Read Online The Ignored by Bentley Little - (ebook by Undead) - Free Book Online Page A

motioned for me to sit
down. I sat. I wanted to wipe my sweaty hands on my pants, but he was looking
straight at me and I knew it would be too obvious.
    Banks leaned forward in his chair. “Has Ron talked to you about
GeoComm?”
    I blinked, stared dumbly. “Uh… no,” I said.
    “It’s a geobase system that we’re developing for cities, counties, and
municipal governments. You do know what a geobase system is?”
    I shook my head, still not sure where this was leading.
    He gave me a look of annoyance. “Geobase is short for geographic
database. It allows the user to…”
    But I was already tuning him out. I wasn’t going to lose my job, I
realized. I was being given a new assignment. I was going to be writing
instructions for a new computer system. Not just partial instructions, not just
one-page rewrites, but an entire manual.
    I wasn’t going to be fired. I’d been promoted.
    Banks stopped talking, looked at me. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”
    I looked at him. “I didn’t bring a notebook,” I admitted.
    “Here.” Sighing heavily, he pulled a pad of yellow legal paper from the
top drawer in his desk, handed it to me.
    I took a pen from my pocket and began writing.
    When I returned to my office an hour later, it was a little after
eleven-thirty. Derek was gone. I put my notes and the papers Banks had given me
down on my desk and walked over to Hope’s station. She was gone, too.
    As were the programmers.
    And Virginia and Lois.
    They’d already left for Stacy’s birthday lunch.
    I did what I always did, waited until twelve-fifteen, until most of the
other people in the building had gone, and then drove to McDonald’s, ordering my
lunch from the drive-thru and eating in my car at a nearby city park. I don’t
know why, but I was hurt by the fact that they hadn’t waited for me. I shouldn’t
have expected anything else, but I’d been asked to sign the card, Hope had
written “See you at the lunch!” and I guess I’d let myself think that I was
actually wanted and welcome. I ate my cheeseburger, taking out the pickle, and
listened to the radio as I stared out the car window at a teenage couple making
out on a blanket on the grass.
    I drove back to work feeling even more depressed.
    They arrived back from the lunch a half hour late. I was walking from
desk to desk, passing out interoffice phone directories that Stewart had left in
my in box and asked me to distribute, when Virginia and Lois passed by me on
their way to the steno pool. They were both walking slowly, both holding their
hands over their obviously full stomachs.
    “I ate too much,” Lois said.
    Virginia nodded. “Me, too.”
    “How was it?” I asked. It was a pointed question. I wanted to make them
feel guilty for not waiting for me, like Charlie Brown in the Christmas special
when he sarcastically thanks Violet for sending him a card she obviously did not
send.
    Virginia looked at me. “What?”
    “How was the lunch?”
    “What do you mean, ‘How was the lunch?’”
    “I was just curious.”
    “You were there.”
    “No, I wasn’t.”
    Lois frowned. “Yes, you were. I was talking to you. I was telling you
about that accident my daughter got in.”
    I blinked. “I wasn’t there. I was here the whole time.”
    “Are you sure?”
    I nodded. Of course I was sure. I knew where I’d been for lunch, knew
what I’d done, but I nonetheless felt chilled, slightly uneasy, and the thought
irrationally crossed my mind that there was a doppelganger out there, a double
acting in my stead.
    “Huh,” Lois said, shaking her head. “That’s weird. I could’ve sworn you
were there.”
     
    I was ignored. By everyone.
    I hadn’t noticed the extent of it at first because the company was not
one big happy family. It was a pretty impersonal place to work, and even friends
did not get much of a chance to speak in the hallways beyond a quick “hi”.
    But people seemed to go out of their way not to notice me.
    I