Roxanna let go of Lucas’s tie when I opened the door and climbed into the back. She twisted in her seat to give me a serpentine smile, keeping her fingers threaded through his hair. I was used to that. She worries Mandy or I might make a play for him one day, using our proximity to establish a sort of, I don’t know, home-team advantage. The fact that Mandy doesn’t think of Lucas that way and I’ve been in a relationship for years doesn’t seem to strike her as a factor.

“Hi, Ana,” she said brightly. “Isn’t it nice how we were able to come and get you?”

Subtext: be grateful, because she could have convinced Lucas not to pick me up, even though our schedule for the week had been arranged since the first of the month. Roxanna thinks schedules and plans are things that happen to other people. Mandy calls her “the wrecking ball” when Lucas isn’t around, and she’s not wrong. Roxanna never met a social construct she didn’t feel the need to challenge, if only to show that she considers herself above such petty ideas.

Sometimes I want to drop six of Roxanna’s own lizards down the back of her shirt and watch her dance around the house until she figures out what she’s done to piss me off.

Lucas looked abashed, although that may have been as much over the fact that he doesn’t like PDAs as anything else. “How was work, Stasia?” he asked.

“Same old, same old,” I said. “I think I’m going to clean out my desk.”

“Oh, no,” said Roxanna, all mock concern. “Are you getting fired?” She lowered her voice on the last word, almost whispering, like it was some sort of delicious secret.

Lizards. In her pants. “No,” I said, focusing on buckling my seatbelt, not allowing myself to look at her. If I didn’t look at her, I could pretend she was one of my phone customers, too distant to be worth getting mad at. “My coworkers keep messing with my stuff. I’ve talked to my supervisor, but I can’t prove exactly who’s doing it, and I don’t want to go to HR, because they’ll like me even less if I get the whole team in trouble. So I may bring my things home, to make it easier.”

I could keep the picture of Seymour taped to the edge of my monitor. No one ever messed with that, maybe because they understood that defacing family photos, even pictures of pets, would make HR intervention inevitable. Besides, they’d just find a new way to torment me if I took everything home. I knew that. But I wouldn’t worry about my toys disappearing anymore, and I wouldn’t start every morning in my cube feeling like I’d been violated.