chapter thirty-one

“Hello hello, hello George and Cadence.”

“Morning, Paul.”

“God help us, it’s Rain Man.”

I tried to kick George under the desk, but he avoided my foot with a cackle. He got to his feet, gave me a meaningful look and jerked his head toward Paul, then went bounding toward the kitchen for more coffee. I turned to my colleague, who was wearing the exact clothes he had yesterday, but clean—Paul must have had a closet full of khaki pants, pressed dress shirts, dark socks, and tan and blue penguin skimmers. “Paul, you never get me confused with Shiro or vice versa. Are we different colors?”

He gave me a look I usually got from George: Duh, dumbass. “Of course. You’re pink; Shiro’s red, like Dr. Gallo.”

Never mind what color Dr. Gallo is.

“Why don’t you have a seat in George’s chair?”

Paul gave the chair a glance of dark dislike, but he sat. I cleared my throat and said, “I wanted to give you a heads-up. Michaela let us know that BOFFO is … is undergoing … a fiscal restructuring.” That sounded unthreatening, right? “And you shouldn’t worry, because she’s working with some financial guys about the restructuring and things are gonna work out just fine, in the way that things do a lot. Sometimes. Work out just fine, I mean. So … just FYI.”

Paul’s eyes, always magnified by the glasses, bulged like poached eggs. “BOFFO lost BOFFO lost funding?”

Why did they decide I should be the one to break bad news to a genius? “That’s another way to look at it.”

“That’s not that’s not that’s not—” Paul was on his feet, turning back and forth so fast his arms were flailing out like those inflatable tube guys at car lots. “Things don’t work out fine sometimes things don’t work out most times, sometimes is more than zero but less than fifty percent and that is not sometimes!”

This. This was why Shiro had left me a terse note and fled yesterday. Yes, I was a coward who hated confrontation, who had trouble standing up for myself. And Shiro never let me forget that failing in me. But who was the coward this time? Who fled from Paul and left me with it because she knew she not only lacked the skill set to deal with a delicately unbalanced genius we badly needed to hold together, she didn’t have the courage to even try. Not just a slut, thank you very much, but also a cowardly bitch.

What is wrong with me this week?

Moving Day and fallout from same. That’s what’s wrong.

Focus!

“Paul,” I said carefully, “you’ll still come to this building.” I hoped. “You’ll still do your work here.” I hoped. “We’ll still be here, too.” I prayed. “There might be different smells, or colors you’re not used to, but that happens when good things are on the way, too, right?”

He was visibly calming down. Thanks, Jesus, wherever you are in the system.

“You’ll still you’ll still be pink?”

“Sure.”

“And Shiro will still be red and and and Adrienne will still be orange?”

“You bet.” Seemed likely, right?

“And George—”

“George will be black forever. BOFFO could blow up tonight and George would be black. George could live a zillion years and he would be black for every single one of them. That’s gotta be comforting, right?”

Paul slumped, visibly relieved. “I heard that,” the poster boy for black said as he ambled back to his desk. “You gonna be okay, Paul? For you, I mean? And by ‘okay’ I mean ‘fucked up.’”

“You could have just said lost lost funding,” Paul said reproachfully, leaping out of George’s chair like it had gotten hot. “I don’t need to come to a blue building to feed HOAP.2 crime stats even after I need to feed HOAP.3. My house is blue; I can do it there. My computer, too. And I’ve almost caught the man disappearing all the ladies of the black. Fiscal restructuring—”

“Let me guess: wrong color? Paul, has anything ever been the right color? Have you ever thought how much easier your life would be if you were color-blind? Maybe there’s an operation you could look into.”

As George passed me, yawning (though how he could be sleepy with so much black coffee in his black system I had no clue), I reached out and smacked the back of his head.

“Ow!” I don’t think it hurt so much as startled the shit out of him. He grabbed the back of his head, spun, juggled madly so as not to douse himself with scalding black sugary liquid, and stared at me.

“Antagonizing Paul just makes everything take longer, idiot. Now leave him alone.”

“What the hell is wrong with you this week?”

“Dunno.”

“Are you Shiro pretending to be Cadence?”

“You wish.”

He nodded glumly. “I do wish. I’m not a fan of change.” Yeah, him and every other BOFFO employee.

“Tough shit.” It felt so fine, I said it again. “Tough shit, Black George.”