Most mornings her boss—soon mine—didn’t arrive until eleven. I read The New York Observer, which was slipped under the door early enough for me to re-fold it and wonder what people up and down Manhattan were doing to be worth ten, twenty, two hundred times more than I was. I was a month out of art school and had decided, too late to apply for fall programs, that I wanted to be an architect. Gillian was a month out of school, too, but she’d studied in the city and interned for a year.
Our office did not have Internet. We had a sour air conditioner in the painted-shut window between Gillian’s and my desks. On the phone for records of utility lines under construction sites where we would never be able to afford apartments, we lifted paint off the sill with our fingernails. I’d started it. On dry days the flakes were brittle; on rainy days they curled off like skin.
“What’ll we do when we meet?” I asked.
“One of us will have to quit,” she said.
I have a story up at Fwriction:Review about office crushes, class envy, and New York in the summer. Many thanks to Danny Goodman for giving it a good home!
(via frontofbook)
