Losing It. Emma Rathbone

I said, as if we were gossiping.

      Her smile hardened.

      “And I noticed the posts have been lagging,” she said. “You’ve only put up two things this week.”

      “That’s right.” I cleared my throat. “It’s been sort of a slow week in education news, so I thought I’d kind of see what happened and catch up towards the end.”

      “I guess I’m just wondering if there’s anything you need to work at a slightly faster clip.”

      “Sure, yeah,” I said, nodding quickly. “No, I’m fine. Just a little behind.”

      She leaned forward and rested her head on her palm and squinted at me. She smiled a searching smile.

      I smiled, too, and raised my eyebrows, and recrossed my legs.

      She stayed like that and held the silence and I was right about to point to a small decorative watering can on her desk when she finally said, “One more thing.”

      “Sure!”

      “How’s the Yacoma spreadsheet coming along?”

      “It’s getting there,” I said.

      “You must be, what, halfway through?” she said. “Three-quarters?”

      “Yes,” I said.

      The Yacoma spreadsheet was a mountainous data-entry project where I had to enter payment information for every one of our hundreds of authors, going back six years. I’d barely started it.

      “Great,” she said. “Because Chris is going to be needing that pretty soon for the audit.”

      “Right, of course,” I said.

      “Glad you’re on it,” she said.

      “Yup,” I said. “I am.”

      “Good.”

      Back at my desk I sat down and looked around. Everything had a matte gleam—my chair, my computer, the door, the desk, the building itself. Someone’s ringtone went off down the hall.

      Senior year, there was Kimmy Fitzgerald. People liked Kimmy because she was nice to everyone. She always wore a winter coat that she allowed her grandmother to sew little bits of fabric onto, so that it made a kind of hideous patchwork, and she somehow got away with this due to a grave, dreamy manner that repelled criticism because you could tell on some innate level that she wouldn’t care what anyone said.

      One night a group of us girls were at an all-night Greek diner that people from our high school often went to. We were talking and picking at waffles and drinking coffee. At the booth next to us was a group of boys from another school being loud and stealing looks at us. We made a show of ignoring them. One was wearing a boxy black button-down shirt, like a waiter would wear, and had greasy blond hair, and a broad face with wire glasses that were too small. On first glance he looked pinched and insolent, like a bully. But then when we were leaving the diner, out in the parking lot, this same guy came up to us. His friends were hanging back, embarrassed, as he got down on one knee and presented to Kimmy a flower he’d made out of the paper place mat. “A rose for a rose, m’lady?” he said.

      We all laughed in a mean, choppy way and rolled our eyes, although you could see—in that gesture, where he was putting everything to the front, you could see the way he was brave and openhearted, even though he wasn’t handsome or wearing the right clothes. Any one of us would have ignored him, but Kimmy didn’t. She saw the happiness that was leaping out at her, and she took it. She stepped forward and, to everyone’s surprise, said, “Why, thank you.”

      They started seeing each other, and sleeping together pretty soon after that. He came to the science fair at our high school and they both sat in front of her project, which was a display of little bits of charred carpet. They drew doodles and played with a calculator and laughed. He became more handsome, like you could see the best version of him because of her.

      I opened a drawer and took out a pencil and started scribbling on a Post-it note, trying to see how dark I could make it. Jessica Seever came in and poured herself into the chair across from me. She worked at the front desk and was my only friend at the office. “Crazy night,” she said, referring to the previous evening. We’d gone to a bar together and sat in uncomfortable silence until her new boyfriend showed up. Then they’d had a theatrical fight that they both seemed to enjoy.

      “Kidman does like you,” she said. Kidman was her boyfriend.

      “Okay,” I said nonchalantly, “sure.” I opened a folder on my computer, suddenly finding, with Jessica’s presence, the will to work on the spreadsheet.

      “I’m actually—” I pointed at the screen with my pencil.

      “Things just got a little out of hand,” she said, proud of herself.

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Look, it was me.” She put her hand on her chest. “I started it. I always do! It’s like Kidman says, I get some tequila in me, I go crazy.”

      “Right,” I said.

      “He’s like, ‘You’re crazy, girl!’”

      The first time we’d met, Kidman had barely acknowledged me, and then spent the whole night flirting with Jessica and looking around like he was really restless. Jessica and I were friends due to the fact that we were both unmarried and roughly the same age and had immediately established a mutual dislike of squirt-out hand sanitizer, which had not, in the end, reaped the conversational dividends I had hoped for. We spent a lot of time together poking at our drinks with our straws. She liked to say things and then gauge my reaction for approval or admiration.

      “You know what they say,” she said, tracing the arm of her chair. “Make-up sex is the best.”

      Her eyes roamed over my face. “Totally,” I said.

      “After you left we went out to his friend’s apartment complex—have you ever done it in a pool?”

      “Yes,” I said. “A bunch of times.”

      In about four hours I would go back home to my apartment, microwave a dinner that would burn the top of my mouth, then float facedown on the Internet for a while before going to bed even though I wasn’t tired.

      “We were, like, up against one of those, like, floating things, with the tube? It was shaped like a turtle?”

      “A pool cleaner?” I said.

      “I guess. But he was behind me, and I was holding on to a ledge. We were in that position? And it kept bumping into his back and he was like, ‘Get it away!’ and I was like, ‘Threesome!’ And he was like, ‘You are so bad.’”

      “Yikes,” I said to Jessica, trying to muster the same wry glint in my eyes.

      At the science fair, Kimmy and Jason had touched each other with total ownership, like it was just a given that they had access to each other all the time. At one point I saw him lift her hand and place it in his palm and study it like it was a precious jewel. I’d never had anything like that. I’d graduated from high school, gone to college, graduated, gotten my first job, and I’d still never had anything like that. Not even close.

      “So good,” said Jessica. “So hot.” She looked at me for a reaction.

      I swiveled around and stared at the empty town center. Sometimes, thinking about those two—Kimmy and Jason—I felt a sense of loss in my own life so drastic it was like the wind was knocked out of me.

      “You want to come out tonight?” said Jessica. “We’re going to this new place.”

      “No,” I said quietly. I turned back around. It’s funny how a decision you’ve been making in difficult increments can suddenly seem like the simplest thing in the world. “I’m leaving.”

      “What?” She looked at me, perhaps for the first time,