Chapter Text
“Overtime? Really? On Christmas of all days?”
A nerve in Noelle’s temple twitched. There was no need for her to look up, the mental image had already been seared into her brain – the fat balding manager peering over her cubicle, flashing a yellow-stained grin at her while leaning against the creaking divider. She never bothered to learn his name; there was no incentive to. Her brain had Pavlov-ed itself into sighing at the sound of his raspy voice and she didn’t need to attach an owner to it as well.
Click-clack-click-clack, Noelle’s keyboard replies, its user resuming her blank stare at the screen. On it was the same Excel sheet that she’d been filling for the past hour, filled with stats and figures she had no care for, but all of a sudden, she really cared.
“Aye, won’t your family be upset? You're not gonna eat with them? Really?”
Noelle shakes her head, praying that he shows mercy and spares the small talk. She didn’t have the energy to lie at this hour.
“Okay, okay, I see how it is. Tell you what? Ya need a ride home, my car’s always there,” he leans closer, his tone reminiscent of the word “miasma”. “Yellow Chevrolet Corvette. Pretty sweet, right? She’s a beauty. Been dreaming of giving some chicks a ride in it and you can be the first!”
The typing screeches to a halt. Noelle stops. Her mind blanks. The gears in her brain struggle to turn, trying to come up with something that would shoo him away. She could feel the searing of his gaze; he was undressing her with his eyes, she knew it. The backlog of HR complaints knew it too. This was a sentence that required utmost deliberation. His presence was sapping her strength and she needed him gone as soon as possible.
“Thanks for the offer, sir, but I’ll have to refuse. My… boyfriend will be picking me up soon.”
A long pause.
“Oh,” the manager sighs. “And you’re leaving him to wait for you at this hour? Damn, even I can do better than that.”
“Yeah, he, uhh… works the night shift. He’s a police officer,” Noelle coughs.
The last two lines were nettle on her tongue. It wasn’t the fact that she lied, she’d been desensitised to it since eighth grade. She vaguely remembered doing it regularly to hang out with that girl from years ago, and although her name had faded from memory, the damage she had done to Noelle’s teenage morality hadn’t. It was the word “boyfriend” that caused such a visceral disgust in her. It was anathema to her even after all these years, even after high school graduate Noelle drew that five-step plan for success then – get into MIT, get an internship, get a good job, get married to a man, have kids. At this rate, she’ll never pass step four. No amount of problem-solving skills could help her find a workaround.
“Alright then. Such a shame. Merry Christmas, Noelle.” he says, taking his own sweet time to turn away. A slow creak from the divider as it returns to its upright form, accompanied by the increasingly-distant thump-thump of dress shoes on carpet.
“Same goes for you.”
The click of the office door echoes throughout the room. Ambient noises could be heard once again; the hummm from the server room, the whirrr of the heater, like bunnies re-emerging after the wolf’s absence. Noelle pauses to take it all in. Her entire body slackens as she melts further into her swivel chair, the fog in her brain clearing up at the relief. She feels a newfound tranquility in the room; the carpeted floor stopped feeling disgusting, and even the piss-yellow overhead lights calmed her eyes.
Noelle allows herself a single spin on the chair. Three hundred-and-sixty degrees, then after a five-second stretch, the click-clack of the keyboard reverberates through the room again.
-
There’s a sense of accomplishment to be had when you’re the last person standing in any given situation. It’s proof that within that specific scenario, you’ve bested your entire competition at something. Skill, endurance, wits, luck; it doesn’t matter, out of x number of people that participated, you were ranked number one for that specific trait. Later in the future, an enterprising developer would pitch the video game Fortnite: Battle Royale based on that premise, amassing billions of dollars of revenue for the company, while current-day Noelle was rewarded with a measly half-hour to kill and forty extra dollars of overtime pay.
For the past month, she’d been the last to leave the office, usually departing when the lights shut off. No one could deny that she was a hard worker. In the HR department’s eyes, Noelle was the perfect employee; she never complained, never disturbed, and she never asked for a raise. Every day she would show up at nine a.m. sharp, hole herself in her tiny spartan cubicle, slave away at the desktop computer, then leave once her daily overtime pay was milked dry.
“They don’t make ‘em like Noelle anymore,” she’d heard her boss say once. “One hell of a workhorse, I’ll tell ya, if she keeps at it my position might be in danger. Don’t know what’s the deal with her.”
I don’t know either, she thinks, waiting for the coffee machine to finish brewing. The earthy smell permeates throughout the room, reminding her of the tiredness that she’d tuned out from overworking. It’s rare to catch a random glimpse of her at all, let alone outside her cubicle; the most one could get is a small peek of her head whenever she takes a stretch. Here stands the elusive Noelle, far from her natural habitat, dressed in the same pencil skirt and white button-up that she’d been wearing every day to work.
Five sips later and the answer comes to her. It’s always laid dormant inside her, innately fueling each of her overtime sessions, but she decides to do the process of elimination for the fun of it. One might think that she wants to appease her boss, to climb the corporate ladder. Wrong. The mere thought of that makes her gag, nearly spitting coffee over the already-stained carpet. If given the choice between giving him the finger and complimenting his hair, she would always pick Option C and splash the scalding liquid in his face. If there were no laws, of course.
The other options got the axe quicker. Abusive household? By technicality, yeah? Could my teenage life be considered that? Noelle didn’t know and didn’t care. She was a hundred miles from that no-name town now, living alone in the cheapest studio apartment she could find in San Francisco. It was barren, yes, but not enough to avoid it entirely. Pure determination? Nope, she thinks, I feel no dogged desire to push through. It comes naturally. Next. Emotional attachment? Absolutely fucking not.
Noelle stops beating around the bush. It was for the money, more specifically, the money needed to get out of this place. The moment she heard the first beep of the keycard, hell, ever since she shook the interviewer’s hand, she knew her job was to get in here, milk as much pay as possible, then leave. She consistently ranked number one in the company for apathy towards work-life balance and they loved her for it.
One more month, she thinks, mouthing the words as she stares out the window. One more month and I’m free from this godforsaken place.
It was a pouring San Francisco Christmas, otherwise known as an average San Francisco Christmas. Raindrops take their sweet time gliding down the panes, like tears down a cheek, creating blurry streaks in their wake. The office building opposite her, normally a dazzling light-blue, now obstructs the rest of the city view with its black windows. Its adjacent counterparts followed suit to blend with the night sky. Noelle presses her nose to the window to gaze at the street below, feeling her pores freeze over as she squints. The street was empty compared to typical working days, but a surprising number of people had decided to forgo the festive season, as seen by the rows of monochrome cars on the road below. Flanked on both sides were canopies of umbrella-bearing workers, and although they were more kaleidoscopic with their colours, it all looked dull from Noelle’s distant point-of-view anyway.
Shit, Noelle curses, I forgot my umbrella. Why today of all days…
She wonders if any of the hundreds of commuters had looked up and noticed the lone yellow glint of her window. What would they think of me, the sole sign of life in this place? It wasn’t hard for her to imagine their perspective. The looming height of Pinder’s main office would tower above them, its neon pink sign surrounded by halos in the darkness. And then the tiny speck of Noelle’s office. An astute viewer might notice her neatly combed hair as she glances down at them. Among those who see her, some may express concern, some may judge her for abandoning her family, but just like the other ninety-five percent, they look back down towards the street anyway, their minds fixated on nothing but escaping the rain.
She cringes. The thought of being publicly associated with this company filled her throat with bile. Noelle Lei? Valedictorian of her high school? MSc holder in Biotechnology? Working as an accountant for a hookup app company? Icarus couldn’t dream of a steeper fall. Fresh-out-of-university Noelle had taken the job in a rare moment of irrationality, desperate for an excuse to leave her childhood town behind; in her eyes, it was just a mere stepping stone to her eventual freedom. Was it an act of rebellion, just to spite her parents? Or was it a desperate attempt to get a reprieve from them? None of these mattered, all that did was the fact she’s now stuck with this blemish on her resume.
At the very least, her old contacts didn’t see her fall from grace.
One more month and I’m free from this godforsaken place, Noelle repeats. She’ll be in Toronto by the start of February and she’ll be truly unreachable. Every last penny from her job went towards this goal. It made overtime feel like medicine instead of poison, sure, it tastes like pure garbage, but at least it speeds up the eventual relief. I’ll get a nice apartment, work in a prestigious laboratory, get my life in order, then finally settle down with a ma-
Click.
The lights and heater take their scheduled shutdown, jolting the thoughts out of Noelle’s mind. She groans. Fumbling for her belongings and her phone, she turns on the flashlight with sluggish reluctance and starts sweeping for the exit, her shin finding most of the obstacles for her.
—
The rain, of course, refused to cease. It continued its onslaught on the commuters below, assisted by the wind to wet those underneath awnings and balconies. Noelle was no exception. She had assumed that the shelter underneath the vehicle drop-off point was sufficient, before being proven wrong by several stray splashes on her skin.
“Fucking hell,” she whispers, “why today of all days?”
Noelle checks her phone, hoping for any notification to distract her. Even a work email would be welcome. Her senses were overloaded and begging for a reprieve, a far cry from the relative peace of the office. Rain battered the metal roof like woodpeckers to a tree, accompanied by a few distant car horns to jumpscare the eardrums. The streetlights now resembled the Sun more than the calming yellow spheres from her office’s view. Her skin began to shiver despite her best efforts, and her tightly-pursed lips, usually straight and parallel with the ground, began to falter and twitch.
Unfortunately, no one had the audacity to send her an email at this hour. Noelle had no social media to derive stimulation from, nor any contacts that remembered her enough to send a how-you-doing? text. She always liked it that way. Not today, though. Her only alternative was the news app and that’s her one-way ticket to high blood pressure.
There’s something humbling about remaining stationary while the world carries on without you. Seeing the constant stream of commuters filled Noelle’s chest with a sense of turmoil; her legs burned with the desire to move in spite of the rain’s taunts. Although she hated the gradual dampening of her shirt and wished to just tank the rain head-on, there is no worse trio than women, white clothes and wet weather.
If only there was scenery to look at, she thinks. People are boring to watch.
It took ten whole minutes to find something worth looking at. A woman in a yellow raincoat catches her eye, standing out from the sea of dark office-wear. Noelle observes her carefully. Her raincoat was slightly translucent, revealing what appeared to be a teal crop top and purple leggings. She would turn her head from building to building, taking in the lights and sounds, unlike the rest who kept their heads down towards their phones. And although it was difficult to verify, Noelle assumed that among the leather dress shoes, the hot pink sneakers must have belonged to her as well.
But the most striking part of it all was the lack of a hood. Both her hair buns felt the full force of the rain, scattering them into dishevelled clumps and spaghetti-like strands. No adult with the mental maturity of one would sport them at this age. Noelle wrinkles her nose. She remembers a lecture from her mother about hippies, about how they stray away from society and end up as useless outcasts in their thirties. That was around ten years ago, but her broken English delivery remained fresh in her mind to this day.
Suddenly, the woman looks in the direction of Noelle’s office. Then at her. She stops and does a double take, eyes filled with sparkling intrigue as she tries to get a closer look. Noelle instinctively looks away, but a feeble spark lights in her head, half shock, half deja vu. Her eyes snap wide open.
Hey, ah- uhh… hold on, what’s your name, I swear I remember somewhere…
She’d never expected to relive this feeling after graduating from university. It would rear its head every time she encountered a difficult question during an exam. A reminder that she’d studied the material and forgot it entirely. Upon an encounter, Noelle would find that her brains had been tangled into fine and before she knows it, time runs out and she’s left lamenting the loss of that mark in some hidden stairwell in school.
If she could remember the names of the cranial nerves in the medulla oblongata, she could surely remember a girl’s name.
Wait, stay, please, Noelle mouths.
But it was too late. She was long gone, having been jostled forward by the crowd. The river returned to a stream of monochrome and dried up of its gold.