AUTHOR
Little Girl, I Want To Murder You
Marissa Pope was having a bad fucking week. Scratch that: she was having a bad fucking year.
It started in February when Danny broke up with her. The little shit waited until the week before Valentine’s Day to break off their three year engagement saying he still needed to find himself
and he wasn’t one hundred percent sure marriage was for him. She’d been crushed. Then Marissa found out that for a year-and-a-half the asshole had found himself
sleeping with some girl at his office—then she’d been pissed.
Come June, she’d lost her job at Johnson, Culpepper, and Kline due to budget cuts. She’d been a paralegal there for four years, but as she was the last one in the door, she was the first one out when the firm’s finances took a turn for the worse. Her boss told her he’d give her a glowing recommendation and assured her she had nothing to worry about: she was bright, a fast learner, and was great at her job. She’d find another opportunity in no time.
He was wrong. She’d done the query-go-round thing for months with very few bites, and the interviews she had managed to get resulted in someone else walking away with the position.
Her parents, trying to be supportive, encouraged her to go back to school for something else. She couldn’t. She’d already taken on as much debt as she could afford getting her Bachelors in Political Science and then a paralegal certificate. If she took on anything more, she’d find herself living in a cardboard box behind The Golden Dragon, sifting through the trash cans for leftover fish heads for dinner. Her parents told her she could always give up her swanky apartment in the city and come home to live with them, Just until you get back on your feet,
they’d said. Again, Marissa couldn’t, no wouldn’t, do that. She was twenty-eight for Chrissakes and none of her peers were still living at home any longer—what would she look like if she came crawling back to Forest Park with her tail in between her legs?
A failure, that’s what. She’d look like a total and complete fucking loser. And, to be clear, that’s exactly what she felt like. She’d lost her fiancé, lost her job, and now the little bit of savings she’d had had dwindled on student loan payments, food, and shelter to the point where she was almost in the negative numbers. She needed money fast. Then, to add on to the parade of pain she’d been marching in all year, Marissa came home in September to a nice letter from her landlord stating that if she failed to pay her rent on time one more time, she’d be asked to evacuate the premises and never come back. He was running a business, not a soup kitchen, and while he felt for her current predicament, there were other people interested in living in her apartment who could afford to be there so his charitable endeavor of letting her pay her rent whenever she was good for it was about to come to an end.
That’s when Marissa swallowed her pride and went down to the StaffRight Agency and begged for a job, any job. Her staffing coordinator, a girl fresh out of college with a metallic grill and acne scars around her forehead, enthusiastically took down her information, parsed over her resume and cover letter, then told her she’d call if she found anything she felt Marissa was suited for.
It was a blow to her ego, the fact that some early twenties kid was going to decide what jobs Marissa was good enough for, when this was probably the girl’s first adult job herself. How the fuck was she qualified to judge anything, least of all someone’s professional skills and abilities?
The agent, Christy, turned out to be halfway decent. She’d gotten Marissa a temp job in another firm making almost as much as she was making at Johnson, Culpepper, and Kline. When her contract was up, however, the firm declined to hire her on full-time, instead choosing to go back to StaffRight for another temp to fill the position.
Marissa was livid, but there was nothing she could do. Christy, like her former boss, told her to buck up: she’d find Marissa something else in the temp-to-hire market shortly and in the meantime, Marissa should reach out to her school’s alumni association for any leads on companies looking to hire.
She took Christy’s advice and got in touch with Kelvin Phillips, the director of her university’s alumni association, and asked him if he had any leads. Kelvin told her his office was hiring and he could get her a job, no problem—if she’d be willing to blow him.
She passed on that opportunity. She was desperate, but not enough to resort to prostitution. At least not yet. She’d started watching reruns of Secret Diary of a Call Girl on Showtime and seeing the extravagant shopping excursions the title character frequently went on, not to mention her nicely decorated digs, made hooking seem slightly more appealing to Marissa. She’d keep the option in her back pocket in case shit got really dire.
Christy called her early in the week and told Marissa she had a couple of prospects lined up for her—was she ready to do the rounds again? Of course she was. Her empty bank account didn’t give her much of a choice. She got her best interview attire together and began pounding the pavement at Christy’s direction.
The first interview that week was a disaster. She’d missed the early train and had to take a later one, making her a half-hour late to her interview. Then, when she got in to speak to the HR rep handling the initial interviews, she’d stumbled over her words, called the woman by the wrong name, and even managed to forget the position for which she was applying. The HR rep had given her a tight smile and ushered her out the door with the dreaded words, We’ll be in touch
—the kiss of death. The words that meant, You’re so not getting this job, you incompetent little twit. Don’t contact us again.
Two more Christy-sanctioned interviews ended up quite similarly, with
