Kevin Blogged - Part V

Larry’s Dead

Chapter I – Kevin Blogged
Chapter II – Tall Brad
Chapter III – A Mysterious Malaysian
Chapter IV - A Hairy Swede
Chapter V- Unix for Dummies

Note, any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

She was the kind of girl whose arm you vaguely remembered licking in an amorous, drunken haze at an office Christmas party the night before while her friend, some Minnie Driver-look alike, scowled on, unapproving, but who, when the bright and cleansing rays of the morning sun lit your crumpled clothes nest on the cold living room floor was nowhere to be found and certainly wasn’t available to explain to you why you were bruised and covered in stale pretzels and crumpled song requests for such quixotic classics as “Get a Life”, “You’re Dunk” and “Drool On Her Arm a Little More, Idiot”. You wouldn’t even know her name if you hadn’t read the scrawled I Am Christy nametag situated revealingly within her mostly unbuttoned blouse. And come to think of it, where the hell was your $20?

Regardless of her reputation, she’d had her heart broken at least a dozen times and then a few more, and one too many of those lotharios could point at her with the cold words, “There was a time when she was my backburner girl.” She’d have sung it like her own personal blues anthem, but she only sang when she was drunk, so everyone had tired of the tune and now she only hummed it to herself.

She’d heard through the grapevine that Larry might be dead, that Brad might in some way be culpable and was currently cooling his heels in an Inver Grove hoosegow, and that Ming have been moved by HR into a solitary cube on LL a good fifty feet away from anyone else, but she was unwilling to check it out for herself, it was just too far to walk. If Larry were dead, he wouldn’t be in her meeting later that morning and if Brad were incarcerated, at least he wouldn’t be hitting on her friends. She’d always harbored an uncomfortable suspicion that he was constantly looking down her blouse. She knew she’d be looking down her blouse all the time if she were that tall. She tucked her foot beneath her, leaned back in her gray cubicle chair, thought about her breasts, unbuttoned another button and reached for her Unix for Dummies cheat sheet. But where her trusty companion should have been, her hand closed on nothing larger than an arrow-shaped sticky note emblazoned with the words Aiming for Excellence. She worried at first it might be another love note from the arm licker, but on third glance she realized it was something altogether different. It was a note from Larry. His voice echoed eerily from beyond the grave, trying to bounce between the gray and brown cubicle walls, but getting no further than the first cube because of the acoustic-dampening properties used by all large companies in employee workspace construction. Nevertheless, the note let her know in no uncertain terms what his undead presence could not, that he had borrowed her cheat sheet.

“Damn it.” She immediately looked around for someone to hit. Now there was no choice but to walk to his cube, after all, a dead guy wasn’t going to be bringing anything back to her, and her meeting had already started three minutes ago. She stomped down the walkway past the rest of her group fuming and muttering to herself, “If he got blood on it, I’ll kill him again. First Brad uses my CDFFL winnings to pay for group legal, now my cheat sheet…” As she stomped past Lisa, Lisa didn’t even looked up, but just enjoined, “Well, wherever the hell you’re going, button up.”