Again, but Better (13 page)

January 24, 2011

Mom and Dad,

My internship starts tomorrow. My boss’s name is Wendy, and she’s already the coolest. She said if things go well, I might get to write a piece about studying abroad in London for the magazine! I spent the morning researching the company to get a better feel for their posting style. This afternoon, I’m going to put together a list
of touristy things in London to try out these next few months. This way, if I get the chance to write that article, I’m prepared. Wish me luck!

XO,

Shane

P. S. I miss your cooking.

P. P. S. I like a boy. He has a girlfriend who isn’t me, and it’s the worst.

I’m outside the door of
Packed!,
jittery with freshly consumed caffeine pumping through my veins.

I glance at my phone again: 9:52
a.m. Eight minutes early. That should be fine. I push in the doorbell and step back as the buzzing sound blasts from the speaker.

Tracey the receptionist welcomes me in. She brings me to a little table outside the office kitchen and sets an old white MacBook on it. This is where I’m to sit. Then she speeds me around the wide-open space, introducing me to the employees. I try to take note of everyone’s
name, but we only exchange quick hellos, so it’s difficult (Donna, Janet, Declan, George—and Jamie?). They’re all trendy-looking, and they all have English accents.

Then I get a rundown of their kitchen–tea station. They have cool cubed sugar, a stainless steel electric kettle, ten different types of tea, and a chart pasted to the wall with everyone’s specific tea preferences. I’m to make tea
for whomever requests it. It’s a quick tour, and she finishes by leading me back to the little table with the white MacBook.

“So you can reach me on IM if you need me,” she adds before heading back to the front desk.

I carefully pull out the chair and sit. I open the MacBook and bring up iChat. Tracey’s name is there as my sole contact online.

For the rest of the morning, I obediently man my
station. Any time someone walks by my table, I sit up straighter, ready to be asked to make tea.
I can make you tea,
I think toward them,
ask me to make you tea!
But no one asks me for a cup of tea. They just walk on by and start making it for themselves. Don’t they know I’m here to make their tea?

I catch pieces of conversation about different cities around the globe as people go by, but not
enough to feel like I know what anyone’s working on. I watch the office breathe for hours, utterly clueless about how I should be spending my time. I instant message Tracey, asking her what she’d like me to work on, and she messages back:
I’ll let you know
. But what do I do in the meantime?

During high school and over breaks, I’ve always worked at my dad’s office (he’s a financial advisor). Every
morning, he has his assistant email me a list of things to do. It was mostly numbing, mindless work, but from that extreme mindlessness came some of my best ideas. I’d zone out and
plot stories in my head while inputting financial stats for hours. The thing is, I don’t want to zone out here. I want to zone in.

I love the cool, modern office environment. Indie, alternative music plays lightly
from Spotify on an unmanned computer at the editing station in the center of the room. The editing station is a group of five big Mac desktops grouped together. The cute, young male employee I noticed during the tour works over there. He’s pale and skinny, with square black-rimmed glasses and curly brown hair. I remember his name: Declan. Then there’s the pretty brown-skinned lady with long, flowing
locks who works at a desk adjacent to the editing bay: Donna. And across from her desk is I think the oldest man in here, George. He’s got pasty skin, round black-rimmed glasses, and a receding hairline. Across the room are two other desks positioned back to back. One is Janet’s, a petite black woman with cool red glasses and voluminous shoulder-length bronze curls, and the other is Jamie’s: a
posh, fake-tanned, might be in her forties, intimidating, tall woman with bleached, straight hair and bangs.

The boss, Wendy, stops by at the music computer every once in a while to switch up the tunes before returning to her office. This morning, she announced that she loved Neon Trees, and we’ve been listening to their music all day. Now I like them too.

At 3:30 p.m., Tracey finally comes
over to my table with a task. I straighten excitedly as she hands me a Post-it. It’s a grocery list. She wants me to pick up some groceries down at the supermarket near Covent Garden.

It’s not magazine-related in the slightest, but I happily get the groceries, eager to be helpful. When I return, Tracy tells me to search the internet for a creative-looking coatrack for the office. I spend the
rest of the afternoon gathering links to weird coatracks and emailing them over to Tracey. At 5:00 p.m., she gives me a bag full of packages and tells me I can go home after dropping them off at the post office.

My shoulders slump as I thump down the stairs and out the door. That was not what I expected. I felt more like a burden that no one knew what to do with today than any sort of assistant.
On the trek home, I try not to be disappointed. This was just the first day.

“I love my office!” Babe exclaims, as she drops a bag of food onto the kitchen table. “It’s covered in Disney-themed things. Everyone has little Disney stuffed animals on their desk. Oh Mylanta, it’s amazing!” The entire flat has congregated in the kitchen to discuss their first days at work. I just finished up the
shawarma I picked up on the way home; it’s not Shwednesday, but I was craving it.

“I have to go back in to work in an hour,” Atticus calls from the couch. He’s typing away on his laptop. Atticus is always moving, juggling, multitasking.

“I ran errands all day: food, dry cleaning, groceries.” Sahra sighs as she puts a pot of water on the stove.

“Yeah, I did data input on a computer,” Pilot adds
as he unwraps a Byron burger.

“I researched artistic coatracks for a good two hours,” I tell everyone. I glance over at Pilot sitting two seats away at the end of the table. He doesn’t meet my eyes.

“Coatracks?” Babe asks in disbelief.

I twist to look at her. “Yep, I really got an inside look at how a magazine is made.” Babe laughs.

“Sahra and I have decided we’re hitting a club in Soho this
Friday. You guys want to join?” Atticus asks.

“I’m staying in this weekend,” Babe answers.

“What about you?” Sahra points her wooden spoon at me.

I can’t help glancing at Pilot again. Why isn’t he saying anything? He always wants to do things. Right now, he’s concentrating intently on eating his burger.
Is he not going to come with us?
I look from Atticus to Sahra.

“Okay,” I answer.

1/28/11
8:30 p.m.

Days two and three at
Packed! For Travel!
went slightly better than day one. I genuinely want to learn, so on Wednesday
after 1.5 hours of panicked internal anguish, I got up—out of my seat and everything—with a plan. I traipsed around the office like an anxious kitten and quietly asked each employee if they would like a cup of tea. This led to mini conversations.

They would open with
something like: “Hi, how are you, darling?”

And I would come in with something brilliant like: “Hi, would you like a cup of tea?”

And they would return with an excited “Yes, please!” or “No, thank you!”

I made two cups of tea. One for Donna and one for Janet. I was super-nervous concocting the first cup. I mean, I’m American and they’re British. By default, they have higher tea standards. But
that chart in the tea station was a lifesaver. I’ve never used these sugar cube things before, and I’m very amused by them. They should make sugar stars! And other shapes! Sugar octagons!

On Thursday, all the employees acknowledged me with a “Hi, Shane!” or “Morning, Shane!” when they came in for the day. They know my name. I’m one step closer to learning how every detail of their job works.
I did a tea sweep at 11:00 a.m. and then another at 3:00 p.m. because that’s about the time I start finding it difficult to keep my eyes open at my lonely little island table.

After the morning tea circuit, Tracey gave me a task that was vaguely related to the company. They ordered five hundred canvas tote bags with the
Packed! For Travel!
logo
on them. I had to go through them all to sort out
which ones were printed correctly and which ones were printed slightly crooked, or “wonky” as the British call it. I’m learning so many new words.

At the end of day three, Donna (Irish Breakfast, one sugar, extra milk), got ready to leave, and the whole office came alive. They stood, gave her hugs, and wished her luck on her trip to Moscow. She’s going to research travel ideas for
Packed!
Part
of her job is going to different cities, staying at different places, and exploring different attractions.

Today’s Friday, so this morning I had class and wrote another sad postcard to my parents to add to my collection. And oh, it’s been five days since Pilot and I have had a conversation. It’s almost like he’s avoiding me.

I’ve been hanging around the kitchen every night after
Packed!
to work
on various writing projects (the Paris blog post and trying to really flesh out an outline for a novel idea about adopted twins in college who learn one of their professors is their birth dad). When I walk into the kitchen, if Pilot’s already there, he suddenly has to leave. If I’m already in there, and he’s coming in, he just grabs something and heads out again.

Babe’s been spending a lot of
time on her bed watching various editions of
Cinderella
. I caught her watching
Ever After
yesterday, and this morning she was watching the Brandy one. I tried to get her to reconsider coming out tonight, but she says she still isn’t up for it. I AM up for it. Tonight, I stop dwelling on Pilot.

I check my appearance in our full-length mirror one last time and straighten out my high-waisted black
skirt. I paired it with a plain red crop top today, and, inspired by Babe, I painted my lips a matching shade of ruby. Avril Lavigne’s new song “What the Hell” plays on repeat from Sawyer over on the table by the giant window. Sahra’s putting the finishing touches on her makeup. She’s wearing a loose, cream-colored dress that falls right above her knees with blue dangly earrings and cream heeled
boots.

“Ready?” she asks in her usual assertive tone. I’m getting used to it now, and I’m starting to respect her for it. She’s confident in a way that I’m only pretending to be, and I don’t think I’m even pretending up to her standards.

“Yep!” I say, pulling a stained finger out of my mouth and popping the top back onto my lipstick. I zip up my boots and grab my purse. Sahra’s first out the
door. I glance back at Babe. She’s wearing headphones and watching the animated original Disney
Cinderella.
I wave goodbye, trying to catch her eye, but she’s engrossed in the film.

We take the Tube to central London. Sahra leads Atticus and me through the streets and to a bright red bar in Soho. The place pulses with music and laughter. We grab drinks (I order a glass of red wine), and the three
of us sit on one of the red trendy-looking couches lining the walls. At first we try to chat, but it’s too loud. Atticus perseveres, trying hard to talk over the music, but despite his efforts, our conversations die quickly. There’s a mildly crowded dance floor in the center of the room. The DJ’s playing Top 40 pop music, and after a few conversationless minutes, I’m itching to get up and move
to the beat. I tap my foot against the floor to Rihanna’s “Who’s that Chick.”

“Want to dance?” I ask.

“Why not?” Atticus agrees.

Sahra shrugs. “Sure.”

I give myself to Rihanna, twirling and throwing my arms around. Wine sloshes over onto my wrist, but I embrace it, cackling. Sahra dances more conservatively, sticking to one or two basic back-and-forth motions. Atticus busts out hilarious old-fashioned
nerdy-looking moves. After a few songs, someone taps me on the shoulder. I whirl around to find an attractive black man in a blue button-up shirt.

I smile at him. “Hi!”

“Hey! My friend would like to dance with you,” he shouts over the music, pointing over his shoulder to another guy. Behind him, a broad-shouldered, freckly, red-faced man built like a rugby player is looking at me.
Are we in
middle school?

“Um, okay,” I say. Rugby Guy walks over and the two men join our little dance circle. Eventually Atticus goes off to get a drink by the bar. Sahra stays with me and the two guys.

When we’ve danced for ages, Rugby Guy asks if he can talk to me for a few minutes away from the floor. After checking with Sahra via eye contact—and receiving an aggressive
go!
head nod—Rugby Guy and
I find an open spot at the bar. I spot Atticus at the other end, talking to an attractive man-bun guy.

“So, this is really fun! What do you do?” Rugby Guy talk-yells over the music.

I turn away from Atticus to respond. “I, um, I write! What about you?”

“Like books or articles? I’m a lawyer!”

“Cool, um, both, I guess.” I take a sip of whatever wine managed to survive the dance session.

He
stares at me for few beats. It starts to feel awkward, so I fumble to make conversation. “Um so, what are your thoughts on
Legally Blonde
? Was that an accurate portrayal of law school?” I try to smile.

His face lights up. “You are so cute.”

He doesn’t say anything else, so I laugh nervously and pull on a British accent. “Um, so, what kind of lawyer are you?”