Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge (19 page)

Ignoring the hand Bailey had stuck out, Jess dove in for a hug. Bailey cringed but reciprocated. She much preferred to reserve hugging for the people who really mattered, but in the last few years society had decided that brief embraces were the best way to greet everyone everywhere.

A dude would never have to hug his interviewer
, Bailey thought and then immediately chastised herself.
Get over yourself. You need something from her. And you kind of liked her once, right?

Right
.

Just try not to look so awkward
.

“It is
so
good to see you again,” Jess said, stepping back.

“You, too!” Bailey said through a forced smile. In school Jess had been, effectively, Bailey’s competition, although the feeling had never been mutual. Bailey got better grades thanks to an endless supply of Post-its, flash cards, and instant coffee, but somehow Jess breezily kept up in every class with a fraction of the effort. She’d ended up at Northwestern—not Ivy League, like Bailey, but still pretty damn good. And now Jess—the one who’d never pulled an all-nighter, who’d slept through a semester’s worth of English lectures and still got extra credit for writing a rap song based on
Julius Caesar
—was the one with the job.

“And I love your outfit!” Jess looked Bailey up and down. “You look like such a grown-up. Like you’re running for election or something.”

“Thanks,” Bailey said.

“I’d vote for you.” Jess winked. “Let’s head back to my office, huh?”

They rounded the corner and emerged into the kind of space that Bailey imagined an overzealous tour guide might introduce as “where the magic happens.”

“And
this
”—Jess gestured grandly—“is where the magic happens.”

“Oh,” Bailey said politely. “Um, I can tell.”

The space was gigantic, with thirty-foot ceilings, windowed walls, and impossibly huge square footage. Instead of a cubicle labyrinth, it held every kind of workstation imaginable. Some employees sat at desks—in chairs or balanced on exercise balls. Some had settled on the floor, typing away at laptops as overstuffed beanbag chairs swallowed them inch by inch. There was even one guy off to the side who was coding while pedaling away on a stationary bike.

“We’re big into personalized workspaces here,” said Jess. “Once we hire someone on, we have them put in a request for what they need to be comfortable. As long as it won’t kill the work flow, management will sign off on it.”

Bailey realized she was grinning—not her precise, professional grin, but the toothy, goofy one a kid got when she walked into an ice cream shop. “What if I want a cubicle?” she said.

Jess chuckled. “A rebel, huh? We’re not big on following the rules, but maybe we can make an exception. Hey, Kyle, come over here.”

A slouchy guy in a knit cap walked over and gave Bailey a once-over; she stood as straight as she could without wobbling in her heels.

“This is Bailey,” Jess said. “She’s going in for Alexis’s old gig.”

“Alexis left?”

“She went full-time doula.”

“Oh. Right on, right on.” Kyle nodded rhythmically, like he was listening to a song no one but he could hear.

“I love Divinyl,” Bailey said quickly. “I listen to—er, with it all
the time.”

“Right on,” Kyle said again.

Bailey cocked her head. “Are you an engineer?”

Kyle laughed. “Nah. Tastemaker, brah.”

“Ah,” Bailey said. Was that a job title?

“You know,” he continued, head still bobbing, “spreading the word, making the waves.”

“Right,” Bailey said. “Cool.”

“That’s what we do out of the Chicago office,” said Jess. “Dev stuff is mostly out in Esseff.”

“Oh. Is that in the suburbs?”

Jess and Kyle exchanged a look.

“SF,” Kyle said. “Like, San Francisco.”

“Of course.” Bailey flushed. Stupid, stupid. She should’ve known better; her parents were from
Esseff
. But she was determined to bounce back. “What’s your favorite part about working here, Kyle?”

“Probably …” Kyle considered. Whatever it was—the product, the teamwork, the management style—Bailey readied herself to nod eagerly.

“Spicy lunch club,” he said finally.

“Oh, I
love
—” Bailey faltered. “What?”

“A bunch of us order lunch and see who can get the spiciest thing. This one time, Emily? She got a ghost pepper burrito and spent the afternoon crying under her desk.”

“Fuck you, Kyle,” called someone a few desks away. Kyle shrugged.

“Oh. That sounds great!” Bailey said, trying not to sound too forced. “Um, lunch is my favorite part of the day, too.”

It was, actually, but she still felt weird saying so during what was technically a job interview.

Kyle stifled a laugh. “Cool to meet you, Hayley. Want a T-shirt?”

Something soft and gray smacked her in the face before she could answer.

“It’s Bailey.”

“Yeah. Those shirts are dope,” Jess said. “They make them from that really soft Mexican cotton, you know? Here, check out the kitchen.”

Bailey balled up the shirt and stuffed it into her purse while following Jess around another corner. In her limited professional experience, an office “kitchen” was rarely more than a fridge, coffeemaker, and microwave with a permanent garlic smell. But the cavernous fishbowl room to their right had an espresso machine, two stainless-steel refrigerators, and a six-burner oven/stove that someone was currently using to bake a pan of mac and cheese.

“Bowie says—wait, do you know Bowie?” Jess wrinkled her forehead. “Bowen Sorensen, I mean.”

Bailey nodded eagerly.

“Sorensen’s the VC”—venture capitalist, Bailey was already speaking the slang (she resisted giving herself a high-five)—“with an eighty percent stake in the company. He revitalized the flagging beeper industry in the late nineties with his idea to sell them to chain restaurants for table reservations and then broke into the app market with Fontdue, which allows users to render their outgoing correspondence in customized fonts. Since then he’s taken both calculated risks and leaps of faith on investments and built a miniature empire in the telecommunications and mobile software business.”

Jess’s eyes widened. “Whoa. Someone did her homework.”

Bailey grinned. She’d made flash cards.

“Fab,” Jess said. “Anyway, he says happy employees are productive employees. If happiness means being able to cook yourself shrimp scampi for lunch, he’s all for it. Sometimes when we have to stay late, he’ll get a guy to come by and do a whole hibachi thing.” She mimed chopping meat on a grill and tossing it in the air.

“Does Mr. Sorensen work out of the Chicago office?” Bailey asked.

Jess blinked. “Yeah, sometimes. Right now he’s in Belgrade. Or Belarus. Which one has that offshore tax exclusion thing?”

Bailey barely had time to shrug.

“Anyway, he’ll be back soon. He wants to build a movie theater here that shows nothing but kaiju cinema.” She did a little fake Godzilla stomp, then frowned. “Assuming that whole women’s arena-football thing doesn’t fall through. Hang on.” She whipped out a phone, furiously thumbed out a message, then stuffed it back in her pocket with a smile. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” Bailey said. The sooner they could slip into the routine of questions and answers, the sooner she’d feel at ease. “I don’t need the hard sell. You can just go ahead and start, uh, interviewing me—”

“Interview. Right.” Jess laughed huskily. “Cute. Want to step into my office?”

“What is it, a pillow fort?” said Bailey.

Jess laughed. “Oh, man,” she said. “You’re gonna fit right in.”

The rest of the journey to Jess’s office became an informal tour. There was the game room, where techs went to unwind because company policy mandated they spend time away from their desks to avoid burnout. And there was the records station, which allowed employees to transfer digital music onto vinyl discs, a casual undoing of two decades’ worth of technological progress.

The farther they went, the more impressed Bailey grew. In her most recent workplaces the sole amenities were the huge collection of booze she wasn’t allowed to drink and a bathroom that may or may not have breathable air, depending on the night. “I’m surprised you don’t have a place for live music,” she said as they rounded yet another corner.

“Ooh!” Again Jess’s phone appeared like mag—well, not like
magic, but very quickly. A moment later she put it away and beamed. “I just texted management. Someone will start looking into it tomorrow. Here we are.”

Bailey didn’t know what incited more jealousy: how nicely put together Jess’s office was or the fact that she had an actual office. Apparently Jess had gotten very into upcycling; almost everything in the room was made from used wooden pallets painted in pastel colors. Bailey secretly loved clicking through DIY projects online, but Jess actually Did Them Herself.

As they took seats on opposite sides of a seafoam-colored desk, Bailey tried to hand over a résumé, but Jess waved it off. “I’ve got it here,” she said, holding up a tablet.
Of course
. This was the future, after all. Self-consciously Bailey undid one jacket button in a last-ditch attempt to casual it up.

Jess set aside the tablet without reading it. “So what’ve you been up to, girl? I heard you kicked ass at Penn. What brought you back? Did you get tired of eating cheesesteaks and running up all those library steps so you could punch the Liberty Bell?”

Bailey didn’t know whether to answer or correct Jess’s wild misconceptions about Philadelphia. “Well, they’re museum steps,” she said.

“Right,” said Jess. “I guess it makes more sense to have the Liberty Bell at a museum than a library.”

“Actually—”

“And what’ve you been up to?” Jess plowed on. “I know it took me forever to get back to you—once again, so sorry about that—but what’s been going on in Bailey world? Just being cool, doing Bailey things?”

“Oh, you know—”
Killing monsters. Secretly protecting the city. Madly crushing on Zane Whelan of all people. Getting magic lessons from the hulking blind anarchist who runs a gay bar
. “—stuff.”

“Cool, cool, cool,” Jess said. “So, let me walk you through the
major details of this job first, and then we can get to your questions, okay?”

The job was nothing groundbreaking. If hired, she’d start out doing administrative work in the firm’s finance department: scheduling, copies, logistics, research.

“Oh, and spreadsheets. Can you make a spreadsheet?”

Nailed it
. “Absolutely.”

“Excellent.” Jess beamed. “It was so, so,
so
nice to catch up, Bailey. Really. Hey, wow, did you realize your name almost rhymes with
really
?”

“Nope,” Bailey said.
Because it doesn’t?
Then again, this was the girl who’d rhymed “Ides of March” with “That’s way harsh.”

Jess grabbed her buzzing phone off the desk. She read the message and then looked at Bailey. “Good news,” she said.

Bailey’s heart swelled. They were going to hire her on the spot. This was a tech start-up after all; things moved fast. Maybe amid all the reconstituted driftwood and bare Edison bulbs, there was a CCTV camera beaming her top-notch interview to the Powers That Be. Maybe Bailey was about to be officially done with bars and bartending forever.

“You can come with us to the bar!” Jess said.

“Thank you s—what?” Bailey frowned.

“Brian’s canceling on our wristband deal, so we’ve got a spot open,” Jess explained. “You’re totally in, right?”

Wristband deals were the only way around the quirky Illinois drinking law that prohibited happy hours: drink prices couldn’t go down (nor could their potency go up) based on time of purchase. But if a big enough group bought special wristbands in advance, they could get discounted drinks for a few hours because it was part of a “private promotion,” rather than an all comers’ happy hour.

“Oh,” Bailey said. “I mean, um, totally!”

That was how Bailey, Jess, and thirteen other Divinyl staff
members ended up packing into McNee’s, a pub in the South Loop that was exactly what Bailey would have expected from a joint with an Irish name: dark wood everything, shamrocks posted up all over the place, and absolutely no traces of genuine Irish culture. There were huge banners of bikini-clad women, smiling and holding up cans of light beer against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.
That’s not very smart
, Bailey thought,
drinking something cold while near naked in a frozen wasteland
. Then she remembered the target audience was probably unconcerned with being very smart.

Each group member wore a bright orange wristband, tagged like an animal to be tracked. “Look,” Jess said, holding up hers. “Orange. Your favorite color, right?”

“Uh, yes.” Bailey couldn’t believe Jess remembered; she’d never embraced the hue with quite the same extravagance as Jess had loved pink.

“What’ll it be, everyone?” The waitress appeared at their table, and Bailey realized it’d been months since she’d ordered in a bar like a normal person.

“Lager,” said one of the Divinyl guys.

“Yeah, lager.”

“Lager.”

“Lager for me,” said Jess with a nod. “Bailey?”

“Uh, I’ll take a chimayó,” Bailey said. The waitress dutifully wrote down the order, but the Divinyl guys looked at her as if she’d just ordered a glass of human blood.

“Is that one of those girlie cocktails?” one said. “I bet it’s pink.”

“Actually, it’s an apple-based tequila cocktail,” Bailey shot back.
Which lets you astrally project your consciousness, if you make it right
. “And I happen to be quite fond of it, so there.”

“Ooh, on second thought, I’ll take one of those, too,” said Jess.

After ten minutes of shop talk, office gossip, and Bailey politely sipping at her ice water, the waitress returned with their drinks.
Bailey perked up and said “Thank you” when she got her glass, but the Divinyl guys were silent except for grunts and a shared annoyed but knowing look. The waitress started to head off, but one of the guys—Kyle, from before—threw a hand into the air and snapped his fingers.