“What’s wrong?” he asks with glee, knowing damn well why I am limping. We can’t pawn any of these gym shops off on him because the assignment requires female guests.
“Not enough fiber in my diet,” I mutter.
His face goes blank. “I thought it was all the gym shops you’re doing.” He snorts. “I know it’s not from really good sex.”
“At staff meeting today I’m telling Greg he needs to give you the role of supportive father-to-be on all those cord blood bank shops that are coming up.”
His pale face makes me grin inside, because Josh can’t stand hospitals. “You wouldn’t!”
Before I can reply, he puts up a palm and shakes his head sadly, “Actually, you would,” he says, leaping up the remaining stairs like Peter Pan and holding the heavy door open for me.
“Thank you. Just stand there for about thirty-seven more minutes and I’ll get there.”
A strange scuffling sound from behind us makes us both turn. It’s Amanda, kicking a box the size of a small ottoman across the parking lot.
“What are you doing?” Josh calls out.
“I no longer have arms,” she whines. “Just shredded, noodly appendages.”
“Gym shops?” I shout. Using my diaphragm makes the muscles between my ribs hurt. Now it hurts to talk? I need combat pay for this job, I swear.
Josh drops the door handle and runs down the stairs.
“Hey!” I protest.
“Please,” he calls back. “I could drive to Starbucks and get us all lattes and return and you’ll still be on the eighth stair. I can help Amanda.”
He’s got a point. I feel like a turtle with fibromyalgia.
Josh comes whizzing up the staircase with the box in his hands like he’s Superman. Balancing Amanda’s stuff on one arm, he uses the other to hold the door for me.
“Show-off,” Amanda and I say in unison. I look at her and gasp.
“What are you wearing?”
She looks like the human embodiment of the coffee bean/piece of excrement on the top of my car.
“Car wash uniform. I have to go and pretend to be a counter employee for the rest of the day.”
“With non-functioning arms?”
“That’s what I said! Greg’s being unreasonable.”
“And that’s the uniform?” Josh squeaks, laughing. “I haven’t seen that much polyester since I watched the movie Boogie Nights with my boyfriend.”
Amanda and I pause, which isn’t hard. “Boyfriend?” We’re in stereo.
Josh blushes. “Well, you know—YES! I have a boyfriend!” he squeals.
We all squeal.
Greg opens a window and sticks his head out. “You guys sound like you’re replaying that scene from Deliverance. You okay?”
“We’re just talking about our cars and how much we love driving in tin cans of humiliation,” Amanda shouts back.
Thwack. The window snaps shut.
Josh starts to tell us all about Cameron while I make it to the seventh step and realize that Josh—geeky, smart, goofy, socially deficited Josh—has a boyfriend.
And I don’t.
Tears prickle at the edges of the soft skin around my eyeballs, taking the immediacy of my aching muscles away from my attention. I inhale slowly through my nose and grasp my leg, pulling it up. Eight. One more stair to go. Just don’t cry until—
Too late.
“You look great!” Josh says as I pull my leg up to reach the top. “All these gym shops are toning you.”
“It’s all neutral. I’m eating more ice cream to compensate.”
“For what?” Amanda snorts. “You’d have to work out thirty-seven hours a day doing CrossFit to make up for the amount of ice cream you’re eating.”
I’m about to answer but she makes it up the stairs and is right behind me, nudging me with her shoulder. I’m forced to stumble forward and take three steps in a row.
“You look like you could star in The Walking Dead.”
“You sound like you could star in Honey Boo Boo.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I was aiming for ‘offensive.’”
“You sailed right past it and hit the ‘lame’ target.”
We get to the stairs. No elevator. Josh and Amanda slip past me and I am grateful for the peace. It takes me seventeen minutes to get to the office. I’m late for the staff meeting.
Just as I walk in, I hear Greg say two different sentences:
“Shannon and you can go to the Catch My Vibe store with her mother.”
and
“The Fort shop goes to Shannon per James McCormick’s instructions, no matter how much you threaten me, Amanda.” Greg flinches just enough to show he’s worried.
Both freak me out, though not enough to drown out the screaming pain in my legs.
“Wait—what?” I ask. Three faces turn toward me, Amanda’s hostile.
“She can barely move!” Amanda argues, gesturing wildly with her head, her arms immobile.
“Pick up your pen and write your name,” I say in a quiet voice.
She’s been taking glare lessons from Chuckles, I see.
“It’s done,” Greg announces. “You get your shot later in the summer,” he explains to her. She leans down to drink out of a straw someone shoved in her can of diet soda.
As I bend to sit in my chair, I hear my hamstrings snap like a high-tension cord on a crane. Ping!
Greg eyes us warily. Josh adjusts Amanda’s straw.
“What’s wrong with you two?” Greg finally asks, though he sounds about as eager to know the answer as I am to know the specifics of my parents’ sex life. And, like me, Greg is about to hear more than he ever imagined.
“I just had more weight swinging in and out between my legs than you could ever imagine,” Amanda wails.
All the blood in Greg’s face drains out, like low tide during a tsunami, rushing back in so fast that he looks like a big red beet.
“Um, I meant what’s wrong professionally. I don’t need to know about your sex life,” he clarifies.
“This was for work! That Bulgarian ex-Olympian at the gym on Union Avenue made me do forty-pound kettlebell reps until I couldn’t stand it anymore!”
Greg sighs with relief. “That kind of weight between your legs!” He’s so relieved.
“What did you think I meant?” she demands.
“Never mind,” me, Greg, and Josh say.
“I thought you were upset about The Fort.”