Chapter 3
three
BILLIE
Our office break room is all clean countertops and motivational wall art.
A canvas print above the coffee station reads Collaborate.
Elevate. Innovate. The refrigerator hums. The lighting is a shade of fluorescent that makes everyone look like they’ve recently received bad news, which, in my case, is true.
I’m sitting at the small table in the corner with a bowl of cereal.
It’s the good kind— the kind with the little marshmallows— and I bought it specifically for moments like this, moments when the universe decides to take a running start before kicking me directly in the chest. I leave it in the pantry of the breakroom, because being kicked in the chest happens a lot here.
The nametag is still on my chest.
THE ASSISTANT.
I try not to look at it. I focus on the marshmallows.
“Oh my God,” says a voice from the doorway, and then Melissa, my best friend who I call my “work wife” is there— all eight months of her, magnificent, relentless, and very pregnant.
She’s wearing a floral wrap dress that somehow accommodates the full architecture of her pregnancy. Her own nametag reads:
THE INNOVATOR.
The words on her nametag are in the same clean, black font as my own, but the meaning is so very different. She points at my chest. “Is that what I think it is?”
“It’s a nametag,” I say, pulling my bowl closer to me.
“It’s a judgement,” she counters, collapsing into the chair across from me. One of my favorite things about Melissa is that I never have to fight to get her on my side. She’s already there without me saying a word. She puts both hands on the table and leans forward. “Spill. Tell me everything.”
So I do. I tell her about Mr. Franklin’s office, and nerves of steel and sharks and you gave up too easily. I tell her about Dr. Rhonda and the trail mix and the twelve-minute personality assessment that concluded, after all of its scientific rigor, that I am best suited for assisting.
Melissa listens. She eats a granola bar she’s pulled from somewhere on her person. When I finish, she’s blunt:
“You need to quit,” she says.
“I’m not going to quit.”
“Then you need to march back into that office and tell Franklin that if he doesn’t give you a real title and a real salary, you will walk out of this building and take every single piece of institutional knowledge you have with you, because you know where everything is and how everything works and this place would fall apart in a week without you. ”
“It wouldn't fall apart,” I say, poking at my cereal.
“It would absolutely fall apart. Billie. You are the only person in this office who knows the password to the old filing system.”
That's true. I don’t tell her that. I eat a marshmallow.
“You owe this to yourself,” Melissa says, putting her granola bar down. Then, she pulls out the big guns and says: “Not just to yourself... You owe this to my unborn child.”
I look up, gasping. “How dare you bring my perfect future niece into this,” then add, “Besides, I don’t owe her anything. I haven’t even met her yet.”
Melissa points at me. “Exactly,” she says. “You haven’t even met her, and you’re already setting the shittiest example possible.”
I open my mouth, but for a moment, can’t find the words to defend myself. Then, I say, “She’s not going to remember this...”
“She will sense it,” Melissa says, placing one hand over her stomach in a gesture that is both maternal and prosecutorial. “Babies can sense things. I read it in a book.”
“What book?”
“I don’t remember. I read a lot of books.” She sweeps a hand toward her nametag. “I’m an innovator.”
And here is the thing about Melissa’s THE INNOVATOR tag— it doesn’t seem like satire.
It seems exactly right. Melissa has been the most creative problem-solver I’ve ever known since the day we met.
She’s the kind of person who figures out a better way to do something before she’s even been told what the original way is.
The tag fits her like it was made for her, which makes it worse, because mine fits me the same way.
“It’s different for you,” I say, and I know how it sounds even as I’m saying it. “You got ‘The Innovator.’ That’s a label that opens doors. Mine just confirms what I already am.”
“Billie—“
“I’m not saying it to be pathetic,” I say, holding up a hand in the air.
That’s one thing about me: you might think I’m being pathetic, but I’m actually just being factual.
I take a deep breath and add, “I’m saying it because it's true. When you walk into Franklin’s office, he takes you seriously.
I walk in, and he looks at me like I’m a misprint.
” I stir my cereal. “It’s hard to fight for yourself when you’ve been spending your whole career trying to convince everyone else that you deserve to be in the room. ”
Melissa looks at me for a long moment. Then she says, “I am super creative.”
“I know?—“
“Which is why,” she continues, leaning forward on her elbows, “I can think of a million ways for you to quit this job and find a better one. I have imagined at least four different versions of your better life just since I sat down. If I can see it— if I can imagine you with a life where you’re actually valued— why can’t you? ”
I don’t have an answer for that. The question sits there between us, a little inconvenient, like furniture arranged wrong in a room.
“The cereal’s good,” I say instead.
Melissa looks at the cereal. Then she looks at me. “Is this the only thing making you happy right now?”
“Yes,” I say. It’s true. I love this cereal. Always have. Always will.
She reaches across the table and takes the bowl.
“Melissa—”
She takes a huge bite of the cereal, letting some milk dribble across her chin. “I was just really hungry,” she says, mouth full. “Pregnancy cravings. You get it.”
“Oh,” I say, thoroughly disgusted and trying not to show it. “That’s fine then. You can have it. I wasn’t really that hungry anyway.”
Melissa sighs, then stands up— which takes a moment and involves a sound effect— and walks to the trash can. I watch, in real time, as she holds my bowl over the bin.
“Melissa, those are the marshmallow ones, don’t waste?—”
She drops it. Bowl and all.
I stare at the trash can. Then I stare at her. She walks back to the table and sits down like she has just made a very important point and would like me to acknowledge it. When I don’t, she explains:
“You just let me have the cereal! And it was the only thing making you happy today!”
“But you’re pregnant—” I start to say, but she waves a hand in the air.
“Doesn’t matter,” Melissa sighs. “I know you were trying to be kind, but Billie— you just let me steal the only thing bringing you joy in a tough moment. You assumed my problems meant more than yours. You saw me walk to the trash. You had time to get up, to grab it back, to say no, that’s mine and I want it. But you didn’t.”
I look at the trash can. “I was hoping you’d stop,” I say, in a very small voice.
“You were hoping someone else would make a better decision on your behalf,” she says. “Billie. That’s what you do. In this office.”
The break room hums around us. I look at the trash can one more time. There's something quietly awful about the cereal being in there. It's not just cereal, and I know it, and I think that’s what makes it land.
“I’m eight months pregnant,” Melissa says, after a moment.
“My back has been hurting since Tuesday. I can’t sleep on my stomach, I can’t sleep on my back, I can’t eat anything acidic, and last week someone on the train offered me their seat and I cried in front of a full train car because I didn’t know how to accept a simple kindness.
” She pauses. “And even in this state, even today, when Franklin sent around that memo about the new scheduling system that makes everyone’s lives harder, I walked into his office and told him it was a bad idea and that I wouldn’t be implementing it. ”
I look at my hands. The nametag presses lightly against my chest.
“You’re so afraid of losing things that you don’t take a chance,” Melissa says. “You do it with Mr. Franklin. You do it with—” she stops, and then continues, gentler— “with a lot of things.”
I know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t have to say it. My boyfriend, Tyler, is on Melissa’s list of “people that need to be destroyed,” and she doesn’t try to hide it.
“I know Tyler’s the reason you won’t quit the job…”
“He can’t afford our apartment all alone!” I counter. The truth is, I pay half our bills, and I’m afraid that might be the only thing keeping our relationship together.
“Yes, he can,” Melissa rolls her eyes. “You told me a few months ago he could cover everything, but he’s worried he won’t be able to max out his 401K.
He makes more money than you and insisted on that expensive lease.
Tell me, Billie, when was the last time you were able to put money away for the future? ”
I dodge the question, because the answer is— never.
“We split equally,” I say defensively.
“And the dishes?” Melissa counters. “Is he still leaving you those?”
“… I don’t like the sink full.”
Melissa walks to the fridge and roots through the top shelf, pulling out a can of coca-cola and cracking it open like it’s the cold beer she really wishes she could have right now.
She takes a few gulps then wipes her mouth.
“I really wish you would take my suggestion and get into therapy. It’s really helped me and Steve become the best versions of ourselves. ”
“Thanks,” I say, pointing at my nametag. “But I’ve had enough of therapy for awhile.”
Melissa doesn’t try to rebut my point. Instead, she pauses for a moment, then adds helpfully, “Have you tried vision boarding? I have a new friend who saw it on Oprah’s YouTube channel and she says it’s a game-changer.”
“You have a new friend?” I ask, surprised. “Since when?!” Melissa and I tell each other everything. I’m alarmed at this new development.
Melissa chugs some more of her coke. “It’s super new.
I just met her a couple weeks ago at a yoga class, and she insisted we grab a coffee.
Her name is Alana, but she was joking with me that everyone at her work calls her La Diabla, the devil, because she’s such a go-getter.
” Melissa talks with the bright, cheery attitude of a kid who’s found a new toy to play with.
Great, I think to myself, Just what I need right now.
Competition for my best friend. Melissa looks at me like she’s reading my mind.
She sits down and puts an arm around me.
“You’ll like her, Billie. She’s coming to the baby shower,” she adds, chewing on the inside of her cheek as if she’s just remembered something.
“She kind of invited herself, to be honest and I didn’t want to be rude…
anyway, you should get to know her. Ask her about the vision boards.
It’s supposed to help you manifest things,” she says, completely straight-faced.
“You cut out pictures of what you want your life to look like, and you?—”
“I get it, I get it,” I agree. “That sounds really fun. Thanks, Mel.”
I stand and head back to my desk, ripping THE ASSISTANT nametag off my shirt and dropping it in the trash as I go.
“Think about the vision board!” Melissa calls after me.
I don’t dignify that with a response. But I do think, on my way down the hall, that if vision boards actually worked, I would have glued my promotion to a piece of cardboard six years ago and called it a day.