1
The fact that she wasn’t eating it until 4:30pm only made Morgan’s sad desk salad sadder. Even if she could have used magic, no spell she knew of could fix that.
She’d tried, she really had. Morgan had ordered it from the new little independent place, instead of one of the many salad chains in the neighborhood who catered to Manhattan tech workers with delusions of healthfulness. She knew she could have, should have, meal-prepped. But the small grocery store nearest her apartment didn’t carry quinoa and the big fancy ones near work were well out of her budget, and she didn’t have time to go to both. The salad chains would have known their clients’ schedules well enough to know to put the dressing in a little container so it wouldn’t coat the lettuce until she was ready. But the cute independent place, while locally owned and certified organic, had drizzled the balsamic-maple-chipotle-whatever all over everything. Now, four hours after she had optimistically ordered the delivery, the spring mix had wilted into something more like slime.
It reminded her of something from her parents’ workshop. She shoved the thought aside before it summoned their presence.
The table—try as she might, it didn’t deserve to be called a desk, but that’s all you got at a small tech startup these days—vibrated lightly as her phone buzzed. Ronaldo glared at Morgan through the plexiglass barrier that pretended to divide the table into separate workspaces. She snatched it up before it could vibrate again. It could be someone else; her thumb hovered for a moment before swiping in her password.
Morgan wanted to believe that the mere act of thinking of her parents wasn’t enough to magically grab their attention, but she wasn’t willing to bet on that. She only saw the first line of her mother’s text at the top of the screen before she flipped the phone to silent and put it face down on the table. From the floor above them there came an ominous rumbling. That one, at least, was not her fault. The new occupants had asked for a gut renovation. The building management company had promised that the worst of the noise would be over by February. It was now late May.
The phone vibrated again. Ronaldo’s eyes flicked up, annoyed.Sorry, Morgan mouthed, hoping he wouldn’t say anything to Kelly about junior employees being insufficiently devoted. Despite her working through lunch—again. She jabbed her answer in without reading the text.
I’m at work
How had she even gotten through? Morgan had had her cousin put a cantrip on her phone last year specifically to keep this from happening. But the phone buzzed mercilessly, despite the slash visible over the little speaker symbol, her mother overpowering every defense once again.
Train just got into Grand Central but I have some
business first so just meet me at the dinner
It’s at 7, your father emailed you the address
Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t remember agreeing to go anywhere. Trying not to visibly sigh, she scrolled back up to the earlier texts.
Oh. Right. Shit. Her mother’s high school reunion. Specifically, her mother’s reunion for Pendragon Prep, that bastion of exclusivity, proudly training the next generation of the best and brightest of the Northeast Corridor’s hidden mage families. The one that every member of the respective Blackwater and McKey families had graduated from.
Every member save her, of course.
She would have preferred to be turned into a frog and left to live the rest of her froggy days on the pond in Central Park, dodging raccoons and hyperactive schoolchildren on field trips, than go to that dinner. She would have happily forked over every last dollar in her nearly empty bank account. She would have seriously considered selling her soul.
She had not agreed to go, despite the lure of the expensive steakhouse. She didn’t want to sit with all the other families and listen to them talk about the accomplishments and romantic successes of their progeny while her mother said nothing about the daughter at her side. At least you couldn’t fail to live up to your potential if everyone agreed you’d never had potential to begin with. She’d never given a real answer, but Fiona Blackwater had a way of assuming that just because she could bend reality to her will, her daughter should also bend without being asked.
Through the glass wall of Kelly’s office, Morgan could see that the Head of Sales had ended her call and was entering her notes into Salesforce. She gave a little push and her office wheelie-chair rolled unevenly over the shitty carpet until she could peer through the door. Kelly brushed a strand of perfectly curled hair over a shoulder. Morgan could only hope to aspire to Kelly’s effortless cool—somehow her new step-boss never smudged her lipstick on her iced coffee straw, never broke a stiletto heel on a subway grate. Her perfectly fitting jeans were a nod toward an industry norm that skewed toward t-shirts pulled from conference swag, but still looked polished. Morgan leaned a little, trying to catch Kelly’s eye.
Kelly finished typing and finally looked up. She raised an eyebrow.
“Uh, I need to work late tonight, right?” Morgan asked hopefully.
“Given your report at the stand-up this morning, I’d think you’d want to,” Kelly said. “Has Tim had a moment to discuss your quota?”
“Not yet,” Morgan said, swallowing. She was only a little behind. She could catch up. Really. She shoved down the sneaking suspicion that Tim tended to avoid hard conversations: if she were still reporting to Kelly, those hard conversations might be being had.
“It’s up to you how you manage your time,” Kelly frowned. Then she caught enough body language and she tilted her head. How did she do that—intuit what someone needed? That’s why she was Head of Sales, and Morgan was a junior not-even-really-a-salesperson. “Unless you need me to assign you some work?”
“My mom has a class reunion dinner,” Morgan admitted.
“Ah.” Kelly glanced down at her laptop and fiddled with the sales tracking software for a moment. “There, your weekly quota’s five percent higher, you probably want to spend some quality time prospecting on LinkedIn tonight.”
That… was not quite what she was looking for. But then it did solve her current problem. She answered her mother’s text.
So sorry, have to work tonight
She waited for the response for a minute, then another, then five more. Nothing. The silence would be welcome if she didn’t know that it indicated icy displeasure.
But at least she didn’t have to go to the reunion dinner.
“Like, why don’t you lie?” Vijay asked from the next desk over. The programmer fully admitted that he’d only lived in Venice Beach for six months, but that hadn’t stopped him from embracing a personal aesthetic that called to mind a refugee from a nineties teen sitcom, puka shell and all. “Like, that’s what I do whenever my parents call.”
