Page 49 of The Frog Prince
“Yes.”
“She wasn’t here long,” Tessa adds, taking another hit from her can. “You should have taken her on a tour around the office, introduced her to everyone.”
Mom would have loved that. She would have been thrilled by a guided tour, getting the official “Here’s my desk, here’s the break room, here’s where we make coffee, and that’s where I make my photocopies” description.
My throat suddenly feels lumpy, and I swallow hard as a big red neon sign, like those applause cues in TV studios, blinksBAD DAUGHTERover my head.
Everybody’s waiting for me to say something now. “I was worried about Olivia returning,” I say, feeling lame, and it is lame. “I’m behind on work and didn’t think she’d appreciate my mom hanging around.”
Tessa crunches her now empty can. “Olivia doesn’t own the office.”
Josh nods.
Sara just continues to monitor everything like a little whatever-she-is. I have not figured Sara out yet. She might be a lot of fun (if she ever talked), or she might be a drone (which I think everyone thinks I am), or she might be someone dangerous, which I doubt, but you never know.
“I know, I—” and I break off, feeling even more like a lame-ass because my mom never comes to the city, we never do “girl things” together, and yet I’ve been really lonely, and good company would be nice.
And maybe that’s why I’m nervous about Mom being here. She’s good, and she’s company, but I wouldn’t exactly call her good company. I just get so uptight around her, my insides knotting, and somehow I go from zero to sixty in no time flat. “I wasn’t sure about protocol.”
“If my mom were here, I wouldn’t give a flying fuck about protocol or what anyone might think,” Tessa answered, tossing the smashed Red Bull can into my trash bin. Two points.
“Is your mom in New York?” Sara asks Tessa.
Sara doesn’t usually speak directly to Tessa. It’s kind of an unwritten team rule. Each team has its own members, and members fraternize with one another, not with the enemy team. But somehow, now that Tessa and I have broken the ice, Josh seems just as comfortable talking to Tessa as he does with Olivia.
“No,” Tessa answers flatly, and Josh, in his brown cords and nondescript beige shirt, is listening intently.
“Is she in New Jersey, then?” Sara persists, and Tessa gives Sara a drop-dead look.
“No.” Tessa tugs on her red tights, pulling them higher on her skinny thighs. “My mom’s dead. She died when I was four.” And then she walks away, combat boots clomping violently as though she’s a hotheaded Irish looking for a fight.
For a moment no one speaks. Sara just looks at me and then Josh before slinking away.
Josh remains. “That explains a lot,” he says after a moment, staring after Tessa.
“Does it?” And in Josh’s face I see something new, something different, something… protective.
He doesn’t like Tessa, does he?
“She’s like a character from a Hemingway novel,” he says, and I try to follow this figurative leap, because it has to be figurative. Hemingway didn’t really write about women, did he?
I look down the corridor toward Tessa’s office. “I wonder what she’d do if I invited her to join Mom and me for dinner.”
“Where are you going to dinner?”
I’m jerked back to the stark reality of a weekend alone with my mother. “The Tonga Room.”
Josh nods. “I love that place. I’m really into the old tiki thing. I used to collect hula dancer dolls.”
Okay, he has to be gay. That’snota heterosexual man talking right now.
“You’re welcome to come,” I say, fingers crossed that he’ll say yes, but I don’t want to come on too strong, for fear of scaring him away. I have to have at least one friend attend dinner with me tonight, or Mom will think I haven’t made any friends yet (which is true), and she’ll worry about me more (which would mean more visits and phone calls). “My mom is hoping to meet some of my…”
My voice trails away, and Josh looks at me, then deadpans. “I’ll be your token friend.”
“You will?”
“Mmmm. After hearing that pitiful story about you falling as a kid in your new high heels—beige Naturalizers, your mom said—I think you need one.”