This is chapter two. In which Franklin is late for work, and divulges a crush.
Want to catch up? Chapter 1 is here.
It was hard to respect a grown man who spoke in epithets the way Scott did.
Who believed in abbreviations, and the reputations of the schools people went to, and thought things like boarding school had any bearing on the success of a full grown adult.
When Scott lay awake at night, did he think about the same things Franklin thought about: childhood memories, personal failings, grocery lists, whether or not the types of people who posted missed encounters on Craigslist all had chlamydia? Or did he care so much about this company that its success infiltrated all of his private fantasies? Was it possible that he really did care that much? Or was it something more blandly sinister that kept him so regimented: power, control, the promise of status with an airline?
The screens of his phone and his watch lit up again, simultaneously:
Let me know if you have any questions.
He considered pelting his phone across the room, but knew, ultimately, that’d mean punishing himself. Scott wasn’t really in the phone. Of course Franklin knew this. And the request was fairly simple. Confirming his preparedness would quelch Scott’s anxiety, which was not an unreasonable job requirement for a mid-level employee. Franklin knew this, too. And yet.
Maybe it was that Scott had a way of making simple tasks feel like a personal favor for Scott himself, and therefore, an insurmountable annoyance that made Franklin feel at once suicidal and too lazy to know how to hurt himself. Maybe it was the fact that Scott had a full head of hair, and was nearly a decade younger than Franklin. Maybe it was that glassy look Scott got in his eyes when he hadn’t slept: the look that said:
I’m in charge, and you’re not leaving here until I’ve made up an assignment to make that clear to you.
He rolled out of bed, cursing himself for leaving socks and pants strewn across the floor.
His back hurt. Maybe he should try a chiropractor, which was something other people at work talked about while they waited for the communal coffee to finish brewing. He’d make a mental note to call his insurance company this weekend, see if that was something they paid for. Did insurance people pick up on the phone on weekends? When was the weekend? Jesus Christ, he didn’t want to spend his weekend talking to some low-level employee forced to answer a stranger’s spine questions when they should have been out doing the things that young people did.
Drinking beer out of paper sacks, speaking with authority on things they knew nothing about, feeling hopeful.
Underwear. Pants. Button-down. He never had to think about getting dressed. He didn’t even know where he might start, if clothes were something he’d one day decide to become interested in. The women in his office showed up to work in consistently outlandish getups, which seemed to get more and more revealing by the year: hoop earrings, outfits that were pants and a shirt all at once, dresses that almost busted at the seams with the weight of breasts and hips that stretched fabric taught against them. He didn’t want to be the type of guy who noticed women like that at work, but it was hard not to.
Especially when Scott hired girls like Jelly. Jelly was the new office manager. Jelly was young: right out of college, probably. Her cheeks blotched and reddened when she was frustrated or upset, which was often. Scott didn’t know what about her job ordering pretzels and M&Ms in bulk and running around frazzled attending to mundane office tasks like making copies and picking up copies could be so stressful as to cause her to break out in daily hives. Franklin thought he overheard Scott mention he owed Jelly’s dad a favor or something, and he would have held that against her, attributed her frazzledness to a life of coddled supremacy — but she was good at her job. And, at least as far as Franklin could tell, she took it very seriously. Too seriously. More seriously than Franklin took, well — anything. Unnecessarily seriously.
She was a nice girl, he didn’t mean to say she wasn’t.
People always thought he was discrediting a person entirely when he criticized one single trait. Jelly was frazzled, and looked scared, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a nice girl. He’d grown attuned to cutting insults with niceties, even in his own head, automatically guilt-ridden from thinking a bad thought without a good thought to counteract it. She was a nice girl who was always flustered, who looked one accidental reply-all away from bursting into tears and darting to the bathroom to cry, while the whole office would have to pretend they couldn’t hear her sobs.
At first, this had bothered Franklin. Her immaturity, her femininity — it wasn’t something he had patience for in the workplace. Jelly’s would be another set of emotions he’d be expected to care about, and he didn’t have the energy. He was tired.
But, more recently, Franklin had grown to appreciate — no, envy — how much weight Jelly’s life still carried for her. He envied that she found, not so deep within her, a drive to show up early for work almost every single day. That she built in the time between painting her eyelids with sparkles and pulling out her laptop at her desk to stop at the gas station on the corner, where she’d pick up coffee in a styrofoam cup, and a thick, sticky donut that always caused her to start her day with a trail of crumbs from her bottom lip to the lap of her pants.
