I push my chair back and pour myself a glass of water, drinking it down in one go to keep from crying again.
Chapter
8
The next day at the office, the overhead lights feel so harsh on my tender, sleep-deprived eyes. My attention keeps flitting between work and the thirty tabs I have open. Pages of keyword searches:
help ghost move on
banish ghost without hurting it
ghost trapped in slack
(Slack’s support FAQ is predictably unhelpful.)
I’m worried about Mom. Imagine, being trapped at work forever? How is she eating? Where does she sleep? After hours of chewing on my thumbnails, I finally try asking.
She sends a string of ROFL emojis—distinctly unsettling, honestly? She never used emojis in life, but she did laugh all the time. And she was always very adaptable.
sampaguita72:
You sound like me.
I did raise you right.
At lunch, Erica shoos me away from my desk, even though I want to keep working my way through my tabs.
“I’m cracking down on sad desk-salad culture around here!” she exclaims.
But I can’t go to the cafeteria. This isn’t the time to risk running into a hot man paying me a confusing amount of attention. (Or maybe more likely: that hot man paying some other girl a confusing amount of attention? Either way, I don’t want to deal with it right now.)
I want to hunker down somewhere to fixate on solving this problem, so I take my sad salad and a book I grabbed off a shelf at home—theComplete Guide to Ghosts and Spirits—and head for the supply closet.
I’m not sure how this book even got onto our shelf; maybe it was one of Tita Wendy’s that slipped into the mix.
When I open the door, someone shrieks.
“Don’t you knock?” Morgan demands, clutching her phone to her chest.
“When I…open a closet?”
She’s sitting on a cardboard box, half-eaten sandwich resting on a paper towel on her lap. Her thumbs hover over her screen, like she was just furiously texting.
Morgan clicks her tongue and seems to notice the Tupperware full of salad I’m holding. “Get your own lunch spot!” she hisses, blond eyebrows lifting into her hairline. She waves an impatient hand at her screen. “There’s so much drama in the Sales Department and my group chats are blowing up. But Erica’s already lectured me twice about myexcessive phone usage.Why don’t you try the cafeteria? They redid it, it’s nice now.”
A flash of sun and dimple plays across my mind.
“Morgan, you know so much about this place. What have you heard about Mark Winterson?”
Morgan’s face lights up like she lives to be asked for intel,and she leans toward me conspiratorially. “I heard Erickson handpicked him to come here. He’s, like, his protégé.”
Winfield Erickson, the new CEO who replaced the last head of TKCORP after a decades-long run. I vaguely remember the press coverage—all these articles about a new era at the company that I skimmed between tasks at my job in New York. He worked for GE when he was younger, rose through the ranks quickly, then took an unexpected turn into private equity.
There was all this speculation about what an interesting choice he was to revitalize a languishing corporate behemoth. But so far the main thing he’s done is the layoffs.
“Now if you’ll excuse me…” Morgan gestures to the notifications piling up on her phone screen.
“Oh! Right. Thanks,” I say, backing away and closing the door gently. There’s always the stairwell.
