Chapter 2
2
“ There you are!”
When I get off the train at Merchandise Mart, Sasha is waiting for me on the platform. That’s unusual in and of itself, because Sasha is always at the office early, knocking items off her to-do list, never exiting the building unless she has a client pitch or remembers she should maybe eat lunch. But what’s really throwing me is the fact that she’s not wearing a coat.
Something’s definitely up.
Sasha grew up in Los Angeles, and her hatred for the cold knows no bounds. She bundles up in sixteen layers as soon as it dips below fifty degrees and stays in her cocoon of coats, scarves, and good fleece leggings until April. But today, she’s standing there in her sharp orange blazer and dark fitted jeans, no hat, no scarf, shaking in her trendy but well-lined Canada Goose winter boots. I enjoy living in a snow globe, but Sasha hates it. Her arms are wrapped around herself, teeth chattering. Even her waist-length dreads look frozen.
“You okay?” I ask, hurrying over to her and unwrapping my scarf from my neck to offer it to her. “Where’s your coat? You get mugged or something?”
“Did you not get my text?” Sasha says, taking my scarf and grabbing me by the elbow.
I haven’t told Sasha that I still keep my phone off most days, only turning it on when absolutely necessary. She knows that was a thing I did right after the funeral, but she doesn’t know it’s still a thing.
“No,” I say instead. “You know I never hear my phone on the train—”
“Shit’s going down at the office.”
“What?”
“Hurry, it’s cold as hell and we can’t be late for this meeting,” Sasha says, rushing me through the turnstile.
“I don’t have any meetings until ten thirty,” I protest.
“Wrong,” she says.
Sasha and I have only been coworkers for a few years, but we’ve been close friends for more than a decade. We met at a party when we were both still relatively new to the city—she was a shivering transplant from California, I was a sort-of-local trying to find my way around the city. I’d just finished a graduate program in marketing at Michigan and had returned to the area to try to launch my career. It was my first time living in Chicago proper, though I grew up less than an hour away from the city.
We hit it off right away and started exploring the city together. We discovered we were both diehard Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, which came in handy when the weather got too cold for us to want to do anything but binge our favorite show. We both loved our gin martinis extra dirty, preferred savory over sweet, and loved nothing more than making a whole meal out of an array of appetizers: salty, cheesy, deep-fried. We both worked in advertising and had mixed feelings about being really good at convincing people to buy things they might not actually need.
We bonded over our miserable dating lives and our wholesome childhoods. Sasha Green was the daughter of two psychiatrists in LA, while I was the product of a high school physics teacher and a real estate agent in suburban Chicago. Sasha was the iconic best friend I never had in high school or college. We finished each other’s sentences and joked that we shared the same brain. It felt like ours was a fated friendship, meant to be.
Plus, we were both Jewish—something that I didn’t initially assume, since apparently the Ashkenormativity (aka the default assumption that all American Jews are of white European descent) was strong with me back then. I was stunned when she invited me to a seder at her apartment. Turns out her mom’s Sephardic and Ashkenazic, and her dad was raised in the Black Baptist church but converted to Judaism. Sasha was not only Jewish but also had the same damn bat mitzvah portion that I did. It was truly basheret : a match made in heaven.
Sasha was the one who told me about the opening at Mercer I’ve actually been able to pay down my student loans and even start beefing up my modest savings account. It’s been good. Every other area of my life could use improvement, but I’m not looking for any big changes on the job front. Which is why the look on Sasha’s face this morning is making me very, very nervous.
“There’s a meeting at nine,” Sasha says. “All staff. Email went out at eight thirty. Seriously, how do you not keep up with your email while you’re on the train?”
“What’s the meeting?” I ask, sidestepping her question. I don’t want her giving me any more static about how much I still avoid my phone.
“Something big. Someone from corporate flew in for it.”
“What? Why?”
Corporate means New York .
The Chicago office of Mercer & Mercer occupies two full floors of the August Building, a sleek office complex near Merchandise Mart. We look like a behemoth, but we’re just a satellite. The hallowed Mercer & Mercer headquarters is in Manhattan, and has a much larger footprint. They only send someone to Chicago when there’s a huge client pitch—or bad news to deliver.
We aren’t prepping any huge new pitches this close to year’s end. We’re just in maintenance mode before we dim the lights from Christmas through New Year’s. Which means that odds are, this is a bad-news visit.
“Not sure,” Sasha says. “But it can’t be good.”
“Maybe we’re all getting bonuses,” I say hopefully.
No one has gotten a bonus in five years, thanks to a few little things like oh, pandemics and global supply chain shortages and the world generally being a dumpster fire all the time. The whole company was going to “continue indefinitely tightening the proverbial belt while celebrating every success,” as the corporate office said in a clichéd email to the whole company last year. Apparently even though the world was back to normal—whatever that means—most employers retained a general sense of impending fiscal doom, and weren’t feeling generous.
“Yeah, right,” Sasha says flatly, waving my words away and killing my optimism with a flick of her slender wrist. “If anything, it’s gonna be cuts. All the managers are losing their shit, trying to get their teams in on time.”
Creatives, as a rule, are not known for their punctuality. Technically, Mercer & Mercer opens at eight thirty, but only the admin team is ever there that early. Those of us on the creative and account side who really want to be taken seriously, like Sasha and me, are there by nine. But a lot of the graphic designers and web folks don’t roll in until closer to ten.
“Is Bryan in yet?” I ask, nervous.
Bryan Walsh-Alvarez is the third musketeer in Sasha’s and my small social circle at work. He’s a couple years younger than we are, which he never lets us forget. He’s also the only one of us who’s married. His husband, Carlos, is a doctor, which is another thing that Bryan makes sure to mention approximately every five minutes. Bryan’s life and finances are secure, even if he were to suddenly find himself unemployed, which is one of the many reasons he’s generally lax about getting to work on time. Legal weed now being readily available at a dispensary across from his building doesn’t help, either.
“Actually, yes,” Sasha says. “Julie got the heads-up last night and texted him at two in the morning.”
Thank God Bryan’s creative director, Julie, likes him so much, and knew to text him at two in the morning, when he’d still be up playing video games. Texting him at eight would have done nothing, because he would absolutely sleep right through it.
“Come on,” Sasha says, as if I’m dawdling. I’m not, but I am struggling to keep up, because my long-legged friend hasn’t let up on the pace for a single second. We’re practically running up the sidewalk, our breath coming out in chilled cloud puffs, hard and fast. Have I always been this out of shape?
“Do you think there will be bagels at the meeting?” I ask.
“No,” says Sasha.
“Killjoy,” I pant, by now sweaty and freezing at the same time. “You sure you don’t want my coat?”
“No, I want you to hurry your ass inside,” Sasha says, stepping up the pace even more.
Three minutes later, at nine on the dot, we’re squeezing ourselves into the conference room on the fifth floor—thankfully the elevator doors were opening just as we made it inside the building. It seems like everyone else from our office is already there. Every seat around the long mahogany conference room table is taken, so Sasha and I flatten ourselves against the wall just as a slick businessman in a suit that probably cost more than my monthly rent clears his throat, leans over, and raps three times on the table.
Everyone flinches.
Straightening up again, the suit smiles and steeples his fingers in front of his chest like he’s about to announce his plans to stop Batman. His white hair is buzzed military short on the sides, oddly gelled and spiked on top. He’s in his seventies, so he would’ve been much too old for frosted tips in the nineties, but I bet he had them anyway.
Across the room, Bryan catches my eye.
His freckled face is pallid, his reddish hair and button-down shirt both rumpled. I self-consciously smooth my own dark curls and give him a sympathetic look. Bryan is unaccustomed to being awake before nine, let alone being at work by then. He’s also usually in ringer tees and ripped jeans, so the nice-ish shirt and khakis look bizarre on him. Julie must have told him to look presentable for the morning’s big announcement. I wonder if the clothes actually belong to Carlos. And if maybe Carlos wore them yesterday, since they definitely have a picked-up-off-the-floor look. Bryan may have just grabbed them in a blind panic trying to get here on time.
Welcome to hell , Bryan mouths.
For real—where are the fucking bagels? I mouth back, and he struggles to hold back a snort.
“Thank you all for meeting on such short notice, such short notice,” says the suit. He speaks quickly but inefficiently, repeating certain words and phrases in a way that sets my teeth one edge. “I’m Barry Ellis—Barry Ellis from the New York office. East Coast team sends their best, as always, as always. All right, all right! Let’s cut to the chase.”
Sasha and I exchange a glance.
Not much of an opener.
“Summer was a strong quarter. Nice work, nice work, good numbers, that’s what we like to see. Well done,” he says, with a bland cap-toothed smile too big for his tanned face. He looks like someone who just lost a senate race and refuses to concede. “Well done. But I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, Q3 was rough and Q4’s looking worse. We might lose the Java-Lo account. I’m not saying we will, but we might. We might.”
Shit.
The Java-Lo account? This makes everyone shift nervously in their seats, the low buzz of anxiety humming louder through the room. Java-Lo has been one of our biggest clients for years—a coffee company that most people on the street couldn’t name, but whose industrial coffeemakers were in basically every hotel, restaurant, office building, and wealthy private kitchen in North America.
I don’t know all the details, because I’m not on the official Java-Lo creative team. But it’s the single biggest revenue line in the Chicago satellite budget. From packaging design to coffee-cocktail holiday guidebook copy to robust international marketing, literally everyone in our office touches it occasionally. It’s in Sasha’s primary portfolio. And Bryan’s one of the lead designers for Java-Lo.
Bryan shoots me a nervous look.
I give him what I hope is a reassuring nod, but probably looks more like some sort of random twitch.
“So what we do wanna see is some real energy this month,” says Barry, with a loud clap that makes one of the interns yelp aloud and quickly try to cover it with a coughing fit. “Some real energy! I know it’s the holidays and blah blah, but this isn’t the time to slack off, it’s the time to double down. Show ’em what we’re made of. And consider that we’ll be looking at hours and impact if we have to make some tough calls in the New Year. In the New Year...if not before.”
“Jesus,” Sasha says, under her breath. “Is he seriously talking about firing people right before the holidays?”
I shake my head, mouth dry.
“All right, so,” Barry says, looking around the room like a shark deciding what fish to rip through first. “Any questions?”
The room is clearly full of questions, but no one’s going to open their mouth to ask one. Bryan mouths a silent one to me: What the actual hell?
Barry nods, satisfied. Like by keeping our mouths shut, we got the answer right.
“Good,” he says. He claps his hands again, grinning that artificial grin. “Good. All right, back to it, then, team—and hey, hey! Merry Christmas!”