Page 11 of Malliko
The Moderator
Clara
My job at Go2Match is the best I’ve ever had.
Granted, my other jobs haven’t exactly been exciting, but I’ve done what I needed to do to provide for my family.
When I was young, I always imagined that I would become a school psychologist and help children cope with whatever troubled them. Growing up in a trailer park, the walls were thin and private yards nonexistent. When there was turbulence in a family everybody knew about it.
We children all had parents who fought about the lack of money, addiction, and other things. We learned to recognize the low hanging shoulders and the pressured expression in each other’s eyes when it was one of those days.
Compared to my friends at the trailer park, I had a dream life. My parents were poor immigrants but loving and caring, although strict.
Driven by my dream to one day make enough money to buy my family a small house with a garden, I was ambitious and top of my class. The interesting thing is that I never dreamt about buying them a large and fancy house – it simply seemed too far out of my reach.
Looking back, I wish I had applied that kind of cool logic when I met Jeremy in my senior year. As I was popular and well known around school, he felt out of my league. But four months after he asked me out the first time, I stood in the small bathroom of our trailer with a pregnancy test that ripped my dreams of college apart.
Jeremy didn’t want to marry me and that made me not want to marry him either. But being from a small town in the Midwest, the pressure for us to do the right thing ultimately brought us to sign the papers. There was no proposal or wedding. It was a quick ceremony at the city hall followed by lunch at his parents’ house.
We couldn’t afford for both of us to go to college because with twins on the way we couldn’t afford day care. I cried for a solid week when I turned down my scholarship to Colombia University. Jeremy on the other hand pursued his law degree out of state.
Our pact was that once he was done and making money, it would be my time to get my degree. The first three years were awful. I loved my boys but had to scramble to support us. Hustling with any small job I could get as a tutor working from home, I taught kids in English, math, Spanish, and any other subject they needed help with. Once the twins turned three, we moved to Boston to live with Jeremy. I got the twins into a free daycare through church, which gave me time to work as a flagger at construction sites. It paid our bills but left me hollow inside. Longing for Jeremy to be done with school so I could have my turn, I got frustrated when he didn’t appreciate his classes or try hard enough. Sometimes I stayed up into the late hours of the night helping him with assignments so he could better his grades.
In the end, I should have known not to trust him.
When Jeremy was finally done with law school, he was determined for us to pay off some of his student loans before I could start studying. Unfortunately, my turn never came. Instead, I had my heart broken from his affair, our divorce, and the loss of custody of our sons. The only thing he left me with was debt and a deep mistrust of men.
I felt lucky when I landed the job as a senior moderator at Go2Match. There were days when I convinced myself that my work was related to the field of psychology. I would read people’s forbidden thoughts and hidden desires. I had even helped the police save a few depressive people from killing themselves, and assisted them in finding criminals who admitted heinous crimes on our dating app.
The best part was that my job offered decent pay and benefits. I wasn’t likely to get rich from working there, but after six years of living on a tight budget, I’d paid off the debt that Jeremy left me with, and I’d managed to save almost seven thousand dollars.
“Morning,” I told Kenny as I passed his office. He was the other senior moderator at Go2Match and usually grumpy in the morning. There were thirty moderators in total, but the others worked part time from home.
As usual, I didn’t get a verbal reply from Kenny, but a quick nod from him, the fifty-three-year-old who had told me for the past five years that he was leaving this job as soon as he found something better.
“Oi, Clara.”
I stopped in my tracks and backed up a little. “Yes?”
Kenny had his hands on the keyboard in front of him while his head turned to look at me. “Darren sent an email. There’s something about a student who we need to take care of. I can’t be bothered with that sort of thing so I’m counting on you to volunteer.” Kenny’s British accent wasn’t posh like the royal family. It was a working-class accent where he often mumbled and used expressions that none of us understood.
“What kind of student?”
He raised his shoulders in a small bob and looked back at his screen. “Don’t know and don’t care. You’re on it, Clara.”
I could argue with Kenny, but the truth was that the idea of teaching someone was a bit exciting. “Alright, but if I volunteer, you owe me one.”
Kenny mumbled something but I could tell he had checked out of our talk, so I continued to my office and sat down my bag under the desk. There wasn’t much room and the view from my window was the backside of a warehouse. Still, I liked my office. It was full of little things like the plants and the picture of my boys with my parents that made it my personal space.
Powering up my computer, I dipped a finger into the flowerpot with the peace lily to see how dry the soil was.
I didn’t get to water the plant before I recognized my boss’s voice from the hallway. Darren was a stickler for being on time and it was already five past eight, so I hurried into my seat and made sure to look busy before he reached my door. He was talking to someone, and I figured it had to be the student that Kenny had mentioned.
“This is where our chief moderators work from. They are the ones who deal with any reports of inappropriate behavior when it’s reported. It’s up to them to determine whether someone has violated our rules or not. In many cases there’s no real issue except for sensitive people who report others when they shouldn’t.”
I heard them stop at Kenny’s office and chat for a minute before they came to my doorway.
“Let me introduce you to Clara Moralez, who has been with us for more than four years.”
