part0058

W ork turns out to be nothing more than a series of details, forms, and paperwork that need to be dealt with, a ten-minute weekly meeting that mostly consists of Greg giggling with excitement and saying, “Three point seven million dollars,” over and over, the sum total of the account we now have with Anterdec, and Josh complaining about office network protocols in so much detail that I start to think he’s part robot.

We’re sitting around the cheap plastic monstrosity that Greg calls a “conference table,” on mismatched office chairs that look like something from the set of The Andy Griffith Show . I’m slumped as low as you can go, my mind fixated on reliving every possible moment where my skin touched any part of Declan’s body. This kind of looping I could get used to—it is so much better than panicked repeat thoughts about whether I remembered to turn off the stove or freakouts that maybe I’d already been wearing a tampon when I put that new one in.

Near-OCD is a bit like being friends with a sociopath. When it’s on your side, the world is your oyster.

When it’s not, everything smells like rotten fish.

“Two words,” Greg says as he closes the weekly business meeting. All four of us are crammed into his tiny little office. It’s 2:13 in the afternoon and all I can think about is getting home so I can veg out and cyber-stalk Declan. I’ve only made it to page twenty-three of my Google search. Three more days before our date, and I feel unprepared.

Greg is standing behind his desk with a look on his face like the cat that got the canary. He’s so happy he is scaring us a little. Greg doesn’t do happy like this.

Something bad is about to happen. The last time he was this happy he landed a bunch of prostate exam stool kit evaluations and poor Josh…well, we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement about that set of shops, but let’s just say that stool samples and the public health department made Josh constipated from pure performance anxiety for over a week.

Josh freezes in place and his entire body clenches. “What did you do, Greg? Because I am not pooping on a card and taking it to a doctor downtown ever again. EVER. You can’t even pay me triple or—”

“How about company cars?” Greg turns around and looks out his window (he has a window…) and points to a shiny red sports car with a racing logo spray-wrapped all over the entire car, advertising a special tire.

Josh’s eyes go wide and his hand instinctively touches the top of one butt cheek. “A company car? For real?”

“For all of you!” Greg morphs into Oprah. “A car for you!” he says as he points to me. “And a car for you!” he says as he points to Amanda. The room explodes into excited shouts and lots of squealing and jumping up and down.

“HOW?” Amanda screams.

Greg takes a deep breath, beaming like a proud dad. He hasn’t been this happy since Amanda texted him last night and told him we landed the Anterdec account, and he texted us all a selfie this morning showing him turning the heat up to sixty.

“Consolidated has been chosen as one of only four marketing eval companies to test drive these ‘wrapped’ ad cars for certain markets. Boston is one of them. We got four cars!”

Josh is ogling the red sports car from the window like Amanda and I look at Chris Evans in a Captain America suit. Actually, Josh looks at him the same way.

“We get that ?” His arm points like it’s detached from his body. He clearly can’t believe it.

“Yes!” Greg bellows. “A car for everyone!” Last time I saw him this excited he got us all free coffee for a year from an account. Free Habanero-flavored coffee from a failed Boston market test run, but enough chocolate powder and cream and it was acceptable. Okay, no—it wasn’t. But Greg was so proud.

Amanda, Josh, and I squeal like the kids on Glee after winning a sing-off.

After twenty seconds of shouting, we quiet down, and I realize Greg hasn’t answered Josh’s exact question.

“You get company cars!” he says again, but this time his face is…different. There’s a bit of a shadow there, a sheepishness that makes a tiny little tickle form in the place inside me where my hinky meter resides.

“We get that, right?” Amanda says, pointing. “Because that is a very cool wrap. I think of Chris Hemsworth and racing when I see that. Patrick Dempsey.”

Josh squeals again. “McDreamy!” We’re big Grey’s Anatomy fans. The entire office. Greg has admitted to having a secret crush on Sandra Oh. We’ve rearranged business meetings for season finales. We cried when Callie and Arizona got into that car crash.

Greg startles, giving Josh the side eye. But he doesn’t confirm.

“Greg,” I say, my tone made of steel. Something is off.

“You get cars ,” he explains. “Fully paid by the company. You can use your company cards to charge all gas, all tolls and parking, and all repairs from now on. It’s all covered by Consolidated or the client. The contract runs for two years.”

“Okay!” Amanda chirps.

“No more mileage reimbursements,” Greg says dryly.

“Who cares? Shannon finally has a car that starts with a key!” Amanda adds. She seems starstruck. I think she’s just dreaming about a Robert Downey, Jr.-and-Chris Hemsworth-and Amanda sandwich.

“But…” I say, skeptical. Josh is frowning. He sees that I am teasing something out of Greg. Details he’s reluctant to give.

“But what? You guys have been begging for company-paid cars for years. Now I go and find a client to supply them, and you’re giving me the third degree!” Greg’s face is red and blustery, but he’s not offended or angry.

He’s deflecting. You know how there are levels in professional chess playing, like Expert and Master and Grandmaster? Well, the same levels apply in professional deflecting. I am the High Princess Queen Pooh-Bah of it, with a finely tuned radar when others do it.

Greg is setting off all my alarm bells.

“Let’s go see the cars, then!” Amanda and Josh rush to the window. “Where are they?” she asks.

“Around the corner,” Greg says, reaching in his desk drawer to fish out three sets of keys. Each set is color-coded: dark brown, a rusty auburn, and bright yellow.

Amanda skips down the hall and stairs like she’s the lead in a Disney princess movie, while Josh is giving me nonverbal looks and gestures meant to convey something in human semaphore, but I’m clueless. All I know is that Greg isn’t giving us the full picture.

“OH MY GOD!” I hear as Amanda shoots through the main doors and peels off to the right, where a bank of cars is parked just behind the building.

Then a bloodcurdling scream of “NOOOOOOOOO!”

Josh and I look at each other and take off at a dead run, bolting through the doors into the blinding sunshine, banking to the right. I’m behind him by a few feet and he stops dead in his tracks. I crash into him, but he’s so frozen he might as well be a steel support beam.

And then my eyes register the cars.

I half expect Drew Carey to appear and make that wha-wha-wha sound on The Price is Right , telling us we lost. Because what I see before me is way worse than my crappy little Saturn. The screwdriver I use to start my car seems like a gold-plated Oscar statue compared to this .

“Is that a giant turd on top?” Amanda gasps. “I am not driving a car that has a huge piece of poop as a hat!” Her voice is high and thin, a fluttering, panicked tone seeping in. She sounds like the whiny girl from that movie The Blair Witch Project .

I’m starting to think that standing in the corner would be a better fate than what’s in store for us right now.

“That’s a coffee bean!” Greg protests. My hands and feet have gone numb with shock. The car in question is one of those tiny little Toyota cars, and it’s covered in what appears to be an artistic rendering of a latte with that signature leaf pattern that baristas use to mark their specialty drinks. That part isn’t so bad, and the coffee chain’s logo is fine, but on top of the tiny little car is an enormous brown, textured thing that is about the size of a double kayak and it looks, indeed, like Goliath dropped trou and squeezed out a giant log on top.

It actually makes me imagine I am smelling poop right now, which makes me hold my nose. I look at Josh and realize he’s doing it.

The store’s motto: Coffee gets everything moving!

“I am not driving that!” we say in unison.

“It’s a coffee bean!” Greg insists.

“It looks like a giant version of the Baby Ruth from that Caddyshack movie!” Josh argues.

Greg studies it and tilts his head, examining it like we’re at the Museum of Modern Art. Or…ahem…the Bromfield Gallery.

“Huh. It kind of does.”

An argument begins instantly between me, Amanda, and Josh about who will be stuck with what is quickly named the Turdmobile.

As the two of them duke it out, I extract myself from the argument, because while the Turdmobile was the most graphic of the three cars, now I have a chance to look at the next one, and…

Well, let’s just say if I were a guy I’d get a rise out of it.

The green one is a huge wrap for a popular drug that helps men with erectile dysfunction. The wrap shows a mature (read: AARP-member age) couple rolling in an intimate embrace in a meadow filled with daisies.

The logo shows two people dancing. The tagline says: Sometimes you have to be hard to please.

I make gagging noises when I take a really good look at the couple in the picture, because apparently my mother has been keeping her new career from me.

Amanda and Josh shut up instantly and Greg looks at me like he needs to perform the Heimlich. Josh has met Mom a few times but doesn’t see what I see.

Amanda, though…Amanda gets my pain.

“Oh! Oh! Marie told me she was working on catalog modeling, but she never…Oh, God, Shannon. Josh is just going to have to take this one.”

“Josh is WHAT?” Josh screams. “Josh is right here and Josh is not driving a Limpmobile around town. Josh will never have sex again if he drives that!”

“Josh is talking about himself in third person,” Greg says slowly, like he’s dealing with a mental patient.

“The thought of parking the Limpmobile in my neighborhood in Jamaica Plain makes me do that, you…” Josh can’t seem to find an insult to hurl at Greg, his eyes skittering between the Turdmobile and the Limpmobile.

In desperation, we all look at car #3.

The giant clawed thing on top is the color of rust and red. The actual car is wrapped with the logo for a famous crab shack, and if that was all, it would be fine.

But the industrial designer who created the two-foot-tall, seven-foot-long…thing…on top of the Smart car had created a masterpiece of a “crab.”

It’s like they took a baby crab, put it on the Island of Doctor Moreau, fed it nothing but water from Chernobyl, and for good measure handed it off to the Human Centipede dude.

“That looks like pubic lice,” Amanda says.

We all turn and look at her, mouths agape.

“We studied it in biology class!” she insists.

“Sure,” we three say in unison.

But she’s right. It looks like the angriest louse ever.

And matched with the store’s tagline: Bring our crabs home tonight and make him dance!

It just…shoot us now.

The three of us get the same idea at the exact same time, and we run around the building to Greg’s car.

“Why do you get the cool car?” Amanda thunders. The cheerleader’s voice dissolves into Maleficent’s vibrant, threatening tones. My balls tighten. Wait—I don’t have balls. But if I did, they would tighten.

“That’s the car the president of the ad company wanted me to drive,” he says weakly.

I think even Chuckles is glaring from my apartment.

“Nuh uh. Nope. I am not driving any of those three cars!” Josh announces.

“My mother is on one of those!” I wail. “For a little pill that makes life harder.” Mom’s been holding out. I wonder why. She’s the type to crow about this kind of thing. Something serious is going on if she’s not screaming on the town common about how she’s now a “professional model.”

“You don’t have to drive that one,” Greg says.

“So I get to choose between the Turdmobile and the Crabmobile?” I whine.

“I am not driving that piece of crap!” Josh says.

“Any of them except for yours, Greg!” Josh’s voice becomes a baritone, fierce and demanding, with a predator’s tone that makes all of us stop and stand a little taller, keenly aware of his manhood.

Josh is about as dominant as an umbrella, so this catches us all unaware. A light breeze pushes clouds in front of the sun and the sky darkens as if he’s beckoned some kind of evil force to do his bidding.

Something Wicked This Way Comes. And its name is Turdmobile.

“This is really cruel,” Amanda hisses. “Company car!” She snorts. Once you lose the chipper one, all hope is lost. Greg’s face reeks of defeat.

“I know,” he says as he sits on a picnic table under a tree, the one where all the smokers in the building congregate every hour. “I tried, but trust me—these conversations are taking place at the other three marketing eval companies. It’s a joke.”

“A joke?” Josh is so angry he sounds like he’s about to throw something.

“It’s some hyper-ironic campaign designed to drive people to the URLs. There isn’t a real chain of coffee shops, or that erection drug, or that crab restaurant. They’re fake.”