Chapter Text
The city of Alpharetta, Georgia has a population of sixty-seven thousand, two hundred and seventy-five. The sun rises at seven o’clock in the morning. At that same moment, the one person out of those sixty-seven thousand, two hundred and seventy-five named “Alpharetta” wakes up, and knows it’s going to be a good day.
They wash their face. They comb their hair. They select a floral scarf, swap it out for an emerald-coloured silk scarf, and then swap it back. The weather calls for florals today.
Alpharetta collects their briefcase, kisses their wife goodbye, and heads to the coffee shop.
Statistically speaking, eighty-one percent of Americans start their day with a nice hot cup of coffee. In Alpharetta, Georgia, that would make fifty-four thousand, four hundred and ninety-two (point seven-five). Alpharetta Way, despite the exceptional nature of her character, is no exception. She orders a cappuccino with honey, and when the barista hands it over the pattern on the top could be a leaf or a milky way. She’s not well versed in latte art.
The walk to the office is lined by short and tidy hedges, and the sidewalks are crowded with business professionals in suits. Alpharetta makes it there with five minutes to spare.
As soon as he opens the door, he can tell something’s wrong.
It’s something in the air, in the way that people are moving. The interns are whispering more than usual, maybe a little more excited. Alpharetta climbs the stairs to her office, making quick work of the two flights and nodding her way through the four rows of cubicles. She methodically unpacks the contents of her briefcase, and as the last paper is settling into place, looks up through the glass walls at the rest of the office.
And there he is: her problem.
Alpharetta zeroes in on him like the focus on a sniper rifle. He’s on the other side of the cubicles, in the other glass office used by the Salesguys, and he’s holding an iced coffee. She doesn’t recoil, per se, but she leans back in her seat with distaste. Iced coffees aren’t a morning beverage. After ten-thirty, maybe. After eleven, certainly. But not this early in the morning. He’s holding an iced coffee, chatting amicably with the Salesguys, shaking hands, nodding, gesturing, and he’s gorgeous.
Maybe the first thing they noticed was the iced coffee, but the second thing they notice is everything else. He has a small silver earring dangling from one ear, but he’s too far away to tell what shape it is. There’s a pair of dark sunglasses propped up on his slicked back black hair. His hands are clearly tattooed under several silver rings, letters on his knuckles and everything, but they can’t tell what it says, or if it goes past the cuff of his crisp white shirt. There are further tattoos peeking up from under his collar, too. And worst of all, he’s wearing lipstick red enough to put the fifties to shame. He’s terrible.
They turn their attention back down to their work, hoping to get started on today’s to do list, but look back up, kind of hoping he hadn’t been real in the first place. No dice.
He is very real, and exiting the other office. For fear that they might be noticed, they square their papers on the desk to look busy.
When they open their laptop to actually get busy, their eyes land on their second problem of the day. There’s an email from the manager at the top of the queue, marked with a nosy little red flag, titled “Department Review.” That can’t be good. Upon opening the email, they find that it isn’t. Apparently the Bureau, head office of head offices, is sending someone around to review the workflow, quality, and overall merit of their whole department.
You don’t get to sit in the glass office without having seen a thing or two, and this isn’t Alpharetta’s first rodeo. She knows that with reviews come the threat of budget cuts, and with budget cuts come layoffs, and with layoffs come a month or two of misery when the office is too quiet and everyone is doing someone else’s half-scrapped project off the side of their desk. The bottom line is, they need to pass this review. It’s a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly.
First, Alpharetta puts both hands flat on the desk and takes a calculated breath. Then, she makes a list of lists she will need to make (ToDo: Organizational Chart. ToDo: Competitor Analysis. ToDo: Financial Statements. ToDo: Sales Strategies and Promotional Materials. Etc., etc.) Then she starts on the sub-lists.
Unfortunately, the new guy is floating around their field of vision the whole time. Chatting with interns. Sipping iced coffee. Patting Dave from Marketing’s shoulder as he laughs at a joke she assumes probably wasn’t that funny to begin with. Photocopying.
The blonde girl from last year’s Q3 shit list (now absolved) is at the water cooler when Alpharetta decides to clear her head. She grabs one of the stupid little Styrofoam cups that cracks too easily, and fills it before she says anything.
“Have you met the new guy yet?” asks ex-Q3-shitlist girl, in an I-have-intel voice.
“No, haven’t had the pleasure,” says Alpharetta.
“His name’s Frank,” says the girl, “He’s such a card.” She sounds too happy about this. She goes to refill her cup, and the watercooler makes a hollow clank. They both look at it, but nothing else happens except for a couple bubbles lazily making their way to the surface of the tank.
“He seems like it,” says Alpharetta.
The sub-lists take a while. After they’re finished, Alpharetta feels the need for a leg-stretch, so they find something to photocopy.
Dave from Marketing is already waiting in line as the photocopier labours through a stack of papers, so Alpharetta makes himself comfortable perched on the edge of the hole-puncher table.
“Isn’t that new Salesguy fun?” Dave asks. “He’s gonna teach me how to golf sometime, he says.”
“Does he really?” Alpharetta asks. Dave nods. “What a card.”
The photocopying soothes his soul, Alpharetta finds. He returns to the glass office with a clear head, arranges the sub-lists in order of imminency, and settles on starting the Competitor Analysis after lunch.
Lunch plans require careful deliberation on a day like today. He needs a venue that a) will not have Frank in it, b) will have a reasonable number of coworkers who may or may not be gossiping about Frank in it, and c) serves decent sandwiches, preferably in that order. He settles on Mikey’s.
In the interest of accuracy, the cafe is not actually named “Mikey’s,” but in Alpharetta’s head, that’s its working title, because their brother Mikey happens to work there. It’s in an old colonial-era building, with windows facing the street, and these antique oak tabletops that are to die for.
Mikey Way is a tall guy with woefully flat-ironed hair, who keeps his enthusiasm on reserve. He is also telepathic.
“What’s wrong, Gee?” he asks immediately.
“One cranberry brie sandwich... And one of those tiny scone things, please,” says Alpharetta. “His name’s Frank.”
Mikey nods knowingly while he punches in their order. “Oh yeah, everyone’s been talking about him. Apparently he just moved over from Pencey Inc. and is some kinda rockstar sales guy. That’ll be fifteen sixty-five. I’m sure he’s nothing to worry about.”
“I dearly hope not,” they put confidence into their voice, but hover around the counter anxiously while he makes their sandwich. The interns clustered around the napkins and straws are saying something about did you hear he once rode a jet-ski? “We’re awaiting some kind of department review right now.”
Mikey looks sympathetic, even though he’s never been part of any departments that Alpharetta knows of, nor been reviewed for much of anything. He hands over the sandwich with the little scone thing.
“You’re a godsend, Mikey, thank you.”
He salutes them off into the plaza with a nod and a thumbs-up.
Lunch in the plaza is so pleasant that there isn’t much to say about it. The sky is blue, the weather is balmy, and the pigeons are remarkably well-behaved. And all too soon, Alpharetta is back at work, climbing the stairs, marching through the cubicles, and-
One of the interns (the one with the bob and baby-bangs, in a knitted turtleneck today) is standing in front of their door with Frank Iero.
“Hi!” giggles the intern, in a way that suggests she’s been giggling as long as she’s been standing next to Frank. “The boss said Frank’s supposed to hot-desk with you for a bit.”
They can’t form an answer for a moment. “Does he?”
“He does!” says Frank, awfully smoothly. He extends a hand that, for some reason, says HALLO on its knuckles, like he tattooed it specifically to greet people in an annoyingly misspelled and/or German way. “Frank Iero,” he says, “Nice to meet you.”
“My pleasure,” says Alpharetta, applying enough pressure to the handshake to be firm, but not intimidating, “Gerard Alpharetta Way. But you can just call me Alpharetta.”
She braces herself for the inevitable oh, like the city? that people respond with, but all Frank says is “Cool!” before opening the door of her own office for her, and following her inside. Awful.
“Well! Um, I’ll leave you two to it!” the intern calls after them, punctuated by a disappointed-sounding chuckle.
Alpharetta starts about setting up an excel sheet for her competitor analysis, as painstaking as it tends to be. They’re constantly aware of Frank in their periphery, where he’s setting up his workspace. Excel proves to be finnicky enough that they push their rolling chair back in frustration, fingers splayed on either side of the computer. An alternative has to be found for this.
“So! Al- can I call you Al?”
“No,” she responds confidently. She looks up to find him staring at her, analyzing.
“Okay.” He turns back to his work, clearly thinking of something else to try.
The excel sheet is staring them down. They narrow their eyes. Not enough axes, that’s what the problem is. Everything’s at right angles there, in sterile little boxes. Nothing overlaps or flows properly. They pull out a pad of sticky notes and their second-nicest pen, and turn to face the window that overlooks the parking lot. With “competitors” written on a sticky-note in neat cursive in the middle, they get to work encircling it in additional notes with the names of the different competitors, all linked together in a nice web of dry-erase. They retreat to the desk to grab another colour of sticky note to record each competitor’s strengths, but this requires a bit more research, so they wind up sitting down.
Frank crosses his legs, driving a foot into Alpharetta’s shin. He winces forward, but has enough pride to not make any noise at least, so Frank doesn’t notice.
The research proves relatively monotonous until he gets to their main competitor: Pencey Inc.
Alpharetta leans his head to the side so that his computer, on its ergonomic computer stand, isn’t blocking his face from Frank. “You worked at Pencey Inc. before, yes?” he asks.
Frank also leans his head to the side at exactly the same angle. The dangling earring is a cross shape, Alpharetta realizes. “Yeah,” he says.
“What, would you say, are their main strengths and weaknesses?”
“Ooh, gossip, I like it,” Frank grins and folds his hands on the table. The knuckles of his other four fingers say WEEN. Oh. That makes sense. “Well,” he says, “They’ve got an aggressive sales team, I’m not gonna lie. They get a lot of business by just getting feet in doors, you know? But they’re hasty. I don’t think they do a lot of their research when it comes to the deals they’re making, and that’s caused enough problems that, well, I didn’t want to stick around.”
“Beautiful, thank you,” says Alpharetta, ducking back behind their screen.
“Hey,” says Frank, his head reappearing beside the computer, lipstick strikingly bright, “What would you say if I put on some music?”
“Must you?” Alpharetta asks, not rolling her eyes. Frank shrugs cordially. As it turns out, he mustn’t, because he doesn’t. She returns to the window, scratching the intel down onto a post-it.
This is a much better format for mind-mapping, a veritable spiderweb of company flaws in stationary-store neon. The brainstorm takes shape, sprawling outwards, until Alpharetta is nearly completely satisfied with it. Yes, it does look like Pencey Inc. is standing out as a main competitor at the moment. That’s notable.
They look back at the desk. Oh. Notable indeed. Turning quickly away from where Frank is twirling a pen back and forth between his (really nice?) fingers, their eyes widen at the parking lot. What if it’s more than a coincidence that right when their rivalry with Pencey peaks, Pencey’s top rockstar salesguy winds up in their office?
Frank could be a saboteur.
Alpharetta sits down shakily. Frank uncrosses and re-crosses his legs, kicking him in the shin again, like a slap to the face. Thankfully, his gasp is silent.
“Welp,” says Frank, slapping his knees, “Looks like that’s it for today. See you tomorrow, Alpharetta.” He smiles (convincingly, Alpharetta thinks).
“See you tomorrow, Frank,” they say, turning back to their computer, because they’re not raring to run away from their work, unlike some people. As soon as Frank’s shoes (the thought of which makes Alpharetta’s shins ache) (the style of which toes a line between well-shined and classically working-class) leave the threshold, they’re already pulling up the notebook from the secret false bottom in the middle drawer, and turning to the page titled “Q3 SHIT LIST.”
They cross the F in a gorgeously cursive “Frank Iero” with finality, in their first-best pen.