Sasha grew up in Los Angeles, and her hatred for the cold knows no bounds. She bundles up in sixteen layers as soon as it dips below fifty degrees and stays in her cocoon of coats, scarves, and good fleece leggings until April. But today, she’s standing there in her sharp orange blazer and dark fitted jeans, no hat, no scarf, shaking in her trendy but well-lined Canada Goose winter boots. I enjoy living in a snow globe, but Sasha hates it. Her arms are wrapped around herself, teeth chattering. Even her waist-length dreads look frozen.
“You okay?” I ask, hurrying over to her and unwrapping my scarf from my neck to offer it to her. “Where’s your coat? You get mugged or something?”
“Did you not get my text?” Sasha says, taking my scarf and grabbing me by the elbow.
I haven’t told Sasha that I still keep my phone off most days, only turning it on when absolutely necessary. She knows that was a thing I did right after the funeral, but she doesn’t know it’s still a thing.
“No,” I say instead. “You know I never hear my phone on the train—”
“Shit’s going down at the office.”
“What?”
“Hurry, it’s cold as hell and we can’t be late for this meeting,” Sasha says, rushing me through the turnstile.
“I don’t have any meetings until ten thirty,” I protest.
“Wrong,” she says.
Sasha and I have only been coworkers for a few years, but we’ve been close friends for more than a decade. We met at a party when we were both still relatively new to the city—she was a shivering transplant from California, I was a sort-of local trying to find my way around the city. I’d just finished a graduate program in marketing at Michigan and had returned to the area to try to launch my career. It was my first time living in Chicago proper, though I grew up less than an hour away from the city.
We hit it off right away and started exploring the city together. We discovered we were both diehard Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, which came in handy when the weather got too cold for us to want to do anything but binge our favorite show. We both loved our gin martinis extra dirty, preferred savory over sweet, and loved nothing more than making a whole meal out of an array of appetizers: salty, cheesy, deep-fried. We both worked in advertising and had mixed feelings about being really good at convincing people to buy things they might not actually need.
We bonded over our miserable dating lives and our wholesome childhoods. Sasha Green was the daughter of two psychiatrists in LA, while I was the product of a high school physics teacher and a real estate agent in suburban Chicago. Sasha was the iconic best friend I never had in high school or college. We finished each other’s sentences and joked that we shared the same brain. It felt like ours was a fated friendship, meant to be.
Plus, we were both Jewish—something that I didn’t initially assume, since apparently the Ashkenormativity (aka the default assumption that all American Jews are of white European descent) was strong with me back then. I was stunned when she invited me to a seder at her apartment. Turns out her mom’s Sephardic and Ashkenazic, and her dad was raised in the Black Baptist church but converted to Judaism. Sasha was not only Jewish but also had the same damn bat mitzvah portion that I did. It was truly basheret: a match made in heaven.
Sasha was the one who told me about the opening at Mercer & Mercer when I was looking for a bigger agency. She’d been an account executive there for several years, and had some pull. I was working for a cute boutique firm, doing marketing and copywriting and soup-to-nuts services for small clients. I loved it, but as I hit my mid-thirties, I was ready for something that was a little less “cute” and a little more “matches contributions to a 401(k).”
Sasha gave me the heads-up about the senior copywriting job at M&M before the position was even posted. I applied early, even though I felt underqualified. I called my father for a pep talk.
You’ve got this, Evie, he assured me.
It’s what he always told me, no matter what. And while sometimes he was wrong—I didn’t get every job, every audition, every opportunity I went after—every time he said it, I felt like at least maybe it wasn’t impossible.
So I sold the hell out of myself at all the interviews, and got the job. For the last three years I’ve been working my ass off, sometimes putting in ten-or eleven-hour days. I still feel sort of middle of the pack at the office. Not particularly special, selected for promotions like Sasha, or beloved by my supervisors like our favorite coworker, Bryan. I’m barely on the radar for anyone with any real influence at the agency. One of the senior executives still calls me Neve, having misheard my name on day one. She was far too powerful for anyone to correct her that day, let alone at this point.
But my salary is solid; I’ve actually been able to pay down my student loans and even start beefing up my modest savings account. It’s been good. Every other area of my life could use improvement, but I’m not looking for any big changes on the job front. Which is why the look on Sasha’s face this morning is making me very, very nervous.
“There’s a meeting at nine,” Sasha says. “All staff. Email went out at eight thirty. Seriously, how do you not keep up with your email while you’re on the train?”
“What’s the meeting?” I ask, sidestepping her question. I don’t want her giving me any more static about how much I still avoid my phone.
“Something big. Someone from corporate flew in for it.”
This excerpt is from the eBook edition.
