Supervolcano: Eruption Read Online Free PDF Page B

translated into hired keyboard . She had a cramped one-bedroom apartment and an eight-year-old Toyota Corolla with bad brakes. Where was the justice in that?
    “Thanks, Vanessa.” Nick Gorczany looked over the letter before inscribing his John Hancock. He was very blond, about thirty-five, and putting on weight. Because he knew all about widgets, he thought he knew all about everything. He pointed to between you and me . “Are you sure that’s right?”
    “Yes, Mr. Gorczany,” Vanessa said. Braining him with the softball trophy on his desk would only get her talked about. Besides, who said any brains lurked inside that skull?
    “I dunno. It looks funny,” he said, frowning.
    “The object of a preposition takes the accusative—the objective, if you like that better.” All she had to do was reach out, grab the ugly trophy, and . . . “If you don’t believe me, see what the Word grammar checker says.” She never bothered with the Word grammar checker, but it wasn’t—quite—dumb enough to make the moronic mistakes Mr. Gorczany did.
    “Maybe you know that, but I bet Don Walsh over at Consolidated doesn’t,” he said. “Change it back to you and I . I don’t want him thinking we’re a bunch of yahoos.”
    “But it’s wrong that way,” Vanessa said helplessly.
    “If he doesn’t know it’s wrong, then it’s not wrong for him,” Nick Gorczany told her.
    She rolled her eyes. “Good God in the foothills! Why do I bother?”
    “That will be enough of that, Miss Ferguson.” Now Mr. Gorczany spoke with some snap: the snap of a boss putting a third-tier employee in her place. He sometimes looked at her in a way she found mildly annoying—not enough to call him on, even for her, but annoying even so. The way he eyed her now scared her, as it was meant to do. “I begin to see why you’ve worked at so many different places the past few years. If you can’t get along with people, you’re going to have problems. Now fix that letter, please.”
    By get along with people , he meant do as you’re told . She almost choked on the injustice of it. She also almost told him to fold the letter till it was all corners and shove it up his wazoo. But the economy, not to put too fine a point on things, sucked. If she punted this job, how long till she snagged another one? Longer than her savings lasted? It might be close.
    And so she contented herself with stalking out of his office, head high, back stiff. The look on her face made a software engineer who was coming in to show him some printouts flinch. It also made a couple of people talking by the coffee machine stare. That didn’t bother her; it wasn’t as if either one of them knew anything.
    Changing between you and me back to between you and I took only a few seconds, printing out the letter only a few more. They would have gone even faster if she hadn’t done them through a red mist of fury. This was what the world was like? Too right it was! You got along better if you were one more smiling moron than if you gave a rat’s ass about doing things right.
    The phone rang. As Vanessa reached for it, she thought how tempting it would be to scream Fuck you! and slam down the receiver. Or to imitate Marshall and answer with Yankee Stadium—second base , and let the jackass on the other end go from there.
    Tempting? God, how tempting! But no. She’d just reminded herself she needed the paycheck. “Gorczany Industries, Vanessa Ferguson speaking.” If she sounded like a slightly constipated robot, well, Mr. Gorczany couldn’t can her for that.
    “Hello, sweetheart.” Hagop Nersessyan had a voice like a lion’s rumbling purr. It was the first thing that attracted her to him. She’d rapidly found out there were others. He knew things in bed poor lame Bryce didn’t even suspect. She wondered how she’d got tangled up with a loser like Bryce to begin with. The same way she’d ended up working here, she supposed. It had looked like a good idea at the