Chapter 5 #2
Avery headed to the conference room with her laptop to meet Kevin, feeling extra thankful for him today.
If it weren’t for her work husband, she would be even more miserable at Metropolitan .
Being around so many writers and never writing herself only exacerbated her confusing postgrad identity feelings.
As a kid, writing had been her escape from her cushioned suburban life.
She kept the same Five Star journal throughout her adolescence, documenting her angst in painstaking, dramatic detail.
She loved journaling, the way the act of putting her thoughts and feelings on the page helped her make sense of things.
Sometimes she’d even write stories—narratives of real-life moments she didn’t want to forget or scenes she completely made up.
She never felt more invigorated, more alive, than when she was immersed in a world of her own creation, the master of her own universe.
Then in college she wrote essays and op-eds for Woodford’s student newspaper, The Golden .
She was ecstatic when her columnist application was accepted and saw the gig as her first step toward a real writing career.
But senior year, when it was time to put the clips she’d generated to use in job applications, she didn’t apply to any staff writer openings anywhere.
She’d been so depressed over everything that happened that she could barely muster the energy to walk across campus to class, let alone fix up her r é sum é .
Now any writing she did for Metropolitan needed to be quippy and condensed into 280-character social copy.
If she never wrote another pun again, it would be too soon.
Kevin appeared in the conference room and flung himself into a leather chair. He fumbled with a charger cable emerging like a snake from a hole in the table and plugged it into his laptop.
“Patricia’s driving me nuts about the site redesign,” he said, clicking a pen over and over again. “She’s asked me to QA it a hundred times.”
“I thought it all looked fine,” Avery whispered as she closed the door. She may hate her job but she didn’t want to get fired for talking about hating it. She needed the money, especially for all the wedding expenses this year.
“It does! I feel like she thinks I’m missing something.
But she doesn’t even know how to add page numbers to a damn Word Document.
” Kevin pounded his fingers against his keyboard, not looking up.
“I’m so over this place. I applied to ten different jobs last week.
Really hope one of them gets back to me. ”
Avery frowned. “Kevin, you can’t leave. I can’t be the only person around here who can embed a video into a draft. I will lose my shit.”
“You can leave, too. Nobody’s stopping you.”
The sound of chairs shuffling around echoed from the conference room across the hall, where the writers were preparing for their weekly pitch meeting. Avery peered longingly at them through the transparent glass wall of their meeting room, wishing she could join. Kevin followed her gaze.
“Or you could move departments,” he added.
Avery glared at him. “I can’t.”
“Come on, sure you can! Just go pitch something. Patricia’s always complaining that the writers don’t come up with good ideas anymore.”
Avery opened her laptop to pull up Metropolitan ’s RSS feed, which she used to track the stories being published throughout the day so she could share them on their social media channels.
Watching the feed deflated her. It made her feel benched from the big game, like she was watching the editorial action happen from the sidelines without ever getting called in.
The worst part was, she wasn’t even a player. She was the waterboy.
“I don’t know, Kevin. I haven’t written anything since college.”
She brought up The Golden ’s website and searched for her name to see if her essays were still there.
She clicked on her favorite essay, a piece she’d written junior year about how watching trashy reality television was beneficial for your mind.
Avery was a sociology major and used to love finding the meaning and significance of seemingly insignificant facets of popular culture.
In her essay, she argued that reality television allowed your imagination to wander into the extremes of experiences and return safely without any consequences.
A communications professor she talked to called it “vacationing.” Her editors at The Golden had loved it.
They thought it was pegged perfectly to the season finale of The Bachelor and ran it a week before, and it got the most reads and shares out of any Golden essays published that year. Avery had been so proud of it.
Rereading it now, though, she thought it was juvenile and pointless. And her writing had surely gotten worse now that she hadn’t practiced in so long. She hadn’t written a single word since before her breakup. Since before that night.
Kevin leaned over the table to look at Avery’s screen. She slammed her laptop closed.
“What?” he asked with a dramatic gasp.
“You can’t read it.”
“Girl, I have Google. I’ll find it myself.
” A second later, Kevin smiled. “Found it!” He squinted at his screen to read the article while Avery wished she could jump out the window and fall to her death.
She’d forgotten what it was like for people to read her writing, the bravery and confidence it took to share your thoughts and feelings so openly with the world.
The version of herself who could do that was such a stranger to her now.
“Avery, this is so smart and well-articulated,” Kevin said. He sounded shocked. And Avery would be, too, if she had to reconcile the girl she was now with the girl who’d written that article. “You have to write something for us.”
Avery mumbled a vague response. Something resembling “no.”
“Why not?”
“ The Golden was a silly student paper,” Avery said. “ Metropolitan is a legit magazine. Nobody cares what I have to say.”
Kevin sighed impatiently. “The media craves voices like yours and mine. Everyone’s gotten sick of cis-het white men projectile vomiting their opinions all over the place without any of us getting a say. You should capitalize on this moment.”
Kevin’s computer dinged with a message from Patricia. He stood up from his seat and left the room, leaving Avery alone with her essay up on her laptop screen, a relic from before Noah stole all her life force. She closed the browser. She was much better off continuing to be quiet.
Avery didn’t hear Noah’s name again for the next couple of weeks and went back to pretending that he didn’t exist. Her irritability toward her job, too, had calmed down.
As the weeks passed by, she reverted to her normal feelings of apathy, which she tempered after work with her usual glass of wine (or three), reality television marathon, and 2 AM doomscrolling.
She didn’t once ask Morgan about who else would be in the wedding party, preferring to live in ignorance for a bit longer despite knowing it was only a matter of time before she would be faced with her old friends-turned-enemies.
By the time the following Saturday afternoon rolled around, when she met Morgan in SoHo to go shopping, she felt like herself again, or at least the version of herself she’d gotten used to since graduation.
“I asked for a sample of this brightening eye cream from Sephora,” Morgan said. She took a sip of her caramel macchiato. “I hope it works. My dark circles are extra dark lately. It’s not fair that guys get to walk around with circles and nobody says anything, but if I do, I look tired. ”
Avery paused in front of a window to admire a pair of sneakers, then kept walking to match Morgan’s long-legged strides along the sidewalk. Avery broke a sweat to keep up with Morgan sometimes. At five-seven, she wasn’t short, but next to Morgan she felt like a troll.
“I don’t think it’ll work,” Avery said. “ Metropolitan did a whole story on those eye creams last week. They just moisturize.”
“Really? Damn, this one’s supposed to be good. I won’t buy the regular size one then.”
Morgan scooted out of the way of an interracial couple holding hands and a family of tourists fighting in another language.
She and Avery were walking away from the overpriced boutiques and heading to Broadway, where the options mirrored more of what you’d find in a suburban mall.
Last week, Avery found a gorgeous gray wool sweater around here for only sixty bucks.
Which, in hindsight, maybe wasn’t that cheap.
Avery sighed. She needed to be more thoughtful with her money instead of following every impulse she had, as though her net worth were bottomless.
She’d never think to sample something before committing to a purchase like Morgan did.
She wasn’t one of those college grads whose parents helped with rent or a gym membership or even a roll of toilet paper; her dad told her she was moving back home to New Jersey before that ever happened.
With the wedding and all its related maid-of-honor expenses, some budgeting would be necessary.
She’d have to pay for not just gifts, but her bridesmaid dress and shoes, her part of the bachelorette party and bridal shower, travel expenses … the list went on and on.
Avery walked over a street vent at the exact moment a gust of wind from a subway rushing by underground made her skirt fly up.
She tried to cover herself, but it was too late: She’d flashed a group of construction workers leaning against the side of a building, and now they were heckling her.
She made a sharp right into whatever the next store was—they hadn’t quite cleared the side streets yet, so it was another expensive boutique—and furiously combed through a rack of clothes, with Morgan beside her.
“Creeps,” Morgan muttered.