I clear my throat. I suddenly feel unbearably alone.
“It drives me mad,” Miyuki says, turning to look pointedly at Anya. “Absolutely crazy. They use your expensive stuff and you get the zits?”
Anya winks subtly at her; another pang of loneliness rips through me.
“Right.” I try to drag myself back to the topic at hand; Barry is about to appear at the window and I’m out of time. I’m officially not allowed to steal any more of it. “That could work. There’s a whole host of randomly allocated awareness days we could try and pin it to—”
“You could hide it,” Sophie says from my shoulder.
“What?”
“You could hide the moisturizer. If it’s that ugly, you might as well have fun with it, right? Stash it all over the country, run a competition to find it, see if the public can hide it too. Then you could run a story with research about how many people steal other people’s skin care, and the mantra could be Skin Care You’ll Want to...”
“...Hide,” I finish in amazement as Barry comes in through the door.
Sophie beams at me—no apparent snark that I can detect—and now I can see more than just the top half of her face, I’m extremely worried I’ve been reading her tone completely wrong since the moment I started here.
“Umm, Barry?” Anton’s mouth stretches around his entire head like a pair of sports sunglasses. “I don’t mean to be a party pooper or anything, but I think it’s my duty to let you know that Cassandra just hijacked my meeting. Like, I booked this room weeks ago. It seems unfair. She rarely attends or makes an effort and then she comes in and takes over, and it just seems very arrogant.”
“Like she thinks she’s the most important person in the room,” Jessica chips in helpfully. “I mean, she’s wearing sunglasses inside. And always these colored jumpsuits, like she thinks she’s a celebrity. Which is crazy because she’s barely an account manager and she’s, like, in her late thirties.”
“I’m thirty-one,” I correct sharply. “You’re head of Human Resources. You should probably know that.”
Barry folds his arms and looks at me and I think I’m about to be fired again.
Four times in one day: impressive by any standards.
“Sorry. Again.” Then I turn to Sophie. “Thank you.”
She opens her mouth, and I close my eyes.
Undo.
“Hey,” Anya says as we all file out of the meeting room, fifth brainstorm finally—thank Zeus and all of Olympia—over forever. “Cassie. Did you say that you wanted to brief me and Miyuki on SharkSkin after lunch?”
Yawning, I pause from pushing my wheelie chair back to my desk.
By my rough calculations, I’ve now been awake more than thirty-eight hours, and every cell in my body feels like it’s been stitched together with dental floss. I can’t remember if I’ve eaten on this round, or hydrated, or have been to the toilet. I’ve also briefed both Anya and Miyuki in detail three times now, but obviously they don’t remember any of it. You’d think all the rabid flirting would have left some kind of mark on their subconsciousness, but apparently it’s evaporated.
“No,” I say smoothly. “Thank you.”
“But—”
“No, Anya. I’ve chosen a different team.”
With a faint, irritating sensation that I’ve forgotten something, I return to my desk and watch Sophie stick a finger tentatively up her nose. Narrowing my eyes, I watch more intently. There’s a tiny sparkly stud in her right nostril that I’ve never noticed before, and it suddenly occurs to me that maybe she’s not consuming her own body mucus: she’s just rotating the stud.
“Sophie.” I sit down. “Would you like to be on the SharkSkin campaign?”
“Really?” Her eyes become spherical. “Oh my goodness, yes, please. I’ve been hinting for weeks, Cassie, but I didn’t think you’d got it. I was like, I think I’m just annoying her. I actually said to my boyfriend last night, I think Cassandra definitely doesn’t like me. He was like, she sounds like a bit of a bitch, so don’t worry about it, but I said you’re not, you’re just supersmart and laser-focused, and I was right!”
Well, that’s embarrassing. Hints received: literally none at all.
Her boyfriend may have a point.
“Sophie,” I say abruptly, frowning as a thought occurs to me, “if I was to, just for instance, be abruptly fired in the middle of the office without warning, how would you respond to this news?”
Sophie thinks about it carefully, as if it’s a completely normal question to ask your colleague on a Friday afternoon. “I think I’d probably say, ‘Oh shit! They haven’t fired you? That’s awful. I’m sure we will all miss you so much.’”
Yup: there’s no sarcasm. She absolutely means it.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“What for?”
“Nothing.” I smile at her. “Glad to have you on board.”
17
I always wait with my whole body.
It’s a three-dimensional physical experience: me, suspended in time as if hanging from space by my knicker elastic. Everything warps—gets stretched out and transparent like cling film pulled tight—until I start to feel time filling every organ.
On Saturday morning, I begin waiting for my second date with Will the moment I open my eyes. I wait for him while I swing my feet out of bed and wiggle my toes in my fluffy rug; I wait while I shrug on my chick dressing gown and check that nobody else is up. I wait while I shuffle sleepily to the quiet kitchen, and I wait while I make myself coffee and banana porridge. I wait while I clean it up, while I shower, wash my hair, dry it, style it; I wait while I carefully apply my weekend makeup. I wait while I select my outfit, a floral silk T-shirt and gold high-waisted trousers, because that’s what I wore to brunch with Will the first time: he said I looked phenomenal and ideally I would like him to say it again.
I wait while I get on the train and sit there, curiously watching my immobile face in the window reflection, and I wait while I walk slowly to the brunch café.
I wait while I choose exactly the same red booth seat.
I wait and I wait and I wait until time stops and every cell of me begins to feel tired and bleached, as if I was once drawn in bright color and waiting has faded me into pastels, like bright sunlight.
With just ten minutes to go before Will arrives, I remember to hop up and look at the blackboard menu on the wall. I didn’t like what I had last time at all—the strawberries on my pancakes were mushy; I had to pick them all off and fold them in a napkin when Will was in the toilet—so if nothing else, I’d like to use my time-travel skills to select a less high-maintenance breakfast.
Still waiting, I stare at the board and assess my options.
Brunch is a particularly dangerous meal for me: one wrong move, and the morning is totally ruined. Bananas are usually safe, but I’ve been known to involuntarily spit a squishy one onto a restaurant table, so it’s still a risk. Bacon and sausage are stylized corpses, so that’s an immediate rejection. Egg is the slimy period of a chicken, so nope. I don’t like anything too crunchy, or too slippery, or too fluffy, or too wet, or too dry, and I don’t like my foods touching each other, so it’s normally a rush to separate them when they get here. I can sometimes get away with a pancake as long as the syrup comes on the side, but avocado on toast is a full liability: if it’s brown, or stringy, or slimy, or has simply been sitting on top of the toast for more than two minutes, it doesn’t even get touched.
The guilt I feel about the money I spend on food I haven’t actually eaten is overwhelming: it’s definitely more than on rent.
I’m just contemplating dry toast, jam in a pot—three options, so I can examine the frogspawn quality of each flavor—when I feel sharp pain running down the whole right side of my body. Frowning, I turn slightly. An older lady with gray hair in a neat bun is standing right next to me, also staring at the menu. And I mean right next to me. She’s not touching, but she’s so close her personal gravitational field feels like it’s made out of hot needles.
Politely, I clear my throat, step slightly away and try to refocus on the menu.
She moves toward me to get a better look at it too.
I step away, a little more purposefully.
She moves toward me.
Shooting her a furious glance, I take a dramatically big step to the right and try to stay calm while my throat begins to close in panic. I can feel her body heat. The tiny space between us is starting to crackle. My entire body now hurts. Why do people always do this? What is wrong with them? I can’t buy a cheese sandwich in Sainsbury’s without a total stranger standing so close I can smell what they use as shower gel.
As if tied to me by a string, the woman moves closer to me yet again and I promptly lose my shit.
“Could you please get away from me?”
“Excuse me?” She bristles like an offended porcupine. “What did you just say to me, young lady?”