Chapter 7 Cass

The tension was palpable, like a thick, humid fog in the summer. It was in my throat. It settled on my shoulders and my collarbone. We had reached an agreement, but it was frail—swaying with the force of our pride. Day after day, we sat in that small conference room and we played our delicate game. Some days I triumphed; other days Marcus bested me.

We brought two completely different approaches to warfare to the table. Marcus had home team advantage and therefore had more resources at his disposal. One day, he caught me scraping the pickles off my sandwich and wrapping them up tightly in foil to mask their scent. The next day, he ordered lunch from a deli and requested one of those massive pickles, which he left sitting out on the conference table for the rest of the day. Another time, I wore a sleeveless sheath dress to the office. In response, he turned up the AC in the conference room so it was a lovely fifty-eight degrees.

But what I lacked in resources, I made up for in leverage. I was the one thing standing in the way of unfathomable wealth. Thus, if I wanted something, Marcus had no choice but to deliver. I told him the binders in the on-site data room needed to be color-coded by content, so he had to buy a new set from Staples after hours (or ask his executive assistant to work overtime to do it for him). I told him I needed him to replace all the hyphens in his file names with underscores, so Marcus had no choice but to spend seven hours straight updating every single file name.

Despite the way we sparred, we were actually productive once we got going. Marcus had a beat on every element of the company. No matter what I asked for, he had it ready and waiting for me. He anticipated my questions before I asked them and in the rare moments when I caught him off guard, he was quick to find his footing. If we were in the habit of exchanging compliments, I would have told him he was formidable. I got close to saying this a few times, but he always found a way to remind me we weren't friends—and never would be.

On the second Friday in the due diligence process, he strolled into the conference room with a Bankers Box. When he dropped it onto the glass tabletop, the surface clanged and teetered with its weight. Startled, I looked up at Marcus, who had rolled the sleeves of his button-down shirt up over his hard forearms. His cheeks were pink from exertion, and he was grinning at me.

"Yes?" I asked, my eyes traveling between the Bankers Box and Marcus.

He patted the lid with his hand. "Legal docs," he announced as he pushed a hand through his brown hair. "You ask, I deliver."

"For the data room?" I confirmed, rising out of my chair to examine it.

"Yep," he said, patting the lid a couple more times. "Everything that you asked for."

When I was standing next to him, I could almost feel the heat radiating off his body. "Heavy?" I asked.

"That's a decade of legalese," he noted. "I can carry it over for you if that's helpful. It needs to go into the data room, right?"

"Some help would be great."

"No worries. Should I…"

"I'll just have you walk it to the door and then I can bring it in."

Marcus lifted the box, inhaling sharply as he hoisted it off the table. I opened the door for him and we headed over to his office on the opposite side of the building. When we got to his office, he put the box on the floor in front of the door. "This good?"

"Thanks," I said as I opened it with Marcus's key. Once the door was open, I pushed the box into the office; he was right. It was incredibly heavy, and it took me a few shoves to get it out of the way of the door.

"Hey, just a sec," Marcus commented from the doorway where he stood. Per my instructions, he was careful not to step over the threshold of the data room.

"Go ahead," I said as I straightened my spine. I shook my hair back, wishing I had a hair tie. Somehow, I was exhausted from having done nothing more than shove this humongous box into the room.

He inhaled through his teeth with his face pulled into a grimace. "Cassie, I completely forgot to mention this. My assistant had a little trouble when he was pulling it out of the closet, so some things might be out of order…"

Something in his expression was far too wry for this admission. In fact, he was practically smirking as he delivered this update. Dread filled me, practically choking me. Hastily, I bent over and pulled the cardboard lid off the box, and at once I realized I'd been played for a damn fool.

Nothing in the box was in order. It was a haphazard pile of papers, laying every which way, some facing in one direction and others upside down. It was chaos condensed, almost like someone removed all the staples and paperclips from the documents, threw them from the third story of the office, and then shoved them carelessly into this box.

"Oh…and now that it's in the data room, I'm not allowed to come in to fix it and you're not allowed to take it out, are you?" Marcus pursed his lips. "Shit, this is going to be a huge headache for you, isn't it?"

Satisfaction tinged every word. It was almost disturbing how much he enjoyed this—almost like he had been planning this one for days.

Bastard . What a sneaky, underhanded bastard .

And I wanted to say that to him. I wanted to shout it in his stupid, smug face. But I remembered what Corinne said: I needed to get it together. My job depended on it. And if I ever wanted to pay my parents back, I needed this job.

"I can handle it," I replied, miraculously keeping my tone calm. "Thanks for carrying this over."

He lingered in the doorway, clearly unnerved by my coolness. He tugged on the front of his expensive shirt, fanning himself. After a moment, he cleared his throat. "Are you sure? God, that's going to take you, like, three days to sort out, right?"

"Maybe."

"These are legal documents," he continued. "They're highly repetitive and it's essential that they're organized correctly. You're going to have to read every page and make sure they all get sorted into the right places."

"I'm aware." I flipped my hair over my shoulder, which I knew he hated. "But I told you there would be no delay in this process, so I'll get it done. That's my job." I threw in a smile at the end, which he didn't return.

He pressed his lips together hard, flexing that nice jawline of his. His green eyes traveled across the papers at my feet and then back up to my face. "Well, good luck with it."

"Thanks for carrying it over," I responded, maintaining my smile, which was as fake as could be. "You've gotten really strong since Princeton. Have you been working out? I remembered you being so scrawny back then."

"Power yoga," he retorted, rolling seamlessly with my banter. "You should try it. It's really good for anyone who is high strung and clearly working through some issues."

"Well you would know, right?" I fake-laughed, and he fake-laughed in response. And honestly, if I weren't so annoyed with him, I would have acknowledged the fact that we actually built off each other's insults with impressive coordination.

"Cool. I'll definitely send some info about my gym over. You probably won't get a chance to read it, what with all the texting you're constantly doing on your phone, but just in case."

"Thanks!" I nodded at the box. "But anyway, I better get to cleaning up your assistant's little mess here. Wow, he's clumsy, right?"

"The clumsiest," Marcus agreed. "Have fun, Cassie."

"Same to you, Marcus."

He turned on his heels and headed away from the data room, and I swung the door shut—finally giving myself a welcome reprieve. Once I was alone, I let out a string of expletives that would make sailors blush.

What a sneaky, underhanded, obnoxious, pernicious bastard .

Unfortunately for Marcus, he had clearly never read the Art of War . He believed this little play—this little Bankers Box of chaos—was going to be like some kind of Russian winter during a land campaign. He thought I would roll over and freeze, admitting defeat.

On the contrary, I was born for something like this.

The average adult could read 300 words per minute. The average college graduate could read about 450 words per minute. The first time I had my reading speed tested, I was in the third grade and clocked at 650 words per minute (and for the record, the average third grader could read 150 words per minute). In my adulthood, I tended to read 1,600 words per minute—and by definition, this was known as speed reading.

Honestly, of all the stupid tricks I had up my sleeve, I thought speed reading was the least impressive. Reading faster really wasn't hard, but people tended to resist adopting habits that deviated from the tried-and-true methods they learned as young children. Their loss, but whatever. It was only in rare moments like these that it came in handy—and I assumed most people weren't regularly engaging in elaborate corporate rivalries with weird quiet guys from college who had morphed into egotistical millionaires over the course of a decade.

Step one for faster reading (in the book of Cass Pierson): Use a gliding technique. I stole a pen from Marcus's desk, laid it across the page, and dragged it downward as I read. This way, I could cover the sentences I'd already read, removing them as a distraction. The technique ensured I could focus only on the sentence I was reading, without my mind wandering.

Step two: Trace the words. Using another one of Marcus's pens, I ran the tip below each word as I read it, speeding up the act itself. Admittedly, this was a harder technique to use in tandem with gliding; it required some coordination to only move the gliding device up and down, while moving the tracing device from side to side. Luckily, I'd been doing this since I was seven—it was like second nature at this point.

But the biggest hurdle to clear here was the organization. Even if I could read every page in this box, ordering and dividing them into the right stacks would be a feat. After reading a few pages, I concluded I would need a mnemonic device. I used the first letter of the first word on each page and the last letter of the last word on each page and combined that with a number to signify the topic at hand. A page about registration of domain names became 1-LS, while a page about the building's lease became 4-EN.

Once I had my mnemonic device in place, the final piece of the puzzle was memory, which wasn't something I needed to be deliberate about. I just…could. I remembered things. Everything.

When I was growing up, my parents employed a housekeeper from Argentina called Maite, who came to our house four times a week. Sometimes she would bring her son Ramon with her. Ramon was quiet and bookish and therefore fascinating to me as a child. I remembered how he would look around my home with wide brown eyes that would travel over the stacks and stacks of books my father stored in every room of the house. Ramon knew not to touch them, but I could see the hunger in his eyes. Most days, he would sit in the kitchen and do his homework while his mother cleaned our house, his gaze traveling to whatever book he could see from his seat.

It took me years to come to terms with how I witnessed disparity in our lives day after day without batting an eye, but at the time I was grateful for Maite's presence. Maite and Ramon would speak to each other in Spanish, and within a few months I had picked up the language. Maite thought this was brilliant. When my mother wasn't around, she would speak to me in Spanish, asking me about my school day and what I was reading. I would chatter on and on, telling her about the stupid things my classmates said and did.

When I was in the fourth grade, Ramon started high school and he came over less and less now that Maite trusted him to stay home by himself. One of the last times he came over, he showed me what he was reading in Spanish class: a story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges called "Funes el memorioso" or "Funes the Memorious." We sat at the kitchen table together and he read it aloud to me, even though I could have read it by myself in mere minutes. We liked those moments together though—Ramon reading to me and me listening to him.

The story was about a young man named Ireneo Funes, living in the countryside of Uruguay. After suffering a fall from a horse, Funes develops a supreme memory: he remembers everything—literally everything. He's capable of recalling distinct details from specific paragraphs on precise pages in books, or of conducting complex number associations in his head. The minutiae overwhelms him. Instead of seeing this as a blessing, Funes suffers from this prodigious gift.

That day when we read Funes, my mother came downstairs, saw me sitting there with Ramon, and this look passed over her face. At the time, it didn't make much sense to me. Years later, I realized it was a foreshadowing of what would come. When he left under my mother's ever-watchful eye, Ramon called me Funes and wished me the best. I never saw him again. A few days later, Maite passed along Ramon's copy of his collection of Borges's stories, which I would keep on my nightstand wherever I went. To Cassie la memoriosa , it said on the inside cover in Ramon's pencil scribble.

Within four hours, I was done with Marcus's little bump in the road. I organized each set of documents into separate stacks, arranged them chronologically, and placed them neatly into the Bankers Box with separators dividing them by year. I used thick binder clips to keep each file together, and even went so far as to put a post-it note with a brief summary of each document on the top.

I emerged from the data room with the brightest smile I could muster and let the door snap closed behind me. All the way across the office—yards away—Marcus was sitting in our conference room at his laptop. Within seconds, his eyes landed on me. Because I was petty as fuck, I waved at him.

He practically flushed in response, his jaw clenching as I straightened my top. Of course, he didn't return the wave. Still smiling, I strolled across the office past his bullpen of engineers, imagining I was strutting in slow motion while Beyoncé played in the background.

When I reached the door, I poked my head into the conference room. "Hey, I'm going to get a coffee. Do you want anything?"

He glared back at me, those pale green eyes fixated on me like he wanted to shoot lasers out of them. "You're taking a break?"

"No, I'm all done," I corrected, gesturing over my shoulder towards his office, delighting in the way his eyes widened.

Visibly caught off guard, Marcus shook his head. "No way. That's not possible."

"I mean, if I had any way to prove it to you, I would." I cocked my head to the side. "But like you so kindly reminded me earlier, you can't go into the data room. So, coffee?"

"I'm fine," he snapped, even though his tone conveyed an opposing sentiment.

"Great. Well, I'll be back soon." I gave him a little wave (one I would honestly never offer anyone in sincerity because it was obnoxious as hell) and I strolled out of the office and into a sunny afternoon.

Another round for me.