And so her parents had told her to get out. That she had a week to be out of their house, and out of their lives.
They’d found out about Matt. Riley had been spotted holding hands with him by a family “friend” driving by the school one afternoon. Word spread quickly, and the story grew into Riley sticking her tongue into the mouth of a boy right in front of everyone. Defiantly. “Brazen Conduct,” they’d called it, and plain old fornication.
The day she left, her mother cried at the top of the stairs as her only daughter walked out the door. Her father was down in his office, working on something for church the next day.
Riley had found the apartment online. She made a deposit in cash, and moved in, all within a few days.
It wasn’t long before Matt lost his job as a carpet cleaner’s assistant. He hated crawling on his hands and knees picking staples out of the stiff and shallow fabric. He hated carrying buckets of water up six flights of stairs and being told he’d put too much cream in his boss’s coffee. He hated being told what to do.
So he stopped showing up and so did the checks, and then there he was one day, knocking on Riley’s door.
Chapter 2
Riley brought the sheets of paper towel back to the puddle. She had taken too many, she knew. Wasteful, but oh well. She dropped them into the water—she loved watching the water as it was absorbed, the almost conscious capillary action of water traveling through the fibers—and then pressed down, wiping up what remained.
She wiped behind the coffin, on top of it, and up the wall to the windowsill. The paper towel was a dark grey, almost black, now. She hadn’t dusted in . . . she hadn’t dusted.
She brushed her hair out of her face. It was too long now, she thought. She was growing her bangs out. Her stupid bangs. Every time she got bangs she hated them within days and spent the next few months growing them out.
One day, when she was in the fourth grade, she had hated her bangs so much she decided to cut them off. She threw up immediately after she saw herself in the mirror, imagining her father telling her to stick her hands out so that he could slap them.
She found a headband, wore it every day and every night for a week, and somehow got away with it.
Until one night it slipped off while she was sleeping and her father came in to make sure she was asleep. He saw the bald patch above her forehead and started yelling.
“Riley!”
She stirred and woke up and knew right away what was wrong.
“I have cancer!” she found herself yelling. “I think I have cancer. It just fell out,” she said through tears and sobs.
She got her hands slapped so hard and didn’t find out for years why he hadn’t believed her.
Some days she still wished there were an easy way get rid of them. But now she had to grow them out until they were the perfect length to get in her eyes and in the way. There’s never an easier way.
She gave up drying the rest of the water even though she knew clean patches would just make the rest of the apartment look more dirty.
Chapter 3
Riley worked in advertising now, going on a year. She got hired at an agency after working at the call center. She was an account coordinator, which meant she did all the work that no one else wanted to do. From scheduling calls with clients to getting coffee for meetings and writing responses to RFPs that would get dropped on her the day before they were due.
She liked it, mostly. The hours were long, the clients were difficult, but the people she worked with were fun, except for the ones she hated.
Like Wendy. Well, hate was a strong word, and an emotion she rarely felt. She didn’t really have the energy for grudges or strong emotions of any sort. The antidepressants helped with that, too.
Wendy was just so . . . Wendy. Always put together. With hair pulled back so tight it stretched her skin, and glasses that made her look both smart and obnoxious at the same time. At office parties, she would leave her hair down and she wouldn’t wear her glasses and yet she somehow looked more professional. More awkward, too.
She was classically pretty, with long blonde hair, a small, almost sharp nose, and long runner’s legs. She was tall, too, at least two inches taller than Riley, who was only five-five.
She wanted to like Wendy, or, rather, she wanted to be liked by Wendy. She was clearly some arbiter of taste, in the office at least. If you looked like Wendy, talked like Wendy, you ended up on projects with Wendy. And those projects tended to go very well. In the agency, your reputation was as good as your last project. Or as bad.
Wendy seemed to be nice to Riley, actually seemed to care about her. But to Riley it always felt like pity. Like Wendy knew she didn’t belong there and just wanted to help her survive. Riley had gotten the job mostly through luck. In her parents’ religion, you weren’t supposed to go to college. So she hadn’t. But she was smart, and she worked hard and lied.
Wendy didn’t need to lie, because she had gone to college. She had gotten the job experience she needed. She had put all the work in, and checked all the boxes. And that made Riley uncomfortable—to be around people who did all the right things—because she never got the chance.
Riley had responded to a job ad for an account coordinator, and so she’d told them she’d been a freelance writer, which was only sort of untrue. She had a blog, with a friend, about books and movies. It didn’t generate any money, but it did give her writing samples she could use in her application.
Luckily, they didn’t look into it any more than that.
So she’d been hired, and by the time they’d figured out she was too young to have been to college, and too inexperienced to know what she was doing, it would have been more trouble than it was worth to fire her and hire someone else. So there she was, working at her first “real” job, and doing it well enough to not get fired, which was more or less what she’d always aspired to do.
But not long after that her depression and anxiety got worse. She started drinking more, and her friend Avery told her she had to go to the doctor. Avery and Riley met at an awards show for local advertising agencies not long after Riley got her job. Riley got too drunk, and Avery found her in the bathroom and helped her get home. Since then, they’d been friends, close friends. Avery was always looking out for her, like a sister might.
So nine months ago, after working for the agency for about three months, Riley described the way she was feeling to her doctor. She had told her that every small thing in her life made her sick. That she’d thrown up at the idea of seeing a doctor, and then once again on the way to the appointment. She’d told her doctor that going to a movie with a friend would give her panic attacks. What if they didn’t make it there on time? What if she was too early?
Her doctor had said, “Have you ever considered medication?”
And Riley had said, “Every single day.”
The antidepressants helped her function, helped her control her reactions to emotion and anxiety. It was all still there, just on a leash instead of tearing through her mind and breaking her down.
She kept asking for higher doses until her doctor said Riley was now taking as much as she was allowed to prescribe. Riley decided to be okay with that, and figured it was the pills that let her.
***
She met her friend Laura at the call center. Laura worked at the station beside her, inside the same cubicle. Cubicles occupied a whole floor of the office building. A vast and depressing sea of grey. Ringing phones and keyboard clicks, and the din of hushed conversations between calls.
It was an inbound call center. People called to dispute charges on their credit cards from things they didn’t remember signing