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Everyone else has signed off, punched out, gone home to bed. I'm still in my cubicle, studying your face. It glows,
back-lit by the monitor. A nudge on my mouse-wheel adjusts the zoom. Colored contact lenses, Clarissa? You've gone
pale green. Who have you gone green for? Is it bald-spot man from the tennis courts? Is it baseball cap man? How
he irritates me. He never looks up; I never see his eyes under that stupid visor. I've got him logged and tracked.
Right now he's in his Saturn, idling in a fast food drive-through. When you vanish with him into your apartment,
does he take his hat off to kiss you or just turn it around backwards? Show you those big, dumb eyes I'm sure he
has. God, that guy never looks up. Hailey's comet could come tap dancing overhead next week, and the idiot would
miss it.
Even last May, during the eclipse, you two went up on the roof to watch the show. Clarissa, you were transfixed,
holding still for Godiva for so long that I could have painted your portrait from the monitor without taking a
screen capture. You took off your shades, and you squinted through a hole in cardboard-but not baseball cap man.
He never gave the eclipse one peep. He stared at you the whole time, like you were sun and moon and Milky Way.
He doesn't pay attention to those either. While you're gazing at the starry band across the night, he watches you
and closes in for a kiss, obstructing my view of you. It's an ugly eclipse of its own, and entirely disgusting,
but I can't look away. As long as I can log time in with Godiva, I'll be centering the screen on you.
Our next time together will be a meteor shower in September. I'm confident that you'll learn of it and go out to
watch it. At least my love of astronomy rubbed off on you. I hope you'll go to your mother's house, away from the
city, and lie in the hammock, where we lay. Don't bring a man. Don't wear contact lenses. Let's see each other
alone and naturally-it's more intimate that way. Just a meteor shower, and your hazel eyes, and my twenty-nine
Godiva eyes strung like steady lanterns on the canopy of the heavens.
Well, shit. The janitor is keying into the lab. Third time this week he's interrupted me. I hate when we're interrupted.
This habit he has of showing up early-I could just kill the guy. Tomorrow, I'll talk to Ms. Cook about it. I shudder
to even think of her, but I have to end these interruptions.
See you later, Clarissa.
The next morning, I stalk back into the lab, striding between two other programmers who have come to work early.
I cut through their morning chat, staring straight ahead. They both hold mugs of coffee against their ties, both
wear the same sleepy smiles and thin-framed glasses, so that I think they are newly installed identical statues
on either side of the door, or that one is the mirror image of the other. I hear a slightly sarcastic "Good
morning," and then hear it a second time, in a different voice. I figure, someone answered someone else, and
that settles the matter. Silently, I creep back to my corner cubicle and boot up the computer.
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