Chapter Fifteen
Griffin
I grind my teeth as I drive to Silicone Dream, the high-tech company whose founder apparently couldn’t spell very well. What’s worse, the founder’s advisors must have also been illiterate.
And yet… The Fullilove family is rich. At least rich enough to have a building on campus named after them.
Another case of money’s inability to buy you a brain. Hmm… Maybe I should do a research paper on that. There has to be a lot of data on the subject.
Upon reflection, it’s become clear that this family is just like my dad. He’s an idiot, too. One who believes that money can make up for all sorts of shortcomings. And a lack of class.
This week’s lectures are shot, since the instruction time is going to be misspent on this bullshit—something my students can’t afford. It’s absurd that Charles wants to force this “case” upon them when they would benefit more from learning how to work with data in Excel, get a decent graph and sort out correlations among economic data and indicators. All of those will be on the final. This case won’t be part of the course grade, as I refuse to redo my syllabus to suit Charles or the Fulliloves.
I park my car and climb out. The company’s headquarters screams success. The slick metal and glass tower pierces the sky of Lovedale. It’s one of the tallest buildings in the area, and insists that you know it’s important.
A pathetic display.
If the company were truly doing well, it wouldn’t be located here. It would be in Silicon Valley. It also wouldn’t be turning to undergrads for a case study; it’d be paying for advice from a top management consulting firm.
Look at the bright side,I tell myself, trying to settle a building annoyance. This could be far worse. It could be Dad arranging things to manipulate me into giving him a baby. He’d distract my students with the cock cannons while a platoon of hookers would corner me and try to get me to impregnate them.
I shake off the nightmarish image. No more thinking about giant cocks and hookers. I’m heading to a respectable company, even if it is run by moneyed morons.
Besides, even if I wanted to—which I don’t—giving Dad a baby wouldn’t satisfy him. Emmett apparently got his maybe-girlfriend/maybe-not-really-girlfriend-anymore pregnant, which was stunning news. Emmett is positively anal. Given his meticulous and excessively orderly personality, I can’t imagine him screwing up something as basic as birth control. On top of that, he hates Dad just as much as the rest of us and wouldn’t have inseminated some random woman just to make Dad happy.
At exactly ten thirty a.m., I walk into the lobby, where the class has already gathered. My loafers slap the pale blue-gray tiles. I tilt my head and…
What the fuck?
I do a double take at the giant clock in front of me. The presence of a clock in a business lobby isn’t unusual, of course. But does the clock tower have to be in the shape of a giant penis? And not just any penis, but an anatomically correct, fully erect one done in bright bubblegum purple?
The clock face’s design has ornate black Roman numerals, and the hands are artistically done to look like arrows tipped with hearts. Somebody tried really hard to add class to this turgid timepiece. The entire scene reminds me of something my father would pull. I suddenly realize, much to my horror, that the firm isn’t a failing high-tech entity like I assumed. It’s a sex toy company. Thus the name Silicone Dream.
My stomach starts to hurt. Fuck. And damn Charles to all seven circles of Dante’s inferno. I was entirely too close to the mark when I decided the Fulliloves are just like Dad. I would’ve been happier to be wrong.
My students are staring with their mouths open, but naturally their phones are out and snapping away. Damn it. First Sandy the escort and now this monumental embarrassment!
The kids start taking selfies in front of the…thing. Everything about this God-awful case is going to hit social media. If it comes back to bite me in the ass during my post-tenure review, I’m going to murder Charles.
Time to get this over with.
I look around. A company that can afford a building like this should have security. And there is a desk…but it’s empty. Nobody in the reception area, either.
Some people are chatting and walking briskly on the other side of the turnstiles, which probably won’t let me in without a badge.
If I were here alone, I might jump them. But I can’t do that when I have the students as potential witnesses.
Where the hell is the company representative we’re supposed to meet?
I take out my phone to check the email from Charles’s assistant that has the details about today. In the most unlikely case, I mixed up the date or time. But nope. It is supposed to be today. At ten thirty. And now it’s ten thirty-six.
If whoever’s supposed to meet us in the lobby doesn’t show up in the next five minutes, I’m leaving. And my students are getting a lecture on the more advanced topics of regression analysis—
There’s a sudden obnoxiously loud voice at the main entrance, and Todd Beaker saunters through the glass doors like he owns Cock Clock, Inc. I look heavenward and give a silent prayer for patience—this idiot can test you worse than a three-year-old having a temper tantrum on a plane. I despise him, and I’m not the only one. At an interdepartmental function three years ago, he publicly declared the economics department a disgrace, a pit of capitalistic greed where overpaid professors produce illiberal number crunchers who sell their souls to the highest bidder. Later, he apologized and said he hadn’t realized the economics department was present at the event, but the damage was done. I trust what people say behind my back.
The loathsome Todd is in a crisply ironed pale blue dress shirt, black slacks and Italian loafers, all of which cost more than half the annual salary of your typical adjunct professor of English poetry. He supposedly married well and started to spend money like an explorer who’d discovered a pirate’s treasure cave. Based on what I’ve heard, his wife must be socially connected as well, because he began to treat the head of his department with condescension—an act that normally would be professional suicide.
On the other hand, he isn’t on the tenure track, so perhaps it doesn’t matter if he pisses Chuck off. Todd probably doesn’t care if his contract isn’t renewed if he has a well-heeled wife, just the way he didn’t care that he made enemies out of the entire department of economics.