Chapter 2
Chapter
It really does feel like I’m back in high school.
I did track in twelfth grade, and now for the first time in years, I’m running again in the mornings, up and down these sleepy suburban streets.
Getting some fresh air first thing helps clear my head, even though I have yet to master the art of getting out the door on time.
As I’m driving off in Mom’s old Honda Civic, her voice rings in my head saying, Don’t let the mail pile up! So I toss the week’s worth of accumulated letters into my passenger seat before pulling out. At a stoplight, I flip through the pile—junk, junk, bill. An invitation to my high school reunion.
It makes me shudder. This is such a company town, a bunch of people I went to high school with also work at TKCORP. I can even see some of them as I pull into the parking lot. Steve from Pre-Calc has become Steve the Project Manager. Grace from Physics is Grace from Sales.
I catch a glimpse of the old swimming pool across the street and get a weird sense of déjà vu for something that never happened.
The city owns it now, but TKCORP originally built it as part of the corporate campus.
Back then, they had all these offerings to take care of their workers: health clinics, a movie theater, a bowling alley, all since demolished or sold off.
A remnant of the age of the big benevolent lifetime employer that ended before I was born.
I’m antsy in the elevator, and when the doors open on the eighth floor, it’s like I sense it before I see him.
There’s Greg, leaning against a cubicle, talking to my co-workers. My high school baggage, come back to haunt me.
Why is he up here? He’s not supposed to be up here! He should be on the sixth floor, in Accounting!
Greg’s angled away from me, deep in conversation with Sarah Ng.
She’s a few years younger than me but she seems to have her life way more together, with her poised answers in meetings and her perfect outfits that make her look like an actress in a K-drama about a start-up.
Meanwhile, every item of work clothing I own was chosen in a panic and fits weird in at least one spot.
Greg smiles at something she says, playful and a little weary, like he’s been through a lot but he has a sense of humor about it.
Morgan Schaeffer walks over to join them, which probably means she sniffs gossip. She’s the other senior copywriter on the team besides Al, and she lives for other people’s drama. She’s an overworked mom in her late forties, but she has the energy of an imp emoji come to life.
Greg leans in and says something to both of them in a low voice. Whatever it is gets a melodious laugh from Sarah, and my stomach dips.
Al wanders over to the group, shaking his head. “Can you believe these targets?” He points to an email from Erica on his phone. “This is as much as three people used to do.”
“Oh well, anyone can do it with a full staff.” Morgan chuckles. “Where’s the challenge in that?”
“Morning, Ruby!” Al says.
Greg turns my way then, and he might be even better-looking than I remember.
Smooth brown skin that’s a bit darker than mine—he moisturizes, clearly.
Cheekbones that are more prominent now that he’s lost the baby fat in his face.
Full lips that give me inconvenient flashbacks to things that are ancient history and not worth thinking about, okay!
We haven’t been in the same room together since Mom’s memorial service, and he kept a respectful distance then.
Our relationship had been in the “infrequent texts and tense run-ins when I’m home for holidays” stage for five years, at least. And even though he tried to reach out after Mom died, I ignored his messages, let his calls go to voicemail.
Greg takes a couple steps closer. “Hey, it’s—it’s good to see you, Ruby,” he says, voice low and earnest like we’re still at a funeral. The top two buttons of his blue oxford are undone, and a hint of the thin gold chain he inherited from his dad peeks out underneath.
Something in my brain short-circuits, and I stare at him stone-faced and walk past without saying anything, slumping down in my chair so my cubicle walls hide me.
“That was weird,” Sarah says. Sound unfortunately travels in an open-plan office.
“Ooh, tense!” Morgan says. “Seems like there’s a story there.”
He better not say a fucking word, I think, waking up my laptop screen and gritting my teeth.
“No,” he says, voice flat. “No story.” And somehow that stings more than if he’d told the truth.
As far back as I remember, Greg’s mom was my mom’s best friend. I call her “Tita Wendy” even though we’re not at all related, the way everyone we knew who was Filipino and roughly Mom’s age could be a Tita or Tito.
They met back when Tita Wendy was still working as a nurse, and Mom came in with a broken wrist and the cheapest TKCORP health insurance plan.
They had the same taste in gossip, and they felt similarly embattled, single moms against the world (Greg’s dad passed away when he was six; my dad left when I was three).
Tita Wendy made fun of Mom for being a snob, and I guess she appreciated that—finally, someone recognized how hard she was working at snobbery!
And so Greg and I grew up together, also best friends. Or we were for a while, at least.
“Was that the girl who—?” Sarah asks.
The girl whose mom died at work. Of course everyone knows.
There was an email. A GoFundMe for funeral expenses. A company-wide meeting about work-life balance.
Everyone whispered, She worked so hard.
Mom died at her desk, pulling a late night on a big project. Shows you go the extra mile, she said. Builds goodwill. It will pay off. She always said yes to everything, volunteered for every task no one else wanted to do, every after-hours or weekend commitment.
The cleaning woman found her the next morning, slumped over her keyboard. Heart attack, apparently.
Mom died at work, and I was three thousand miles away from her.
I peek over my cubicle, and Greg’s eyes meet mine. My memory shuffles through the dozens of times we’ve locked eyes across a room over the years—in class, at the mall, at the table when he and his mom came over for dinner—and it was like he knew exactly what I was thinking.
Our psychic link, we’d joke. That’s how close we were. (It made the joke better that his mom works as a psychic. Tita Wendy hurt her feet and left nursing when we were in fourth grade—her pivot to the spirit world, as she likes to call it.)
But I learned a long time ago that was bullshit, something I fooled myself into believing. I never knew what he was thinking at all.
He looks away first, stepping back from Sarah’s cubicle, one hand raised. “See you guys.”
I slide down in my chair again. I can just hear what Mom would say, if she were here: Why are you always brooding? Why can’t you be warm and gracious like your cousins? One of them is married to a dental hygienist. Maybe if you worked on your charm, that could be you one day!
Okay, fine! I’ll make an effort, for once!
Everyone’s gone back to their own desks, so I search for Greg in Slack.
ruby.ocampo:
Hey, sorry I was awkward
It is good to see you
It’s just been a while
My stomach lurches as I stare at the messages I sent, but he writes back pretty much instantly.
.leon:
yeah, it has
mom said you needed some space?
i wanted to visit earlier, obviously
Tita Wendy has been coming to check on me a couple times a week since I moved back.
The first time, I was a wreck—subsisting on instant noodles, barely leaving the house, trying to get my head around Mom’s elaborate record-keeping system, which centered on stacks of envelopes she’d grouped by theme inside the rolltop desk in the living room.
Tita Wendy took one glance at me when I opened the front door and said, “Roobs, you look like hell.”
And I blurted out: “I can’t see Greg! I’m not ready!” So she made sure he stayed home whenever she came by. When I run in the mornings, I take a longer route on purpose so I won’t go past his house. Somehow I deluded myself into believing I could avoid him indefinitely at work too.
.leon:
how have you been?
Oh sure, hit me with the hard questions.
I need to get back to my actual job, so I leave Greg’s message without a reply.