If someone told me ignoring a fire alarm to fight with a copy machine would totally change my life, I never would have believed it.
Mr. Kender was sitting behind his desk, clicking away with a mouse and looking intently at the screen of his docked laptop. He drummed his fingers against the mouse pad for a bit before he sighed and leaned back in his chair.
“What’s my damn password for the red folder?” Mr. Kender asked. Sometimes I thought I must have been hired for my rote memorization skills. Melody must have told him I was a diva at multiple choice tests before I had to drop out of high school. I rattled off the combination of letters and numbers twice before he managed to get it entered correctly. He smiled his thanks and motioned toward a large stack of paper.
“Olivia, please take this packet and make enough collated copies for the board meeting this afternoon.”
“Yes, sir!” I replied before heading out the door.
I stumbled into the elevator, almost completely tripping over the damn red heels Melody had put me in. More professional, my ass. If I fell on said ass and sent the hundred-page packet scattering all over the floor, how good my legs looked wasn’t going to help out my career. Mr. Kender had been a decent boss so far though he definitely needed to watch the personal space issues and occasional leers. The board meeting was an important one, so I was pretty sure he wouldn’t like me to bring the whole thing back to be re-sorted.
I had only been with the company for three weeks, and I hadn’t done a lot other than doing data entry, making copies, and reminding Mr. Kender which password went to which folder. I had no idea what was in the folders, but I swear there was at least one per Crayola Big Box color. I didn’t really expect much else from this job since I was only an intern, but hey, this twelve-month internship was going to make me enough money to pay for a four-year degree. When you have been trying to support yourself since the age of sixteen off the meager life insurance policy your dad left you, it was definitely worth any tasks I might have normally considered beneath my intellect.
My mom died of bone cancer when I was little, and I didn’t really remember her very well. It was always just me and my dad, but he worked a lot of hours, and I learned to take care of myself. It was a good thing, too. My dad was a police officer, and he died when he was hit by a car while chasing a suspect through Chicago traffic. I was a month shy of my seventeenth birthday and didn’t have any other family, so the family court agreed to emancipate me. I got my GED that year and started working at a fast food place, trying to make enough money for college. It sucked. Big time. This job was a dream come true for me.
I was hired as Mr. Kender’s personal assistant. It was a job I wasn’t totally qualified to do, but his actual administrative assistant, my best friend Melody, did most of the real work. I was there for backup, which meant I was given all of his secret passwords in case Melody wasn’t around to remind him and do all the menial stuff she didn’t have time to do. I’ve known Melody since high school. She graduated a couple years before me and has really tried to help me out since my dad died. I don’t know what kind of pull she may have had, but I was called back after the first interview and offered the job, so something must have clicked for me.
For once.
I fixed the knotted red scarf at my neck—which matched the shoes and skirt, thank you, Melody—and stabbed at the button for the thirty-second floor a couple more times. I was pretty sure Melody had me all dressed up today because she was fixing me up with yet another guy she was sure would be the one I would want to get it on with. Ever since I told her I was sick to death of being a virgin, she had been fixing me up with every guy she thought I might be into. I swear, if she walked up to me, carrying a manila folder with the words “Operation Cherry Pop” on the cover, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
None of the guys were worth a second date, let alone actually allowing them to see me naked. I mean, not that I was that much to look at, but I had to have some kind of standards. Melody kept asking me what I was looking for. Hell, if I knew that, I’d go find him myself.
The biggest issue with the last three dates? They kept asking me what I wanted to do. What movie did I want to see? What restaurant did I want to go to? What music did I want to hear in the car? When, at the age of sixteen, you have to start making life-altering decisions without the benefit of a proper high school diploma, the last thing you want is someone to ask you to make more decisions. How trivial the question may have been didn’t matter. I wanted to sit back and relax and have someone just tell me what we’re going to do on a date for once. That sounded like heaven.
I sighed and stared at the wall display. I hated the elevators in this building. Well, if I were completely honest, I would have to say that I hated all elevators. I had always had a fear of getting stuck in one, even when I was little. Working in a skyscraper with fifty-seven floors wasn’t my first choice, but as I said
, the money was great. At least the copier was only two floors up. If it hadn’t been for the heels, I would have taken the stairs.
The doors opened and I rounded the corner to the copier room. Thankfully, there wasn’t anyone else in there, so I didn’t have to wait in line. I pushed all the appropriate buttons and sat back for a second while the machine did its thing. I needed sixty copies, so it was going to take a while.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself a bit. Something about working for the CIO of a government agency with its hands in all kinds of stuff got me a little worked up at times. I was always getting worked up, and I worried about making a major mistake and getting fired. It’s not like it was a stressful job, but I was still so nervous about doing everything right that I tended to get a little too anxious, even about making copies. That was probably because the damn Xerox machine hated me.
It must have heard me thinking bad thoughts about it because the damn machine jammed before it was halfway done. I pulled open the upper tray, then the lower one, then opened the back cover. I didn’t see anything, so I put them all back in place and hit the button. It erred out again, so I went through the whole routine a second time. The machine swore to me there was a paper jammed in there somewhere, but I sure couldn’t find it. After about ten minutes, I finally gave up, checked to make sure no one actually witnessed me leaving the thing while it was still jammed, grabbed what I had so far, and headed to the other copier room on floor thirty-nine.
At least this machine was more cooperative. I tried to think happy thoughts about the Xerox company while the copier did its thing. I knew it was going to take forever to run through the remaining copies because this machine was an older model and didn’t run nearly as fast as the other one.
When the fire alarm went off, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Once I got over the shock, I let out a perturbed groan.
I hated fire drills. I knew I was supposed to use the damn stairs, but there was no way I was going to walk down thirty-nine flights for a drill when I had all these copies to get back to Mr. Kender before noon. To top it all off, the copier had just run out of paper, and I had to refill it. Deciding to ignore the fire alarm completely, I dug through cabinets until I found the stack of “COPIER PAPER—TO BE USED FOR COPIERS—NOT FOR PRINTERS!” and managed to get the copier reloaded without actually breaking anything important-looking.
I had probably been up there for about a half hour when my cell phone started buzzing in its little clip on my belt. I thought it looked totally dorky, but Melody reassured me that in an IT department, it was borderline cool. I looked down and saw Elissa’s name displayed. She was the receptionist for Mr. Kender’s department, and we’d been going out to lunch together a lot.
“Hey, Elissa,” I said. “I should be ready in about ten…”
“Olivia, thank God!” Elissa was practically screaming into the phone. “I couldn’t find you down here anywhere! Didn’t Lauren show you where our group meets in the parking lot? Where the hell are you?”
“I’m in the copier room,” I said. I could hear Melody yelling in the background, which was odd because she was supposed to be in an all-day training session. She was having a catered lunch and everything. “I have a bunch of work to do, and I didn’t pay any attention to the drill. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
Elissa was silent for the first time since I had met her.
“Elissa? You still there?”
“You’re still in the building?” Elissa’s voice dropped lower, and her tone sent a shiver up my spine.
“Yeah, I figured the fire drill…” My voice trailed off as realization hit. There was a fire in the building. A real fire. And I was on the thirty-ninth floor.
Oh my God! What am I going to do?