Facebook: 1 status update: “I’ve got a big job interview this week and I have a question since I haven’t done this in a while. Do you really have to print your resume out anymore? Can’t everyone pull it up on their phones?” Four likes, two comments. Comment 1, a friend from college: “Congrats on the job interview!” Comment 2, a friend of Elinor’s mother and a heavy Facebook user: “You don’t have to print out your resume, but I do think it’s a nice gesture.”
Twitter: 15 tweets, slightly more journalistically inflected than usual. Perhaps Elinor thought her future employers would be looking at her Twitter. Sample: “Thought-provoking article about waste treatment from @Mike_Moriarty_Journo. We need to know where our trash goes! #knowyourtrash.”
Instagram: 2 pictures. Picture 1: Elinor’s street taken from the top of her roof. It’s not a very beautiful vista, but it is dense. There is a series of ruddy tenements and the occasional brutalist apartment building. The trees look desiccated. Caption: “First time up on my roof this year. #pretty #NYCwinter #WinterIsComing.”
Picture 2: Mike and Elinor. It is from when they were in college, which you can tell from the lack of ostensible filter, Elinor’s American Apparel leotard, and Mike’s hat. In the picture, Elinor is kissing Mike on the cheek. He is blinking. Caption: “To my amazingly sweet, funny, kind boyfriend. Thank you for always getting me pizza at 3 in the morning, just because ‘I need it.’ Thank you for helping me cope with work and for letting me complain endlessly about my stress even when you have your own shit to do. And thank you for doing the dishes last night. Here’s to another year with my best friend.”
Elinor talked to Mike for the first time in October of senior year. Elinor was sitting in Starbucks, in a sweater that was always a little too wide, drinking a cinnamon sugar latte. She was studying for her History of Communications class and feeling guilty about the latte. Elinor loved food, and she was also a distracted, impulsive, and tetchy eater. While studying, she could eat an entire bag of Rold Gold pretzels like it was a pack of gum. She realized she wasn’t horribly fat, but she was in no way skinny either. At a certain point the year before, she’d realized she was developing an immutable second roll on her stomach.
Mike walked up to her table. There was an empty seat in front of her and he put his bag on it.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” he said. Elinor was a little surprised. She knew who Mike was, but they had never talked before.
“Of course,” said Elinor. “I’m Elinor by the way.”
“Mike.” Mike held out his hand. Elinor shook it, and Mike gave her a lugubrious smile. Then he went into his leather rucksack and took out a stack of legal notepads and laid them on the table. He also took out his History of Communications textbook and placed it carefully next to the notepads.
“You’re studying for History of Communications?” said Elinor. “Me too!” She held up her book.
“Cool,” said Mike.
“You know, I think I’ve seen you around before.” Elinor realized then she was not going to bother anymore with the pretense that she didn’t know who he was. People did that, but personally, she always felt like it was a little bit rude, or hypocritical or something.
“What year are you?” asked Mike.
“I’m a senior.”
“Me too! How come I don’t know you?”
“I don’t know!”
Mike chuckled.
“I like your honesty. Everyone else I have ever met would have acted like they didn’t actually know me but secretly they would have known me? I love that you didn’t do that. It’s so fucking shitty.”
“Oh thanks,” said Elinor. She became red. “Yeah, that’s so dumb.”
“Where do you think you have seen me?” he asked her, looking at her in an unblinking way. “I want to know.”
“I don’t know—around, I guess,” said Elinor, feeling a little uncomfortable. “We take this class together so maybe that’s it.”
“Oh yeah,” said Mike, looking, Elinor thought, slightly disappointed. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. He had sweat into the front of the hat slightly, but Elinor still thought he was handsome. He had small, determined features and well-cut clothing. Plus, she thought writing things on legal pads was kind of cool. Elinor just took notes on her laptop. “Do you like the class?”
“It’s okay. Do you?”
“The professor’s a fucking idiot.”
“Yeah,” Elinor agreed. When she thought about it, she didn’t like him much either. He spat when he talked. There were so many lectures about the female reporter who had dressed up like a mental patient and hid in a mental hospital and won a prize. Elinor had forgotten her name. She knew she was right about thinking this class was so boring. Elinor’s father said she often said things were boring when she didn’t understand them enough. That was why he made her go on the high school debate team, the biggest disaster of her life.
“I’m so glad you said that! I thought I was going nuts. Everyone likes him, even though he’s fucking crazy. There was this amazing infographic on Think Lab the other day that completely rebutted his lecture on Tuesday. I’ll send it to you, but essentially, it just traces the way freedom of the press evolved throughout history and how it’s contracting. It’s truly scary.”
“Wow,” said Elinor. Mike seemed very serious, and Elinor was rather impressed. She wished she sounded like that—finding granular information on Think Lab, a site she had only vaguely heard of, and then recalling it, as if it had somehow become part of her marrow. She studied and got good grades, but that was mere application. This guy sounded like he was really brilliant. “That’s so cool.”
“I kind of hate the Internet too,” said Mike. “Like, I go on and off Facebook. I’m not on Instagram. But I do read Think Lab.”
“I’ve totally heard of Think Lab.”
“I bet you love the Internet. I bet you’re always on Instagram. Hashtagging your pumpkin spice latte or something?”
“Ha-ha,” said Elinor, stung. Did she look really lame? Was that so lame to do, anyway? Because she had actually Instagrammed a latte, but like, two years ago, before it was a thing. And so many people she knew still did it. At least she wasn’t still doing it! “No way. I mean, I have an Instagram, but everyone does.”
“I bet it’s all lattes. Let me look at your Instagram.”
“No,” said Elinor. “Besides, you don’t even know my name. And I’m private. Maybe I won’t confirm you.”
“I’ll figure it out,” said Mike, smiling at her.
It was at this point that Elinor realized Mike was really different from any guy she had known before. For example, in her sophomore year, she’d dated one of the guys who lived below her in her apartment building. He was small and wore large shirts. He was friends with all the guys downstairs, but in the particular way men have, his roommates always treated him with a benign tolerance and no real affinity, sort of like he had always been invited at the last minute to fill in for someone else. He laughed very eagerly at most jokes and loved to play video games. They dated for only three months and they didn’t even break up. They just stopped hooking up one day like they had forgotten about each other. Mike could feel a surging, moralistic passion without humiliation. He could rescue her from her most potent fears about herself—the banality that she sometimes worried didn’t even have the virtue of a particular visual idiom. This is what Elinor desperately craved even though she wouldn’t have put it quite like that.
Mike and Elinor studied next to each other for the next two hours. At the end of it, Mike stood up and yawned.
“Well, I need to go to a meeting at the Quill,” he said. The Quill was the alternative magazine on campus. Mike, she vaguely remembered, was an editor there or something? She had tried to get on it her freshman year and they had rejected her. It wasn’t a big deal though; it was a very competitive process.
“Can I get your number though?”
“My number?” said Elinor.
“If you want to go over any of this stuff.”
“Okay,” said Elinor. She tried to hide her shock. He wanted to talk to her more about what stuff? She told him her number.
“I’ll text you,” said Mike. He put his hat back on his head, stuffed his notepads back into his rucksack, and walked out of the Starbucks.
“What did you end up doing on Friday?” asked Sheila. They were sitting in Sheila’s apartment watching some version of the Housewives franchise on a laptop with a plastic keyboard protector on top of it. Elinor had a fleece blanket wrapped in a complicated fashion around her legs. Sheila sat to the side of her in a hooded sweatshirt. There was a dark gray cast in the apartment, despite the fact that it was only 3:00 p.m. Pustules of water were clinging to the oblong windows of Sheila’s living room.
“Friday sucked. Well, it was sort of okay,” said Elinor. “Mike and I got in a kind of a fight.”
“Oh no!” Sheila plucked at her scrubs pants. On Tuesdays, Sheila worked mornings. This Tuesday, Elinor had gotten the afternoon off because Ramona was sick and her mother had decided to stay home with her.
“Yeah, we went to that party in Greenpoint.”
“I would’ve gone to that but I was fucking exhausted. What did you wear?”
“That green shirt thing.”
“I love that.”
“Do you think it’s cute? I feel like it makes me look fat.”
“No, it’s so cute.”
“Anyway,” said Elinor. She never really trusted Sheila’s sense of style. “I felt like Mike was ignoring me and I kind of yelled at him on the way home in the cab.”
“What did he do?”
“Well, I don’t know. I could have overreacted? A girl sat on his lap.”
“What the fuck? Were you pissed? I would have been so pissed.”
“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” said Elinor, irritated, though Sheila was agreeing with her. “He didn’t mean it. It was a joke or something.”
“Oh, okay.”
“I think I just misinterpreted it. He actually cried he felt so bad.”
“He cried?” said Sheila. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ralph cry, like ever.” Ralph was a guy Sheila had been in love with since they were eighteen years old. She had sex with him approximately six times a year and yet they still managed to have a dramatic relationship. Sheila was always yelling at Ralph in a large party full of strangers. Ralph was always texting Sheila at 3:00 a.m. with the word “Hey” but nothing else. He would date other women occasionally, and Sheila would look at those women on Facebook and Instagram and generate virulent insults about them that still managed to shock Elinor when she thought about them later.
“But I don’t know, I think I just felt bad because I didn’t know anyone at the party,” said Elinor. “I probably shouldn’t have yelled at him.”
“I think Mike’s just so sensitive,” said Sheila. “It’s kind of adorable.” When Sheila was in the communications school, she, at some point, had had a class with Mike. Ever since Elinor and Mike had started dating, in Elinor’s opinion, Sheila had seemed to appoint herself some kind of Mike expert, and Elinor had to work, constantly and without rest, to disabuse her of this notion.
“I don’t want to be a nagging girlfriend,” said Elinor, to close the subject with some finality.
“You’re not,” said Sheila. “I bet he’s just stressed out because of his job situation.”
“Well, Memo Points Daily called him in for an interview on Monday.”
“Oh my god! That’s cool. What will he do?”
“It’s a good job, I think? Mike says they will let him write. He has that fact-checking job but he hates it.”
“That’s cool,” said Sheila. They started watching Housewives in silence.
“Lisa Rinna is such a bitch,” said Sheila.
“I like her,” said Elinor. “It’s Kim that’s the bitch.”
“Kim’s more crazy.”
“But she’s also super bitchy.”
Kim was acting very drunk at a brunch and telling everyone they weren’t being supportive. Elinor and Sheila watched the scene together for a while.
“Did I tell you that Ralph just told me that he’s not coming to the party I’m having, and it’s my fucking birthday. You’re so lucky Mike’s not doing shit like that.”
“That’s true,” said Elinor. And she really was. “I wish I was less of a bitch.”
“You’re not a bitch.”
“Ha-ha,” said Elinor, not really laughing. She left fifteen minutes later. Both parties felt traumatized in a vague way. That was how they usually felt after a long, aimless period hanging out together. Still, they were best friends.
On the way back home, Elinor texted Mike about dinner. Mike took a full fifteen minutes to respond. “I was just going to get a piece of pizza. I’m at a coffee shop now #werking on my thing.” Then he sent an emoji of a pizza slice.
Elinor texted back that that was fine, although for some reason she couldn’t name, Mike’s tone in this missive made her nervous. Sometimes, she would sense imperceptible swings in Mike’s mood from very mundane-seeming text messages. This one, for example, included no particular endearments or invitation to get pizza with him. She could invite herself, of course, but would that make him think she wasn’t letting him work?
This was when she realized she had a missed call and a voice mail from a nonspecific Manhattan number. She wondered if it was her student loan, who was always calling her from different areas of the country like a well-traveled spy.
“Hello,” an older man’s voice said doubtfully into the phone. “It’s J. W. Thurgood, um, John Wallace Thurgood from the Journalism.ly. We got your name from Pam Johnson. Anyway, we want to interview you for an exciting new position at the Journalism.ly. Can you send your résumé, clips, et cetera to JW@journalismly.com and we can set you up for an interview in the next few weeks? Thanks for your time and we look forward to hearing from you.”