The Follower (13 page)

Katie complained to her friends about the Mitchell situation all the time. Amanda told her to just ignore it, that things would get better. Katie tried to take the advice, but nothing seemed to change. She felt more like a gofer than an assistant. She’d wanted to work in PR to interact with people, to use her communication skills, but it seemed like all Mitchell did was have her run errands and do clerical work. And whenever he asked her to do something, it was always with that
tone
in his voice. Everything he told her to do was a command, with never a please or thank-you. It got to the point that Katie couldn’t even stand looking at him anymore. The tan, the teeth, the Rolex, the pinky ring—the guy was a total Mr. Smarmy. And his cologne! Katie didn’t know the name of it, but he must’ve used half a bottle of the stuff every day. The whole office reeked of it, even the women’s bathroom. Katie wondered if he wore all that cologne as some kind of sick power trip—he wanted people to smell him, like a cat that craps all over a house to mark its territory. One night at a bar, a guy came up to Katie, wearing the same cologne as Mitchell, and even though she thought the guy was kind of cute, she blew him off. She just couldn’t deal with any guy who smelled like her creep boss.

Things got so bad, Katie even tried to talk to her mother about it, but of course she didn’t have any real advice. She just said, “If you’re unhappy, quit,” and then started talking about pruning the rosebushes or whatever. Katie was like,
Gee, thanks for the great advice, Mom. Well, it was really great talking to you, too
. Of course, Katie had been thinking about quitting. She would’ve loved to work someplace else, anyplace else, but she was afraid that leaving her first job out of college so soon would look bad on her résumé. She wanted to get at least a year in and then move on.

But now that she’d made the decision to go back to school, and knew that she’d be leaving her job by next September, it made it much easier to brush Mitchell’s comments aside, to not take the things he said so seriously.

She was going about her workday, having one of the better mornings she’d had in a long time. She managed to finish all
her work without getting overly stressed or pissed off, and had some time to look into some grad schools on the Web. She requested applications from several schools, including Berkeley and the University of Washington.

Mitchell was in and out of meetings most of the morning and she barely even spoke to him. Then, around eleven thirty, Katie was getting a cup of coffee in the kitchen, making small talk with Rachel, an assistant, and JoAnne, an intern, when Mitchell came by and said, “You can stop talking about me now.”

“Sshh, everybody, Mitchell’s here; be quiet,” JoAnne said, playing along.

“It’s okay, I don’t mind,” Mitchell said, starting to pour himself a cup of coffee. “As long as it’s only good stuff.”

“Of course it’s good stuff,” JoAnne said. “Right, girls?”

“Yeah, it was all good,” Rachel said. “Definitely.”

They were beating the joke to death, but everyone was smiling anyway. Mitchell was smiling because he always seemed to be smiling, probably because he thought his choppers were so great and he wanted to show them off to the world. JoAnne and Rachel were doing major ass kissing. Rachel was up for a promotion, which Mitchell would have input in, and she’d been joking around with him, doing blatant brownnosing for weeks. JoAnne was trying to kiss up to Mitchell, too, trying to position herself for a possible full-time job at the company after graduation. Katie was smiling, not because she thought anything was funny or even amusing, but because she felt above it all, like she knew what was really going on and everyone else didn’t.

Then, maybe Mitchell saw Katie smiling and wanted to put her back in her usual, miserable place, because he said, “Katie, I meant to say something to you before, but I really like that outfit you’re wearing.”

Katie knew some zinger was coming. After all, Mitchell wasn’t exactly the type who dished out compliments, and straight guys didn’t normally comment on women’s clothing.

“Yeah, I love it, too,” JoAnne said, naturally agreeing with whatever Mitchell said. Why didn’t she just get it over with and blow him already?

“Me, too,” Rachel said, also sounding totally fake. “Where’d you get it?”

“Oh, Ann Taylor,” Katie said.

“It’s great,” Mitchell said, pouring it on, sounding like freaking Isaac Mizrahi. “But didn’t I see you in one just like it the other day?”

It was a typical passive-aggressive Mitchell comment. He had the uncanny ability to zero in on the thing Katie was the most sensitive about, the thing she was praying no one would notice. There was no reason for him to mention anything about her clothing except to be cruel and to embarrass the hell out of her. And, as usual, it worked. Katie’s face was burning up and she wanted to run out of the office and never come back. She could tell that JoAnne and Rachel knew what Mitchell had done to her, but they were too wimpy to come to her aid. Katie thought, Couldn’t one of them even, like, change the subject or something?

Then Katie realized everyone was staring at her, waiting for her to answer. It felt like a full minute had gone by but it had probably only been a few seconds. She could tell that Mitchell, that prick, was enjoying watching her squirm.

Finally, she heard herself say, “I have two of them.”

She knew the excuse sounded very lame, like an obvious cover-up.

“So you were wearing the
other
one the other day,” Mitchell said, as if he bought the explanation even though it was obvious he didn’t. “I get it now.”

Katie returned to her desk with her coffee. She felt, strangely, the way she had after having sex with Andy the other night. Then, in one of those weird moments of kismet that always made Katie think that there had to be a God, an e-mail from Andy arrived in her in-box.

The note upset Katie and she didn’t know if she had the right to feel upset about it, which made it even more upsetting. There was nothing really
wrong
with the message. If it weren’t for what had happened between them, she might have thought the note was sweet and thoughtful. Making things even weirder and more confusing, she’d had a pretty good time with Andy on their date last night. At first, when they’d met in front of the movie theater on First and Sixty-second, she’d regretted agreeing to go out with him. She felt uncomfortable and couldn’t even make eye contact. She kept replaying that night in bed, remembering how he’d pinned her arms down and forced himself on her. Although she kept reminding herself that he hadn’t actually pinned her down, that he hadn’t used any force at all, actually, it didn’t matter, because this was how she kept remembering it.

In the movie theater, during the previews, her whole body had tensed when he rested his hand on her knee for a couple of seconds. She shifted away but wanted to move to another seat or, better yet, leave. But then the movie started. It was okay, not great, but Andy laughed a lot, even at the jokes that weren’t very funny. Katie wasn’t sure, but she got the sense that Andy’s laughing was part of a strategy for getting laid, that he was trying to show her that he was a fun guy, that he could let loose. After the movie, Katie wanted to get into a cab alone and go home, but she didn’t want to be rude, so she walked with Andy uptown along First Avenue. He was acting very polite, asking her a lot of questions about high school and college. She hated admitting it, but he seemed as charming as he had on their first few dates, and she was starting to feel more comfortable around him.

When they reached American Trash, a bar near Seventy-sixth, Andy asked Katie if she wanted to have a drink and she said okay. He was the perfect gentleman, helping her on and off with her coat and even pushing the bar stool in for her after she sat down. He didn’t try to come on to her at all in the bar, maybe because he’d sensed the tension in the movie theater. But then he told her that he wanted to talk to her about something.

“What?” she asked, although she knew from his tone that it had to do with the night they had sex and the awkwardness afterward.

“I just want you to know,” he said. “I mean, I hope you know that…I mean…God, how do I say this?”

He sipped his beer. She thought it was cute, the way he seemed nervous, struggling to find the right words. He was showing a sensitive, vulnerable side to himself that he hadn’t let her see before.

“What I mean is, I like you a lot,” he said. “And I hope the other night was cool with you. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was rush you or make you feel…I mean, I just want everything to be cool with us, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” She was relieved that he’d brought this up, put it out in the open.

He smiled, looking into her eyes, and said, “Cool. That’s very cool.”

They finished their drinks and walked back to her place. She was glad they’d talked and she felt a little better about everything. When they got to her building he was very polite and didn’t suggest going up to her place or anything like that. He was backing off, taking it slower. Then he kissed her good night and it was a nice kiss—not too long or with too much tongue. Later on, when she was alone in her apartment, she felt very good about the way the date had gone and she was even looking forward to going out with him again.

But now, as she read the e-mail for the fifth or sixth time, she wasn’t so sure. She still couldn’t get Friday night completely out of her head, and she didn’t know if that was the real Andy or if last night was the real Andy. On the one hand, she felt like he was Jekyll-and-Hyde-ing her, playing head games, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to deal with that crap anymore. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure that he’d done anything wrong in the first place. Bottom line, she was very confused and didn’t know whether she should dump him or keep on dating him. In college, she never used to obsess this way, especially about guys. If a guy treated her like shit, she dumped him, and that was that, end of story. She’d had
good judgment, too, what she liked to call “asshole radar.” Her friends used to be amazed by how quickly she could tell whether a guy was a jerk. She could tell just by looking at the way a guy dressed, or the way he smiled. But in New York she was clueless. There was no black or white in the city—everything was gray, blurry. When she met Andy she thought he was the greatest guy in the world, and she’d even thought Mitchell was okay. But now she knew Mitchell was a dick, and the jury was still out on Andy.

She decided that she was too caught up, that she needed another opinion about all this. She e-mailed Andy back, asking him if he wanted to go out on a double date with Amanda and one of his roommates. The question wasn’t out of the blue because Katie had already told Andy that she wanted to set Amanda up sometime. A few minutes later, Andy wrote back that that sounded like a great idea and that he’d ask his roommate Will, who was a med student at Mount Sinai Hospital, if he was into it. Meanwhile, Katie e-mailed Amanda, and Amanda said she could go out Wednesday or Thursday night, and Katie e-mailed the info to Andy. Then Andy e-mailed back that Will was into it, and after another couple of e-mails they set up the date for Wednesday night.

Katie was relieved. Although the situation hadn’t been resolved, she felt like it would be soon.

After lunch at the rip-off salad bar across the street—they charged by the pound and weighed everything down with so much dressing that she always wound up paying like eight dollars for a salad of mostly lettuce—she returned to the office. Finally, five o’clock came—time for another trip through subway hell. The ride itself was okay, but when she got out at Eighty-sixth Street some black guy hanging out near the stairwell said, “Shake that big ass, baby. Yeah, shake that big ass.” She gave him the finger and he shouted, “Yeah, I like that! You a dirty bitch, too.” Although she didn’t want to let the words of some sicko in the subway get to her, she couldn’t help it. When she got home, she stared in the full-length mirror, convinced that her ass
did
look pretty big and that she had to lose five pounds, maybe ten. She changed into yoga pants and a
tank top and went to the gym for the six o’clock advanced step class.

As she was on a mat, stretching her hamstrings, someone said, “You need to get some more extension,” and she looked up and saw Peter Wells standing there.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Hi, how are you?”

“Pretty good,” he said. “Here, lemme help.” As she lay on her back, he held her right leg by the calf and pushed it back with gentle force. “Keep your knee straight. Yeah, just like that. You feel it now?”

“Yeah,” Katie said, cringing.

“Hold, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten…and relax. How’s that?”

“Great, thanks.”

Looking down at her, Peter smiled for a couple of seconds—she noticed that he had really nice-looking white teeth, not obviously fake-looking ones like Mitchell—then he said, “So how’re you doing?”

“Okay,” she said. “Tough day.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“What can you do? That’s New York, right?” Katie squinted. “Wait, I thought you work mornings?”

“I do,” Peter said. “I was just here working out myself, actually.”

“Oh, that’s cool. Hey, you want to hear something really weird? I saw somebody who looked just like you before.”

“When?”

“Today. This morning.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I was buying my coffee outside work and I could’ve sworn it was you. He had these sunglasses on and a baseball cap, I think.”

“Maybe I have a twin.”

Katie laughed, then said, “Yeah, maybe.”

“Actually, today’s my day off,” Peter said. “I just came here to work out. I woke up at around noon.”

“Late night last night, huh?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Out with your girlfriend?”

“No. Actually we broke up.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but it’s not as sudden as it sounds. We were just kind of incompatible. We’ve barely been together anyway.”