The Interview

Chapter 13

Rolling her eyes, Glinda logged in with her details and clicked the confirmation button.

"Be grateful for such an abundance of nourishment and choice. No more complaining or questioning my math skills. I'm a financial analyst, in case it escaped your memory."

By the time the delivery boy dropped off their dinner, Glinda's enormous appetite had all but vanished. She could hardly even stand the smell wafting from the warm boxes. She tipped the kid with the first note she could find in her pocket, then hurried back upstairs, eager to divest herself of her overly fragrant load.

"Pizza's in the kitchen," she singsonged to alert the boys. She herself quickly fled into her room.

She opened up her laptop. Nikidik had asked her to review someone else's work for him over the weekend. As much as she resented the extra workload, the assignment would probably make for a decent distraction right now, and if she finished it all today, her Sunday needn't be spoilt at all. Scanning the spreadsheet, she willed herself to get into a productive mood. She vaguely remembered looking at it earlier and thinking that it seemed like an easy job, so there was no reason why she shouldn't be able to sort it out within the next hour, possibly less.

So far for the theory. In practice, Glinda could hardly bring her brain to add up two and two, let alone make sense of the messy data in front of her. She found herself staring at the numbers, realising that her colleague had screwed up massively fairly early on, then continued the same mistake consistently throughout his work. The problem was that she could not put her finger at what exactly the mistake was, only the point at where it had started to all go wrong. The only way of fixing this would be to pick up from there and redo it all from scratch. She groaned in frustration. That's was not what she'd signed up for.

In the end, her frustration and unwillingness to do any serious work right now only contributed to her growing headache. Suddenly, everything irritated her. Her eyes were too dry, her hands too cold. Her focus began to zoom in and out. Sometimes the voices of the boys laughing and chatting in the kitchen, seemed as loud as though they were standing right beside her, yet next thing she knew, the noise faded into the background, and all she could hear was the silence of her fingers not typing as they should. Angry, she removed them from the keyboard and propped up her elbows to cradle hear head. She sighed, eyes still fixed on the screen, now blurred in front of her.

This was how Crope and Tibbett found her a little later.

"Hey Glin, aren't you worried Crope is going to finish all your favourite pizzas?" Tibbett asked laughing before stopping short. "You alright, babe?"

"Yeah, fine," she replied, still not quite there yet.

Crope came a bit closer and bent forward to study the almost blank spreadsheet she was so incessantly staring at.

"You haven't been very productive," he stated, scratching his head. "Maybe you need some fuel to get started? Shall we bring you a slice or two? I can even feed you if you don't want to make your fingers greasy."

Smiling sadly, Glinda finally tore her eyes off her work to look at her flatmates.

"Thanks for offering. That's very sweet."

She closed her laptop. After all, there was no chance she'd get anything done tonight. She swivelled her chair around and pulled up one leg, hugging it. Chin resting on her knee, she watched the boys. One by one thoughts floated through her head, things she longed to tell them, some things she needed to tell them. Still, it was difficult to actually speak the words. Even to her this reluctance was silly. The rational part of her knew that Tibbett and Crope loved her just about enough to accept almost anything she might confess to. Considering their extremely accepting nature and the rather trivial confessions Glinda had to offer, there was truly not much to be worried about.