We laughed courteously as we picked up our receivers and dialed. I waited for her outgoing voice mail to come through.
“Nine-one-one emergency response, what is your emergency?” the voice on the other end asked. I looked at the receiver in horror and then slammed it down in the cradle.
“What happened?” Derrick leaned over, looking at my phone, but I was too mortified to answer.
“Very good. Okay. Let’s move on to transferring calls.” We all turned our attention to the front of the room. “You’ll note the hold button—”
Suddenly, my phone rang, interrupting our instructor.
The entire class turned toward me; Derrick even rotated his chair to stare me down. The instructor frowned, gesturing at my ringing phone, and I grabbed the receiver.
“Hello, everything is fine . . . I’m fine . . . I just misdialed,” I stammered into the phone, then hung up before the caller could say a word. I could feel my cheeks radiating, confirming that I had turned a humiliating shade of crimson.
“Who was that?” the instructor asked, sounding more curious than accusatory.
I stared at her, unable to invent a story quickly enough. “I must have dialed an extra one after the nine-one,” I said quietly.
“You called nine-one-one?” Derrick hooted. There was a brief silence in the room, followed by an eruption of laughter. I looked up from my white-knuckled fists resting on my thighs and was surprised to see a roomful of sympathetic faces. Derrick threw an arm over my shoulder, and I melted into his side with a dramatic pout.
“Whatever, I just called the managing partner of the firm by accident,” somebody called out from the back of the room. I looked toward the voice and met Carmen’s eyes.
“You called Mike Baccard?” the instructor gasped.
“At least nine-one-one can’t fire you!” Carmen said, and the room erupted into laughter again. I nodded gratefully at her.
The instructor smiled. “Oh, you really are a special class. But let’s move things along. At this rate, we’re not getting out of here before the end of the day, and I have three new kittens at home who aren’t going to feed themselves!”
Derrick and I locked eyes. “I’m pretty sure pets count as living things,” I said.
“You have me there, Vogel.” He smiled. “I owe you a drink.”
We were given offices with unobstructed views of Manhattan, firm email accounts, firm cell phones, firm laptops, firm credit cards, firm 401(k)s, firm health insurance, Equinox gym memberships, and firm gym bags to encourage us to use them. I met my secretary, Anna, who showed me the picture of her grandchildren in the locket around her neck and proudly told me that her oldest son had just joined the clergy. I liked her immediately. She asked me about my message-taking preferences, offered to turn my changes to documents, and insisted she’d keep me fed even when I thought I was too busy to eat. I didn’t know what “turning changes” meant, and I couldn’t fathom living in a world where work ever trumped the demands of my growling stomach, but I thanked her profusely, and silently vowed to never ask her for a single thing I could manage to do myself.
“I come in at nine each morning to get your affairs and schedule in order,” she continued. “Most attorneys come in between nine thirty and ten thirty, but there’s no rule for you. I leave at five thirty, and the night secretary covers you until I come back in the morning. Sound good?”
I nodded, and she returned to her cubicle outside my office to allow me to get settled.
“Let me know if you need anything, anytime!” she yelled to me. “I take care of you and the two attorneys on either side of you, but I’m never too busy, even if I seem it.”
I smiled gratefully and sat back down at my desk, scanning emails from the training coordinator about our schedule for the coming week. To pass the time until our lunchtime ethics training, I called Carmen’s extension to practice joining a conference call. The rest of the day flew, and when our benefits training ended at four thirty, I returned to my office, feeling it was too early to leave. Soon after five, I looked up and locked eyes with Anna, who was packing up to leave for the night just outside my office. She nodded knowingly and walked toward me, leaned her shoulder against the doorframe.
“You should go home, honey. You’ll be working so hard you’ll forget what your apartment looks like soon enough. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She ducked out of my doorway before I could say goodbye.
My phone rang, instilling a sudden panic in me that it was time to do real work, but Carmen’s name was on the caller ID.
“Hi.”
She laughed. “How weird is it that we have offices?”
“Right? I feel like I’m playing a lawyer on TV!”
“We’re all going to the bar across the street to celebrate our first day. Come!”
“I promised my boyfriend I’d be home for dinner tonight.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she scoffed. I glanced at my watch. Orientation had finished ahead of schedule, and Sam wasn’t expecting me home for at least another hour. I thought for a moment about all the postwork happy hours I’d seen on television and in movies. I had never before had colleagues willing to spend money on overpriced midtown drinks.
“Fine. I’m in.” It felt good to yield so easily, allowing me to feel like a professional for the first time in my life.
“First round is on me!” Derrick insisted as he handed the bartender his credit card, our crowd of five circling up behind him at the bar.
“No!” we protested in unison.
“It’s my treat. I’ll take it out of my moving stipend,” he said with a smile. “What’s everybody drinking?”
After we shouted our orders at the bartender in turn, I scanned the sparsely populated bar.
Kevin leaned in to me. “Just us and the trading and advertising crowds now. The lawyers and investment bankers won’t get here until six thirty at the earliest.”
Derrick passed me my vodka soda over Roxanne’s head, and I mouthed a thank-you. “How do you know they’re in advertising?” I asked Kevin.
“Their clothes. Could be just bad taste, but lack of funds is more likely,” he answered before heading off to commandeer a high-top whose occupants were paying their bill. I noticed the preponderance of khakis and ill-fitting dresses around the room, then looked back at our small clan’s well-tailored suits, smart skirts, and flowing tops. And we haven’t even gotten our first paychecks yet.
Kevin waved us over to the table as the waitress was finishing clearing the glasses and wiping up whatever gummy residue of dark liquor was left on the heavily varnished wood.
“Derrick, how do you have anything left in your stipend, by the way?” Carmen asked. “My stipend barely covered my move, and I only came from Boston. Didn’t you move across the country?”
Derrick shrugged. “My parents have a furnished place in the city where I’m living now, so I didn’t really have anything to move. But Klasko asked if I was moving from outside New York City to inside New York City. I said yes. Because I was. And now I have ten grand to spend on you lovely folks.”
We met his glass in a cheers.
“They give you ten grand to move?” Roxanne asked. “Columbia kids weren’t offered anything.” She looked at Jennifer, who nodded in agreement.