Read Online Office Girl by Joe Meno - Free Book Online Page B

Ashland and the girl pauses beside him, both of them atop their bicycles. And the snow is still coming down and Jack reaches into his gray winter coat and takes out the silver tape recorder, and the girl asks, “What’s that?” but Jack doesn’t answer; he just holds the tape recorder up and hits play and record and the sound of the snow drifting down and floating through the air somehow seems to grow louder, and after ten seconds Jack holds the tape under his chin and says, “Snow, at the corner of Division,” and then he switches the tape player off.
    The girl looks at him and smiles and Jack shoves the recorder back into his coat.
    â€œWhat was that for?”
    And Jack doesn’t bother to try to explain.
    A few moments after that, they are quietly climbing her rickety stairs, carrying their bicycles beside them. And then her key is in the door.
    And then they are sitting on the girl’s couch and she is showing him her brother’s high school composition notebooks, and there is a blue one, and another one that is orange, with a rounded wire edge, and she flips to a specific entry and says, “Here, read this out loud,” and Jack asks, “Really?” and she says, “Yeah. I make everybody do it,” and he nods and sees the girl is probably a lot younger than he thought she was and he starts to read, “ The technology in the TV show Star Trek is not real; it’s fake. But many scientists argue that what we see in the movies and on TV could one day be real. Why not? It happened with rockets. And also escalators …” and here Jack stops reading and looks at the girl and she is laughing and saying, “Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard?” and he is nodding but he doesn’t think it’s actually all that funny. It seems like something he might have written in high school or maybe even yesterday; but he doesn’t say anything because they are kissing now and after a minute or two, he asks if he can use the bathroom, and it’s then he decides he has to come up with a reason to leave. Because this girl is too young and dismissive. And all he can come up with is to fake a stomachache, and when he comes back out, he says, “I’m not feeling so hot,” and the girl asks, “What’s wrong?” and he says, “I think I’m gonna take off. I don’t want to get you sick,” and she says, “What is? What’s the matter?” and he says he has a bad pancreas and holds his left side, even though he has no idea where his pancreas is, and the girl nods, and it’s nice to see her look concerned, and then he lifts his blue ten-speed from beside the front door and hurries off.
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AND THEN.
    Only a few moments later, Jack is pausing at a stoplight, recording the sound of the traffic light making its alterations overhead—the noise of the different colors switching from one to the next, a specific, mechanical sound—and when the light turns green, he rides off again. Before he can stop himself, he sees a smallmodel foreign car turning in front of him, and although he knows what’s going to happen, this realization is about one second too late. The red foreign car hits the rear tire of Jack’s bicycle with the corner of its front bumper and Jack flies over his handlebars and lands on his back, and there he lies, groaning, watching his blue ten-speed ride off without him. And then his left eyetooth begins to throb. And he looks up and sees a girl, somewhere in her twenties, her eyes brown, her hair blond, wearing a green coat and red sweater, mouth agape, standing above him asking, “Oh, my, God, Are you okay? Are you okay?” and he sits up, his back and elbow sore, his eyetooth throbbing, and tries to straighten his glasses. He gets himself to his feet and stumbles around a little, the girl reaching out to catch