There was a handful of weeks where Janice left on grand-maternity leave, and I took over her tasks full-time. It was a perfectly fine month, despite the fraud report mess (which, by the way, nobody ever noticed, and you know I kept that shit to myself). I was free to wreak havoc entirely on my own. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I did have access to everybody’s account information—again, no bank should have given a sixteen-year-old this level of clearance—and yes, I did look up all of my friends’ bank accounts. For business.

When Janice finally returned, rather than having her resume the duties she’d been responsible for forever and that I had surreptitiously taken over, Shirley relegated her to a series of menial secretarial tasks that needed dedicated work. Now, far be it from me to point out that it should’ve been the sixteen-year-old pipsqueak who got demoted to bitch work, and not the desolate woman who had worked there for years, but it was Shirley’s decree, and she was bigger and louder than all of us, so we did what she said. It also didn’t help that it was painfully obvious that I’d only gotten this job because my mother’s friend ran the whole place, that I was only a pimply interloper who had come into Janice’s space and declared it my own. But I do as I’m told.

Here was Janice’s task. Sometimes, people get sued. Sometimes they get sued because of money stuff. It’s very complicated, and I would explain it to you, but honestly you wouldn’t understand. Just trust me on this. Sometimes, when people get sued because of money stuff, they have to produce a bunch of documents, like bank statements and cashed checks and pictures of receipts from the dildo emporium, and it’s up to the bank to print all that shit out, except maybe the dildo receipts, but all the rest of it for sure. And this particular summer, there was a case that required every document from one account for basically the past thirty years. Which sounds like a perfectly easy task until you remember that Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet until 1996, and almost all of those documents weren’t on a computer. Instead, images of all of those checks were on tiny rolls of Kodak film that had to be inserted into a tiny machine and scrolled through individually, like a giant version of one of those ghastly red View-Master toys from the 1970s that you held up to your face and clicked through to see pictures of Bambi’s mom getting shot.