a bookstore. Or at parties”—I counted to three on my fingers. “So it’s not me being picky when no one’s interested. And before you ask about online dating, that’s not gonna happen. I don’t like the idea of my photos or personal info floating around on the internet.”
I drank the last of my wine directly from the glass carafe. “And I’m always working because if I wasn’t, I’d be at home all alone, drinking cheap rosé, watching Shark Week reruns in my pajamas.”
Candace giggled. “That sounds pretty amazing actually.”