Chapter Two
It turns out that when your chief strategy officer thinks you’ve made a threat on the CEO’s life, it’s a damningly difficult predicament to come back from.
Sitting in my boss Amanda’s office, feeling like a child who’s been ordered to see the principal, I tried to explain. My joke with Selma, our nickname for Bill, Dan’s incomprehensible syllables, my useless ear, how this was all a massive misunderstanding.
“But he asked you outright,” she says, squinting at me. “You could have explained it then.”
“But I couldn’t hear him ,” I insist, not for the first time. I point to my deaf ear like I always do whenever she sidles up to my right side and doesn’t understand why I can’t hear her.
“But you pretended you did .” She says it slowly, enunciating in full to drive home the ridiculousness of my decision. She’s watching me, reading me, searching for an explanation—possibly even realizing I may not be as capable as she thought.
Amanda, I know, would never pretend to hear someone she couldn’t.
With her sleek, dark bob and penetrating brown eyes, Amanda is no-nonsense in a way that makes me squirm.
Amanda doesn’t fall into despair in basic social interactions.
She does reasonable things like ask people to repeat themselves instead of spiraling into absurdity.
I’ve spent the last decade establishing myself as someone who is reasonable.
More than that—reliable. Capable. Put me in a meeting and I’ll ask all the right questions and suggest helpful ideas.
Ask me to write a press release and I’ll craft something that perfectly fits Ryser’s innovative and informative tone of voice.
And if I happen to leave the company holiday party early to catch up on emails (read: recover in my cubicle after exactly thirty minutes of dodging small talk like a competitive sport), that’s my business.
I’ve always been able to hide my social shortcomings behind my professional polish.
Until now.
“I know,” I say. “But…well, I have a philosophy that there’s a limited number of times you can ask someone to repeat themselves. Too many and it gets awkward.”
Amanda’s lips form a thin line of anguish. “Lauryn,” she says, her words measured and pained, “I think we can safely say there are fates worse than awkwardness.”
“Agreed.” I chance a chuckle. Amanda doesn’t smile. I play her words back, this time picking up on their ominous foreboding. “Wait, what do you mean?” The question comes out almost in a whisper, wrapped in dread.
“Well.” She spends several seconds straightening the glass paperweight on her desk.
When she finally lifts her eyes to meet mine, there’s a reluctance in her gaze.
“Dan suggested that…maybe the stress of the last year has caught up with you. We’ve certainly had to put out a lot of fires lately.
The child labor lawsuit. The…water situation in Pennsylvania.
The actual fire, in Nevada. Putting out the statements, preparing talking points. It’s a lot to take on.”
It’s hard not to wince at Ryser’s laundry list of disasters.
I should be able to reference them with all the same detachment Amanda uses, but it’s easier to push them out of mind, focus on our team’s mission to massage these incidents with deferrals, denials, distractions.
It’s why Amanda felt the need to implement Bill—no, BLL ; I should really start using its actual name lest I spark another panic—in the first place: a dedicated resource detailing our strategies and accepted terms for spinning these PR nightmares.
But Amanda’s gentle tone makes me want to shrink into my seat.
It’s as though she’s trying to analyze my feelings, dig into my psyche.
But there’s nothing to see here. I locked my morals away in a cage when I started working here, and I refuse to let her pick the lock now.
I will myself to look neutral and unbothered.
Child labor for Ryser’s chocolate bars, draining low-income communities’ watersheds for Ryser’s bottled water, all just another day at the office.
Whatever it takes to get my steady paychecks and secure a promotion.
It’s all part of my plan. Get promoted to communications manager within the next year.
Become communications director within seven years.
And then, once I’m in that role: do some good.
Instead of glossing over Ryser’s wrongs, we could acknowledge the harm we caused and take a step to counteract it: partner with a nonprofit to improve labor conditions, invest in a water conservation project, fund a scholarship program, offer financial support to an affected community.
Take concrete action to offset all the deferrals and denials I’ve played a part in over the years.
Do enough good deeds to quiet the restless morals straining against the bars of their cage.
Over the years, Amanda has turned down my every suggestion to add a touch of nuance to our standard response—but when I’m a communications director, with a budget and a semblance of authority, I’ll be able to make a difference.
And then, the final step in my timeline: retire as soon as I possibly can. According to my spreadsheet, I only have to work here for eight more years, until I’m forty, and then I can retire early, leave the working world forever, and maybe actually feel good about myself for a change.
Or, at least, no longer contribute to a company so notorious that Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to detailing its controversies.
Eight more years glossing over Ryser’s atrocities with carefully worded statements pulled from a clunky platform I won’t call Bill anymore.
Eight more years living in my dark basement apartment in Brentwood for the cheap rent, even though it gets only a sliver of sunlight for fifteen minutes on a good day, my neighborhood consists of a laundromat and a perpetual construction site, and the thirty-minute commute squished against strangers in a Metro car fills me with a daily dose of dread.
What’s eight years in the grand scheme of things?
It crosses my mind that eight years is also the age of one of the children mentioned in the child labor lawsuit our team publicly glossed over in favor of emphasizing Ryser’s “considerable progress” toward fair labor practices. But I try not to dwell on that.
“I’m sure I’m partly to blame,” Amanda goes on, her tone still achingly tender.
“I’ve probably leaned on you a little too much this year.
Your work is so stellar. You always go above and beyond.
But…there’s nothing wrong with needing to take a step back.
Dan recommended transferring you to a satellite office. ”
“Okay,” I say slowly. This sounds all right so far.
I know there’s a Ryser branch in Bethesda.
Not as glamorous as Ryser’s shiny headquarters here in DC, but Bethesda could be a good change of pace.
I piece together the positives: calling into Amanda’s meetings from the comfort of my cubicle.
No chance of awkward elevator run-ins with Dan.
I might even find a cheap apartment that doesn’t always smell damp.
“Okay,” she repeats, looking pleased at how I’m taking the news.
A keen sense of satisfaction slides through me. Yes, I am taking this well. I am a good employee. I am hardworking and easygoing and I would never murder our CEO.
“You’ll be working from our Greenstead office from now on,” she continues.
That word slices through me, making me jolt upright. “Greenstead?” My mouth forms the word like a terribly familiar habit.
“That’s right,” she says, perking up even more, finding something encouraging about my reaction. Mistaking my horror for excitement.
“So…” I grip the arm of my plastic chair. “I’d be running communications from there?”
Amanda grimaces. “It would be more of a support role.”
“Oh.” A demotion.
I want to race home to my spreadsheet, double-click it open, and run the numbers to assess what this means.
A demotion means a lower salary, and a lower salary means those eight years would stretch on for longer—ten, fifteen, twenty years.
Just the thought makes me feel like the walls are closing in, surrounding me in darkness.
“It’s really a lovely place,” Amanda tries, and I let out a loud laugh.
She eyes me warily, and I’m fully aware this is not the behavior to exhibit when I’ve given my superiors grave reason to doubt my sanity today, but I can’t help it.
My mind flashes with dead, rotting fields, crumbling brick buildings, the faint smell of mustard. A lovely place.
“You’ve never been there, have you?” I ask.
Amanda tilts her head. “Have you ?”
“I’m from Greenstead.”
Her eyes grow large, but she quickly masks her expression with a broad smile. “I’m sure it’s beautiful.”
“It’s smelled like mustard since the flood.”
Amanda winces. “Factory malfunction,” she corrects.
Ryser uses only the most sanitized language to refer to their Greenstead mustard factory’s accidental tank explosion in the ’90s. In the span of minutes, millions of gallons of bright-yellow mustard coursed through our small, rural Virginia town, flooding everything in its path.
I was four then. I don’t remember much about it.
Just that one day the world was bright and full of color and smelled like sunshine, and then suddenly fresh air was a thing of the past. The rest are snippets: A vinegar tang burning my nostrils.
Endless news coverage about cleanup efforts.
An unsettling feeling that nothing would ever be the same again.
“I would really rather not go,” I say. It takes some effort to keep my voice even when it so badly wants to wobble. “I’d like to stay here. Please.” It’s a fight to keep it to one please , to not say the word over and over again the same way it’s pulsing in my mind.
The corner of Amanda’s mouth lists upward in a sympathetic half smile. “I would like that, too. But…” She shakes her head. “Dan is…rattled. This was the best I could do. You’d still work at Ryser. Just…at the charity office.”
I nod slowly, resignation seeping through me.
After the flood—or factory malfunction —Ryser set up a charity office in Greenstead to aid in the recovery.
They processed claims, issued reimbursements, oversaw repairs.
But Greenstead never really recovered. Every year, the population dwindled as people took their leave for somewhere with life, somewhere that wasn’t the butt of an easy joke, as if there’s anything funny about your hometown being decimated in an instant.
Is this a monkey’s paw situation? I wanted to do some good and now I’ve gotten my wish in the worst way?
Going back to the town that felt like my own personal prison is a special kind of punishment.
And while knowing that the charity office exists has always been a small comfort—after all, I didn’t really abandon Greenstead if it’s been in Ryser’s capable hands all these years, did I?
—helping out at a small-town charity office isn’t quite the large-scale act of good I’d hoped to do at Ryser.
No matter how many fundraisers or cleanups Ryser’s charity office sponsors, Greenstead will always be a tiny tragedy of a town whose best days are far behind it.
I knew that even as a kid. I spent my childhood dreaming about leaving Greenstead at the first opportunity, and that’s what I did.
I left my old life in the past and set my sights on something new.
I went to college at Georgetown, I got a job that paid well above market rate at the largest company in DC, and I left Greenstead behind.
And now, it seems, I’m going back.