Page 19 of The Boardroom: Jonathan
“Well,” I said, bending a staple I had found on the table frustratingly with my fingers. “I certainly can’t argue with that.”
Samantha stared out the window at the falling snow. “So what now?”
“We stay.”
“Wewhat?”
I felt my frown morph into the grin of a madman as I revealed my plan. “You can do what you want, Sam, but the only offline copies of the data we need are in this office, and that’s the only way we have a chance to get the report in, and that’s if the power’s back on by morning. I’m staying.”
“It’s going to snow ten inches!” Samantha exclaimed.
“Twelve,” I corrected with a smile. “And if you trulydowant what’s best for Wordsworth, and your employees that you supposedly care so much about, then I suggest you get ready for a long night.”
Samantha stood her ground for a moment and watched me carefully, and eyed me up and down as if trying to decode my thoughts. She slipped her beige heels back on her feet and walked up to face me, her head held high.
“Very well,” she said with that regal smile of hers. “Let’s do this.”
***
Within twenty minutes, Samantha and I had both downed some energy drinks Cassidy had in the fridge that probably contained an illegal amount of caffeine, and were rolling open endless file cabinets trying to locate the data sheets that just hours earlier we had accessed with just a few clicks of a mouse.
“You know,” I said, sucking on a fresh paper cut. “I don’t know why it never occurred to me to ask Sabryna how her filing system works. Would have come in handy,” I said, shutting another drawer with a rolling thud.
Samantha smiled at me sympathetically. The office looked otherworldly. I had left the blinds up so we could watch the progress of the snow through the windows. Samantha and I had dug through the office to find anything that lit up, so a motley assortment of right-side-up flashlights and candles of all shapes and sizes gave the room a warm glow. It had a very romantic feel to it, like an old Italian restaurant.
Oh, crap.
After we had collected all of the files that were pertinent to the report from their various hiding places around the office, we opened them up and organized them on the large conference room table, which was looking more chaotic than it ever had in the lifespan of our digital age company. Samantha and I were both filled with the artificial frenetic energy only pure will and caffeine can get you, and our hands shivered with it as we stacked and passed papers around the table, and the soft glow of the flashlights made it seem as if our task had an even more extreme importance.
“This reminds me of college,” I said, copying down some data. “I can’t remember the last time I planned to pull an all-nighter to finish a project on time.”
Samantha laughed. “Not me. I had all my papers done two days ahead of time.”
“I bet you had a 4.0 GPA too.”
“Maybe,” she smiled.
“So, you never pulled any good pranks? Went to any good parties?” I joked. “I suppose you were always back in your dorm asleep by ten p.m.”
“I did blackmail the head of the math department once.”
I stopped writing. “Youwhat?”
Samantha smirked. “Let’s just say he was behaving very inappropriately towards one of my friends, I threatened to tell the dean, and then I just happened to mention how it would be really, reallyawesomeif she got the department’s most prestigious internship.”
I scoffed. “Figures.”
“What do you mean, ‘figures’?” Samantha laughed.
“I mean, you have the opportunity to blackmail some pervert who you probably could have gotten a couple hundred bucks out of, and you ask for aninternship?And not even for yourself?” I exclaimed.
“She was probably going to get it anyway, I just wanted to secure her spot,” Samantha said matter-of-factly.
“Never mind,” I joked. “You’re just as lame as you were before.”
“Haha.”
“I’m kidding,” I said. “You’re a good friend, and clearly a badass.”
