Jane Weiss 12:46 PM:
Your story was great. It gave me the courage to call my boss.
Jane Weiss 12:47 PM:
They thought it was great too. I got my special correspondent job back!
Jane Weiss 12:48 PM:
Thank you.
I let out a silent scream and punched the air with both fists. It worked! Jane got her job back! Punching the air wasn’t sufficient to let out this elated energy: I did a few body rolls and shimmies and—
“Rachel?” Kenneth poked his nose around the corner of my cubicle.
I froze midtwerk. Kenneth was bright pink and appeared to be struggling between the desire to ask what was going on and the desire to slip away like nothing had happened. The latter won: he slowly reversed so that his face disappeared a centimeter at a time.
“Kenneth, wait.” I dug around inside my desk drawer until I found what I was looking for. And then I peeled off a gold star from the sticker sheet and pressed it gently onto Kenneth’s forehead. “You deserve this. Thanks for telling me to write that #MeToo lesson.”
He turned even redder, muttered something incoherent, and went back to his cubicle.
My phone buzzed with a fourth message from Jane: “BTW, offering to go to therapy was the clincher. They loved that idea.”
I burst out laughing. When I’d calmed down, I sat back in my swivel chair and spun around, gazing up at the fluorescent lights. Who would’ve thought I would round out the year having landed not only myself in employer-mandated therapy, but my sister too?
My November therapy session began routinely enough. My therapist asked me how I was doing with that tiny, concerned crease between her brows. (If that crease could talk, it would scream I AM A KIND AND EMPATHETIC LISTENER.)
I told her that I’d made up with Sumira and caught her up on the Jane drama. And after we’d talked about those things, something else occurred to me, and I acquired my own eyebrow crease as I thought about it. I didn’t want to bring it up, really, but therapy had this way of forcing thoughts out of my mouth.
“Is there something else on your mind?” she asked.
No, is what I wanted to say. Instead I blurted out, “I saw Christopher Butkus on Halloween. I saw his beautiful house and it’s not a modern monstrosity and he made lollipop ghosts and he liked the otter costume the best and I wanted him—I wanted him to see me.”
Long,longpause.
“But he didn’t see you?”
“No. It was dark. I was walking home. I wasn’t stalking him or anything.”
“Of course not.” She smiled gently, like she would never mistake me for someone crazy enough to be a stalker (which, given some of the things I’ve said in therapy, could not possibly be true. But I appreciated the kind sentiment nonetheless).
I straightened my shoulders with the dignity befitting a nonstalker and thought for a moment.
“It was weird. Seeing him. Almost like my subconscious had been working on the problem of Christopher Butkus for months and I hadn’t realized it.”
She waited, and I filled in her silence in my mind:How very fascinating, Rachel. And what did your subconscious tell you, Rachel? I’m dying to hear how it all turned out.
“Yes,” I answered myself, “my subconscious. When I saw him, I felt like I’d been working on all these calculations and the answer was that I didn’t hate him. I don’t hate him.”
The crease deepened: I could tell she was on the edge of her seat with this revelation.
“And that feeling—I can’t stop thinking about that feeling.”
“Which feeling?” she prompted.
“The feeling of wishing he had seen me and invited me in, and that we had sat together in front of his fire, talking and ribbing each other and sipping hot cider and—” I trailed off, because my imagination was spinning ahead, picturing us inching closer on his sofa, our hands brushing in the candy bowl, and Christopher telling me that his feelings hadn’t changed. I could picture the way the firelight would dance across his face. I felt faintly sick with the speed at which my mind was working, and at the whole idea of it.
“Help me. You’re supposed to help me, right? So explain why this is happening. I’m not interested in Christopher Butkus. Is this just months of loneliness making me go off the rails? Is it because I feel like he’s my last chance at finding someone? Is it because my mom likes him? Why am I fixating on him?”
