She flashed me another watery smile. “My fiancé left me.”
I blinked. Not the answer I was expecting. Not an answer I remotely respected.
Her eyes cooled as she read the subtle changes in my face. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Not a young girl like you, fresh off your internship. This must seem like the stupidest thing in the world to you.”
“No, no,” I mumbled half-heartedly, “not at—”
“The thing is…I don’t even like finance. I like the lifestyle. I like the competition. But I don’t give a shit about the numbers.” She dabbed again at her eyes. “And now, by moving here, I’ve lost the only thing I’ve ever really cared about. Jeff.”
Note to self—stay away from men named Jeff. They made you crazy.
“So I’m leaving, going back. My high school sweetheart is picking me up at the airport when I fly in.” She stared with fierce determination in the mirror, daring her own reflection to disagree. “I can fly back to California this afternoon and everything will go back to the way it was before. But this…” Her eyes flickered up to the ceiling, and I knew that like me, she imagined the towering skyscraper overhead. “I can’t do this anymore. I hate this city with a passion. I’ve got to get out while I can.”
With a suddenly brisk gesture, she tossed the tissue into the trash and headed toward the door. I don’t know what exactly made me do it—probably just blatant disbelief at the golden opportunity she was throwing away—but I rushed after her.
“Wait,” I called. She turned back around, and I struggled to find the words. “I mean…are you at least going to tell them what’s going on? I’ve heard this new merger has everyone on their toes—they’ll need to know you won’t be—”
She held up a hand, and I fell silent. “I’m sure they’ll muddle along without me.” For the first time, her eyes sparkled as she glanced around. “What’s one missing cog, right? Consider my defection payback for those years wasted at grad school.”
My lips parted, then turned up in a disbelieving smile. “I just don’t…”
“Good luck, honey.” She winked. “Knock’em dead.” Then she was gone.
Only years later would I understand the significance of that moment. The moment that Katie McGill (I eventually discovered her name) walked out of the lobby and jumped in a cab for the airport. It was the moment when my entire life suddenly altered course. The single catalyst that sparked off a chain of events that would change things forever.
All I thought at the time was, wow—what an idiot! I headed back to the waiting room still shaking my head. To give up the dream…it was unthinkable! And then to give it up for a man? I actually rolled my eyes as I settled down into a suede chair. Another note to self, if I ever found myself wandering down such a ridiculous road—hire someone to shoot me.
“So, you got your resume all memorized?” the receptionist asked me, looking up from her meticulously potted plants with a bored stare.
I tapped my forehead with a grin. “Practiced it again in the cab.” I wondered how many of us rookie automatons she saw on a weekly basis. Twenty? Forty? Deciding to look it up later, I started going over my list of accomplishments again in my head when the door suddenly slammed open, and a harried looking woman stormed inside.
“…off the phone with the Chinese liaison and they don’t know what happened any more than we do. Not to mention my Cantonese is rustier than I’d like. I don’t know if they were trying to set up a conference call at four o’clock on Friday, or if they were trying to order four more copies of the prints that Jamie sent over on Saturday. Damn translator is out sick. Like anyone gets bronchitis anymore?! Not to mention, they’ve sent over the mockups a full week early, and my backup girl from California has yet to make an appearance. Who’s this?”
The diatribe stopped suddenly, and I realized that all eyes were on me. I stood quickly and offered out a respectful hand. “I’m Jenna Harks. We had an appointment to—”
The receptionist cut me off. “Ms. Macer, this is the—”
“Wait—are you her?” Patti Macer, my hopeful soon-to-be supervisor, looked at me with wide eyes, magnified even wider under her glasses. The receptionist turned my way in slow motion behind her, and for a split second, I paused.
Let me preface this next part with: this is NOT my thing. I set my sights high, but I knew that in order to get there, I’d have to spend a few years slaving in the mines. I understood the importance of hard work—I placed a premium on integrity (even if saying those two things made me sound like I was running for head of the local school board). In other words, it was not in my nature to risk it all by going out on a limb.
That being said, I was a wildly overqualified candidate applying for a two-year minimum entry level grunt job just to get my foot in the door. In the door of a company full of rabid employees who would pounce on this opportunity if given it themselves. My mind flashed back to the girl, crying in the bathroom. She hadn’t told anyone she was going to leave. I hadn’t told anyone where I was headed.
A strange confidence brewed inside me and I shook Macer’s hand vigorously.
“Yes, I’m yo
ur girl.”
And just like that, I was whisked away. Up past the nameless cubicles, past the run-down coffee pots, the blood shot watering holes for grunts still pushing year one. All the way up to the seventieth floor. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I’d jumped forty floors in ten minutes. Not bad for my first day on the job.
Patti Macer, my new supervisor, had been talking nonstop since my questionable introduction, and although I watched the ascending elevator floors with a fixed smirk, I was absorbing every word.
“So in short, we have about seven days to do close to two months of work. That’s why we called the west coast for some backup. If we can pull this off, it’ll be the third greatest merger in US history, falling short only to AOL/Time Warner and the Louisiana Purchase. Yes—we count that.” She shot me a look as the doors opened and she gestured down a hall. “You and your team are going to be crunching the numbers, cold hard facts. You’ll be writing the bulk of the merger yourself, literally finding a way to absorb the company without exceeding the hard limits set by the Chinese stockholders. But don’t worry about the technicalities or the spin—that’s why we have our PR and legal departments. Am I right?”
I nodded hastily. The higher up we’d gotten, the more papers she’d dumped into my hand. I was now a walking file cabinet, trying desperately to balance the small library she’d handed me while keeping pace and not tripping on my new heels. When she stopped suddenly, I almost had a coronary.
“This is going to be your office. Mine is right down the hall. The rest of the team is scattered around this floor. There’s a staff meeting every morning at eight and the work day begins at eight-thirty—not a second later. You okay with that?”