Lizzie

Looking back, maybe I should’ve noticed the red flags.

The unusually large sign-on bonus, for example—payable only after I lasted thirty days on the job.

Who can’t last in a job for thirty days? That was my thought when I applied for this position.

And then there were the strange looks my co-workers would give me when I went around introducing myself as Vossameer Inc.’s new social media manager. “I’m here to jazz up our online image,” I’d explain.

In the elevator, on the communications floor, down in the sleek and elegant lobby, just these strange looks. Uncertain smiles. One woman’s mouth formed into an alarmed “o” before she introduced herself back to me.

At first I chalked it up to company-wide cluelessness about social media. After all, Vossameer didn’t even have a Facebook page when I started three weeks ago.

But now as I watch my boss Sasha fret and frown over the PowerPoint report I created to show how perfectly I nailed my assignment, I’m starting to think a little bit harder about those red flags.

She clicks to a page that shows examples of my successful, industry-appropriate posts and a graph of my stunning engagement numbers.

She sucks in a breath. Winces.

What?

Trust me, Facebook engagement was no easy feat; Vossameer’s most exciting product is hemostatic gel for use in traumatic wound-care situations.

Another wince. A frown.

Was I the clueless one all along? Was I misreading the looks I was getting from my new co-workers?

Am I like the traveler in Transylvania who excitedly tells all the villagers about finding an awesome free castle to stay in? OMG, I have the whole place to myself because the owner only comes out at night. Isn’t that wonderful? Score! High five!

I hold my breath as she clicks from page to page.

Sasha has a severe blonde bob, a love of nautical-looking outfits, and a Cruella De Vil makeup style, though to be fair, it might be a poorly lit home mirror.

“Mmm…” she says finally. And it’s not a yum type of mmm. It’s an uh-oh type of mmmm.

“Is there a problem?” I ask.

She just shakes her head. As though the problem goes beyond words. Like she asked for an interim report and I gave her a handful of peanut shells with the salt licked off.

She clicks to another graph of positive results and again she furrows her dark and dramatically arched brows—I see it in the reflection on the screen.

“The engagement numbers are already better than most of Vossameer’s peers,” I point out.

Crickets.

Actually, not even crickets. “Crickets” suggests little beings are happily chirping away in a field. What I hear is more like the silent gloom of stones in a forgotten parking lot.

She clicks to the next page. My website mock-up.

“You wanted our site to come up on the first page on Google,” I remind her. “Now it does, but we’ll do even better once the new site is up. I think people will stay longer.”

Trust me, that’s a nice way of putting it. The current Vossameer site looks like it was made by depressed robots in 1998.

Of course, when you’re Vossameer, a billion-dollar unicorn of a company, you don’t need a nice site. Vossameer could have no site at all, and giant health groups would still pay zillions of dollars for their lifesaving medical gel.

But now they’re trying to partner with some high-profile charitable foundation—Locke Foundation, part of Locke Construction.

So they have to look shiny online.

Which is why they hired me. That was my assignment.

When you search Vossameer, the top hit is a Forbes article on mysterious CEO Theo Drummond that can be summed up in eight words: he’s an asshole, but his products save lives.

And it’s not the only one. Tons of articles paint Mr. Drummond as a reclusive genius. A gruff misanthrope. A surly asshole.

I’ve never met the notorious Mr. Drummond, but the asshole thing is not hard to believe. The evidence is all around.

The employees here are fearful, as though they’re expecting to be fired at any moment, or maybe beheaded. The environment is sleek gray marble and steel, like an elegant and slightly futuristic prison. No outside decorations are allowed, not even in the deepest recesses of your cubicle.

Even the outside of the building is unforgiving—a mod gray concrete bunker with rectangular windows arranged in straight rows. A study in harsh geometry.

Mr. Drummond doesn’t like decorations, Sasha told me once. Vossameer is about lifesaving solutions, not party streamers.

I’d brought a giant tub of home-baked frosted cookies to share my second day, and people nearly fell out of their chairs. It turns out we can’t bring treats to share. Ever.

This is a workplace, not a potluck, Sasha said.

I’ve gotten good at sensing the assholey DNA of Mr. Drummond’s statements, and I’m pretty sure that was one of them. Same with the party streamers comment. It’s something about the sheer jerkiness of it, and also, how Sasha changes her voice to sound breathless and intense.

Everyone here is obsessed with Mr. Drummond. They seem to regard him the way the ancients regarded the gods that controlled the weather and plagues. Angry and vengeful, yet glorious. Never to be spoken ill of.

Also, nobody talks about Mr. Drummond without using the word “amazing” at least once. Maybe that’s in the employee manual somewhere.

Sasha’s obsession goes way further—more into awestruck love territory.

She speaks his name like she’s whispering hallowed secrets to the Greek oracles atop Mount Olympus—Mr. Drummond this, Mr. Drummond that. Amazing Mr. Drummond.

“Mr. Drummond is not the most sociable person in the world,” Sasha breathlessly informed me the day I started. “He has extremely high standards—for himself and for his employees—but his amazing breakthroughs save lives every day. The work we do to support him makes that possible.” And then she’d looked me deeply in the eyes and said, This is the most important job you’ll ever have.

I’d just nodded while making a mental note to stay away from any brightly colored liquid.

I cross my arms. Wait for Sasha to click on through my doomed PowerPoint.

“On the next page are the website hits that come from Facebook,” I say nervously.

Sasha doesn’t want to see the next page. She levels a long red fingernail at the screen, like a blood-red rocket, and taps on the image of an old man holding hands with a baby. She then taps the faces of happy newlyweds. “Why am I seeing these people?”

“Well, our marketing materials tend to concentrate on the medical effects of our hemostatic gel, but that’s not what we’re selling, is it?” I say. “We’re selling more time with loved ones. We’re selling health providers the ability to grant more time to wounded patients. That’s our true product.”

She actually cranes her head around and looks up at me, like I’m saying something really radical. And not Marketing 101.

“Look at any hospital or pharma website,” I continue. “Right now, let’s go look. You’ll see pictures of happy people living life together. ”

Sasha pulls out her phone and enters the name of a large local hospital. Does she not believe me? I’m hugely relieved to see an image of a woman leaping in the air, trailing a silky scarf behind her.

Sasha looked surprised.

This place.

That jerk Mr. Drummond runs these people so hard, they have no life. Poor Sasha seems to be up to her neck in press releases and case studies. But seriously, do they not watch TV? Do they not mess around online?

“After all,” I say, “it’s not as if hospitals are going to fill their sites with pictures of bloody scalpels and ugly surgical scars. Right?” I try a smile.

Sasha doesn’t.

She’s back at my PowerPoint. A family at a picnic. Old people doing a puzzle. At one point, she sucks in a breath, like the images literally agonize her. “Mr. Drummond won’t like seeing all this,” she says in the most ominous tone possible. “He won’t like it at all.”

As if I’ve spent my three weeks filling people’s drawers with Ping-Pong balls instead of nailing my assignment.

“Why won’t he like it?” I hate how small my voice sounds.

She just shakes her head.

“The thing is, my assignment was to modernize and humanize Vossameer’s online presence…and people relate to people,” I say.

Cue the crushing gloom of stones.

If I were more mercenary, I’d give them the boring site they want and a sad Facebook feed shunned by all. I’d be long gone by the time they realized I screwed them over. But that’s not me. I may only be here for the bonus, but I intend to do a good job for them.

“No, you probably have a point. About the people,” she says. “It’s social media, after all.”

“Yeah, right?” I agree hopefully.

“Mr. Drummond does want this foundation partnership. But…” She gestures at a picture of a happy family. Makes a tiny little sound. A tiny little frightened sound.

Does Mr. Drummond just hate happy families? Will he start throwing chairs if he sees a little boy and his grandfather working on a train set?

And if so, why bother to invent lifesaving solutions?

“Welp!” Sasha straightens up. “Who knows, maybe he’ll like it.” Her tone is weird. Far too bright. “Mr. Drummond sees things we don’t, does things for reasons we don’t always understand. It’s amazing he’s as patient with us as he is.”

“Sure, okay,” I say.

“I’ll have you present with me,” she says. “We’ll head up after lunch.”

“Wait—what?” I nearly swallow my tongue.

I’m going up to the top? To the tyrant’s lair?

“You’ll help me explain.”

“I thought you liked to present…solo.” I’ve gotten the feeling that Sasha has been passing off my ideas as her own. Not that I care. Again, only here for the bonus.

“You’re the expert.” She smiles.

Translation: If all goes well, she’ll take the credit. If it goes poorly, I’ll take the fall.

She looks over my outfit, or more winces over it.

I straighten my blazer. I’m in a gray pantsuit with a white shirt under. It’s something a stylish female detective would wear, at least in my imagination. Even my dark blonde hair is contained in an un-fun bun.

Where did I go wrong?

Though to be fair, most maiden sacrifices happen with the helpless victim wearing a nightgown.

“It’s fine.” She waves me off. “See you at 1:45.”

I thank her and make my way down the row of non-visually-distracting cubicles.

I eat my turkey sandwich at my desk, feeling doomed. I open my bag of chips ever so quietly. That’s another rule—inmates of Gulag Vossameer must not make excessive non-work-related noise.

What’s more, they must never prepare foods that produce an excessive smell. Microwave popcorn is expressly banned.

I have this fantasy of popping popcorn in the microwave—Orville Redenbacher extra-buttery movie version—while dancing on my desk in a pink mini skirt to Britney Spears’s “Gimme More.”

But that would have to happen after the bonus is in my bank account. I desperately need that bonus. Beyond desperately.

I just need to last six more business days, not counting today. A person can handle anything for six days, right?

Two hours later, we’re waiting for the elevator. Sasha frowns at me for about the tenth time. “Do not speak unless spoken to. You understand?”

“Got it,” I say.

“Don’t elaborate needlessly,” she says. “You tend to elaborate…”

I swallow. “Got it. No elaboration.”

I don’t have an official marketing degree. I used to own a bakery, Cookie Madness, that got really popular thanks to my work on Facebook and Instagram. I even won some awards. Those awards got me this job—I could tell from the interview.

It still hurts to think about my stolen bakery. My stolen life. My stolen dream. Stolen and destroyed.

We get in. Sasha hits the button for the fifteenth floor. “Not everybody gets the chance to meet him,” she says.

Yay? I think. But I don’t say that. I just nod and smile.

I worked in restaurants all through culinary school, and I had a lot of jerky bosses. Jerky bosses can be fun because they give the employees a shared enemy to whisper about, to exchange mocking glances over, and that creates a sense of camaraderie, like a workplace version of the French Resistance.

Vossameer doesn’t have even that bit of joy. It’s sad.

We’re stalled at the tenth floor while people try to fit in a cart. Nervously, Sasha checks the time.

I’ll admit, I’m interested to meet the elusive and tyrannical Mr. Drummond on a purely WTF level. Because who runs a company like this?

In my quest to be the perfect leader of the five employees who worked at my cookie bakery, I used a lot of positive reinforcement. If somebody took a risk that backfired, I would still praise them, because I wanted them to feel empowered to try new things. I encouraged individuality and creativity, and it totally paid off—my employees came up with some great ideas.

We hit eleven. The cart leaves.

There aren’t many photos of Mr. Drummond out there. Most of them are him standing in large groups, or in a lab wearing protective goggles. I requested a picture for the site, and Sasha told me Mr. Drummond isn’t into it. The picture he makes his assistant provide for industry events is a black-and-white line drawing of a chemist’s beaker with two bubbles coming out of the top of it.

He doesn’t like to draw attention to himself, Bob from HR explained in hushed tones.

Hushed tones.

As though amazing Mr. Drummond might hear his words and feel displeased, and that might destroy his ultra-important lifesaving train of genius thought, and a swarm of locusts would descend from the sky to eat everybody’s smell-free lunches.

Here’s a hint for the inmates of Gulag Vossameer: you don’t have to talk in hushed tones when you discuss Mr. Drummond. He doesn’t have godlike omniscience. He doesn’t have bat-like hearing. He is not a wizard.

He is but a man!

When you pull aside the curtain, that’s what you’ll find. A controlling jerk of a man with a machine to make his voice sound loud and boomy. Just like in The Wizard of Oz.

Right before we hit floor fifteen, Sasha takes out a compact mirror and touches up her lipstick. She’s such a gorgeous and clever tiger of a woman, smart and aggressive. Sure, her aggression is turned on me half the time. Still. I feel bad for her.

I feel bad that this jerky man has made her feel like this. It’s not right!

I want to tell her not to waste her time on a control freak like Mr. Drummond. He’s just another man behind a curtain! I want to say. There’s more power in your awesome shoes!

But I don’t.

For the record, her shoes are awesome—shiny and sculptural high heels in severe black. Her dress is a formfitting knit, sexy in an understated way, with a smart wool blazer over it.

She snaps shut the compact and glances at me nervously as the door opens.

I so rarely see her nervous. It’s ominous. Like in movies where the most powerful jungle animals start running for the hills.

“Don’t mess this up,” she says.

“No worries!” I try a reassuring smile. “I got your back.”

Sasha’s frown is intensified by her severe Cruella brows. Again she surveys my outfit; again she doesn’t seem to like what she finds.

We then begin our long trek down the sleek hallway of harshness.

Now, in addition to the presentation, I’m stressing about my outfit. At the bakery I never had to dress businessy. I’m so nervous now that I remove my necklace and slip it in my pocket. Less decoration.

Then a wave of annoyance flashes over me, because what? I just spent the last three weeks working my heart out on their online presence. If this company was run at all competently, I’d be feeling pride and excitement, with just a little nervousness. And Sasha would feel it, too. We’d both be eager to hear feedback and use it to create the best site possible.

Instead the mood is into the belly of the beast.

We pass a pair of concerned-looking chemists, coming from one of the labs. There are labs on every floor here. That’s what you get when a chemist runs a company.

We reach Mr. Drummond’s office. Sasha knocks.

A distressed-looking woman lets us into a large reception area lined with file cabinets. “He’s expecting you,” she whispers, leading us toward a pair of black doors. Even her gray hair seems anxious, the way it wires urgently out of her head.

I smile. “Thanks,” I say.

A glance passes between the two of them.

What?

I’m starting to get paranoid. And kind of angry. People here work so hard for him, and how does this guy reward them? By keeping them completely on edge.

The receptionist knocks softly—twice—then pulls one door open.

I follow Sasha into a chaotic office space that’s decorated with charts of chemical elements and whiteboards with madly scribbled circles and lines and letters, like the alphabet exploded somewhere nearby.

File cabinets and shelving units full of boxes and binders and bottles line the walls, and taking center stage is a massive worktable supporting piles of manuals and notebooks and a lone coffee cup next to a lone laptop.

In a gloomy far corner there’s a broad wooden desk, dark except for one warm circle of light cast by one lonely lamp. Two severe chairs wait in front of it, sentinels at the ready.

But where is amazing Mr. Drummond? Why would his receptionist act like he’s here when the office is empty?

A door off to the side is plastered with colorful safety signs, including one that says “Lab Coat and Eye Protection Required.” A lab, then. Did he go in there?

I wander past the worktable. “Looks like Mr. Amazing is being amazing elsewhere,” I mutter.

“What’s that?” Sasha says.

“Looks like he’s elsewhere,” I say more loudly.

I move closer to the desk. Close enough that I suddenly make out a pair of icy gray eyes staring sternly at me from behind black-framed glasses. Dazzling eyes. Gorgeous eyes.

Mr. Drummond.

Fear whooshes through me. Did he hear what I said? Please, no!

Mr. Drummond stands and pulls off his glasses, still staring at me.

Gulp.

His white lab coat hangs open, revealing a fine gray suit underneath. He stalks toward me with the grace of a large predator.

But that’s not what’s so remarkable about him.

With or without glasses, he’s the most dramatically, effusively, wildly handsome man I’ve ever seen. His hotness has its own force. It has its own gravity. It has its own zip code, miles past the neighborhood of stop staring and deep in the religious-experience-of-beauty zone.

Double gulp.

His dark hair is short and thick, with the texture that you know would be curls if he let it grow out, but like everything at Vossameer, it is rigidly controlled.

His brows are sooty. His lips, currently formed into a frown, are dangerously lush, a little banged-up to create a bad-boy pillowy effect that I very much like.

I swallow and straighten up, reminding myself that this is the control freak responsible for the stern and joyless workplace that is Vossameer. The cruel architect of the microwave popcorn ban.

His extreme hotness is just another assholey aspect of him. Another way he controls people. Melts their minds. Makes their pulses race.

“We have the social media and site makeover presentation for you, Mr. Drummond,” Sasha stammers. “For your perusal.”

He continues to regard me unhappily. Did he hear my Mr. Amazing comment? “Do we have an appointment of some sort?” he asks Sasha, even though he’s looking at me.

“Yes,” Sasha says.

He shoves ink-stained hands into his pockets. “And you are…”

“This is Elizabeth Cooper. New assistant.”

“Pleased to meet you.” I half-lift my hand, unsure if shaking hands is a thing he does with mere mortals.

He grunts at me, then turns to Sasha. “Let’s have it, then. We’ll set up over there.” He motions at the worktable.

I quickly retract my hand, curling it around the printout folder. O-kay!

When I had a new person join my beloved bakery, it would be like we were greeting a long-lost sibling, not somebody’s pet spider that you never wanted to see in the first place.

We go to where Mr. Drummond is clearing a space. He looks up when he’s done, and for one hot heartbeat, I have this strange sense he’s aware of my secret opinions about him, as if there’s some strange conduit between us.

Or who knows, maybe he’s telepathic in addition to being the world’s most amazing chemist and most horrible CEO.

He takes the laptop from Sasha and centers it where he wants it. His hands are quite large, with long fingers, strong yet elegant. I find that I can’t look away from him. He really does have some kind of magnetic gravity thing going on.

Sasha takes her place in front of it and clicks to open the PowerPoint. The title comes up. Vossameer. Relatable. Human. Engaged.

Then a page with the generic new tag: “Helping to save lives.” Sasha thought of it. It’s quite the step up from their old tag, “medical antihemorrhagics.”

Mr. Drummond frowns, as though he’s having trouble making sense of it. Finally he utters one word, dripping with disgust: “No.”

Sasha looks at me. Like she’s stunned that such an offensive thing made its way to the presentation. “You’ll need to get rid of that, Lizzie.”

“No problem,” I bite out, feeling my face heat.

He clicks deeper in. He’s reading everything—all the great results. And he doesn’t seem happy.

Sweat trickles down my spine.

It’s as if I’m in marketing opposite-world. Good is bad. Down is up. It would make a funny story if it wasn’t so important for me to keep this job, to get the bonus.

I cannot lose the bonus.

But things aren’t looking good.

I’m suddenly awash in the frantic, helpless feeling I had the night I discovered the life I’d built was imploding. The night I found my bank accounts cleaned out, and then I discovered the bakery eviction notices that my ex, Mason, had hidden from me, followed by the credit card debt from cards I didn’t know about.

Mason had worked his way into my trust, little by little, and he’d stolen everything. I know I share some of the blame. I was so in love with him. Blinded by love.

It was too late by the time I called the police. Mason had disappeared, probably to a tropical island, they thought. He’d always dreamed of living in the Caribbean; that’s probably one of the only true things he ever told me.

In the days after, I learned the worst of it—he’d taken out loans everywhere possible in the name of Cookie Madness and my name, too—including a loan from loan sharks.

Actual loan sharks.

Which is why I need this bonus so badly.

“What are these images of picnics?” Mr. Drummond barks. “How is that relevant to anything? I’m running a pharmaceutical gel business, not a Six Flags.”

Sasha turns to me. “Lizzie?”

I look at the screen, feeling his eyes on me, willing myself not to die of despair.

The picnic shot is one of my favorites. Manhattan skyline in the background. I love New York, and now, thanks to Mason, I have to move away to cheaper pastures.

As soon as I get the loan sharks off my back.

“People don’t care about what’s on their bandages,” I say. “It’s not the quality of Vossameer gel they care about—”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Drummond interrupts, indignant. “Of course they care about quality.”

“No,” I say, looking him right in the eye. “They care about another chance to be happy, to share meals with their favorite people, to watch them grow. To celebrate together. Lean on each other…” I almost want to cry, imagining all the things I’ll miss.

Mr. Drummond’s gaze gets even more intense, if that’s possible. It’s like he wants to bore a hole through my face.

“So actually,” I say, “these pictures are relevant. Because we’re not selling hemostatic gel. We’re selling another day. We’re selling possibilities. And giving medical personnel the power to deliver on that.”

The air seems to pulse between us.

“It’s how all other medical solutions companies position themselves,” I add, thinking I’ve made a compelling case.

Mr. Drummond tilts his head. “Do I look like I care what other medical companies are doing?”

I swallow. “Okay.”

“It’s a question,” he says. “Do I?”

My heart pounds in my ears. Really? He’s going to make me answer a rhetorical question? I suck in a breath. “I suppose you don’t.”

“You suppose right. I don’t care what other companies are doing. And all of this…children and their teddy bears and whatnot…” He gestures at the screen, seeming at a loss for words, so heinous is the sight, “it has no place on our website or our feeds or whatever...”

“That’s what I’ve been telling her,” Sasha says. “Families don’t belong on our site or on our feeds.”

I curl my hands more tightly around my file folders. “How about medical personnel? Or could we maybe spotlight the chemists?” There’s a whole army of chemists here, ready to do Mr. Drummond’s bidding, his personal fleet of nerdy minions. I’ve spoken to a few of them in the elevator. They talk about the amazing opportunity to work under him. The amazing learning opportunity. “We could have them talk about—”

“How about achieving our goals without a lot of fluff?” Mr. Drummond says, totally cutting me off.

There’s this weird silence where I think I could actually come to hate him. I’ve been working on letting go of my hatred of Mason with the help of a book entitled Forgive and Be Free, but I might hate Mr. Drummond. I might even cherish hating him. Miraculously, I manage a smile. “Social media, too? No images of people?”

He raises an inky brow.

“Okay, so the assignment is to modernize and humanize Vossameer’s online presence,” I begin, gritting my teeth, “and I hear you saying, let’s do that without using any humans whatsoever.” Is he listening? Does he hear how messed up that is? It’s like saying, I’ll make some noise without using any sounds whatsoever.

But no. He grunts his approval.

“Very good, Mr. Drummond,” Sasha says.

I stare at one of his alphabet explosion boards, willing the meeting to be done.

“So do we have everything under control?” he asks.

I grit my teeth and nod, because I have to keep this job. “Absolutely.”

“Of course,” Sasha says. “I’ll help her figure it out.”

We get out of there quickly. Sasha is silent all the way down the hall and into the elevator. Then the doors close. “You were a disaster,” she says. “The way you contradicted him on everything. I had to pull it out of the fire for you.”

I bite my lip. Wait out the clock, I tell myself. Outplay. Outlast. “Well,” I say, “we have a strong new direction to work with. So that’s good.”

“Those images. I told you…”

“Consider them pulled,” I say.

“And your outfit. It was highly distracting to Mr. Drummond. The employee handbook forbids revealing outfits.”

My hand goes to my collar. All my buttons are done up except the neck-choking one, but who does the neck-choking button?

“It’s distractingly formfitting as well,” she says. “This is a workplace, not a fashion show.”

I quickly button the neck-choking button. But it’s not the outfit. She didn’t like that Mr. Drummond was so focused on me. I want to reassure her that what passed between us was disdain only, but I did find him attractive in an annoying way.

And he was looking at me a lot.

This is bad.

Nothing will get me fired faster than if she thinks Mr. Drummond likes me.

“I’ll keep it appropriate,” I say. Right then and there, I resolve that whatever spark there was, I’ll douse it. Stomp it. Kill it.

I’ll become utterly invisible and unattractive to him. Mentally I scan through my closet, trying to think of the ugliest, most shapeless outfit possible.

“Even so, I’m going to have to write you up for inappropriate workplace attire,” she says.

“What?” My pulse races. Three write-ups and I’m out. With trembling hands I check the rest of the buttons. “I didn’t think…”

“Now you will,” she snaps.