“I know that if I tell you something, you’re required by law to act on it. Which means you’d have to have that talk with the rest of my team.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing’s wrong.” I put on a bright, sunny smile, trying to believe it enough that he could pretend to believe it too. “I was going to bring you my vacation paperwork, but what do you know? I left it at my desk.”

“Uh-huh.” He glanced at his screen, where the team-monitoring software would tell him what state we were each in. “Your shift starts in two minutes. I’ll log you in and put you into not-ready, since you were talking to me, but next time, remember the paperwork you’re supposed to be delivering, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, before turning and scurrying back to my cube.

My coworkers were focused on their screens, on their customers, on their jobs. My bank was sitting in front of my keyboard, where I couldn’t possibly have missed it before. I picked it up. It was light enough that I knew my fifty cents in pennies and nickels had been stolen, along with the AA batteries that made its snapping mechanism work. That didn’t matter. I put it to the side and sat down, reaching for my headset.

Time to get to work.

3.

By the end of the day, I was starting to seriously reconsider my desire to maintain gainful employment. Maybe Lucas would let me live in the house without paying rent if I agreed to do the dishes.

Or maybe he’d get tired of the fact that I have no real skill when it comes to cleaning, and he’d throw me out, and I’d wind up working somewhere even worse. Someplace where the people would be just as unfriendly and willing to tease, but with stricter hours, or even—horrors—a dress code. I don’t even own a business casual wardrobe. I’d need to get a job to pay for dressing myself for my job. No. I needed to stay where I was, to keep enduring the teasing and blowing the bell curve all to hell.

Besides, I actually sort of liked my customers. They were each a puzzle to be solved, and once it was untangled, they went away forever, fading conveniently into the low background roar of experience. That wasn’t something to give away without a fight.