The New Guy

re: Scene photo, "Warehouse B" (posted 11:42 PM)

marrow_and_salt · 11:51 PM · 4 likes: Lighting is wrong. Nobody leaves a room that clean. Fake.

cold_open_77 · 11:58 PM · 9 likes: Too much, honestly. Is this even allowed here?

mothlight · 12:03 AM · 2 likes: Fake, obviously. That's why I'm still reading.

k_dutch · 12:20 AM · 1 like: I think it's good.

The Monday morning meeting at Whitlock & Crane began at ten past nine, and by twenty past Asher Cole had already made a mistake without noticing it.

The small conference room on the fourth floor smelled of burnt coffee and carpet glue. Hargrove sat at the head of the table with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pen between his fingers, and the pen tapped the wood in a slow, even rhythm that everyone in the firm had learned to hear as a warning. Dana from the paralegal pool sat on his left with her laptop open. Two junior associates sat across from her, and at the far end, beside the window with its view of a parking structure, sat Asher, with a yellow legal pad in front of him and a spreadsheet already open on his phone under the table.

The assignment itself had been simple. Hargrove had asked him to summarize the commercial lease that had come in on Friday. It was an easy task, the kind of thing a first-year was handed so that someone would find out whether he could read. Asher had read it three times over the weekend, and he had built a table of every clause, color-coded by risk, and he began now at the top of it, clearing his throat first, and explained to the room what a commercial lease was. He explained that it set out the rights and duties of a landlord and a tenant. He explained that rent was typically due monthly. When he reached the end, he looked up and said in a tone of quiet discovery, "Of all of it, Section 7 is the one that matters most."

The pen stopped tapping.

"I wrote Section 7," said Hargrove.

For a moment nobody moved. Then one of the associates coughed into his fist, and Dana looked down at her keyboard, and somebody at the middle of the table let out a breath that was almost a laugh. It was over in two seconds. Asher felt his face grow warm, but he told himself that this was only what happened to the new person in any office, that the senior people needed to remind you of the pecking order now and then, and that the laughter had really been a kind of envy. He had caught the clause that two other people had missed. Of course they resented it.

"Thank you, Asher," said Hargrove, with a smile that stopped well short of his eyes. "That's very thorough. Next item."

Asher nodded and drew a neat line under Section 7 on his legal pad, and then, because the line looked unfinished, he drew a second one.

The meeting dragged on for another forty minutes, and he took notes the whole time, though nobody had asked him to. When it finally broke up he gathered his things slowly so that he could walk out beside Dana, and caught up with her in the corridor by the copy room.

"You really didn't have to go through the whole lease out loud," she said, without any edge, shifting her laptop to her other arm. "It was eleven pages. Everybody had read it."

"I wasn't sure everyone had," said Asher. "People say they've read things. Most of the time they haven't."

"Okay." Dana gave him a long look, the sort of look one gives a child who has just explained the weather. Then her face softened, because she was a kind person, and she added, "Just maybe don't say 'the one that matters most' about someone's own clause. Hargrove's sensitive about his clauses."

"But it was true."

"I know it was." She smiled tiredly, and pushed the copy room door open with her shoulder. "That's sort of the problem."

He stood in the corridor for a moment after she had gone and went over her words in his head. He decided that she had been giving him a hint about office politics, which was generous of her, and which he would repay at some point. It did not strike him that a person who needed a hint on that subject might be someone who had been given a good many already.

…

At noon the staff canteen on the ground floor was nearly empty, which was the reason Asher liked it.

He took the same corner table every day, the one by the vending machines, where he could put his tray down and his phone beside it and eat in peace without anyone asking how the morning had gone. He had not been invited to lunch by anyone in the office since his second week. He did not think about this often. The partners ate out with clients, and the associates ate at their desks, and the interns were a different kind of animal, he reasoned, who kept to themselves because they were busy. When he did think about it, he decided that it was only the way people were with newcomers, that in six months, once his name had settled into the building, they would come around.

In his coat pocket, folded flat, was a coffee receipt. He took it out and smoothed it on the table. It was for a large black coffee, bought at a quarter to nine, and he had bought it for Dana, who liked it with no sugar and who never remembered to bring cash. He kept all the receipts in a small envelope in his desk drawer, in order, in case she ever wanted to settle up. She never had. It did not occur to him that this was strange. It simply seemed to him the proper way to keep the books on a friendship.

The canteen cook was ladling soup from a big steel pot behind the counter. His name was Tomas, a heavy, gray-haired man of about sixty in a spotless white apron, with thick forearms and a face as patient as bread. Asher had noticed his habit during his first week and had been quietly amused by it ever since: before he served a single bowl, Tomas stirred the pot with a long wooden paddle, and he always stirred it exactly seven times, no more, no fewer, and then rapped the paddle once against the rim.

Asher took his bowl and sat down, tasted the soup, and tasted it again.

"It's very salty today," he said, when Tomas came by with a pitcher of water. He said it the way he might have given an opinion on a witness. "You should probably cut back on the broth. People think salt is flavor, but really it covers up a lack of it."

Tomas smiled. It was a mild, tired smile, and he topped off Asher's glass without a word, and he did not argue.

"Thank you," he said, in his thick careful English. "I will remember."

Asher nodded, satisfied.

He thought it was good to be honest with people. Most of the world was too polite to say the true thing, and it was the true things that helped. He ate two more spoonfuls and made a mental note to mention to Hargrove, at a suitable moment, how poorly the canteen was being run.

…

The room Asher rented was on the second floor of a narrow brick house on Pruitt Street, across from a laundromat that stayed open all night.

He came home at seven, ate cereal standing at the counter, and sat down on the edge of his bed with the laptop on his knees. It was a small room with a single window and a desk he had assembled himself and a wall calendar from a bail bondsman, on which he had circled in red the date his internship would end. Below that date, in smaller pen, he had written the word OFFER? and then crossed it out and written it again.

The phone buzzed on the blanket.

It was Noah, from the group chat that the four of them had kept since their sophomore year, the one named Law School Dropouts (Eventually). Noah had sent a link, and under the link three words. Tell me this isn't real.

Asher frowned. He opened the link, and the page asked him for a password, and then Noah sent the password, and then a second message that said: It's a private forum. Priya found it. Marcus thinks it's all fiction, like a creepypasta thing. We've been reading it for a week. You'll love it, it's basically a true crime podcast but in writing. Don't tell anyone, it's weird.

Weird how? typed Asher.

Read the first page.

He did not usually do what Noah told him, but it had been a bad day, and he was tired of his own thoughts. He clicked through.

The forum was called The Quiet Room. It was plain, almost ugly, white letters on a black background, with a list of threads and the number of replies beside each one, and no pictures, no ads, none of the things that made a website look as though someone cared about it. He scrolled down. There were posts with titles like Crime scenes that look staged and Does anyone else think this one is too clean? and Rate the realism, 1 to 10. Under each there were long threads of comments, with nicknames and timestamps and small numbers marking how many people had liked them. The tone was strange. It was polite, even friendly, the way a club for model railroads is friendly. People argued about the placement of a lamp. They argued about whether a particular photograph showed the right amount of shadow. It took him a minute to understand that these were photographs of the kind he had never looked at on purpose, and that every person in the room was acting as if they were not real.

A chill ran across the back of his neck. It was not exactly fear. It was the cold, bright curiosity he felt reading a good case in a law journal, one where the facts were so wrong that you could not stop turning the pages. He told himself that this was just a story, a game that grown men played to feel brave, and he scrolled further, past the pictures he did not need to look at, to the post that was pinned at the top of the whole forum, where the new members were supposed to start.

He read it slowly. He read it a second time, with his thumb hovering above the screen. Outside, the laundromat's yellow light fell across the ceiling of the room, and a bus went by, and the building shook very faintly, the way it always did.

Then he typed a single sentence to Noah. Okay. I'm in.

Noah answered in a second: Told you.

Before he could put the phone down, it rang. It was a video call, and when he accepted it, three faces crowded into the little screen at once: Noah with his chin on his fist, Priya in a green hoodie with her hair in a towel, Marcus half out of the frame and chewing something. They were all talking at the same time, which was how they had talked since they were nineteen.

"Okay, okay, wait," said Marcus, swallowing his mouthful so quickly that he coughed. "Before you say anything, the rules. Rule one, it's fake. Rule two, it's fake. Rule three is that Priya thinks it might not be, but Priya also thinks her cat is a reincarnated Roman emperor."

"He is," said Priya, with great dignity, and tugged the towel more firmly around her head.

"What is it, then?" Asher asked, a little suspicious. "And who runs it, if nobody knows who anybody is?"

"No idea. Somebody with a lot of free time." Marcus waved a hand. "It's like a writers' workshop for people who are into crime scenes. They post a photo, or they post a scene they wrote, and everyone picks it apart. Is the blood believable, would the guy have really done it that way. Like a book club, but with a body count. Half the posts are copy-pasted from old true crime sites, the other half are fan fiction."

"You'd be good at it," said Noah, rather quietly. He was the only one who had not laughed. "You pick things apart for a living."

"I'm an intern," said Asher. "Nobody pays me to have opinions."

"You pick things apart for free, then."

They all laughed at that, and Asher laughed too, a beat late. He did not mind. It was the first time in weeks that anyone had said he would be good at something.

Asher lay back on the bed with the phone held above his face. The first line of the pinned post was still there on the screen, in white letters, the glow of it cold on his eyes.

Welcome. Everything here is fake. Please keep believing that…