season opener win? Jael Pereira and her complete lack of a life plan can’t begin to compare.
I stand up quietly from the rug and slip back into my maxi dress. My panties are way too gross to even consider putting back on, so I decide to leave them for him. Something to remember me by, I think bitterly. As if he remembers any of the girls in his endless chain of conquests. I set the lock on the door to close behind me and slip out into the crisp early October night.
I slept with Sergei Drakonov. Sergei motherfucking Drakonov . If that shouldn’t shake all the self-doubt and self-loathing from my system, I don’t know what will. And yet I feel an odd heaviness around me, a strand of unanswered questions still dangling around my neck. The DC night buzzes with an eerie sense of unfinished business that works its way inside my head.
An engine rumbles somewhere behind me, like some giant SUV stalling out just beyond my periphery. I turn around, but Sergei’s street is silent. No idling cars.
I head toward the Metro and hope I’m not too late to catch the last Red line train. The bars are still hopping along the main Connecticut Avenue drag, and somehow, hearing the whoops and hollers of drunken interns and junior staffers reassures me. I’m not alone in my restlessness, my aimless ambition just looking for a goal to latch onto.
Then I hear the engine stalling again. A black Escalade rolls by, so slow that it can’t be an accident. Are they cruising for someone? I can’t shake the sense that they’re following me. But that’s ridiculous. Who cares about Jael Pereira? For one brief moment, I fucked Sergei Drakonov, but now I’m back to being a nobody.
It’s Monday morning, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s J. Edgar Hoover building looms over me like a Brutalist architecture hangover. It’s easily the ugliest building in the entire District of Columbia, its drab brown concrete walls and weird panopticon of a crow’s nest leering over the sidewalks with all the class of a Metro drunkard. But this is my internship for the fall semester. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, I get to greet the good ol’ Hoover Building with a tray of coffees for the Special Agents I work for and a cheap single-ply smile plastered on my face as I set to work filing all the paperwork they’re too lazy or too “important” to file for themselves.
Look. It’s not like I expected to waltz into the FBI and become the next Clarice Starling on Day One. I haven’t even finished my Criminal Justice degree, though, yes, I’d harbored secret hopes of bagging myself a serial killer or busting up a terrorist ring before the semester was over. But I’m no slouch, either—I’ve taken classes on psychological profiling, criminal behavior, money laundering, terrorist operations—everything the budding FBI hotshot needs to know. And guess how much of that knowledge I get to use on a daily basis?
“Four pumps of sugar free vanilla, two pumps of sugar free toffee, one shot of soy, double espresso,” I announce to my main boss, Frederica Monteverdi, Special Agent in Charge of the Organized Crime Unit. She holds up one finger for me to wait. I know this ritual well—Frederica won’t let me leave until she’s verified that the coffee (if you could still call it that, after all the crap she puts in it) has been made to her specifications. I’m supposed to actually stand over the baristas and watch them make it. An order quite obviously given by a woman who has never had to order her own coffee in a crowded downtown DC Starbucks at nine in the morning on a Monday.
Frederica takes a sip of her coffee. Her blonde pixie cut is looking even more severe than usual today; she’s buttoned her plain white blouse all the way up to her throat. Her face scrunches up—even she finds her concoction hideous—but then she nods. “Thank you, Miss Pereira. That will be all.”
After distributing the remaining
I stand up quietly from the rug and slip back into my maxi dress. My panties are way too gross to even consider putting back on, so I decide to leave them for him. Something to remember me by, I think bitterly. As if he remembers any of the girls in his endless chain of conquests. I set the lock on the door to close behind me and slip out into the crisp early October night.
I slept with Sergei Drakonov. Sergei motherfucking Drakonov . If that shouldn’t shake all the self-doubt and self-loathing from my system, I don’t know what will. And yet I feel an odd heaviness around me, a strand of unanswered questions still dangling around my neck. The DC night buzzes with an eerie sense of unfinished business that works its way inside my head.
An engine rumbles somewhere behind me, like some giant SUV stalling out just beyond my periphery. I turn around, but Sergei’s street is silent. No idling cars.
I head toward the Metro and hope I’m not too late to catch the last Red line train. The bars are still hopping along the main Connecticut Avenue drag, and somehow, hearing the whoops and hollers of drunken interns and junior staffers reassures me. I’m not alone in my restlessness, my aimless ambition just looking for a goal to latch onto.
Then I hear the engine stalling again. A black Escalade rolls by, so slow that it can’t be an accident. Are they cruising for someone? I can’t shake the sense that they’re following me. But that’s ridiculous. Who cares about Jael Pereira? For one brief moment, I fucked Sergei Drakonov, but now I’m back to being a nobody.
It’s Monday morning, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s J. Edgar Hoover building looms over me like a Brutalist architecture hangover. It’s easily the ugliest building in the entire District of Columbia, its drab brown concrete walls and weird panopticon of a crow’s nest leering over the sidewalks with all the class of a Metro drunkard. But this is my internship for the fall semester. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, I get to greet the good ol’ Hoover Building with a tray of coffees for the Special Agents I work for and a cheap single-ply smile plastered on my face as I set to work filing all the paperwork they’re too lazy or too “important” to file for themselves.
Look. It’s not like I expected to waltz into the FBI and become the next Clarice Starling on Day One. I haven’t even finished my Criminal Justice degree, though, yes, I’d harbored secret hopes of bagging myself a serial killer or busting up a terrorist ring before the semester was over. But I’m no slouch, either—I’ve taken classes on psychological profiling, criminal behavior, money laundering, terrorist operations—everything the budding FBI hotshot needs to know. And guess how much of that knowledge I get to use on a daily basis?
“Four pumps of sugar free vanilla, two pumps of sugar free toffee, one shot of soy, double espresso,” I announce to my main boss, Frederica Monteverdi, Special Agent in Charge of the Organized Crime Unit. She holds up one finger for me to wait. I know this ritual well—Frederica won’t let me leave until she’s verified that the coffee (if you could still call it that, after all the crap she puts in it) has been made to her specifications. I’m supposed to actually stand over the baristas and watch them make it. An order quite obviously given by a woman who has never had to order her own coffee in a crowded downtown DC Starbucks at nine in the morning on a Monday.
Frederica takes a sip of her coffee. Her blonde pixie cut is looking even more severe than usual today; she’s buttoned her plain white blouse all the way up to her throat. Her face scrunches up—even she finds her concoction hideous—but then she nods. “Thank you, Miss Pereira. That will be all.”
After distributing the remaining
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