Page 78 of On His Mind

Mara (10:32): Penelope. Do not tell me that you’re still sleeping. This is unacceptable

Mara (10:35): Okay, you need your beauty sleep. But we’re hanging out this afternoon. I’m not asking.

I’m typing back before I’ve fully sat up.

Me: This afternoon, yes.

I hit send, and I’m about to put the phone down.

And there, under Mara, ishim.

Percy (2:47 a.m.): The light thing. Clerestory.

I stop. I sit on the edge of my bed in yesterday’s makeup crusting on my eyelashes, and I look at it. He texted first. He was the one person in my life who wanted nothing from me, and now something in my stomach has gone wrong, because he reached, and he never reaches, and I don’t know what changed. And it wasn’t ahey. It wasn’tyou backorhow was Lisbon.He sent me the one word that’s only ours, from a freezing hallway, on a game day.

I start to type. I get as far as I and delete it. Yeah, delete it. Are you okay — no. Everything I put down is a door that either swings open or slams, and I can’t do either at ten-forty in yesterday’s makeup.

Mara:Two hours. Brunch.

I rush to the bathroom, putting my phone on my bed. I’ll answer him later. When I’ve had proper sleep, when I can form a thought.

Mara is exactly what I need, and she has no idea she’s my savior. She’s at the coffee place on 8th with two drinks already ordered and a whole story going before I’ve sat down — something about her cousin, something about a boy from high school, her hands moving, and she makes me forget about everything I have going on. We hang out for three hours. We go to a vintage place. She makes me try on a coat that’s terrible, and I make her buy a scarf that’s perfect for her skin tone. She laughsthe way Taylor used to laugh, from the belly, without checking whether it’s appropriate, and something in me loosens. I like her. I like her a great deal, and it’s easy, and I have not had easy in a long time.

I don’t check my phone. Not once. It stays in the bottom of my bag all afternoon, and the not-checking takes a small, constant effort. Mara has no idea. She’s telling me she was born in Wisconsin and lived in California until she was five, and her hands are going, and I let her carry me through the whole afternoon.

Theo texts at four.

Theo: You around this week?

I answer it at a red light on the walk back, one-handed, without breaking my conversation with Mara.

Me: Maybe Thursday.

Theo: Cool.

“You have to come to Gianna’s thing Saturday,” Mara says. “It’s like a girls night or something. She’ll love it if you came.”

“I’ll try.”

“You’ll come,” she deadpans, giving me eyes. “She’s going to have the best stories because she has been at the hockey house all week driving her brother insane, so she needs girl time that isn’t full of enormous men who leave their gear everywhere. Her words.”

The hockey house.

I hold very still on the sidewalk, and I smile. “Yeah, it sounds fun.”

“It will be,” she says back. “I’m so happy I met you last night.”

“Me too.” I smile.

We hug and then part ways.

The text from Percy is still haunting me when I go to bed, and it’s still there in the morning, and I can’t stop thinking about it, but I don’t text him back.

On Monday, I start at a new firm. It’s three floors up over a hardware store on Sedgwick, and the first thing I notice, coming out of the stairwell, is that nobody looks up.

At Whitmore, everyone would have looked up. Whitmore was a converted warehouse with the brick sandblasted back to raw and the ductwork left bare on purpose, scale models under glass by the windows, a whole wall of material samples arranged like art — a room built to be walked into and admired, and everyone in it half performing for whoever might walk in. This is not that. This is eight desks, a plotter, and a coffee machine. The carpet’s industrial and worn pale in a track between the door and the printer. There are drawings pinned up everywhere, real ones, marked to death in red, and none of them are framed. Somebody’s got a dead plant. It smells like toner, old coffee, and trace paper. It is, without question, the least impressed-with-itself room I have ever stood in.

I sent them my portfolio myself before the end of last year. No one’s hand on it but mine. My mother doesn’t know this firm exists. Nobody arranged a dinner. I got the email over summer, and I haven’t told a single person how much that plain little acceptance meant, because there is no one I could say it to who wouldn’t make it into something.