Mira had arrived at the library before anyone else on Monday morning, not bothering to flip on any lights as she walked through the darkened lobby and down the hall to her office. She closed the door behind her and settled heavily into her chair. She turned on her computer and glanced at the clock in the corner of her screen as she opened a blank document.
The Board of Trustees would be here in less than two hours, and while Mira had barely slept all weekend thinking of that moment, she also hadn’t come up with the right words to say when they arrived. She imagined that Jack would be eager to throw her under the bus straight away, and Mira’s only chance to preserve even the slightest bit of dignity would be to walk into the conference room and immediately tender her resignation, before he had the chance to show them the video.
With any luck, that would be enough for him – she’d even throw a recommendation his way if it meant that he didn’t play that video for the Board and completely derail her career. She put her fingers to her keyboard, closing her eyes for just a moment to steady herself, and then started typing.
She’d never written a resignation before – never so much as quit a fast food job – and her pulse was racing as she worked. Faintly, she heard the library coming to life beyond her office door, the hum of the lights coming on and the bustle of her staff settling into their morning routines. In the back of her mind, Mira thought that it might be a good idea to corner Jack at some point before the meeting to let him know what she was planning – if he knew that she’d put in a good word for him, maybe he’d be less likely to burst into the conference room waving the surveillance tape over his head.
Before she had the chance, though, there was a soft knock on her door and she looked up from her computer.
“Come in,” she called, and Juanita popped her head through the door.
“Good morning, Mira,” she said. “Olivia Winters is here.”
“Oh no,” Mira said with a slight groan, glancing back down at her clock and wondering how much time had gotten away from her. “Is it time for the meeting already?”
“No,” Juanita said, “you’ve still got about twenty minutes. Ms. Winters is early and she asked if you were free.”
“Sure, Nita,” Mira said, a pit beginning to form in her stomach. “Send her in.”
She managed a much more casual air than what she felt, her stomach bursting into a thousand butterflies as she waited tensely for Liv to enter the office. In that moment, Mira was absolutely sure that Jack had tipped her off, she’d already seen the tape, and she was coming to tell Mira there was no need for her to come to the meeting at all because the Board had decided to terminate her.
But Liv walked into the office with an oblivious smile on her face and said cheerily, “Hi Mira. How’ve you been?”
Mira minimized the window on her computer where her resignation letter sat ready to be printed out, and said, “Oh, I’ve been better.”
“What’s wrong?” Liv asked, coming over to perch on the back of one of the chairs in front of Mira’s desk. Liv was a year younger than Mira, a professional go-getter just like her who had worked her way up the ranks in her field very quickly and had her hand in a lot of the Westbrook political sphere. Serving on the library’s Board of Trustees was far from Liv’s only extracurricular, and Mira never knew how she managed to juggle it all when she had trouble enough just handling Jack. Liv furrowed her brow and ran her fingers through her raven black hair, seeming to follow Mira’s thoughts. “Is Jack giving you trouble again? I told you that you’ve got to take a firm hand with him, especially because of the age difference-”
“It’s not that,” Mira said, then added, “Well, not exactly.”
“Are you still having problems with that group boycotting your Internet filter?” Liv asked next. “Honestly, it would have been great if you could have gone to the Board with a solution, but if you need more support-”
“I’m in love with one of my pages,” Mira blurted. The statement seemed to echo through the room, hitting her ears in a fuzzy way that made her whole body reverberate with it – she hadn’t said anything nearly so explicit to Chelle, or even to herself, and the fact that it had just spilled out of her was a little jarring. Mira hadn’t planned to give any details like that to the Board, and now color rose into her cheeks as she watched Liv’s mouth drop open.
“Okay,” she said slowly, “that would appear to be a problem. Does she reciprocate?”
“I don’t know anymore,” Mira said quietly.
She hadn’t seen Chelle since their blow-out on Friday afternoon, when she’d made it clear in no uncertain terms that they were through. She’d been so harsh, and she spent the whole weekend trying her damnedest not to think about. Now there was a good chance she’d never see Chelle again – if someone had spoken to her that way, she wouldn’t want to see them again.
Then she took a deep breath and said, “But that’s not the whole problem. The problem is that we were, umm, together in the stacks, and Jack caught us. He’s got surveillance footage of us and he’s planning to show it to the Board and call for my resignation.”
“Oh Jesus, Mira,” Liv said, putting her hand to her forehead. “Why would you do something like that?”
“I don’t know,” Mira said, Liv’s judgment prickling under her skin. She’d just spent forty-eight hours replaying every single inappropriate action that had occurred between her and Chelle, so she didn’t need any further judgment from the only person in Westbrook she considered a friend. “It was stupid, I get it.”
“What are you, fifteen years old?” Liv harped. “You had to know the entire time that what you were doing was a fireable offense-”
“Haven’t you ever done anything stupid in your life just because it felt right?” Mira shot back. “Yes, I knew it was wrong. My brain was screaming for me to walk away right up til the moment that we kissed, and I did it anyway because she’s like a magnet-”
“Okay-” Liv said, relenting, but Mira was deep in her speech and she couldn’t stop.
“-like a siren or something. From the very first moment I saw her, there was a part of me that woke up – something that I didn’t even know existed before her,” Mira said. “Liv, I tried to stay away from her. I tried not to hire her. But something just kept drawing me to her-”
“Okay,” Liv said, holding up her hands. “I get it. You’re obnoxiously in love with this girl. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re about to be in deep shit.”
“I know,” Mira said solemnly. She turned to her computer and pulled up the document she’d spent the morning working on, then hit print. The page came sluggishly out of the little laser printer beside her desk and she slid it across the table toward Liv. “I’m going to resign.”
Liv picked up the page and glanced over it, and while she did, Mira found herself steeling to rebuff any argument that Liv might make trying to talk her out of it. But when she set the letter back down on the desk with a sigh, she made no effort to dissuade her. All Liv said was, “Okay. I’ll see you in there.”
***
Mira sat in her office after Liv stepped out, watching the clock slowly tick down to the start of the meeting. She had about five minutes left – just enough time for the anxiety to creep in and make her fight to keep her body from shaking with it, but not enough time to corner Jack and attempt to squeeze a promise out of him not to show the video.
When it was finally time, Mira took one last deep, slow breath, then picked up her resignation letter and walked down the hall to the conference room. It was almost like being a prisoner walking to her execution, except there were no guards marching beside her. The hall was empty and the whole library felt silent, or maybe it was just the blood pulsing in Mira’s ears that made it seem that way.
She walked along the glassed-in conference room, trying to keep her eyes straight ahead but unable to resist the temptation to peek in. She saw Liv first, sitting at the table and giving Mira a sympathetic look through the glass. Most of the other Trustees had arrived, but they were too preoccupied with the table full of donuts and coffee that Juanita had set out for them to notice the ashen look on Mira’s face.
And then there was Jack. He was sitting at the head of the table – the place where Mira always sat. A spark of anger shot through her at the audacity he had to take her place before the meeting even began, but then she forced another low, deep breath to fill her lungs. He’d chosen that seat on purpose, to rile her up and to send a message, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of ruining her career and filling her with unchecked anger in front of a room full of white-haired old men who would be deciding her fate soon enough.
As Mira entered the room, she locked eyes with Jack and he tapped one finger casually against a CD that he clutched in his hands, then gave her a smug grin.
She tucked her resignation letter self-consciously behind her back, holding his gaze until he looked away, pretending to be very interested in the legal pad on the desk in front of him. She went to the front of the room and stood rather than taking a seat – she wanted to get her resignation out of the way as soon as possible – and she hoped that in her silence she was evoking stoicism more than fear.
Mira folded her hands behind her back while she waited for everyone to finish with the donut table and find their seats, and she kept her mind occupied with the task of trying not to clutch her resignation letter so hard it turned into a wrinkled mess. Finally, the last of the Trustees arrived and the room settled down. One by one all heads turned to Mira, standing conspicuously at the front of the room.
“Well, sit down then,” one of the white-haired old Trustees said, waving to an empty chair in the middle of the table. “We don’t have all day and I would like to call the meeting to order.”
“Actually,” Mira said, forcing her voice to be loud when all she really wanted to do was crawl beneath the table, “I have something I need to say.”
She held out the resignation letter, looking down at it and taking one final deep breath before she plunged the figurative sword into her stomach. Then she opened her mouth.
“Wait!”
The conference door swung open and thumped heavily against the wall, and everyone turned to the intruder, Mira included. It was Chelle, out of breath and with a wild look in her eyes.