Chapter 3
3
“So, who’s polishing up their résumé?” Bryan asks as he refills his coffee from the gleaming spigot of a stainless steel Java-Lo 3000.
The futuristic machine was a gift from the company when we first landed the account. The slick logo—the engraved letters JL with three threads of stylized steam rising from them—is practically a foot tall on this massive thing. The Java-Lo 3000 is apparently a ten-grand coffeemaker. Turns out, there’s a whole world of companies and mansion owners out there that can drop ten thousand dollars on a coffeemaker. Which is kind of stomach turning, but is also the reason I’m able to pay my bills.
I dig around in the office fridge and find a fruit tray someone shoved in there, leftovers from a client pitch yesterday afternoon. I put some pineapple and melons on a paper plate, but they look too sad to eat.
“Guess we all should be,” I say, trying to make light of it. “High-turnover industry anyway.”
Bryan raises an eyebrow. He’s taken a few personal days lately, and I wonder if he’s already been out there chasing another job. Maybe my comment hit a little too close to home if he’s keeping it close to the vest for now. He doesn’t say anything else, but it makes me feel mildly better that maybe he has one foot out the door already, much as I’d miss him as a coworker.
“I cannot lose this job,” Sasha says, looking grim.
Her perfectly lined eyes are closed, like she’s warding off some unseen evil. Her high cheekbones look sharper than usual. Everything about her is more angular than it used to be. Sasha’s always been pretty fit—she’s a marathon runner who doesn’t have a car and walks or bikes everywhere in good weather—but this seems like a new level of svelte. It’s hard to tell under all her winter layers, but she must have dropped at least ten pounds. When did she lose that weight?
I know we shouldn’t comment on bodies, so I decide not to ask her about it. Not right now, especially. And meanwhile, here I am, eating again. Ugh. I should really go to the gym. No one’s seen my cheekbones in years, and the word angular has never once been used to describe me. Zaftig is a more apt descriptor.
I look at my plate of sad fruit, which is somehow empty. I set it down and wrap my arms around myself self-consciously. I suck in my gut a little, but almost immediately give up.
“I get it,” Bryan says sympathetically. “Losing your job would totally suck. It’s not like you have a real cushion. Like, say, being married to a doctor, which I highly recommend—”
“Shut up, Bryan,” I say, elbowing him and giving Sasha a reassuring nod. “Hey. Sash. You’re not gonna lose your job.”
“You don’t know that, Eve,” Sasha says, shaking her head. There are dark circles under her eyes, another detail I somehow hadn’t noticed earlier. She must not be sleeping well. Maybe I will ask her about it. The sleep stuff, anyway. When we’re not at the office.
Although lately, I pretty much only see her at the office. She was dating this guy Emmet for a while, and when they got together we saw less and less of her. After close to a year, she and Emmet split sometime this summer, thank God. She’s been more present the last couple of months, but still hasn’t fully emerged from her ghosting phase.
“Java-Lo’s the biggest thing on my docket, by far. It’s like eighty percent of my portfolio,” Sasha says, voice low.
I can tell she’s genuinely upset, but I’m not sure why she, of all people, is so nervous. Sasha’s at the top of her game, and everyone knows it. She’s constantly headhunted by other agencies. She’s smart about money. Sure, she has a penchant for expensive clothing, and she bought a gorgeous, overpriced condo in a doorman-guarded upscale Lakeview building last year. She has some pretty steep expenses. And she enjoys fancy dinners and going out on the town—or at least she used to, up until she went into hermit mode with her now-ex-boyfriend. I don’t know if he was a full-on asshole or just a real homebody, but when they were together, social Sasha disappeared from the scene.
Bryan and I were pretty sure her boyfriend must have basically moved in with her and cajoled her into Netflix-and-chilling nightly. We joked about it, but the fact was that it really stung. Especially since she wasn’t there for me when my dad died. She came to the funeral, but that was it. No shiva visit. No showing up with ice cream to just let me cry. Those first few months, I was reeling, and she wasn’t there to catch me.
But she broke up with Emmet months ago. And I recall reading a highly scientific article in Seventeen magazine a thousand years ago that said it should only take you half the time you were in a relationship to get over it. Together less than a year? You should be over it in under six months. She’s got to be over the breakup by now, and she’ll survive whatever cuts Mercer & Mercer may make. Personally and professionally, Sasha is my friend who will always be fine.
Whether he realizes it or not, thanks to Carlos, Bryan is also now more financially and emotionally stable than I am. I wonder if any of my friends are aware of how much I’m struggling these days. Probably not, since I’ve deliberately failed to mention it.
“It’s not the only thing on your docket,” I point out. “And we haven’t lost them yet. And the whole leadership team loves you.”
“Yeah,” Bryan agrees. “If any of us are getting cut, it’s probably you, Eve.”
“Bryan!” Sasha snaps. “Don’t say that.”
“What? It’s true. Last in, first out,” Bryan says, matter-of-fact.
“I’ve been here three years,” I say. My inferiority complex about being a non-standout employee suddenly flares like a dangerous fire in my chest. “I’m not the ‘last in.’ Nancy just started here, like, three months ago! And there are interns, and that new receptionist whose name we haven’t even learned yet, and...and I’m not even on the Java-Lo account.”
“Yeah, but everyone working on Java-Lo’s been here forever ,” Bryan says. “They’ll probably want to move our copywriters over to other clients, and cut someone else from some other team to make room for them. And Big Boss Denise still thinks your name is Neve.”
“Shit,” I say, a lifetime of culturally ingrained paranoia making me think, Oh my God, Bryan’s right . Our agency moves people from account to account all the time. Maybe I really am expendable in this scenario, even if I’m not on the struggling Java-Lo account.
I look desperately around the kitchen. Despite having already inhaled all of the fruit, I very much want a doughnut.
“You’re going to be fine,” Sasha says, although she doesn’t sound super convincing. “We’re all going to be fine, we just...just need to keep our heads down. Generate some good work this week. And keep showing up on time.”
She looks at Bryan.
“What?” Bryan says. “I get to work on time! The office opens at ten, right?”
Sasha and I snort in stereo, and I’m grateful to Bryan for managing to lighten the mood.
“Okay,” Sasha says, refilling her mug from the Java-Lo machine and tilting her head toward the door. “We should get back to our desks and just...get through the day.”
“Thanks for the pep talk, coach,” Bryan says, saluting.
The rest of the workday is blurry. A series of email responses, a kickoff meeting for a new but small-budget client, drafting some copy for another small client’s local radio spots, all with the buzzing backdrop of coworkers whispering about who might get cut.
Mercer & Mercer occupies the seventeenth and eighteenth floors of the August Building, and the layout on both of our floors is exactly the same. Bryan and I are both on the eighteenth floor, with all the other copywriters and designers. His seat is six down from mine. Sasha is on the seventeenth floor, with the account executives, media buyers, and administrative team.
Our office is the open-concept style popular with so many agencies, even though employees universally hate it because you have zero privacy. The executives have private offices tucked into the corners, near the breakroom and the conference rooms where client meetings are held. The peons, though, are seated in ergonomic chairs at long, wide, gleaming-chrome tables in the center of each floor’s massive main room. We have partitions around our workspaces, but they’re clear. So it cuts down on sound, just a little, but you’re totally visible to your colleagues on either side of you at all times—and also to the person directly across the table from you.
The outer walls of the building are floor-to-ceiling windows, which adds to the fishbowl feeling of the place. The open floor plan and copious panes of glass make for pretty minimal interior design options—ironic, for a creative agency. On our limited wall space, the decor consists of framed prints from our flashiest ad campaigns and the gleaming awards we’ve won for said campaigns, which feels self-congratulatory and totally cringe.
“Invitation to the holiday party!”
I look up from my desk, confused. Nancy is beaming down at me. She’s a new hire, a media buyer who came from Ogilvy and has a ton of good contacts but is annoying as hell. She’s what my bubbe would have called a kibitzer zhlobeleh —a gauche little gossip.
Nancy is a box blonde, a few years older than I am, which puts her squarely in her forties. But she dresses like she’s in her twenties, and aggressively so. Today she’s in thigh-high black leather boots and a red-and-green pleated minidress. Her hair is pulled into two messy ponytails on each side of her head, and she’s wearing a red Santa hat.
Last in, first out , I remember Bryan saying.
Here’s hoping.
“We’re doing a river cruise!” Nancy crows.
“A river cruise...in December?” I ask, raising an eyebrow dubiously and wondering how long she’s lived in the Midwest. “This is Chicago. That sounds terrible.”
“Oh, it’ll be fun ,” Nancy says, beaming. Her big white teeth are distractingly bright. Can’t be a home whitening treatment. She must pay a dentist for that. “And we’re all going to wear Santa hats to keep us warm. It’s Friday night. The invitation is tucked into the brim. Ho ho ho, here you go!”
Before I can stop her, she jams a Santa hat on my head, then prances off to torture Talamieka, the designer to my immediate right. Talamieka is a talented artist who doesn’t suffer fools, and I almost want to hear whatever cutting response she might shoot at Nancy. But I’m also suddenly really tired. I glance at the time on my computer. It’s after five.
I’m going home.
I walk past Bryan’s desk, but he’s already gone. No surprise there—if forced to come in early, Bryan would absolutely feel justified in leaving early. The dude is devoutly opposed to putting in a full workday. He was a quiet quitter before it was cool. Which makes me nervous. I know he’ll ultimately be fine if he’s let go, but I’d miss the hell out of him. He’s a pain in the ass, but he’s also the only person who can get me to smile when I’m in a foul mood. And he’s good at his job, which means everyone wants to work with him. So hopefully he’ll be okay. But I can’t help wishing that for once, Bryan would take something as seriously as the rest of us do.
While it’s not a shock that Bryan exited early, I’m surprised that when I swing by Sasha’s desk downstairs, she’s already gone, too. She never leaves before I do. Most days I’m begging her to leave while she insists she just has to send “one more email.” I’m glad she’s not tied to her desk today, for once, although I wish she would’ve buzzed up to my desk to see if I wanted to sneak out with her. I think, again, about her hollow cheekbones, and hope my best friend is doing okay. I think about texting her, seeing if she wants to grab a drink.
But it’s cold outside, and I didn’t sleep well last night. My own social muscles are still pretty atrophied from my past year of grief and lethargy. Sasha probably has other plans, anyway.
I’ll do it tomorrow , I think, and head for the train.