Page 46 of Use Me Up

“Hey,” says Nicole Bruin, the agent I intern for. “Earth to Hannah. Where’d you go?”

I blink at her, shaking myself, embarrassed. I was thinking about Ellis again, obviously.

It’s Monday morning, and I’m at work. I don’t come in to the office every single day, because a lot of my interning is just as easily done at home on my couch. A lot of my duties are to read all the submissions that Nicole gets, note any that hold my interest to pass on to her, and to send out form rejections to any that don’t.

I was trained heavily by Nicole until I understood her preferences. We’d go through the same group of emails, and I would reject or give to her, and until I got it exactly the same way she would do it, I wasn’t allowed to sort the submissions for her. But I know what she likes now. I am an expert in Nicole Bruin.

I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, because I took this internship so that I could learn how to be an agent on my own, and I need to develop my own preferences and my own instincts for what sells and what doesn’t. But all of that has been obliterated, because I have trained myself to think exactly like Nicole.

I wonder if I am just this sort of person, the kind of person who lives to please other people, and who never makes any space for whatever it is that I want.

But here’s the real truth: it feels better to make other people happy than it does to make myself happy.

And in all the noise about people-pleasing and toxicity and everything else, I sometimes think people lose track of that. We didn’t evolve from creatures who lived all alone in the woods, after all. We used to live in tribes. Maybe we’re supposed to please each other. Maybe that’s the way to be happy.

Anyway, like I said, I am not even sure, anymore, if I ever wanted to be a literary agent at all. I know that I spent all of my undergrad talking about it, telling everyone that I was going to have a job on the other side of graduation with my English degree, that I was going to carve out my own path.

What the fuck was I thinking?

What path?

When have I ever done anything daring or original or just for myself?

“Sorry, Nicole,” I say, giving her my undivided attention.

She laughs. “It’s fine. Whatever you were thinking about, you seemed to be enjoying it. Did you have a good weekend?”

Good? Not the word I would use, exactly. “It was eventful,” I say.

She laughs. She did not see my Instagram, because I have a professional Instagram that I use for my literary agent self, assuming I ever figure out how to be a literary agent.

Nicole starts talking about all the things we’re preparing for, including her next trip to New York. She’s one of the few agents who isn’t based in NYC, instead living here, in one of the many suburbs of DC instead. She travels to New York frequently, however, to lunch with editors and other sorts of things that literary agents do. I always want to come along for these visits, because this is how I’ll make connections in the industry.

She tells me that we need to see where we are on the checklist of all the things we’re meant to have accomplished by then, and I pull up the checklist, and we start going over each item on it together.

The rest of the morning is busy, working on this or that, trying to work through the checklist.

When I leave the office for lunch, I’m met by my mother’s assistant Jordan and my brother Andrew, who are waiting on the bottom floor of my office building. There are a bunch of different offices in this building. Nicole rents space here.

It’s so typical that my mother sent her assistant.

Jordan is non-binary. They are tall and elegant and smoothly androgynous. They are my mother’s right hand, and they take care of all sorts of things for her. They know everything about my mother’s personal business, and I have gotten used to Jordan being my mother’s surrogate since I was about eighteen, which was when Jordan was hired.

“We’re taking you to lunch,” Jordan informs me, gesturing with their hand as if this is a regal sort of order that we all have to obey.

I groan. “Andrew, I thought we did this, already.”

“That was before brunch,” says Andrew.

“I heard about brunch,” says Jordan, hand to their chest, sighing dramatically. Jordan doesn’t mean to be dramatic. They are just dramatic on accident. “Anyway, where do you want to eat, Hannah? We have about fifteen restaurants within walking distance, and I think you should pick.”

I was going to go and get a salad from the deli across the street, because I thought I’d be bringing my lunch back upstairs to the office, and I like it if the people I work with think I’m the kind of person who voluntarily eats salads.

I know, I’m a very pathetic person who cares too much about what people think of me.

And I do like salads.

Mostly.