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Chris slept peacefully next to me, bathed in the early September sun that seeped in from the crack in the curtains. Visually, he was a work of art. When he was resting, the lines of his face set perfectly. But while my eyes were being treated to wonder and beauty, my ears were having a very different experience. Chris snored loudly. His full body rumbled with each breath in, but it was something I could sleep through. Admittedly, waking up to it was jarring, but it was the sort of thing you tolerate with a partner. It wasn’t malicious nor something they could help.
And I also hoped that his snoring could chase that aforementioned nightmare away, but there had been no luck on that front, not that I told Chris that.
But despite how loud his snoring was, my phone’s vibration–the soft hum of its shake–cut through the noise and woke me. But even with that shock, I took my time with it. My eyes slowly drifted open, and I groaned softly enough to make my displeasure known without waking Chris up. I was determined not to disturb him as this was the most restful sleep he had gotten in a while. The Stella Maris students had finally arrived and filled out the ranks of his restaurants, freeing him from all the shifts he had been covering. But the exhaustion he had earned still lingered. It would be a while before he had fully recovered. And this phone call didn’t concern him.
Even before I grabbed my phone, I knew it was Erika calling me. All I had were my instincts, but they felt incredibly strong right then. I felt it. But why she would be calling, I couldn’t be sure. I'd been fairly diligent about sending edits back. There should have been nothing outstanding on my end. Also why would she be calling this early?
It was that curiosity that silenced the usual hesitation to answer her. But with Chris still resting, my response time was delayed. The first call turned over and went to voicemail, but Erika was never the sort to leave a message. Instead, she hung up and gave it a moment as I slowly climbed out of bed and started towards the hallway. My foot had just stepped over the threshold when the buzzing started again, signaling Erika’s second attempt (out of three) at calling.
But I was ready for it now and picked it up on the second ring.
“Hi Erika,” I said, knowing that my tiredness was seeping into the phone.
I didn’t think it mattered. It was early enough in the day that I had a right to be as tired as I wanted. Or so I thought.
So I asked, “Why are you calling this early?”
For a moment, she said nothing. Her uncharacteristic silence informed me that I had asked a stupid question.
“Mia, it’s got to be noon there. We're in the same time zone now.”
My mouth fell open as I tried to muster some sort of rebuttal, but nothing came to me. My mind had gone blank. I pulled the phone away from my ear for a second to stare at the screen with a dull horror burning in my stomach. Despite my dismay, Erika was right. It was noon, and I was supposed to meet Professor Evory for lunch at 12:30. There was no way I could make it on time.
“Shit,” I whispered, still reluctant to swear in front of anyone despite how often I had heard Erika do it.
I put the phone back to my ear just as Erika was asking if I was okay.
“Yeah, I just overslept, and I had a lunch appointment.”
“Uh huh,” she said, hesitantly.
I could cut the skepticism in her voice with a knife, as the expression goes, but then again, the skepticism was so thick and well-fortified that even a knife couldn’t have cut through it. There was just no level beyond the “knife” one that I could reference right then.
“You ‘overslept’ just because?” she asked.
She was fishing. I could tell, but I chose to indulge her. “I overslept because my boyfriend came over,” I explained, grimacing at the potential innuendo.
This wasn’t the sort of thing I liked to talk about or imply, especially with a professional connection, but as much as I hated making those implications, I knew where this conversation was going. I knew she was inclined to hear about my oversleeping and make certain assumptions that I didn’t want to deal with. So I picked what I thought was the lesser evil: the innuendo.
“And in any event,” I said, desperate to change the subject, which likely only drew attention to my discomfort, “I don’t owe you any edits, do I?”
Erika sighed. “You dropped so much work on my desk that even if you don’t owe me edits, you should assume you owe me edits.” She paused. “Or that’s what I want to say.”
Oh no.
“Because you’re turning around the edits too quickly.”
I flinched and pursed my lips. “Isn’t that what I should be doing? Don’t you need me to make those edits?”
I felt a shift on the other end of the phone. “Mia,” Erika said in a calm and steady voice.
Of course with my name being what it is, there’s no great way to say it in a calm and steady voice. The vowel combination was not very forgiving. I focused on that even though I should not have. That thought was useless, but it made for a good distraction from the buildup of tension in my body as I anticipated the hit that was coming, the accusation that had been lingering on her lips this entire conversation.
And sure enough, Erika charged right in. “Are you having a manic episode or something?”
“No!”
“Mia,” she said again, as if that subtle rebuke would be enough to change my mind.
It almost was, but I wasn’t having a manic episode. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I could hide behind that technicality.
So I argued that point. “Someone would have noticed if I was. I see Professor Evory often, and I’ve been signing books for my old rector. Also the boyfriend. The boyfriend would have noticed.”
“Mia, I don’t know who any of those people are.”
She was right. She knew the name Professor Evory but not the person. And most dormitories don’t have rectors anymore, so I doubted the job title meant anything to her. Then there was the boyfriend, and while that position was one that normally conjured images of trust and care, I wasn’t the best at picking people for the role. I had already proven as much.
“Mia,” she said again.
I hated the sound of my own name. It wasn’t just then. It was something that was always true but that I couldn’t say aloud. Because honestly who names their child after their fucking cat? My dad apparently. And my mom just let him. I didn’t need to think about that, though. I didn’t need that reminder. Also, I knew Erika’s tone of voice meant something. My mother would use that tone of voice when she was angry with me. It would be coupled with her going on and on about how much she hated her life despite the fact that not even four hours before she would have said that I was her life, her everything. So it would follow that she hated me. Or that was what I would have to assume. In my mind, there was really no other way to think about it.
But the tone of Erika’s voice wasn’t angry, per say. It was meant to be strong and authoritative as she tried to pull the truth out of me. She did not like that I was resisting her inquisition. To her, it was a bad sign. And I didn’t know how to convince her otherwise.
“Erika,” I insisted. “I’m fine.”
My voice didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded like a character that I was trying to play. It sounded like Judith Hynes, perhaps. If so, I was on the right track. Judith was definitely fine, and she rightfully took offense when someone thought that she wasn’t. Judith would push back. Judith could assert a boundary. It came naturally to her, even with Erika, because Judith had never asked Erika to be her backbone in the first place.
“It’s fine to be tired once in a while,” I added.
“And if you took it easy with these edits, you wouldn’t be so tired all the time,” she snapped back.
But Erika was calmer when she said it. She was backing off. Whether it was because she found my performance convincing or not was hard to say, but I was just happy with the result. At least, I was for the moment. In the next, she spoke again.
“Mia,” she said yet again.
I cringed. She couldn’t see it.
She went on, “Nothing I send you is life or death. Nothing needs to be done instantly. I give you timelines and deadlines for a reason, and that reason is not to have them completely disregarded so you can be self-destructive.”
“One, it’s not self-destructive. But two, it helps you if I get them into editors sooner, right? Then you or whatever baby agent is assigned to me gets to make some money and live well in this capitalist hellscape.”
“Mia,” she said again.
In some ways, Erika sounded just the same, just as she had all those other times she said my name, but it had more of a sting that time. It had more bite and was ripping away more of my soul than it had before. It hurt. And I never had much of a pain tolerance.
“Stop!” I cried out, voice cracking. “I know what my name is.”
In the face of that outburst, Erika backed down. I could hear the ruffle of her suit as she pulled away from the phone. At first, that was all either of us heard. We said nothing to each other. And in that silence, there was a silent nod that we were both on edge and had to tread cautiously with each other. The consequences of failing to do so had never been established, but we both knew they were there.
To break my tension, I exhaled. Whatever Erika chose to do didn’t make its way over the phone. But she seemed calmer when I finally spoke.
“You know I don’t enjoy doing edits,” I said to her.
“Which is why I’d expect you to put them off. I shouldn’t be getting them back less than 48 or even 24 hours later!”
“But then they’re just looming overhead, right?” I argued. “They’re still on my desk, figuratively or otherwise, and I don’t want to deal with it.”
“Which is why I had thought you would put them off,” she said again.
I shook my head. “I don’t want them around me. I don’t want to think about it. The only way out is through, so I pushed through.”
Too quickly, Erika wanted to say, but she couldn’t. Her earlier accusation still hung in the air. It wasn’t thrown at me with any sort of malice, but it still stung when it hit me. Her intention–or a lack of malice therein–didn’t mean that what she said hadn’t changed our dynamic. I still trusted her less for her question. She knew it, and the fact that she hadn’t apologized made things worse. She didn’t think she owed me an apology, clearly, because there was a chance she was right. If she was, it retroactively justified what she said. Or so she and many others would assume. I hadn’t formed my opinion yet.
She started to say my name again but stopped herself. She’d acquiesce to that specific demand, I almost heard her say. Instead, she said, “Just tell me, verbally say it, that you understand none of these edits are life and death.”
“I understand,” I replied, robotically.
“That you don’t need to run yourself ragged to send these edits back to us.”
“I understand.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she finished.
I hesitated. That hesitation undid whatever progress we might have made.
“Say the whole thing,” Erika demanded.
I didn’t want to. My stomach lurched. I was willing to acknowledge her point but not in the way she wanted me to say it. After all, her word choice was loaded. But Erika didn’t know it. Erika wasn’t as familiar with words or all my dysfunctions. Consequently, she misread my hesitation. It wasn't that I wanted to be difficult or that I disagreed with her. Rather, some self-preservation instinct took over and kept my tongue still. And because my self-preservation instincts didn’t work like they were supposed to, I didn’t do the logical thing and simply explain myself. I just stood there, frozen in place with a bitter bile rising up the back of my throat.
Meanwhile, Erika waited. She bit back my name, but I could hear it on her lips. She was trying to show me the requested restraint, but even she had her limits. If I didn’t want her to say it, then I had to say something. If I wanted this conversation to end, the only way out was through.
“I don’t need to work myself to death getting these edits done. It’s not worth wearing myself out. It’s not that important. It... doesn’t matter.”
I didn’t understand what her point was in my saying it. My tone wasn’t convincing, and my voice cracked on the last few words. There was no way she believed me. I could hear it in her voice when she signed off, when she told me to take a vacation with the aforementioned boyfriend whom she didn’t ask any additional questions about. She probably thought the issue was addressed, maybe even fixed, and as far as she was concerned, it was. She had done her job as my agent to help me be successful. And sometimes being successful meant taking breaks.
But it hurt to say those words as she laid them out. They went against what I wanted for myself. I had wanted to make something of value for my readers. I wanted to make books that mattered. I didn’t need to be on any sort of classics list or have my books assigned in schools. I just wanted people to care about the things I poured myself and my heart into.
I didn’t need everyone to love my work, I always thought. I just wanted some of it to be loved by someone. And maybe I wanted to be loved too.
But that felt impossible. Because, as Erika in her infinite wisdom said, it didn’t matter. My work didn’t matter. No one was waiting for those books. No one needed them. Maybe nobody would take solace from them. They were going to be what I had always suspected they would be: shelf dressing or decoration. People would buy my books in order to look well read, but they would never actually read said books. So there was no point in them. And no point in me.
This was something I had always suspected was true. It was a thought I had gotten used to dodging and averting. There was always something else to think about, something else I needed to do, someone else who probably hated me, otherwise known as a relationship I needed to fix, or something else I was failing in. There was always a place for my mind to run to that wasn’t this point of no return. But suddenly, I had fallen into it, and to my horror, there was no way out.
As cliché as it was to admit, writing had been my refuge my whole life. When my mother was yelling at me, when my father was dying, when I was feeling anxious, I’d run into the worlds I was spinning in my mind. Writing made those places almost real. So I did it. I poured myself into this act and then got told repeatedly that I was good at it. Everyone would praise me for my writing. My teachers would read my short stories out loud in class. I won awards. I got published in literary magazines. I had my book published, critically acclaimed, and constantly sold out. All of that validated my use of this crutch. And maybe that was all that it was: a crutch.
So why kick it out from under me, Erika, I wanted to ask but couldn’t. It would have just been emotional extortion. That kicking wasn’t what she meant to do, but it was what happened. And it wasn’t her fault. It might have actually been mine for not being a more put together person.
I fell against the closest wall and choked down the sob coming up in my throat. I didn’t want to wake up Chris, even if he wouldn’t be mad if I did. Instead, he would scoop me up in his arms and tell me how much he loved me. He’d listen when I told him what Erika said and how I interpreted it. And even though he’d think I was overreacting, he wouldn’t accuse me of that. He’d say I was putting too much pressure on myself or that my standards were too high. Either he had a story in his back pocket or he’d be able to adlib one about someone who read my book and loved it. Maybe it inspired them to get the therapy they needed because the characters in the book validated the hurt they struggled to recognize. And while that would have been ironic given my own history with therapy, it would be worth something.
And if I found that point unconvincing, he would go on to add another. He would say that even if people only enjoyed it and didn’t get some grand epiphany, it was still worth something. Because we get to just enjoy things and be happy sometimes. We don’t need to study and think and self-reflect all the time. So even if I only gave people something else, some sort of break, I gave them something of value.
And I know Chris would have told me that because it was both the sort of thing I needed to hear and had heard him say before. He casually threw it out when we were drunkenly watching bad movies one night.
And I responded, “Hey, I’m going to steal that and put it in a book one day.”
He laughed as he drew closer. “I hope you do. And when you read that line, you’ll think of me and about our nights together and all my stupid jokes. You’ll smile. And that smile will be like my licensing payment.”
I snorted. “You work for cheap.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to live in a world without that smile. Whether or not I see it.”
But what did it mean to live in a world with my tears, I almost asked. I was sober enough to stop myself, though. Because, yes, that might have been an interesting thought experiment, but he wasn’t trying to engage me in something like that. Instead, his point was to be flirtatious and loving and so many other things a boyfriend should be. And yet, the question had lingered in my mind. After all, I could give him that smile a time or two, but I was more inclined to be sad than to feel joy. That was just my lot in life. Clearly.