Chapter Three: In Limbo
Itold myself:he doesn’t want to date you, and he doesn’t want to be your friend.It’s over.
I’d only met him three times.It should have been easy to get over him.But it wasn’t.I’d been dumped by girlfriends lots of times.That was nothing like this.What made it worse was that superficially my life hadn’t changed: same job, same friends, same apartment, same Undeclared Mustard.But nothing felt solid or worthwhile anymore.
I’d turn up for work, do my job, eat lunch with Trish, and hang on every word she said about him.I asked her every day how he was doing.If he was okay, I was okay.Actually, I wasn’t, but it made things bearable.
He kept his word and didn’t tell her.Trish treated me like she always did: friendly, chatty, not suspicious when I asked about him.
Then Valentine’s Day came.I was feeling sorry for myself because I was still single—not that I wanted a girlfriend anymore.At work, someone had cut out red paper hearts and pasted them all over the workstations, and I was dreading lunch because I figured Trish would tell me all about her Valentine’s Day plans with him.
Except, Trish didn’t come in.Which was weird because Trish never missed work.
Around noon, the phone rang, and Roger answered.
“Uh—” he said.“Y—uh-huh.Okay.”He winced and hung up.
“What happened?”I said.
“Trish quit.”He started walking away.
“Wait—what happened?”
“I told you.Trish quit.”Roger left, presumably to break the news to Simon.
I knew Trish wasn’t happy working in the lab, but she didn’t hate it, and she’d been acting normally the day before.I expected her to come back and tell everyone she was joking.But she didn’t.Four days later, Simon posted an ad for her job.
My situation had been bad before, but now it was worse.Because the one person I could talk to about him was gone.
I didn’t have her phone number, but I found her email address in the university directory, and, after chickening out for a day, I sent her a message:
Hey.It’s Craig.You want to meet up some time?
She didn’t reply.
I needed to know what had happened.I needed to know he was okay.Because it was keeping me awake at night worrying.I got this sense he was in trouble, that something awful had happened to him, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.So, a couple of weeks after Trish quit, when I found a letter addressed to her in our lab’s mailbox, I took it and walked over to her place in the Annex.
