Want to sign my bare…

“Want to sign my bare?”

The perfume laced words come wafting in my office door like cannon fire. Katie, the last bastion of female charm in the entire building, stands framed in the doorway in her tailored suit… awaiting my response. She leans slightly to the left, hand on hip, while her right arm dangls at her side, holding the referenced albino stuffed animal.

“Bare what?” I ask. “Never mind. Whatever you’re baring, I’ll gladly put my name on it.”

I sit back in my chair, pushing away from the desk. I cock my head back and look down my nose at her in mock curiosity.

“I bet you would,” she says. Lazily, her right arm swings forward releasing the stuffed bear from her grip and lofting it through the air and neatly onto my chest.

“I thought you were supposed to be out of here already? Word was, you had one foot out the door… and that was weeks ago. What are you still doing hanging around here? I’ve already told you, I’m taken.”

Despite the coarse words, my tone is a little too theatrical, giving away my comically antagonistic intentions. Katie slipps through the doorway like silk sheets and pulls up a seat opposite me on the other side of the desk. She plunks a pack of colored markers down on the desk, looking meaningfully from the markers back to my eyes.
“So, how about it?” she asked again.

For the first time, I actually look at the bear and notice that the drunken pattern of graffiti littering its otherwise pale skin, is not manufactured, but actually a collection of idiotic phrases from the gaggle of technical misanthropes that work in our building.

“Last day.” Drawing my conclusion from the unannounced delivery. “Where to now? Fame? Fortune? Table dancing?”

“Shut up and sign it,” she counters, leaning back in the chair and shoving a tray of multicolored fine tip Sharpies across the desk at me with her manicured fingertips.

“Not telling, eh? You make it hard for a man to stalk you.”

“I only want the dedicated ones. A girl can’t make do with half assed stalkers.”

Call me complicity. I dig a red sharpie out of the batch and stare at the bear for a second. All the prime landscape (his ass) is taken, so I just decide to go for the face.

Something most people don’t know about me is that I was a rather accomplished artist in my teen years. I started out tracing pictures, and then eventually I was able to branch out and draw my own versions of my favorite characters. Though I have never been able to legibly write my name, I can draw a fantastic pair of comic book breasts.

The only piece of this dubious talent that still clings on is my ability to draw caricatured (over exaggerated) features. I decide to give the bear a pair of cholla eyebrows and huge red lips. A speech balloon slides from the right corner of the mouth saying, “Got a penny?”

No one will ever get the joke, but it has me laughing out loud. Katie takes one look at it and frowns.

“Are you saying I’m cheap?”

“If the shoe fits,” I reply, shrugging and splaying my fingers. She leans forward, crinkling her nose and squinting at me like an angry 4 year old.

“Come get some,” she challenges me, standing and flouncing out the door.

If I hadn’t already received the email saying that the company was providing a farewell by means of ice cream, I would have been understandably nonplussed.

Something to note; Katie and I aren’t friends. I wouldn’t even call us acquaintances. I know next to nothing about her other than what can plainly be seen around the office, and what kind of underwear she prefers her men to wear. She knows I am spoken for and that I am the best conversationalist in the company.

We wound up sitting on the outside of a happy hour, cracking jokes and snickering into our beers at the expense of others, and nonverbally decided we were cohorts from then on out. If we were both in a meeting, we joked our way through it. If we were both at the happy hour or business lunch, we were partners in crime.
We’ve rarely spoken outside of the office social events. My work never takes me near her, and hers never brings her into my area. We are, essentially, strangers.

If not for a random seating arrangement and some beer, I might never have known how fun she was. I wonder what else around here I am missing out on.

I’m going to get some ice cream after all.