Love Interest

“We can cut it if you want,” she says. “But to be honest, our subscribers tend to find the personal lives of on-camera talent just as entertaining.”

Alex nods while I do a mental checklist of every personal detail I’ve absorbed about all my favorite entertainers. I hope Amy from @unironicliterarybitch got an A on her senior thesis. And that @gypseaswholesomelife figures out if she’s gluten intolerant.

Speaking of personal lives—

“What did you study?” I ask Alex. “That’s a good question, right, Saanvi? What majors got us here?”

“Sure,” she says.

“I double majored in entrepreneurship and digital media,” Alex says.

Which means: All along, even back in college, he wanted this. The whole time, he was figuring out how to be good at it.

Something cracks open inside me, and air rushes in. I am starting to know him, and it feels like … relief. Like an inevitability I wasn’t ever going to be able to stop from happening.

“Let me guess.” Alex laces his fingers together, pinning me with a knowing look. “Finance?”

“What gave me away.”

“The necklace you’re wearing is engraved with ‘It’s Accrual World.’”

My hand flutters to my neck, and I fiddle with the gag gift Miriam gave me for my last birthday. Alex’s gaze drops to my neck, too. He frowns and looks away, twirling his Topo Chico bottle.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask, nodding at his pizza. He’s eaten only three-quarters of one slice compared to my two and a half.

He shrugs. “Adderall screws with my appetite.” Glancing at the crew, he adds, “Can I say that on camera, Saanvi?”

“That’s PG compared to what’s ingested on Wall Street,” she mutters, more focused on Eric’s video frame than the Real Us. “Especially if it’s prescribed.”

“It’s prescribed.”

“Guys, don’t say anything useful right now, something’s wrong with Eric’s camera.”

“ADHD?” I ask Alex, ignoring Saanvi.

“Yes.” He shakes his head, smirking. “Don’t say it.”

“Don’t say what?”

“That finding that out makes perfect sense for me.”

I bite my bottom lip. “You were right.”

“Yeah?” He grins, crossing his arms over his chest. “Regarding?”

“I didn’t know anything about you.”

Alex’s smile drops. After a beat, he says, “You’re starting to.” His eyes catch and hold on to mine, and it feels like he’s withholding my oxygen. “Here. I’ll give you one more thing. I’m an Enneagram seven.”

“Okay.” I tilt my head, appreciative but confused. “Sorry, I don’t know my number.”

“Should we do Enneagram tests during our next seminar?” His eyes brighten. “And then, as a follow-up, we could get a comedy contributor to write a spread on how to work with each Enneagram type—but make it snappier and funnier than what’s on the internet now.”

“You really do shit ideas.”

“Casey, say that again for the camera, but less gross,” Saanvi says.

“You are an idea factory,” I restate, never dropping my eyes from his. “But I don’t want to know my Enneagram, because I refuse to believe my personality can be boiled down to a number. Besides, who says my work personality is the same as my regular one, anyway?”

Alex considers. “Wouldn’t that get exhausting, though? Showing up as someone else to work every day?”

I get a flash of Dad the way I drew him in crayon when I was a kid. Me, Dad with his guitar, ghost-Mommy, plus my one-eyed corgi, Pirate. I colored a million of those still lifes during aftercare, at church, on road trips to visit Dad’s family in Arkansas. Now I see the drawings the way Dad must have seen them then: cookie-cutter portrayals of a family man who worked in a total boys’ club environment where everyone assumed he was straight years after he’d self-acknowledged he wasn’t.

Try as I might, memory doesn’t serve me on the exact day Jerry entered my life. He just … bleeds into the past somewhere in the middle of my fourth-grade year. I remember him planting rose bulbs in our weed-ridden, overgrown flower beds. I went outside to loiter, pleased when he gave me his gloves and I stuffed my tiny hands into them, gripping the dirt. We didn’t talk a lot in the beginning, and looking back, I think Jerry was treating me like he treated his rose bulbs. Tentative, careful nurturing was what it took to get them to bloom.

Eventually, I started asking him questions about plants. Then about him. A few years later, about who he was to my dad.

“I can only tell you who your dad is to me,” Jerry answered. “Someone I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

It was that simple for him. That straightforward. But for my dad, it was a bit more complicated. It was the reality of his workplace in the early two thousands, and for years, he showed up as someone else to work every day.

“No,” I say to Alex, shaking my head softly. “You’re right, actually. That would suck.”

The conversation pauses while he watches me, his eyebrows furrowed, very obviously trying to parse through the thoughts behind my expressive face.

“What floor do you have to visit to get the best cup of coffee in our building?” Saanvi throws out.

“It’s Well, the life coach company on the twelfth floor,” I say quickly. “They’ve got a drip machine that has this gold setting—”

“Nope.” Alex shakes his head. “It’s that app start-up three floors below yours. They have the fancy Breville where you can save your drink of choice under your name. And a fridge dedicated to milk.”

“You’re both wrong,” Sara pipes in. “The editor in chief of Frame has an assistant who used to be a barista. In Italy.”

“Settling this debate,” Saanvi whispers, “would make for a fantastic video concept.”

It goes on like that for another twenty minutes. We talk about print versus online content, our favorite and most loathsome parts of our jobs. When the subject drifts, Saanvi always pulls us back on course. It’s silly nothingness, but it’s fun. And despite the cameras, and constantly being scared of saying the wrong thing because these are my literal coworkers, and even though I’m trying to eat, and chew, and swallow, and talk with a clean mouth while also suppressing some seriously powerful burps from the Topo Chico, I realize this is easy.

Which is, in a word, strange. It usually takes more effort on my part to make myself come across that way.

Eventually, we pack up and head back to the office. I’ve got no clue if the team got what they needed, no clue how I’ll come across on the other side of those cameras. But the universe is out to play, because if that whole experience could have had a grand, ridiculous finale, Alex and I give it one on the escalator down.





CHAPTER NINE


All things considered, the spewing thing is pretty funny.

I come around to it the next day, watching the footage over Andre’s shoulder. More accurately, it’s the first thirty seconds of the video draft he’s already cobbled together.

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