Friendship (10 page)

14

Amy, Jackie, and Lizzie often took their lunch break at the same time. They’d get soup and sandwiches from the French bakery and then go sit and eat them in the park near the water. The wind always whipped off the river, drowning out their scraps of conversation. They’d eat their food with quiet determination and stare out at the water and Manhattan, glad not to be eating pathetically alone but also glad that the wind was so noisy that they didn’t have to talk to one another.

Today, though, they crammed down their grilled veggie paninis in record time and turned their backs to the wind so they could hear each other speak.

“I talked to Avi this morning while I was coming back from getting coffee at One Girl and he was on one of his smoke breaks, and he had just gotten off the phone with Jonathan and he seemed really upset,” said Lizzie, fretfully twisting a lock of her thick hair around her finger.

“More upset than usual?” said Jackie. Her engagement ring caught a spark of light coming off the water and gleamed, as did the thick black frames of her glasses. Jackie would be fucked if it turned out that they were all fired. She and her fiancé, Mark, were getting married at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in June, and theirs would be the kind of wedding where everything from the cake to the table decorations would look handmade and artisanal, as though Jackie and Mark had made them, which would be—Lizzie and Amy knew, because they were often told—superexpensive.

“He was freaking. He may have been smoking two cigarettes at once.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t eat them or put them up his nose.”

“Amy, this is serious! I asked him what was wrong, and he was like ‘You should probably start packing up your desk.’”

Amy smirked. “Come
on.
He always thinks Yidster is about to fold. It’s because he was in the Israeli army. And because he worked at so many start-ups that folded. He has PTSD.”

“Well, this time he means it! I asked him what Jonathan said, and it was something about how if the site doesn’t start making a profit by the end of the year, their dad is pulling the plug.”

“But we’ve never made a profit. I don’t think we even try to sell ads anymore. We just do that ad swap with Jewbilation and Parentheeb.”

“I know! I’m our ad sales manager!”

“You are? I thought I was,” muttered Lizzie. She absently stroked her iPhone’s bedazzled case with one finger, as though tickling a small animal under its chin.

“Oof. I would be so bummed if we all lost our jobs,” said Jackie.

“I kind of would be and kind of wouldn’t be,” said Lizzie, turning the phone over and swiping meditatively through her email in-box. “It might be time for something new anyway. You know? I mean, obviously our jobs here are kind of a joke.”

“I like that about our jobs. Where else am I going to get a job where I can just spend all day on
The Knot
?”

“Just go work at some blog For Women, spend all day on
The Knot
, and write blog posts about your wedding feelings. I’m sure you’d barely notice the difference.”

“That’s harsh, Amy.”

“Sorry. Sorry. I guess I’m freaking out a little. I mean, I don’t really know where I’m gonna go from here.”

“You’ve never thought about it?”

“Of course I’ve
thought
about it.” Her thoughts, though, had never been particularly realistic. They’d been along the lines of, maybe she’d go edit a new site that would be created expressly for her, or she’d write a book or a TV show about something she couldn’t quite imagine yet. Herself. Someone slightly more interesting than herself.

They made their way back down the cobblestone street and up the stairs to their office, half expecting to see a dejected Avi carrying boxes down the stairs as they climbed them. But when they got there, he was at his desk, shouting at someone on the phone in Hebrew, which was normal, and they trooped back to their stations around the room as they always did.

They didn’t hear anything else about Yidster’s supposed demise that day, so it was still possible to dismiss it as just another blip, a rumor that had amounted to nothing. But the next day, Amy got back from a meditative, solitary soba-noodle lunch to find Jonathan and Shoshanna sitting at the conference table.

“Amy. Where are the Vyids?” said Shoshanna immediately, not even bothering with pleasantries. Lizzie and Jackie, who were wearing headphones and pretending not to notice what was happening at the conference table, surreptitiously muted the volume on their respective computers.

“I thought we had moved on,” said Amy weakly.

“Moved on? You were supposed to have ten of them ready for our approval by today!”

Amy felt a stab of genuine rage, similar to the emotion she deliberately provoked in herself by reading
Slate
comments or Styles section profiles of vacuous, rich pseudo-artists, but this was sharper, right in the center of her sternum. “Was that maybe something you told Avi, or was it in an email? Because—I’m so sorry if I’ve overlooked something—I just didn’t get that assignment, actually?”

Jonathan and Shoshanna exchanged looks, maybe telephathically communicating their commitment to the alternate reality they were busily creating.

“We discussed this in our last meeting. Did you not take notes? We gave you
very specific
instructions. We kept refreshing the site, waiting to see that you’d taken the initiative, but no. I’m just wondering what happened.” Jonathan was employing that maddening strategy of pretending to be confused, not angry.

“I wasn’t … aware that I’d been given specific instructions. I certainly wasn’t given … a budget? Equipment?”

Shoshanna turned her silver MacBook Air toward Amy. “This girl just sits in her bedroom and uses the built-in camera on her laptop, Amy! She got two million hits on this, and it’s just a video of her explaining why she chose these specific scents of Yankee Candle!”

Amy watched the video, which was on mute, for a few seconds. She felt as if she, too, were on mute. There just wasn’t any possible response.
Trying to make a viral video is the worst idea you’ve ever had, and you’ve had nothing but bad ideas—in fact, I work for one
was just the merest beginning of what Amy wanted to say to Shoshanna. There was also
This girl’s shirt is very low-cut and she appears to be around fifteen
and
A lot of people are watching this in order to make fun of it, and I suspect there is at least one death threat in the comments,
but Amy wanted to keep her job, at least for another few weeks or months until she could find another one, so she didn’t say anything.

They all sat there in silence—Jonathan, Shoshanna, and Amy watching the muted video in the center of the room; Avi, Jackie, and Lizzie sitting at the periphery, pretending to be engrossed in their screens. When the girl finished holding up candles and the video ended, Shoshanna crisply clacked her slim computer shut and stood. “I can’t wait to see what you come up with,” she said, and then she and Jonathan were slithering toward the door.

Amy watched them leave, then stood and walked back to her desk, trying to glimpse her coworkers in her peripheral vision. After she sat, she tried to modulate her typing so it wouldn’t appear frenzied as she Gchatted with Lizzie and Jackie.

Amy:
you heard all that, right?

Lizzie:
duh

Jackie:
mmhmm

Amy:
Well maybe this will be fun! We can all take turns doing them and

Lizzie:
no fucking way

Jackie:
yeah, no one told us to do shit. You’re on your own here

Lizzie:
you’re the one with expertise in these matters

Amy:
No0000ooooo

Lizzie:
Oh, come on, it won’t be that bad. And like no one will see them

Jackie:
no one is even going to watch them

Lizzie:
Jinx

Jackie:
heh

Amy:
ughhhhhhhh

Lizzie:
cheer up, dude, you’ll do one and then they’ll forget all about it

Amy:
if you hear of any jobs lmk

Jackie:
If I hear of any jobs I am applying for them, bitch

Amy:
you two suck

Amy is busy, you may be interrupting.

15

The first time Bev had ever taken a pregnancy test was in her junior year of high school, two weeks after losing her virginity to Trevor Gillespie. Her period wasn’t late and Trevor had used a condom, but she’d driven three towns over to buy the test anyway. She was certain that God would punish her for having sex, and for no longer believing in him. Bev had wondered a lot, while she was driving, how it was possible that she thought a God she no longer believed in was still capable of punishing her.

She was sure that with time, she would get out of the habit of feeling guilty about every single thing she did. So recently, though, she and her sisters had been forced to recite memorized verses from Scripture every night at the dinner table. Bits of them still got stuck in her head on repeat, like the boy-band songs that were just beginning to dominate the newly Clear Channel–owned airwaves. But instead of Backstreet’s Back or “As Long as You Love Me,” Bev’s internal monologue chanted at her about virtuous women and pure hearts.

She and Trevor had not lain in sin, exactly. They had remained standing, behind a toolshed, in sin. Probably that was even worse.

Another bad thing: Trevor did not, generally speaking, acknowledge Bev’s existence when he encountered her at school. His official girlfriend was a fellow senior, a person with teased bangs and a big gaggle of teased-bang friends. But Trevor had worked for several years after school at Bev’s dad’s lumberyard, shouldering stacks of two-by-fours and loading them onto trucks, the kind of work her dad had begun to hire more workers to do because he’d lifted those heavy things for so many years now that he couldn’t anymore. Trevor and Bev had been acknowledging each other with nods and grunts since she was a seventh grader, and then, when Bev started high school and finally grew breasts, he started occasionally saying full words to her, such as “Hi” and her name.

At first this attention had led Bev to make the classic mistake of ascribing to Trevor all the virtues of the characters in the books she read, people she found infinitely more interesting than anyone she knew in real life. She hadn’t even had what most of the isolated, book-loving heroines of the books had: one good teacher or wise old relative or like-minded confidante. She’d been realistic enough to know, at least, that she couldn’t expect Trevor to become her confidant. Maybe, though, she thought, he would become her boyfriend. She excused their initial clandestine make-out session to herself with this hope. It would be worth a little bad behavior if Trevor would elevate her from “almost friendless, library-dwelling weirdo” to “senior’s girlfriend.” Not to imply that she had let him kiss and touch her unwillingly, with some mercenary goal in mind. It had been her idea, actually, to ask him to go for a walk to the perimeter of the property with her, and she had spread out her hoodie on the grass and motioned for him to sit.

He’d sat and looked at her with wide-set blue eyes. He smelled sweaty and pleasantly sour, like wood shavings, and dirt ringed his big neck. In a few years he would begin to look like most of the men in Bev’s hometown, still thick around the shoulders and arms but with pregnant-looking guts and ham-hock thighs from fast-food lunches and hot-dish dinners. But right then, at eighteen, he was a perfect specimen, if a little Neanderthalish. Bev wanted to see him naked. She imagined him naked and herself fully clothed. In her mind’s eye she saw him kneeling in front of her in the cornfield—naked, begging—while she stood over him wielding mysterious, enormous power.

“You know I have a girlfriend,” he said.

“Yeah, but I thought this could be, like, a casual thing. No strings attached, et cetera.”

He’d grinned, showing a broken tooth that hadn’t been capped. “Damn, Beverly, I thought you were some kind of holy virgin! But if you’re okay with it…”

“I’m okay with it. This is just for fun,” she’d said, and he leaned in and kissed her.

She hadn’t been expecting anything, really, so she’d been surprised at both the vehemence of the kiss and its subtlety. Other boys—not that there had been many, just a couple of pro forma Bible camp closet fumblers—had mashed their tongues into her mouth carelessly. Those boys had seemed fundamentally uninterested in kissing, more occupied with semi-covertly rubbing their boners against some part of her—her knee, her hand, the side of her leg, it didn’t seem to matter—just like little dogs. Trevor, she realized right away, was different. He had kissed her collaboratively, teasing her, letting her tease him back, having a kind of conversation with her that was much more interesting than anything he’d ever said to her with words. For the remaining moments that she was still capable of conscious thought, she’d thought he would be a good person to have sex with.

But sex, when they tried it a few clandestine-make-out-full weeks later, was almost ruined by Bev’s body, which was undermined by guilt in a way that her mind was somehow not. “It’s okay,” she said numerous times, but it wasn’t, and for a horrible moment she thought that Trevor had given up. They moved away from each other, breathless, Bev feeling leaden with disappointment. To have gone so far, then failed! It was humiliating, not to mention just as much of a sin as the actual completed act would have been. She’d expected Trevor to shrug back into his pants and jacket as easily as he’d shrugged them off and leave her there and never come back. Instead, he leaned back toward her, kissing her again.

“It’s because you’re scared,” he’d said quietly. “What would make you less scared?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s safe. There’s nothing to worry about.”

There was so much to worry about, always. She couldn’t make her mind shut up.