5:05pm, Parking Lot
I back into a Visitors Parking space and find myself next to a temp I recognize. We lower our windows and introduce ourselves. Her name is Sara. We size up each other’s cars and I am relieved that mine is smaller than hers.
“Cute car,” she says. “How long did you have to drive to get here?”
“About forty minutes. It’s not so bad. When I took this job I thought it would take an hour with the traffic.”
“Me too,” she says. “Where are you coming from?”
“Oh — it’s a tiny suburb. I don’t think you would have — hey, there’s Heidi. Have you two met? Let’s go say hi.”
Heidi is sitting in her car, balancing a lit cigarette, a Starbucks coffee cup, and a cell phone on which she is texting. She looks up and grins and snaps her phone shut.
“Hey. We’re early again. This is stupid.”
“I know,” says Sara. “I don’t want to go in, but it’s too cold out here.” She shivers and wraps her purple striped scarf around her neck.
“I don’t know if I’m going to last at this job,” says Heidi. She takes a long drag on her cigarette.
“What do you mean? How can you know? All we’ve had is training so far. All we’ve had to do is sit there.”
“I know. But do you guys remember anything from last night?”
“I do,” says Sara confidently. “I can help you if you get stuck.”
“You may have to help me too,” I tell her. “I haven’t looked at my notes once today.”
“Ha! Why should we? We don’t get paid to do that.”
“I know. I just — I want to do well. I mean, we can all do well. They have 14 jobs. Anyways, we might as well go in. Sara, you look like you’re freezing.”
“I am freezing,” she says.
Heidi turns back a third time and points her car keys towards her car.
“I’m a little OCD about that,” she says.
“Oh my God! Me too!” I point my car keys towards my car one last time.
We head up.
5:45pm, Break Room
“Is everyone here?” says Julien, looking around.
“I think that Indian girl is gone,” someone says. “The one who was sitting there –” she points to a corner of the conference table — “last night.”
“She is gone,” says Sara, smiling. She leans over and whispers to me. “I tried to meet her, thinking you know, she and I are both Indian, we can stick together? And she was a snob to me. Like she didn’t want to meet me. Can you believe? I’m glad she’s gone. She was a snob.
But don’t tell anyone I said that,” she finishes in a low whisper.
I nod.
Julien looks down at a piece of paper.
“Did anyone get her name?” he asks.
“I think it was….it was something like….” a temp trails off.
“No one really met her,” volunteers one.
“Yeah, she kind of kept to herself.”
“She was a snob!” Sara joins in excitedly.
“She did kind of seem like it.”
“Yeah.”
“What did I say. She was a snob. I told you she was a snob,” Sara says, louder now.
“Okay,” says Julien, looking down at the list. “Well if you’re Sara,” he says, looking up at Sara, “then she must have been..Pandara? Anyone else here named Pandara?
He looks around.
“Pandara is gone. Everyone else is here. Thirteen people. Let’s go to the training room.”
We troop into the training room and take our seats. Julien looks out in the hallway and comes back.
“Well I guess I’ll get started,” he says, “If you could all turn to page –”
“I’m here,” announces Amber, walking the length of the floor in a few steps in her four inch heels. She stops in the center, slightly in front of Julien.
“I’m here, I’m here. But Singapore is going to call me back any minute, so you’ll just have to get started without me.” She glances at him and glances at us. “I have to talk to Singapore,” she says again, and strides out of the room.
Julien brushes the sweat from his brow.
“So as I was saying, if you could turn to page twenty five, you’ll see that we were talking about the –”
We are plunged into total blackness.
There are a few giggles and the creaking of chairs can be heard, and then Julien’s voice comes from the front of the room.
“Oh, I should have told you guys about this. This, um, this happens regularly, it’s some kind of energy saving thing, you know, an environment thing, where the lights are set to go off at night.
I’ll be right back. The switch is down the hall. Just sit tight.”
We sit. I try putting my hand in front of my face and I can’t see it. A dull glow comes on behind me and I turn around to see Courtney and Melissa, who are both about twenty years old and who seem to have hit it off, shining their cell phones around and giggling.
Click
The room is flooded with bright light. We blink in the glare.
Julien comes back. He looks at his watch and sighs.
“All right. Let’s see if we can get some training in before the break.”
Next installment on Monday
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