1
There had to be an easier way.
There had to be an easier way for a girl to make a living that didn’t require me sitting here pretending my boss didn’t have his hand on my upper thigh.
What? Did he think I was that hard up for a job that I wanted to be groped by a balding senior partner with a wife and seven kids at home? A guy who had to wipe the spit from the corner of his mouth that collected when he spoke longer than a minute?
His hand crept higher like some kind of tarantula.
He was getting bolder. Last time he stopped at my knee, and when I’d recovered from my shock and pushed him away, he’d laughed and pretended it had been an accident. I’d laughed it off too. What choice did I have?
I, Jane Carmichael, was just a twenty-eight-year-old attorney with student loan payments higher than my monthly rent, who’d landed this job four months ago in a market where they were hard to come by. Sure, I would have preferred to remain at my job at Legal Aid, a job that I started at right after law school. At least until that seemingly perfect April day I arrived home early from a three-day training retreat to find my live-in boyfriend of four years doing the dirty with another woman on my brand-new Pottery Barn sheets. I moved out of Eddie’s condo that same day after answering an ad for a roommate from Craigslist.
It quickly had become clear that the measly pay I received from Legal Aid wouldn’t be enough to cover rent, student loans, my car payment, and other necessary bills like, you know, gas and groceries. So I’d reluctantly left my job at Legal Aid for a job here. If the exhaustive hours and constant pressure for more and more billable hours weren’t stressful enough, I also was stuck dealing with the nauseating attention of one Troy Jenkins, one of the senior partners and my direct supervisor.
Yes, I realized my life was in the crapper.
Troy’s hand was still on my thigh, only now his breathing was getting noticeably louder even as he kept his gaze on the folder in front of him, pretending to be hard at work in case anyone happened to be passing by the conference room and looked in.
As I saw it, I had two choices. I could laugh and push his hand away, scold him like it was all a harmless prank. Then wait for the next time it happened. And it definitely would happen again. This was, like, the fifth similar incident since I started here, the last one where he “accidentally” hit his arm against my boob.
The other choice was—
A high-pitched scream filled the room. It wasn’t mine.
I stared down. My beautiful turquoise PIX Patrol Montblanc pen, a present from my now ex-boyfriend, was embedded in the top of Troy’s hand. Troy held his hand out in front of him and we stared at it in horror. His eyes were wide and his already pale complexion had whitened three shades.
Almost involuntarily, a giggle bubbled out of me. An actual giggle. I don’t think I’d giggled since I was fourteen and my best friend, Penelope Ferrara, laughed so hard she actually peed herself a little.
Suddenly, the conference room where we were working on discovery for a big sexual harassment suit we were embroiled in—yes, I understood the irony—was filled with paralegals and attorneys, drawn by Troy’s scream. Chaos ensued as he was surrounded. Someone pulled the pen from Troy’s hand, and immediately a rush of blood oozed out, dripping down his hand and splattering onto the white marble floor.
“Look what you’ve done,” Troy screamed at me, looking a little green now as he wobbled on his feet.
“What happened?” someone asked, and for a moment, Troy’s eyes locked on mine. It appeared he was momentarily at a loss for words that would explain why his hand had been in the way of my pen.
Suddenly, I was tired. Tired of the whole mess that was my life.
I’d busted my butt working my way first through high school, then college, and finally, law school just so I could spend sixty hours a week dodging the errant hands of my creepy boss. There had to be another way. One that definitely didn’t involve putting myself through any more humiliation.
I stood up. Man, I wanted to lay into this guy, expose his groping hands to the whole firm—if they didn’t already know. But Tucson was a small city and an even smaller legal community. It would be mutual destruction if I actually said what had happened.
So I said the only thing I could and still maintain some dignity. “I quit.”
I turned to go but hesitated as I saw my beautiful pen sitting on the top of the conference table among the bloody paper towels and six boxes of discovery documents. I grabbed a towel, carefully wrapped the pen inside it, and turned around. Just as I reached the doorway, I caught sight of a slight smile on Aggie Bloomenthal’s usually stoic face. Meeting my gaze, she nodded slightly.
It was just the push I needed to continue out the door and not run back to try to salvage the burning fire of my career. Head held high, I left the room.
Troy could suck it.
Two months later
“Would you like to make a donation to the Tucson Homeless shelter?” asked the girl behind the checkout counter.
Okay, so things were dire but I knew that things were far more dire for other people out there, which was why, regardless of how many times I shopped here, I offered what I could. “Sure. Five dollars.”
She pushed a couple buttons on the register. “That’ll be eighty-six dollars and seventy-nine cents.”
Crap. How did a shopping trip for a few necessary items like underwear, coffee, and tampons add up so quickly?
I thought about returning the Fruit of the Loom hipsters. But since I’d had an entire load of laundry thrown into the dumpster because I’d forgotten them in the dryer at the apartment complex, things were getting desperate. Returning the coffee wasn’t a possibility either. Same with the box of tampons and the bottle of ibuprofen I’d added into my cart since I knew a visit from that red fairy was coming in the next week or so. And the bottle of spaghetti sauce and pasta? Well, I had to eat.
Needless to say, my life had not improved after I quit. Turned out that looking for a job when you don’t have one nor any recommendations from the last job can really bite you in the butt. And in a small city where every attorney knew everyone else, the rumor buzzing around that I might have stabbed my former boss hadn’t helped.
As the cashier waited, I did a mental check on my bank balance. Save for the amount I needed for rent, I had one hundred and forty-seven dollars left to my name. I looked over my grocery selections again. In the end, it was the cherry Pop-Tarts, a bag of marshmallows, and three—never mind, two—giant-sized chocolate bars that I slid back to the cashier.
“Sixty-eight dollars and ninety-two cents.”
Better. Red-faced, I swiped my card and beat it out of there. I headed to the parking lot before remembering that, in an effort to save money, I’d cancelled my auto insurance and walked here instead. I was trying to get used to the distinct possibility I might not have a car to drive at all soon, seeing as how I hadn’t made the last payment and didn’t see how I could make the next one under my current circumstances.
I adjusted a bag on each arm so they didn’t cut into my skin and started walking the four blocks back to my apartment when my phone rang from my back pocket. I set my bags down none too gently and scrambled for my phone. I’d sent out umpteen resumes over the past weeks, and maybe, finally, I was about to get a call back for an interview.