Chapter 4: Stuck in the Supply Closet During a Fire Drill

Subject: REMINDER: Fire Drill Today, 2:15 p.m. (This Is Only a Drill. Please Walk, Do Not Flirt) The last line was not in the original memo. Someone in HR has a sense of humor, and I'd like to find them and offer a raise. At 2:14 I was in the supply closet on the eleventh floor, searching for a toner cartridge and minding my own business. At 2:15 the alarm went off, the door swung shut, and Julian Voss squeezed in behind me, holding a stapler like an alibi.

'I was getting a stapler,' he said. 'In a drill.' I said that was a very efficient use of an emergency. The door, it turned out, had a lock that engaged on closing and a handle that had opinions about being used. We pushed. We pulled. We discussed the building's engineering in terms I will not reproduce. The alarm continued, cheerful and relentless, like a smoke detector with a sales quota.

'I was getting a stapler,' he said.

The closet was perhaps four feet wide. There were shelves of copy paper at my back and Julian's chest in front of me, and a single bulb overhead that made his eyes look unfairly dark. He had loosened his tie at some point that afternoon. I noticed this the way you notice a small crack in a windshield: with total calm, and then with a quiet feeling that the whole thing might give.

We stopped talking. That was the dangerous part. His hand found the shelf beside my head, not touching me, just claiming the air. 'Daria,' he said, low, and my name sounded like a question I had already answered somewhere private. I looked up and said, 'Do not say anything clever.' He said, 'I wasn't going to.' Then, very quietly, 'I was going to say your hair smells like oranges.'

The alarm cut out. Silence rushed in like water. Somewhere down the corridor a security guard called all clear, and the door shuddered open on the gaze of three coworkers holding clipboards. Julian stepped out first, stapler raised, perfectly composed. I followed with a toner cartridge I had never found and a face that I assume was the color of a stop sign. 'Nothing to report,' I told them. It was the biggest lie I had told all year.

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