I blink at my work colleagues. I don’t know exactly how to feel: touched that they’ve noticed my work-attire schedule, embarrassed that I’m now very clearly wearing yesterday’s sex clothes or horrified at the way this topic has veered into horribly unprofessional territory so quickly.
“Can we stop talking about my underwear at work, please?”
I’d also point out that I’m not a six-year-old girl, but Barry has just moved his hands slightly and I can now see the picture on his mug: a cartoon deer, jumping away from an arrow. It’s so old the entire image is faded and scratched, but you can still see the words Did You Myth Me? scrawled underneath.
A flicker of white electricity runs quickly from one side of my head to the other, as if I’ve been struck by Zeus himself. Stay calm, Cassandra. Remember, you’re at work. Stay humble and respectful and professional and—
“Barry.” My voice is tight. “Is that my mug?”
“Oh.” My boss studies it with infuriating nonchalance. “I don’t know. Is it?”
“I will rephrase for clarity.” Breathing hard, I lurch to my feet. Electricity runs between my ears again, and I feel my brain sizzle. “That is my mug, Barry. Why are you drinking out of my mug?”
My breath is coming hard and fast now: a steam train at full pelt.
The entire office has now gone silent, but I don’t care, I will rip the world apart, I will turn them to stone, that is my mug, it lives on my desk, it belongs to me, everyone knows that, it comes with me everywhere and how dare he—
“OH MY GOD,” I yell as Barry inexplicably goes to take another sip. “GET YOUR LIPS OFF MY FUCKING MUG!”
Bursting into flames, I rip it out of his hands and cradle it like a furious mama bear with her tiny cub. Hot tea goes all over my hands and chest but I barely feel it. Is my mug okay? Is it ruined forever? Can I wash it with toilet bleach? Will I ever be able to look at it again without thinking of Barry?
“Umm,” Sophie says nervously over the top of our computers. “I think we have a new cleaner, Cassie. She moved all the mugs from our desks to the kitchen. So maybe that’s why there was a bit of a mix-up?”
Anger sizzling, I spin to look around the office. Every single face is turned toward me and the color they’re producing as a group is extremely unpleasant: a kind of sludgy, icky brown.
At times like this, I can totally see why I’m so unlikable.
I’m not a big fan of me right now either.
“Oh,” I say. “I see.”
“Let’s have a chat in my office, shall we?” Barry says sharply, and yeah, this particular firing is definitely my fault.
“—think someone new must be start—”
“Hold that thought,” I tell Sophie, jumping up and running to the kitchen.
I get there just in time. My boss is casually perusing the open cabinet—a king surveying his kingdom—and I have to fight yet another identical flicker of white-hot rage: you want tea, buy your own bloody mug, Barry.
“Whoops,” I say, taking my mug out of his hand. “How did that get in there?”
Then I run back to my desk and put it safely in a drawer.
“Sorry,” I say in relief to Sophie. “Where were we?”
The first time I lived this week, I spent most of it in the toilets.
While I think everyone can agree I’m not a PR star, Selling-In is where I really do the opposite of shine. I have a long list of journalists I’m expected to speak to and convince to run my story. This takes at least an hour per phone call: three minutes to talk to them, and fifty-seven minutes to stare weepily at the script I’ve typed up and stuck to my computer. I slur and I stammer, my phone feels like a hand grenade that could go off at any moment, and after every call I have to lock myself in the loo to either cry or experience some lava-hot anxiety diarrhea.
If I’m really lucky, this gets pointed out loudly by one of my colleagues.
Little by little, I fall apart.
By the middle of a Selling-In week, everything hurts all the time: light, sound, smell, temperature, the texture of my own clothes on my skin. I cower in dark corners when everyone else is in meetings. I stop being able to use public transport. I stop being able to eat or sleep. Eventually, I stop being able to speak at all. By the weekend, I am so sick I have to spend it in bed, just like I did after a full week of school.
So when Barry accused me of not being a People Person, he wasn’t wrong.
Sometimes I barely feel like a person, singular.
This time, Sophie watches me make my first call—“H-h-h-h-hi, th-th-this is C-C-C—”—and leans over her computer.
“Hey, Cassandra. Would you mind terribly if I make all the phone calls?”
I stare at her. “Uh?”
“It’s just I really love talking to journalists.” She twiddles with a lock of her chaotic red hair, blue eyes even larger than normal. “I’m building connections that will last my whole career, right? So you’d be doing me a huge favor. I’ll do the talking, and you do the emailing. Deal?”
I stare at her for a few seconds. “B-but B-Barry won’t let me.”
“Barry doesn’t need to know.” Sophie shrugs easily. “He comes into the office, does his little walk around, you pick up the phone and make a pretend phone call. Okay? Problem solved.”
It takes me at least fifteen seconds to work out what she’s doing and—when it finally clicks—I feel my chin crumple and I have to swivel away and pretend to be abruptly fascinated by the watercooler.
I love her.
I love her with every cell in my strangely sensitive body. Every single mean thing I have ever thought about Sophie I now officially retract: the way she slams her keyboard with her fingers is perfection.
“Okay,” I manage, straightening my face and swiveling back. “I guess I could go with that plan. If it would help you, obviously.”
“Oh, it would.” She nods vigorously. “We’re a team, right?”
At the word team, my chin abruptly crumples again and my bottom lip pops out. What the hell is wrong with me? I’m nearly a decade older than this girl. Why does it feel like she’s somehow mothering me?
I swivel away, straighten my face, then swivel back.
“Yes, Sophie. We’re a team.”
By Wednesday, I have spoken to literally nobody and it is glorious. Every now and then, I take off my noise-canceling headphones just to witness Sophie chat happily away to strangers. No script. No stammering. No sweating or crying or running desperately to the toilet. It is truly a marvel, like watching Bellerophon slay the Chimera.
Admittedly, we do very nearly get caught by Barry.
“Hello,” I say to the speaking clock. Every hour or so, I make a fake call just so one of my colleagues doesn’t dob me in. “This is Cassandra Dankworth, calling from Force It PR.” Sophie widens her huge eyes at me, so I smile and widen mine back. I have no idea what we’re communicating to each other, but it is so lovely to be included. “I was just wondering if you received the press release about SharkSkin? Oh, you did? You’ll run it? Cool. Bye now.”
“Fawcett,” Barry says as I put the phone down.
Jumping six inches, I swivel toward him. “Uh—”
“My name is Barry Fawcett.” He scowls at me with his little bulldog face. “Fawcett PR. Can you say Fawcett for me?”
“Fawcett.”
“Because it sounds a lot like you are saying Force It PR, Cassandra, and that is extremely not funny.”
Busted. I totally was. “Sorry, sir.”
“Don’t let it happen again.” Barry walks off in a huff and apparently Sophie’s straining baby blues meant Barry is standing directly behind you, except they look a lot like how’s it going? and also it’s nearly lunchtime and also this journalist is boring, so how am I supposed to tell the difference?
We’re just giggling about it when my phone beeps:
Still up for tonight? W xx
I stop giggling. Tonight?
“Hey.” I lean up so I can see over my computer. “It is Wednesday, right?”
“Yup.” Sophie nods with admirable certainty. “Sure is.”
I check my jumpsuit again (black), then double-check my calendar—we’re definitely midweek—and I am now extremely confused. Our curry date is on Friday. Will hasn’t technically asked me yet, but that’s okay: he asks tomorrow morning. I remember it very clearly because I was starting to panic that our date hadn’t gone as well as I’d thought. We’ve exchanged a few texts over the last day and a half, but I’m almost certain there’s been nothing at all about tonight.
Disoriented, I scroll through our texts to look for clues.
Panic starts to mount.
Where have all our texts gone this time?
And it’s only as I scroll back with increasing freneticism that I suddenly realize: I’ve been tweaking time over the last two days. Not a lot—a burnt piece of toast, forgotten house keys, last night I fell asleep during a TV show and decided to just erase time instead of looking for the remote control—so I didn’t give it much thought. But perhaps I should have, because have I accidentally erased my texts with Will again?
Quickly, I type:
Of course! Remind me again what we’re doing? C xx
A few minutes later: