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Lexi
My best friend Trevor’s cubicle sits right across from mine at the Corn Corners Tribune. A year ago, fresh out of college, both Trevor and I lucked out landing entry-level positions at this old-fashioned newspaper that actually distributes both online and in print. Don’t scoff. Our Sunday news has devoted readers throughout the tri-county region and beyond.
Trevor shot up the ranks before I did. He has the coolest position on the paper if you ask me. He’s our food editor. About six months ago, the food critic on staff left for a job at a bigger publication in Columbus. Now Trevor basically gets paid to eat out and tell people exactly what he thought of the meal and the overall dining experience—kind of like that grumpy cartoon critic inRatatouille, but without an unnaturally long face, or the bitter attitude.
I wad up a Post-it note and toss it across the aisle in Trevor’s direction. It sails past him and lands on the floor on the other side of his cubicle. I quickly turn my head toward my current writing assignment.
Don “Toots” Green passed peacefully in his sleep on the first of June. Don spent his life farming peas and beans on the outskirts of Urbana at his family farm, Green Acres (not to be confused with the 1960s television show of the same name). According to local residents, everyone for miles around came to get “Toots’” beans …
I pinch my pointer finger and thumb across my forehead begging myself for inspiration. Coming up blank, I scrunch up another Post-it. This time the wadded ball of paper pelts off Trevor’s neck and he slaps at it like an annoying bug. I barely stifle a giggle and he whips his chair around with a look of fierce, but playful retaliation dominating his dark features.
“Lexi,” he warns.
“What?” I say with feigned innocence, stuffing the next balled sticky note under my leg one second too late as his eyes track the movement.
“What are you sitting on?” Trevor asks, stalking across the aisle toward me.
“A chair,” I gulp.
“Stand up.”
“I’m working,” I offer. “And you are interrupting my creative flow.”
“On the obituaries?” Trevor asks, well aware of the assignment I’ve been relegated to once again this week by our oh-so winsome boss, Jeanette.
“It takes concentration to honor a life,” I defend.
“Hand it over,” Trevor says, his hand outstretched toward me.
“What?” I ask? “My commemoration of Toots Green’s life?”
“Your ammo,” he says, his lip turning up at the corner, making him look simultaneously boyish and manly.
“Ammo … ammo … ammo …” I say, stalling, looking around my desk as if I’m trying to retrieve the alleged instrument of his torture.
“The one under your rear,” he says.
“Trevor, I could go to HR, you know. You don’t say rear to a fellow employee at the CC Tribune.”
“Lexi.”
“Okay!” I say, reaching beneath my ample thigh and pulling out a now crushed Post-it, recently flattened from the time it spent sequestered under my skirt.
“Thank you,” he huffs. Then in a mocking tone eerily mirroring Jeanette’s nasally voice he says, “This isn’t workplace appropriate.”
He holds the compressed paper in the air like evidence in a crime scene.
I burst out a laugh as he walks away. He looks over his shoulder and mouths “Payback’s a bear,” as he deposits the sticky note in his grey plastic trashcan.
I do take my job seriously. I’ve dreamed of journalism my whole life. Granted, writing odes to the local farmers wasn’t what I pictured, but I’m in what I call my stepping-stone years. Write enough obituaries and eventually I’ll get to go out on a meaningful assignment, and before long I may even have my own column.
Our boss, Jeanette Rumper, could be the poster child fordoesn’t play well with others. She probably should come with her own warning label. Maybe it’s the last name. I’m sure she took a number of hits being teased in elementary school. Not to mention, she was engaged to a lawyer here in Corn Corners named John Rash a few years ago. They called the engagement off last summer. Thank goodness. Her hyphenated name would have been … well, anyway … suffice it to say it looks like she dodged a bullet.
I don’t think I’m imagining the way Jeanette’s face squinches up like she just ate a sour lemon when she looks at me, hands me my next assignment, or reads anything I wrote. She’s a tough critic, and for some reason I’ve never made it onto her list of people she’d like to share a room—or a planet—with.
It’s a short list.
