The Follower (12 page)

Another Monday morning, another
day Katie didn’t want to get out of bed. After hitting the snooze button three times she finally dragged herself into the shower. A cup of coffee with Splenda barely had any effect. She felt like she could crawl back under the covers and sleep till noon.

She had some good days, when the city didn’t seem so bad—maybe when she was having a nice day in the park or was out with her friends—but, all in all, life in New York was burning her out big-time. She was sick of the grind, of the same routine day after miserable day, of always being exhausted and stressed out. It seemed like she worried and obsessed all the time these days, and she never used to be that way. Once in a while, she’d catch a glimpse of herself in a mirror and wonder,
God, is that what I really look like?

She never would’ve believed New York could do this to her. When she was growing up in Massachusetts, she used to dream about living in the city someday. Yeah, Lenox was beautiful, with all the mountains and trees and lakes and everything, but it was boring as hell, especially at night. There were no bars or clubs to go to—even the nearest city, Pittsfield, was dead at night. The most exciting event of the year was on Fourth of July weekend, when Peter, Paul, and Mary, or some other old-fart band, played at Tanglewood. Movies and TV shows set in New York always made big-city life seem hip and exciting, and she wanted to be like one of the Friends, and hang out at coffee bars with cool, interesting people.
When she was in college, she and her friends took day trips into the city sometimes, to go shopping or to have lunch; she always had a great time and she decided she’d move to Manhattan the first opportunity she got. When she graduated last May, a friend told her about how this girl Susan, who’d gone to Brown, was renting an apartment on the Upper East Side and was looking for a roommate, and Katie jumped at the chance. After she got her first job, as an assistant at Hamilton & Forster, a financial PR agency, she was looking forward to living out her dream.

But, pretty much from the start, New York had been a disappointment. Her job sucked, definitely not worth all the stress, and she wasn’t crazy about any of the people she worked with. Most of them were from New Jersey or Long Island and she felt like she couldn’t connect. A few friends of hers from college lived in the city, but she didn’t see them as much as she would’ve liked because they were busy at their jobs. The times she went out, she had fun, and she met a few guys, but no one she really liked or who really liked her. She wound up spending most of her nights alone, which was unusual for her because she’d always been a very social person. Making things worse, it had been a hot, miserable summer in New York, and all her friends had weekend shares at houses in the Hamptons. She couldn’t afford her own share and didn’t want to ask her parents for any more money. A couple of weekends, she went out as a guest, but she felt like she was freeloading and she didn’t have such a great time anyway—the people out there had way too much attitude. So she spent most of the summer by herself, having some good days—shopping, hanging out in the park, going to movies—but most of the time she felt lonely and depressed in the sweltering, half-deserted city.

In the fall, her friends were in town more often and the weather improved, but her rut continued. Her job wasn’t getting any better, and whenever she went out she seemed to attract the world’s biggest assholes. If she was at a bar and noticed a cute guy, she’d do everything she could to let him know she was interested—making a lot of eye contact, smiling,
even winking at this guy one time when she had a little too much to drink. But at the end of the night only the assholes wanted her number, and because her social calendar wasn’t exactly filled, she usually gave it to them.

She finished doing her hair and makeup and then got dressed, putting on the gray pin-striped pants suit she’d bought last week. It had looked so good on her in the store, but now she felt like it made her look dumpy. She tried on a couple of other outfits but didn’t like them, either. Searching her closet, she couldn’t find anything else decent to wear. All of her work clothes that she liked were dirty, and she’d been putting off getting them cleaned because she couldn’t afford the ridiculous dry-cleaning prices in Manhattan—like, eight dollars to clean a fucking skirt; were they serious? She tried on another outfit, hated it, and started to cry. This had been happening a lot lately—little things that she used to brush off and barely think about overwhelmed her. She’d had a meltdown at a store recently when she found out they didn’t have a jacket in her size, and the other day when she got her hair highlighted and didn’t like the way it came out, she had a brat fit. It seemed like anytime something minor went wrong, she was suddenly on the verge of tears.

Realizing that if she procrastinated any longer she’d be late for work, she put on the navy-pants-with-navy-jacket outfit that she’d worn on Friday, figuring she’d just have to hope no one noticed.

Although her commute only took about twenty minutes door to door, it always drained her. As she headed toward the Eighty-sixth Street station, she was already dreading having to pack into the subway, like she was a fucking cow or something. Then, realizing that she was taking the same route to the subway that she took every morning, she said, “No, I’m not a fucking cow, I’m a fucking rat.” She realized she’d spoken out loud when some guy passing by gave her a look like,
Wow, that chick’s nuts
, and she wondered if she was. You live in New York long enough, you start to lose it. Whenever she walked around on the Upper West Side, on Broadway, she witnessed the city’s effect firsthand. It seemed like every other
person—especially the ones over sixty—was mentally ill, or searching garbage cans, or walking around mumbling to themselves about socialism or whatever. But Katie had no idea that it could happen so fast, that she could start going crazy in just five months.

In the subway station, she made her way through the crowd to the stairwell and went down halfway so she could watch for an express train on the lower level and a local train on the upper. The local came first so she had to rush upstairs with the other commuters who’d been waiting at the halfway point, and when the doors opened she had to force her way inside, with the other people who had been waiting, five or six deep, on the platform. When Katie reached the door, there was no more room in the car. The last person in, a guy in his forties, had backed his way in and was standing facing the platform, holding his briefcase in front of him as if somebody was shooting at him and he was trying to block the bullets. Katie heard the beeping sound, indicating the doors were about to close, but then the doors kept closing partway and reopening because somebody was blocking the doorway. Katie glanced at her watch: 8:41. She had plenty of time to get to work if she got on this train; but if she didn’t and another train didn’t come right away, she’d be a few minutes late. Today was the Monday morning staff meeting and she’d been late last Monday and didn’t want to hear it from her boss again.

“Move in, please,” she said, in a bitchy, impatient tone she wouldn’t have recognized as her own before she moved to Manhattan.

The guy with the briefcase managed to move a couple of inches to his left and Katie had an opening. She backed partway into the car, wriggling her ass to try to create more room, getting groans from everyone around her, and one guy with a Spanish accent said, “Damn bitch.” Now Katie was preventing the door from closing. They closed against her arms a couple of times and Katie said, “Move in, please. Can you please move in?” The doors closed against Katie’s arms again and the conductor over the PA system ordered, “Stop blocking the doors!” Somebody told Katie to just get off the train and Katie
found herself muttering, “Shut up,” as she continued to wriggle and twist her way farther into the car. Finally, she got far enough in that the doors could close, but she was pretty sandwiched between people, her face maybe a half inch away from the door.

Looking at her reflection in the dirty Plexiglas, she thought,
God, I look like dogshit
. She appeared bitter, worn, as if she’d aged five years since college. She used to be such a happy, positive person; she didn’t know how she’d turned into
this
.

At the next stop, Katie managed to maneuver her way farther into the car. She put in her ear buds, turned on her iPod, and closed her eyes, trying to block out the world. Coldplay was into “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” and she decided enough was enough with all this bullshit—today was a wake-up call; it was time to make some serious changes in her life. Last night, on the way to the movie theater, Andy had been talking about studying for the GMATs and applying to business schools, and she decided she was going to start studying for the GREs, maybe even take a course at Kaplan. Deadlines for next fall probably weren’t due till January and February, so she still had time to apply. She was going to start doing research online, to try to figure out where to apply and what she wanted to study. She knew she wanted to work with people, so maybe she’d go for a master’s in communication or education. She wasn’t sure how she’d pay for grad school, though. She already owed something like twenty thousand dollars in student loans, which she knew she wouldn’t be able to pay off for twenty years, unless she won the lottery or married a rich guy. But she figured she’d find some way to make it work—take out more loans, get some aid or a scholarship, do something. The key was that things would eventually change; this nightmare she was trapped in now couldn’t go on forever. She wasn’t going along some dark road that led to nowhere. There had to be a finish line ahead, a bright light at the end of the tunnel, even though she couldn’t see it right now.

She was jolted from her thoughts when the old, sickly guy next to her started having a coughing fit. As she turned away
and started breathing through a tiny space in the left corner of her mouth because she was convinced the guy had TB or something deadly, she thought,
I
am
so
moving out of this city
.

At Fifty-first Street, she got off the train, moving toward the exit in shuffle steps with the rest of the crowd. There were four sets of stairs leading up to the street and, as always, she took the one at the far right because it let her out practically right in front of the doughnut cart where she bought her coffee and raisin bagel every morning. She felt like a rat again, but this time she didn’t bitch about it out loud. Now that she knew her time as a New Yorker had an expiration date, she felt more removed from everything.

There were five people on line ahead of Katie at the cart. In Lenox, it might’ve taken ten minutes but in New York everyone moved quickly and in less than a minute it was her turn. The very-gross-looking-but-very-nice guy at the cart started pouring her coffee, knowing exactly how she took it, and said, “Hi, sweetheart, how’re you today?”

“Fine, thanks,” Katie said.

As she was digging into her purse, looking for money to give the guy, she looked up for a moment and saw a guy in a Yankees cap and dark sunglasses on the corner of Fifty-first and Lexington. He was about thirty yards away and she couldn’t see his face very clearly but he looked a lot like Peter Wells.

The guy at the cart plopped the bag with the bagel and the coffee onto the counter and Katie handed him the five. He gave her the change and said, “Have a good day,” and Katie said, “Thanks.” Then Katie looked toward the corner again, but the guy with the sunglasses was gone. Katie was usually good with faces and had thought the guy looked exactly like Peter, but it didn’t make sense that he’d be just standing there at nine in the morning. She figured she must’ve made a mistake.

“Excuse me,” the woman on line behind Katie said in a bitchy tone because Katie had blocked her from the cart for, like, two seconds.

Katie gave the woman a dirty look, then made an annoyed
tsk
sound and walked away.

Although Katie wasn’t late for the staff meeting—actually, she arrived a few minutes early—Mitchell, her boss, still found something to get on her case about. After the meeting he complained that she hadn’t e-mailed a press release to somebody-or-other at so-and-so, even though Katie was positive that Mitchell had never told her to send the stupid e-mail. Katie wanted to tell him to go to hell, but she’d worked at her job long enough to learn that arguing with her boss was pointless. It was much better to swallow her pride and spew all of the usual,
Oh, I’m so sorry, my mistake
crap, than to get into an argument and feel shitty about it for the rest of the day.

Katie didn’t know what Mitchell’s fucking problem was, why he seemed to have it in for her, but she thought it might’ve been because he was attracted to her. Although he was in his forties and married, he had definitely been flirting with her at the job interview. He hadn’t come on to her or anything, but she noticed him checking out her legs and breasts a few times, and he’d said, “It’ll be a lot of fun working together,” in a very suggestive way. Of course there was no way Katie would ever get involved with a married guy even if she was attracted to him, and she was not, in any way, attracted to Mitchell. He was old, and old guys always grossed her out. He also had a fake tan that was too dark and fake teeth that were too white. He looked like a sleazy game-show host.

The first few days at the job, he was very nice to her; then, probably when he started catching on that she wasn’t interested, he changed. He snapped at her a lot—not yelling or even raising his voice, but just acting irritated. He nitpicked her work to death, never satisfied with anything she did, always telling her she needed to do more of this or less of that. Sometimes he put her down in front of other people, embarrassing the hell out of her and making her feel like an idiot. She couldn’t believe he was acting like such an immature jerk. He was like a boy in grade school who likes a girl but, because she doesn’t like him back, he starts hitting her and treating her like crap.