Ted's office smelled of stale coffee, freshly cut styrofoam, and the silent tension of a ship about to run aground. Lily, seated at her assistant's desk, watched every movement of Mr. Druthers like a hawk. She had identified his favorite "toy": a baseball signed three times by Pete Rose, which the man caressed like a talisman of power.
Ted, for his part, was sunk in creative despair. His own design—an elegant, modern building that didn't resemble a phallus—was hidden in a drawer while he painted the umpteenth styrofoam tree "chestnut brown." "I can't show it to him, Lily. He'd destroy me. Or worse, laugh and then send me to design bushes for the trees."
"That's exactly what needs to change," Lily whispered with the determination of a revolutionary. "An environment of fear doesn't foster creativity. It fosters... this." She pointed at the pathetic trees.
Her opportunity came when Druthers went to lunch, leaving the lonely ball on its shelf. With the precision of a cat burglar (or a kindergarten teacher), Lily entered his office, took the ball, and hid it in her drawer. Then she placed a note where the ball had been.
Ted nearly had a heart attack when he found out. "What did you do?! That's his prized possession! Pete Rose signed it THREE TIMES!"
"Now he'll understand the value of being nice," Lily said imperturbably. "When he finds it with the note, everything will change."
"What's going to change is that we'll all be fired!" Ted lowered his voice to a panicked hiss. "Give it back now."
"Not until you show him your design."
It was a stalemate. The tension in the office became palpable. Druthers, upon discovering the theft, didn't react with the expected change of heart. Instead, he called a staff meeting. His speech was quiet, venomous. He promised mass layoffs if the ball didn't return. It wasn't a child's tantrum; it was the calculated threat of a man used to winning.
In Alyx's apartment
The atmosphere was different but equally charged. Marshall had gone there seeking refuge from Barney's madness.
"He says he 'tamed her,'" Marshall recounted, distressed. "But today we had a pop quiz, and everyone got a C- or lower! It's worse! Dr. Lewis is... radiating contained fury. And Barney says it's because he 'miscalculated,' that she's more 'wild' than he thought. He's going back tonight, Marshall! My Constitutional Law professor!"
Alyx listened while mixing paint. The situation was absurdly predictable. "Barney sees hunting patterns where there are complicated people, and Lily sees kindergarten classrooms where there are toxic offices." She sighed. "They're both trying to fix broken systems with the wrong tools. And you two are in the middle."
"What do I do?" Marshall asked, his voice a lament.
Alyx looked at him. Months ago, she would have devised a three-point plan and assumed the burden. Now she only offered an observation. "You didn't do anything wrong, Marshall. Your mistake was believing Barney or Lily had the answers to your problems. Your grades are your responsibility. And Ted's office... is his battle." She paused. "Sometimes, the only justice is to endure and wait for the storm to pass. Or to change trenches."
It was unheroic but honest advice. Marshall absorbed it. It wasn't a solution, but it was scaffolding for his own confusion.
The storm in Ted's office reached its climax hours later. Druthers, with the anonymous note in his hand (which spoke of iPods that would leave if he didn't behave), announced his final ultimatum. Cornered, Ted begged Lily to return the ball.
"Show him your blueprints, Ted. It's the only way," Lily insisted, her pedagogical theory crashing against the wall of corporate reality.
"Fine! Okay!" Ted yelled, defeated. "But if I do and we still get fired, this will have been for nothing."
Lily, her heart pounding, returned the ball just as the important clients—a bank from Spokane—arrived to see the model of the "penis building." The timing couldn't have been worse.
Parallelly, in Dr. Lewis's apartment, Barney was executing his "counterattack." He had returned, brimming with renewed confidence and a Power Bar, determined to prove his "dominance." The scene Marshall imagined (and that Alyx, with a shudder, could visualize with terrible clarity) was one of epic discomfort.
"This time, there will be no mercy," Barney had told Marshall with a fanatical glint in his eyes. "I'm going to... overwhelm her with my prowess."
Marshall could only wait and pray that her hip (hers) survived.
The confrontation in the office was quick and brutal. Druthers presented his marble phallus to the clients. One of them, unfiltered, said it: "That's a penis." Druthers erupted in ridiculous denials. And Ted, driven by desperation and the specter of layoffs, stepped forward.
"Wait! We have another idea."
Against all odds, against the will of a Druthers red with fury, Ted showed his blueprints.
The clients, relieved to see something that didn't remind them of male anatomy, loved it. In an absurd twist of fortune, Ted was promoted to project manager. Druthers, humiliated but unable to deny the success, retreated, muttering.
Lily watched it all from her desk. It hadn't worked as she planned. Druthers hadn't learned to be nice; he had been defeated by someone with better ideas. Her "Aldrin Justice" had been, at best, a clumsy and dangerous catalyst. But it had worked. Ted was safe, even triumphant. A good outcome for the wrong reasons. She felt euphoric and empty at the same time.
Ted, euphoric, approached her. "You did it, Lily! You forced me to face him. This wouldn't have happened without you."
Lily smiled, but the smile didn't reach her eyes. "It was your design, Ted. I just... removed a toy from the path." The words sounded hollow even to her.
Meanwhile, in Dr. Lewis's apartment, Barney's "counterattack" had concluded. He appeared at Alyx's apartment, where Marshall waited nervously, with... a sling on his arm and an expression of profound discomfort.
"What happened? Did she hurt you?" Marshall asked, alarmed.
"On the contrary! It was... intense," Barney said, but his sling told another story. "She's... demanding. Very demanding. Said my 'prowess' was overrated. Then she graded my pop quiz and gave me a C-." He made a dramatic pause. "But then she said that after her eight weeks of physical therapy for the hip dislocation, she'd give me an 'A'."
Marshall and Alyx looked at each other. The silence said it all. The "taming" had been a disaster. The cougar had counterattacked, leaving Barney wounded (in his pride and apparently in his arm) and Marshall with the prospect of a professor even more enraged but, perhaps miraculously, more generous with future grades.
It was chaos with no clear victories.
That night, Lily returned to Alyx's apartment, not euphoric but pensive. "It didn't turn out as I thought," she admitted, looking at Alyx's canvas. The scaffolding now clearly supported the outline of an elegant, non-phallic skyscraper. "I thought I could fix things with a simple lesson. But the adult world is... messier."
Alyx nodded, applying a touch of white paint to the top of the sketched building. "Scaffolding isn't for giving lessons to others. It's for holding yourself up while you learn." She paused. "Did you find your passion?"
Lily looked at her hands, which had hidden a baseball and written an anonymous note. "I think my passion is... not standing idly by. But maybe I need to learn better tools." She smiled weakly. "Less toy theft. More... I don't know. Something."
Alyx handed her a brush. "Start here. The base needs another color."
It wasn't an answer, or a job, or a passion. It was just a gesture of sharing the scaffolding. And for that night, for both of them, it was enough.
The silver earring shone on the side table, a silent witness that sometimes justice was a shifting concept, and the only possible reparation was the one made, slowly and carefully, upon oneself.
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