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Therestoftheday was largely uninteresting. After an awkward two- to three-minute pause at the counter spent searching through Slack for the intern thread and holding up a line of people trying to get coffee before work, Lainey managed to order and bring back the coffees. The sight of a matcha latte perked Monica up quite a bit, which offered Lainey some relief about what she thought was a rapidly deteriorating relationship. She gave Mr. Arnault his peppermint green tea, and he took it while on the phone, nodding a thank you to her, or at her, without looking up from his computer. She then went on to do the extremely important task that Monica had given her of going through the company’s email and unsubscribing from each individual junk email and then deleting them, a job that Monica had seemed positively gleeful about finally being able to pass onto someone unqualified enough. Lainey had expected to get through it rather quickly and move onto something with more meat, but she realized around hour two that she had managed to get through twenty-seven hundred, a fact she was proud of until she eyed the number of unopened emails, the bulk of which were, in fact, junk emails: sixty thousand. Her eyes blurred and ached from the harsh screen light mixed with the monotonous nature of the action. Monica passed her some blue light glasses and patted her shoulder.
“How about you do something else for a bit? Break it up?”
“Yes, please.”
“Why don’t you go get everyone lunch?” Lainey smiled ruefully, feeling a bit like a delivery driver. When she returned, there were sixty-six thousand unopened emails.
Five hours later, Monica patted her shoulder.
“Time to go home. You did a good job today.”
“Will this be it, do you think?”
“You’re an intern. This will probably be it.” Seeing her crushed face, she added, “For a while, at least. It’s grunt work, but it gets your foot in the door.” She shrugged.
Lainey tried not to take the shrug personally, but it caused a twinge in her sternum. The idea that four years of AP classes and debate team followed by four years of a perfect GPA had led her to a position serving coffee and deleting emails was a hard pill to swallow, but it was practically a horse pill that that fact didn’t seem to bother anyone. Only she and she alone was taken aback by the reality of where all her hard work had gotten her. She was tired of things getting her “foot in the door.” Where was this door? It seemed to be at the end of a corridor, too long to be labeled a hallway, the kind you could hear your breathing echoing in.
On her way out, Mr. Arnault called out to Lainey from his office. “Miss Crane, come see me please.” She walked over and peeked inside to see him at a desk, surrounded by papers and looking lost in thought, if a bit troubled, a deep line forming on his forehead. He ran his hands through his hair.
“Hi, I’m glad to see you. I was hoping we’d get to talk more today, but I understand that you’re busy. How did I do?” she asked, half of her body leaning out of the room as she swung from the door frame.
“Come in, please, and shut the door.” She did as he requested and stood awkwardly, her hands clasping her elbows behind her back.
“Is everything all right?” Lainey asked nervously, her feet shifting uncomfortably. Mr. Arnault rested his face in his hands for a moment before dragging them down his nose and dropping them onto his desk.
“Well, no, Lainey. Tell me, are you grateful for this opportunity?” He looked at her with a hardened expression, and she found herself in awe of how comfortably he could sit in discomfort. He didn’t flinch or fidget when she didn’t respond for several minutes. He just allowed the beats of silence to pass, the march of time to march on. She didn’t know how he resisted the urge to fill the empty air.
“I am,” she finally managed to squeak out, confused at his apparent anger.
“So why, then, did you show up late and wearing . . . that?” Lainey looked down at her shirt. It was a simple, houndstooth number with a peplum bottom. She chose to answer the first question instead.
“Well, sir, I’m sorry I was late. It was only a few minutes, and of course I made sure to notify your front desk. The road here was blocked off, so I had to go around, and my GPS wouldn’t tell me an alternate rou—”
“I don’t need an excuse, Miss Crane,” he said firmly, putting up a hand the way he had to her father at dinner. Lainey jerked her head back as though she’d been struck. She understood why he had called her “Miss Crane” in front of others, but why was he still doing it while they were alone together in his office? She felt her face heat up. “I need someone reliable. I thought that because your father has an excellent work ethic, you would know how to show a certain amount of professionalism in the workplace. From now on, I expect that. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir. I apologize, and I will improve.”
“That’s all. You may go. I expect to see you here tomorrow. At seven a.m., not 7:04, not even 7:01.” Lainey turned and opened the door, her shoulders distinctly drooped, and her mood significantly deflated. “Oh, and Lainey,” he piped up, and she turned around expectantly, hoping that he would offer her a crumb of encouragement after tearing her down. “You parked in the visitor’s parking lot. The employees park on the street.” Lainey nodded and left the building numbly, not daring to look Monica in the face after the verbal lashing that she’d just received. She sat in her car and finally allowed tears to brim over her waterline and fall down onto her shirt that was, apparently, not professional enough anyway.
Chapter nine
“Hey there, Graduate! How was your first day at the new big girl job?” Jill called from the couch, already in sweatpants and a long tee. One thing Lainey had always admired about Jill was that she knew the value of comfort. She never let her workday infiltrate her home life, to the point that even her work clothes were tainted and stripped the moment she arrived home. She was strumming a ukulele and smiling widely at Lainey, then noticed the streaked mascara pooled in a puddle at the crest of her cheeks. “No, that bad? Oh, come here.”
“I just need to be alone right now,” Lainey sniffled. She went into her room, a space where she felt safe from pretense. Her room had been the one place that no one needed her to be anything when she was a child. No one asked about report cards or debate team practices, and so she’d sit in it for hours just being herself, feeling the rug beneath her and reading. Sometimes, someone would knock on her bedroom door and she would feel this jolt of paralyzing anxiety. The reality that people perceived her and that that perception mattered to her was too much.
She went to her mirror and examined her outfit, still unsure of what Mr. Arnault hadn’t liked about it. Slacks and a shirt and some close toed heels seemed, to her, taken right out of aSex in the Cityepisode. She’d thought it was perfect when she’d chosen it the night before, giddily hanging it on her headboard. Now, she felt too sexy in it, noticing the way the soft fabric of the slacks and the tie around the waist seemed to accentuate her body. She let her hair out of the severe bun she’d worn, which now felt like a poorly executed cosplay of an employee, and turned slightly, watching her hair drop in an elegant swish down her back and graze the top of her butt. She noticed the way her butt was lifted in the pants and sighed. She began pulling clothing out of her drawers and holding them against her body, flattening them against herself and trying to think of what Mr. Arnault would think of them, imagining herself in them researching obscure medical techniques in front of Mr. Arnault, dropping something and having to pick it up in front of Mr. Arnault, stumbling and being caught by Mr. Arnault’s strong and capable hands . . . . Every outfit she pressed against herself lead back to daydreaming about him. That couldn’t be a good sign. Maybe he was right. Haphazardly, she started going through her drawers, throwing clothes on the floor until she arrived at exactly two outfits that might be considered professional: a turtleneck with slacks and the dress she had worn to her grandmother’s funeral. So, professional for an Amish person or a nun—either way, someone who had wandered into a workplace after a long religious retreat.
Flustered, she opened her door and called out to Jill, “Please come help me.”
Jill stood up, still playing her instrument, and walked over to Lainey, taking tiny leaps as though she were a performer. “What do you need?” she asked with a coy smile.
“Mr. Arnault told me today that my outfit was unprofessional. Is this really unprofessional? I don’t see it.” Lainey struck a little pose, her hand on her hip.
“Spin around,” Jill said seriously, looking Lainey up and down as she did. “It is, yes.”
“Why? Because of my butt? I can’t help that I have a butt.”
“No, I just had you spin for fun. Because of the straps.” “What’s wrong with the straps?” “They’re just a little less than two inches thick.”
