Not For You

The fluorescent lights buzz. Their persistent whine is a million mosquitos in my brain.

“Ok, everyone.” My boss, Sanjay, and I stand in front of the giant rolling presentation monitor. Sanjay claps his hands together. I flinch.

“Let’s get started,” he says.

The murmur of voices subsides. The fluorescents buzz louder. In front of us, thirty black ergonomic office chairs are arranged in a horseshoe shape around the monitor. Twenty-seven pairs of eyes turn to us. The open concept office suite of Crayne, LLC gapes like a mouth, the strings of naked bulbs hung from the black industrial pipes above are a hundred staring eyes. My heart thunders.

 “First of all, happy Friday,” Sanjay says. This annoys me. I don’t want him to introduce my team’s presentation by putting “happy” before an ordinary day of the week, like it’s a holiday. It’s not.

Next to me, I see D’Andre shifting around. He’s on the development team too, and his work station is right across from mine. I can never get away from him. He looks a lot like T’Challa from Black Panther, which should warm me to him but doesn’t. I can feel the heat of his body each time he shifts toward me, and it makes my skin crawl. I shove my hand in my pocket to rub my lucky pencil stub and try to compress my molecules so they’re all contained in the one square of tile I stand on.

 “…great effort this week,” Sanjay’s saying. His voice is strong and confident, like one of my old MIT professors giving a lecture. I don’t understand how he does it. I spent so many hours as a kid practicing speeches in front of my bedroom mirror, Dad coaching me from the desk chair. And I haven’t managed to speak in front of Crayne, LLC once in the four years I’ve worked here. I guess that’s why Sanjay owns a tech startup at 30 years old and I don’t. That and the fact that his glasses never slide down his nose. Mine always do.

“I especially want to recognize our back-end team,” Sanjay says. “The update is ready for beta testing, thanks to Jiang, D’Andre, and Ben. Let’s hear it for our guys!”

The clapping starts. Percussive, like cymbals crashing in my eardrums. Someone whoops, making me jump again. It’s a tsunami, and I’m drowning. I clamp my legs together, hold my breath, and count backward. 10…9…8…

When I was a kid, I used to scream to block out the pain. Mom taught me to count down from ten, and by the time I got to zero the awful sensation would most likely be gone. If it wasn’t, I would just start over again at ten.

The clapping stops before I get to six. I let my breath out.

“You okay, bro?” D’Andre’s whisper is like a dripping faucet when I’m trying to sleep. That’s the thing about D’Andre. He’s always talking. Nonstop talking. And he always calls me things like “bro” and “man,” which I know is supposed to be friendly, but seems to me like calling your dog “dog” instead of its given name. Sure, he buys me English Breakfast tea and scones whenever he gets lunch at Francesca’s Deli, and I suppose that’s nice. But it requires no great insight on his part. Everyone knows I’m obsessed with the UK. I have been since I was a kid. The thing is, I have nothing to talk about with D’Andre, even if I was interested in talking to him (which I’m not.) I like British novelists and British rock bands. D’Andre likes rap, jiu-jitsu, and Netflix docu-series. We have nothing in common. I did overhear him discussing the Marvel Universe with Jiang a few weeks ago, but to be honest, changing your opinion about someone is a hassle.

I nod to D’Andre, because if I don’t, I know he’s just going to ask me again if I’m okay. But my thumb smarts where I jabbed it on the ragged metal end of the pencil stub. I take my hand out of my pocket to suck the coppery drop of blood.

“So,” Sanjay says. He taps the presentation monitor and brings up the beta version of the platform. “Our customers rely on Crayne to provide streamlined, user-friendly organizational solutions for their businesses, right?”

No one responds. I stare at the back wall, over everyone’s heads, so I don’t have to see their eyes. I trace the alternating lines made by the dull white cinderblocks. Right, up, left, up. I play Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb in my head. Back at my work station, I’d been two and a half minutes into the song when the meeting started.

“We’re taking innovation and functionality to the next level with this update.” Sanjay turns to me, D’Andre, and Jiang. “Ok, guys. Want to walk us through?”

He says “guys” but D’Andre and Jiang are the only ones who ever talk at these things. If this was high school, I’d be hiding in the bathroom, headphones on. If I was in college, I’d be hiding in my dorm room, headphones still on. But I’m an adult, so I stand up here in front of everyone at Crayne, LLC, because if I ran out the door right now Jake St. Onge would never let me forget it.

“Alright,” D’Andre says, his voice unnecessarily loud. Even though I’m not looking at him, I know he’s grinning his stupid grin. He claps his hands, but I don’t flinch this time. “Most of you have already seen the new user interface, or at least parts of it. Props to the user experience crew for their teamwork on this.” In my side vision, he points both index fingers like laser beams at the horseshoe of coworkers. Against my will, Jake St. Onge’s toothy smile sucks my gaze down from the wall. Or maybe it’s because the green button-down shirt he’s wearing has sort of a sheen to it. In any case, Jake looks like he’s just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

 “So, when a user logs in to the platform, they can access their files here.” D’Andre taps the presentation monitor. “We’ve created this array of choices, depending on the business type.”

 We, he says. He’s so full of it. Jiang and I did the real coding. D’Andre’s only contribution, as always, was talking. He says it’s helpful because he’s the one that talks to the other teams and integrates their input. Front end design, quality assurance tests, user feedback, all that. But I could do that, too. If I had to.

“Actually, that’s not quite accurate,” I say. I didn’t intend to say it aloud, and my voice surprises me. High and shaky, it doesn’t really sound like mine. But the words keep coming.

“The algorithm we developed automatically detects the business type and categorizes files accordingly.” I toggle from the user view to the code. My fingers are numb, and everyone’s eyes burn me. Still, I go on.

“As you can see here, we use product, employee, market, and sales platform as variables.” As I speak, Dad’s coaching comes back to me. Project your voice from your diaphragm, Ben. I project my voice from my diaphragm.

“Because the new Crayne platform is intuitive, users spend less time setting up the platform and more time doing business.” The more I talk, the faster I toggle between the code and the user interface, the better I feel. For once, despite all the eyes on me and my shaky legs, I don’t feel judged. I’m showing them something I know, and that only I know how to explain.

“So the software takes the burden off the customer by reducing data entry. We think users will like the man-hours that this automation frees up.”

My mind goes blank. I’ve run out of words. It’s like hitting a wall at full speed.

In the silence, my blood pounds in my ears and the fluorescents buzz overhead. There’s Jake St. Onge, leaning toward Omar and whispering something. He’s got a crooked half-smile as his eyes flick between Omar and me. I feel like I’m passing a group of guys from the track-and-field team in the high school hallways between classes.

But then I see Holly. She’s wearing a dark blue dress with little white flowers, and her blonde hair is up in a bun with the ends sticking out at odd angles. Her head is cocked to the side and she’s smiling at me.

“Thanks, Ben,” Sanjay says. He’s smiling, too—not his small, CEO smile, but one that shows his teeth and crinkles the corners of his eyes, so you know it’s real. Like he’s proud. “Really well done.”

I keep standing there as he begins talking to the whole company again, until I see that D’Andre and Jiang are walking back to their chairs. I hurry after them and sit in mine so fast that it rolls back a few inches. I drag it forward with my heels.

D’Andre grins his stupid grin at me. “Bro, what?!”

I don’t know how to answer that, so I don’t. I’m exhausted. Now that my part’s over, I can’t concentrate on what Sanjay’s saying. I stuff my hand in my pocket and find my pencil stub, rubbing my thumb and forefinger hard over the crushed metal eraser cap. I never understood how people could throw away perfectly good pencils, just because they were no longer useful for writing. Like all the work they’d done meant nothing.

I still draft all my code in pencil, even though some people at Crayne, LLC think it’s weird. Jake St. Onge is one of them, but I saw him walking around with a little notebook for a few weeks after he started working here. The notebook didn’t last long, and I can tell you why. He was using a mechanical pencil. Mechanical pencils are an abomination.

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