Snow Day

Julie stuck her head round the doorframe. The office was eerily quiet this morning, unlike the street outside that was a cacophony of blaring horns and people shouting. A little bit of snow and everyone goes nuts, she thought, walking into the empty room. The lights were on, thanks to timers, but the computer screens stared blindly at her from every cubicle she passed on her way to her own.

The door blew open abruptly, as if the blizzard outside had found its way in through reception, but it was only Sam. Sam was Julie’s best friend and the single reason she’d stayed in this stuffy office for this long. He’d introduced himself on her first day, a colourful change from the funereal feel of the rest of the workers, with their dark suits and grim expressions. He’d been wearing the mandatory dark suit, but instead of the white shirt worn by everyone else, his was electric blue, with a tie patterned with nuclear sunbursts. When he put his feet up on the desk (as he often did), she had seen that his socks were Day-Glo pink.

His smile was as bright as his socks, and his blue eyes danced with glee when they met hers. She’d looked him up and down, turned around once to scan the room of depressed-looking robots, looked back at him, and sighed with relief. Her mama had always told her, “Find the joy, Julie,” and looking at Sam, she’d known right then that he was going to be the joy in this job. The five years since hadn’t altered that perception one scrap. The rest of the staff had come and gone over that time, different people, but the same expressions. Always gloomy and grim. No idea where the joy was.

She’d found out on the second day how it was that Sam got away with wearing what he did, when the boss had come into the room. Just moments before, Sam had been sat at his desk across from her, feet up on it as normal, jacket over the back of his chair. When the door had swung open that time though, and she’d glanced up and recognised who’d come in, and looked over at Sam, for a moment she’d thought someone else was sitting there! His feet were on the floor, trousers hiding his socks (green that day, virulent, like jungle plants had come in and vomited all over them), his jacket was on, and his shirt was white. She could’ve sworn it had been bright purple a moment ago.

The boss had walked around the room, clearly scanning everyone’s screen as she did. She’d stopped at Julie’s desk for a moment, scowling across at Sam, who was working at the same clipped pace as everyone else in the room and appeared completely oblivious to her presence. Eventually, she’d moved on and then left the room. Julie had waited a minute to be sure she’d left before turning back to Sam, only to find him, feet up on the desk, jacket slung over the back of the desk again. Her mouth had dropped open, and he’d winked at her.

It turned out, his jacket had the top of a white shirt stitched inside, so with it on, it looked like he was wearing the right shirt, and he had an alert of some kind under his desk, so he knew when the boss was on her way. In five years, Julie had never seen him caught out, but she could tell by the way the boss looked at him that she didn’t like him. Sam had never explained why, though. He’d never clarified his alert system to Julie either, although since about a week after she started, she’d discovered that her chair vibrated about forty-five seconds before the boss walked through the door.

“Hey Julie, you made it!” Sam greeted her this snowy morning. It wasn’t really much of a surprise that they were the sole two workers to make it in; they both lived close by, in opposite directions.

“Have you known me to miss a day?” She hadn’t missed a day her whole life. Even when she’d been in hospital during school, she hadn’t missed a day. The day had come to her there, and it had been the kids in school missing out.

“Ha, you never miss, kid. Looks like we’re the only ones to make it though, I’ve been past the rest of the offices, and they are tombs this morning.”

“When aren’t they?” Gloomy, depressing, and full of corpses. Yep, that sounded about right.

Sam grinned back at her and pulled his jacket off, slinging it across his chair. Today’s shirt was a particularly stunning number in palest lilac, with spirals of bright pink and neon orange swirling across it. The sole purpose of its design was to burn out the retinas.

Julie threw a hand over her eyes and staggered back for effect, laughing. Sam kept grinning as he pulled that shirt off too, to reveal the quietest shirt Julie had ever seen him in, a plain white one. This time her reaction was unfaked, as her jaw dropped and her eyes widened. Just like Sam’s grin.

“Thought that’d get you,” he said, “but there’s no point burning out our retinas when it’s just the two of us. Hey, wanna do something fun?” His face held a mischievous expression, and he held his hand out to her.

Julie eyed him for a second, then flung her own coat and jacket down and followed him back out of the office door.

“Shut your eyes,” he told her, grabbing her hand.

She did, resisting all impulse to peek as he spun her around two or three times, then led her a few steps down the hall. Or up, she couldn’t tell. She heard him open a door, and then he turned her gently and led her through the doorway (she assumed).

“Ok, open your eyes!” he announced from beside her.

It was obviously a day for jaw dropping and mischief, she thought, looking round at the one room on this floor that she had never entered.

The boss’s office was completely different from all the other team offices on the floor, as if it had been created, or at least decorated, by not just a completely different firm, but maybe in another century. While the rest of the offices were modern cardboard construction, with that weird felt stuff stapled on, looking as cheap as they were, this one was made of actual wood, or at least panelled in it. The desk chair was black leather, and there was a leather sofa against one wall. There was an enormous tv on the wall across from the sofa, and the computer monitor was about three times the size of any of theirs.

“Close your mouth, kid, you’ll drool so much the cleaners will wonder who made the puddle!” Sam advised her, his eyes twinkling in that special Sam way.

“We can’t be in here!” Julie hissed at him, trying to drag him back out, her gaze flicking all around the room in search of cameras, or the boss staring at them. She couldn’t see either of those things, which helped slow her racing heart down a little.

“Calm down, kiddo, we’re quite safe. I told you, no one else made it in.”

“What about the security system?”

“I don’t think they have one internally,” Sam said, considering her confusedly.

She took a deep breath and counted to ten, then let it out slowly.

“Ok.” She looked around. “What shall we do now then?”

“I’ve always wanted to search her office. You know, in all the cop shows there would be a safe, or a secret drawer or something, and proof in it that she was breaking the law.” He wiggled his eyebrows for comic effect.

“Really? What are you, five?”

“C’mon, are you telling me you’ve never wanted to poke and pry round?” He walked over to a landscape picture of the city on the wall behind the couch and lifted it away from the wall. The blank, spotless, safe-free wall.

Julie’s hands twitched. She clenched them firmly. No. She would not snoop and prod round her boss’s office. It was none of her business why the boss never had any of the workers in there that she’d ever seen. She would absolutely not join Sam in his search…

Her hands crept out, completely against her will, to look behind another picture.  

They found the safe hidden behind a picture on another wall, but sadly neither of them knew how to open it. Sam found a secret drawer in her desk, but there was nothing in it.

“Ha,” he said, “obviously she hasn’t found this yet.”

“We should put something in it,” Julie suggested, although she couldn’t think what.

Sam’s face lit up (not really, it was already as bright and twinkly as fairy lights, but if it could’ve, it would’ve), and he dashed out of the room to return in a moment with his other shirt.

“You can’t put that in there, she’d know it was you in a second,” Julie protested.

Sam winked at her, then started unbuttoning the white shirt. “C’mon, kid, what d’you take me for?” He put on the bright one, then folded the white one as carefully as a salesperson. When he had it as close as possible to brand new, he grabbed a lipstick out of one of the desk drawers.

“Here, you put this on and give the shirt a kiss. I should’ve got you to do that before I took it off really, but we’ll make do.”

Julie did as instructed, leaving a perfect lipstick kiss in the boss’s signature colour on the collar of the shirt, and he slid it gently into the secret drawer.

“That’ll confuse her. Oh, I know what we should do. The owner’s office!”

That wasn’t on the same floor as they worked on. Julie had never been up there. She made sure to work the average. Never stick your head too high or too low, her daddy had always told her.

“Have you been up there before?” she asked Sam, following him up the stairs.

“Oh, a couple of times,” he said airily, waving a dismissive hand. She wondered what he’d done to get called up there. In five years, the only way either of them had broken the mould was by still being there. And she didn’t think their company gave long service awards.

“Here,” he gestured her out of the stairwell, onto a plush carpet.

She gasped. It wasn’t like their office, that was for sure. Nor was it like the boss’s office. This was pure luxury of the most modern kind in shades of white and grey, with gleaming gold accessories. There was a small waiting area with a couch and a couple of chairs, opposite a white, glass-topped reception table, currently unmanned. The cubicles up here were miles away from the cramped spaces she and Sam worked in downstairs in terms of space and comfort. At the end of a short corridor were double doors, gleaming white. Gleaming was clearly a theme up here. The handles were gold and shaped like question marks. As if they were asking, “What do you think you are doing, entering this room without an invitation?” Or maybe that was just her imagination. Her heart was thudding in her chest as they approached.

Sam glanced at her. “Scared?”

“What? No. Me? No.” But her steps got a little shorter and a little slower.

“It’s ok, they really aren’t here,” he reassured her. “Shall I go in first? You can dash in and rescue me if you hear a scream,” he added, somewhat less reassuringly.

She glared at him. “I would totally come and rescue you!”

He patted her shoulder. “Of course you would, that’s why I brought you with me. I wouldn’t bring any of the goons on such a perilous mission. They’d run right back down to the office if they heard a scream and never leave it again!”

She laughed, picturing any of their colleagues even making it up this far, then bolting for safety. In her head, there was a dragon behind the door, shooting fire at them as they ran.

Sam reached for the door handle on the right. She grabbed the one on the left, looking challengingly at him. He gave her a nod.

“On three?”

“One…two…”

“Three!” they said together, as she pulled her door, which completely failed to move, and he pushed his, with much more success. A second later, she copied suit, and the doors swung open, not quite together, to reveal…

Something much less incongruous than the boss’s office downstairs. In fact, it was quite the disappointment. Sure, it was big, expensive, and gleaming, but it looked just like the rest of the floor. There were the requisite couches against the wall, and the television, and the enormous monitors, but there was no dragon, nothing out of the ordinary at all.

“Well. So much for the dragon,” Julie said, moving further into the office.

Sam put his hand on her arm and pulled her back quickly.

“What?”

“What dragon?” he asked, his face a study in confusion.

“Oh. I was imagining there was a dragon here to chase us back downstairs. That’s why you’d be screaming. Why else would you scream?” She raised her eyebrows at him.

For once, it was his turn for the jaw drop. “Five years I’ve known you, and this is the first time you tell me there’s dragons in your head? Julie girl, we have to go out more outside the office!”

She gave a brief thought back to the last time they’d gone out after work, having drinks at a nearby bar. She’d poured him into the taxi home that night. Not that they took it strictly in turn to get the drunkest, it just kind of averaged out that way.

“We go out plenty.”

“Not if this is the first I’m hearing of dragons. Quick, what’s your favourite book?”

“Easy, Dragonsdawn. Yours?” She couldn’t believe they hadn’t talked about favourite books before. Or gone to see a film. Ok, so they were always either working or drinking. It wasn’t as if the fact that their job was soul-crushingly boring was a newsflash.

“Alice in Wonderland,” Sam said, with his trademark massive grin, which, now she came to think about it, was definitely Cheshire-y.

He pulled her over to the couch and sat down next to her sideways, so he could face her.

“Favourite movie?”

“Hmm…LOTR The Two Towers. You?”

“That’s a good one. I like the oliphaunt in number three. I’ll go for Pirates of the Caribbean. ‘Where’s the rum gone?’”

“I love that film. ‘But you have heard of me!’”

Sam gestured to her to stay where she was as he got up and walked over towards the opposite wall. Below the wall-mounted television was a cabinet. He opened one of the doors and pulled out a bottle of rum and a couple of glasses, putting them on the table beside the couch. Under the desk was apparently a fridge, as he presently magicked up a cold bottle of cola. He grabbed the tv remote from the desk, and they spent the next several hours watching their favourite films, steadily making their way through the rum.

As the workday came to an end, they helped each other back down the stairs, staggering a little, and grabbed their coats out of the office.

They headed for the exit, having completely forgotten why they were alone in the building, to be brought up short by the scene at the door. The morning’s blizzard had clearly snowed itself out after dumping two feet of snow on the city. The sun had set an hour ago, and they could see the streetlights reflecting off the surface of the snow. They were trapped!

Just to check, they ran at the doors, a little unsteadily. The red light above blinked at them aggressively, and the doors refused to open.

“I mean, they swoosh, right?” giggled Julie. “They don’t have to push the snow open or anything. Just swoosh, doors!” She waved her arms haphazardly, demonstrating what the doors ought to do, and nearly clocked Sam in the face. He grabbed her arm to stop her waving it again, and she nearly overbalanced into him. He grabbed both her arms to help her stay upright, which would have been more successful if he was more stable. As it was, it mostly just meant that they ended up sat on the floor together, laughing hysterically at each other.

 “Swoosh! Hey, like a dragon!”

“But is the swoosh their wings, or them breathing fire?”

“Ooh, tough choice. Fire breath would be pretty useful right now; they could clear the snow away so we could get home.” They sat pensively for a moment, contemplating that.

“Ugh. C’mon kid, no use us just sitting on the floor. There must be another door somewhere, hopefully a not-electric one.” He hopped up and dragged Julie up after him, catching his balance on the doors this time. “I dunno about you, but I do not want to be spending the night here.”

Julie shook her head. “No, my bed is comfy. Ok, doors.”

After a short search, they discovered a card-operated side door that neither of them knew existed. Thankfully its locking mechanism wasn’t jammed, and it opened inward.

They shoved, stepped, and swept their way out into the snow, round to the front of the building. There they found that the road crews had already been busy, and there were paths cleared through the snow.

“You want me to walk you home?”

“Nah, I’ll be fine. See you tomorrow, Sam.”

“See you tomorrow, kid.” He turned and walked away.