Yeah, okay? Earlier than I thought.
()()()()()()()()()
As I contemplated turning around to see this ‘female god’, I tried to remember if God was very hot. I remembered Jesus being kind of a young guy in a dress with a long beard. I tried to shave his beard to see if it would make him less impossible to see, but all I ended up with was a picture of my cousin before he became a punk. It wasn’t working.
“What does that even mean?” I asked, angry that I couldn’t figure out what a female version of God might look like.
“Fucking turn around,” muttered Colquite, his eyes still all stupid and glassy. But, finding myself clearly portrayed in his mirror-like eyes as an elephant, I quickly spun my chair around and hoped I would not see myself in such a way ever again. I was suddenly terrified that the plasma-terrorist would turn me into an elephant. It seemed a completely rational fear.
Whoa. Um. Okay.
“Hell,” I said to myself, my smile crashing around on my face, making my eyes twitch uncomfortably. There was a girl standing at the reception desk and I wasn’t sure if she could be related to the plasma-terrorist. At least until I realized she was incredibly hot and that I was sure I had been wrong about Jesus if Colquite thought she was a female version of God. Her hair was a little crooked on her head, but it looked alright, and her skirt was probably longer than I liked, but I could deal with it. Damn, she was--
“Right, Staples, didn’t I tell you?”
“Actually, you didn’t really tell me anything. I ended up trying to picture Jesus as a girl and then my punk cousin snuck into my mind and started break-dancing and I don’t know--”
“Damn, just shut up. You‘re ruining it,” muttered Colquite. I was glad I had annoyed him. He, and the rest of the Bible, thoroughly deserved it.
“No, I never got to tell you about--”
“Stapleton!” shouted Glorworth, waving his arms above his head like a broken helicopter. “Now!” I assumed he meant for me to try and fix his broken helicopter, so I got up, hoping I could help. He was talking to the female God and I was curious, if I may so myself.
“Yes, Mr. Boss?” I said happily, looking at Female God as I said it.
Glorworth clenched his teeth but disregarded my choice of words. “This is our new receptionist, Claire Doncaster. You will be showing her--”
“How to do as little as possible without getting caught.” There was a silence. “I meant to say, I will be showing her how to work hard without becoming too--”
“Shut up, Stapleton. I apologize for his incompetence.” And then, appearing sort of twitchy and probably more incompetent than I, he walked away mumbling to himself. Claire looked at me and I couldn’t decide if I should call her Claire or Doncaster. Doncaster was more romantic. Like a Spanish fencing teacher who breaks people’s arms and then creates casts rather than calling paramedics, who are probably much better at making casts.
“Well, Doncaster, let’s do this.” I smiled broadly. She sort of smiled but said nothing. I wondered if she was as mute as God. It would make sense, since I had talked to God so many times and he just ignored me. I led her over to my desk and sat down. “So, this is the computer.” She just nodded. “And that’s shithead.”
“Colquite, actually. Nice to meet you.” But Colquite didn’t look up from his computer and I assumed he was just too self-conscious. Or jealous. Definitely jealous.
“Well, his name is Colquite but that’s not what anyone calls him. You see, when he was about eight years old, one of his friends made a statue of him out of dog shit and it looked so much like him--besides the fact that it was kind of brown and featureless, although that isn’t so inaccurate--that they all started calling him shithead. Mostly because ‘shit-body’ just didn’t sound as good. And then--”
The day went on much in this manner. I openly insulted Colquite in a merciless way, Doncaster said nothing and smiled thinly, I laughed loudly, Glorworth talked to his therapist about why he let his most incompetent employee train the employees he must have been hoping wouldn’t be quite so incompetent. Doncaster was learning fast.
But when she was finally sitting at her desk and not bothering me with the unnecessary length of her skirt, which was actually unforgivably long, I went on the internet. Not that this was weird. I spent most of my days watching dirty videos and playing addicting pacman-style games. Today was different, though. Today I tried to learn something.
“Hey, Col--I mean shithead.” I laughed.
“It’s not funny,” said Colquite in his most dignified manner.
“It is,” I insisted, too busy trying to find important information to continue with more violent insistence. “How would I find out who kidnapped me on the internet. Is there, like, a website where it’ll show everything that’s happened to me in the last few days?”
Colquite looked up, his face scribbled with incredulity. I wondered what would happen if I literally scribbled on his face with incredulity.
“Well? Is there?”
He still stared. “Yes, Staples. Search it. Search your name and ‘plasma-terrorist’ and you’ll definitely uncover the mystery of your hangover.”
“It wasn’t a fucking hangover,” I said quietly, suddenly sure that the plasma-terrorist was listening. “I was--nevermind. You’re no help.” I turned sullenly back to my search engine and hit the keyboard with my fist. Then I hit ‘search’. That’s what I thought. No items matched my search. Not items ever match my search. Feeling discouraged, I suddenly realized that I should be happy if no items matched my search. Wasn’t I trying to hide from the plasma-terrorists? Um. Yeah.
Good, then I was free to go home and--but they knew where I lived. Of course. I had to hide somewhere.
“Colquite, I’m staying with you tonight.”
“My pillow’s going to smell like shit.”
“Because you sleep on it.”
“Exactly.”
“Perfect. Well, hopefully I won’t be sleeping on--”
“Hopefully you will,” said Colquite, leaning towards my desk and grinning like an idiot.
“Wow. This is getting weird. You aren’t secretly a plasma-terrorist, are you?” I asked, feeling dubious and a little bored. He was just making fun of me. I knew that no one would believe me, but I didn’t know that Colquite wouldn’t believe me. He was beyond no one. He was the transcendent no one.
Colquite sighed and turned his attention back to his computer. “Great, you figured me out.” Orange eyes aren’t even distantly related to blue ones. They contradict each other. Not that I could rule out the fact that it was possible Colquite had somehow become my very worst enemy while being my very best friend at the same time. And I also wanted to know what made my very best friend think it funny to call me a liar and then mock me for insisting on something that couldn’t possibly be true. Because I never mocked him.
I tried to imagine why an imaginary person--who wasn’t imaginary--would want to kidnap me. My superior intelligence, of course. They probably stole part of my brain and were going to come back for the rest on a later date. I pictured someone dragging my brain out of my nose and then crashed into the bathroom, vomiting into a sink that was in use.
When it was time to go creeping back to hideout/apartment, I decided to tell Doncaster how I wished she would speak. “I wish you would speak,” I said slowly, leaning on her desk.
“I wish you would wear shoes.”
“She speaks!” I shouted, immediately hunching over her desk as everyone searched around for the idiot who didn’t know that someone who couldn’t speak couldn’t get a job in customer service. Because it wasn’t me, anyway. “Anyhow, what if we went out tonight? Like, for--” But I didn’t get to say coffee, or dessert, or trans-Atlantic-trade-companies because I accidentally said, “shit.” Now, I didn’t say this because I wanted to go out for shit. I said it because the window was open behind Doncaster and a kid with orange eyes was gazing at me fixedly.
“What did you just say?” she asked, horrified. What did I just say?
