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“Not a total disaster,” Sophie said. “I met some… nice people.”
Amanda tilted her head and fake glasses to the side. “You paused before you said nice, why’s that?”
She was so perceptive. That’s why they paid her the big bucks. Or sometimes $25 an hour.
“Well. I mean, one of them is definitely traditionally nice. I don’t know about the others. I actually met both the CFO and the COO today. I didn’t really expect that. I made a fool of myself in front of both of them.”
“Tell me about that.”
Well, I didn’t want to go into the building…”
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew once I went in there, I was going to… it was going to be over.”
“What was going to be over?”
“I would be one of them, you know. I’d be working for Apex. I’d be like, some kind of… corporate stooge.”
“I thought you’d studied for many years to become a corporate stooge.”
“I did. And then I got there, and I was looking at the building, and I was like, wow, is this what I want? And then it didn’t matter, because it was time to go to work, so I went to work. Do you know what they had me doing today? Making a list of people to pay off so we can destroy the habitats of endangered animals. It took me about three hours to become evil so I could impress them. If Alex Roth wanted me to stab a panda I probably would.”
“Perhaps you can effect change from within.”
Sophie gave Amanda full credit for not bursting out laughing when she said those words.
“That’s what people who are about to be completely swallowed up by the system tell themselves while they slide into moral oblivion.”
“Or it is something that people who want the world to be better tell themselves so they can make the changes they want to make?”
“You don't know what it’s like there. It’s… you’re just one of thousands of people. You have to do what you’re told, or they’ll replace you with one of thousands of other people.”
“It was your first day, Sophie. Did you really expect to save the world from corporate tyranny on day one?”
“I guess not.”
“You put a lot of expectations on yourself, and sometimes it makes you freeze. But it could give you the momentum you need to really change things one day.”
“Yeah. Or I could end up like Ellen.”
“And who is Ellen?”
“Ellen is the ghost of secretaries past. She haunts the fifth floor, giving me disapproving looks. I’ve never seen anyone like her in real life before. She's like a walking antiquity.”
“Sounds like you’re not viewing her as a person, more like a prop.”
“I didn’t get a chance to get to know her. The second I saw her she was laying into me about being late, and then she spent the rest of the day coming to me about infractions I didn’t even know I was committing. Do you know how thick the employee handbook is? I think she made up half of it herself just to give herself something to complain about the women she thinks are her underlings. I notice she didn’t say a word to any of the men. Sexist. I didn’t even think there was sexism anymore… Why are you smiling?”
“I’m smiling that you don't think sexism exists anymore.”
“I mean, you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean; you have to say all the words in therapy.”
“I hate therapy.”
Amanda smiled. “You’re not supposed to enjoy it. You're supposed to learn through it. Improve yourself through introspection. Say the things you don’t want to hear yourself saying, so you understand how…”
“How terrible I am?”
“We can't improve if we don't understand where we’re lacking.”
“Uh huh. Well. I think we’re out of time.” Sophie looked at the clock on the wall. It never changed. It was set perpetually at five minutes to midnight. There was probably some meaning to that, but she didn't know what it was, and she didn’t need Amanda’s smug explanation of whatever it was. The entire room was filled with symbolic imagery which probably meant sweet fuck all.
“We have twenty minutes left,” Amanda corrected.
“I feel like we should be out of time. This feels like the longest fifty-minute hour in the history of fifty-minute hours.”
“Well, you're wasting a lot of it complaining about it. So that’s nice.”
“I thought therapists weren't supposed to be snarky.”
“There are no real guidelines around that.”
“I think there probably are.”
"Feel free to bring me a manual with the rules in it,” Amanda smiled.
Suddenly, Sophie felt like Ellen. She did not like feeling like Ellen. She also felt like she understood Ellen a little better than she had about sixty seconds earlier. It was nice when people did their jobs the way you expected them to. It was not nice when they went off the rails and just did whatever they wanted.
