MY FIRST WEEK AT CATAPULT IS ELECTRIFYING. I SPEND MOST OF my time in the game room playing every release Catapult has produced in the last ten years (and some from their competitors). While I don’t interact much with anyone besides Anita during her brief daily check-ins, I might even convince myself that getting paid to game all day is fulfilling enough.
On Friday, I come home to find a small wicker basket at my front door, filled with mangoes and kumquats. There’s an immediate thunderstorm in my gut as I instinctively look to Charlie’s door. I take the envelope lying atop the fruit and tear it open to find a card with the image of a night sky full of shooting stars. Inside it—two printed photos. The only two pictures we took on the trip. The first, our heads pressed together on the plane, the blue of his eyes popping out like it’s a 3D image, and the other—us holding hands across the table at that first dinner. I fan the two photos in my hand so I can regard both at once. We really do look happy. Like a punch-drunk couple basking in a romantic getaway.
When I can’t stare at the photos any longer, I move on to the card. On the otherwise blank inside, he has scrawled in surprisingly neat handwriting:
Sloane,
Congrats on making your dreams come true. I know you are going to do big things there. Your dedication to getting what you want is inspiring. You deserve it all.
Charlie
PS—I may have initially thought these photos were for Brooke. They never were. They are ours.
PPS—I would have gotten this to you sooner, but kumquats are surprisingly hard to find.
I stare at the card. At his handwriting, small and non-aggressive. The wide curves of his d’s and b’s. My eyes catch on his words. I know you are going to do big things there.
Like I have so many times since we have been home, I contemplate knocking on his door. Even if I don’t have the words to say thank you, to commemorate what existed—and still does—between us, I’d settle for just staring at his face when he opens the door. But, as sweet as this gesture is, it also proves Charlie knows the importance of this job. That he wants to see me succeed in it and respects why we can’t be together. I pick up the basket and head inside to greet Finn.
Later that night, I leave a note at his front door that simply says thank you, one kumquat set atop it.
By the following Monday afternoon, my enthusiasm for my new job has worn thin. If I’m not in the game room (alone), I’m at my desk staring at the eggshell wall (alone), wondering when I’ll actually get to do something, even if it means fetching coffee or taking meeting notes. At least then someone might acknowledge me. Jack and Kenji spend virtually all their time in the Zelda conference room, which has a constant revolving door of activity. I’ve clocked every other person in the office has at least three meetings a day. Even Anita has a daily check-in with the partners.
To cozy up my little nook, I’d planned on bringing in the lucky bamboo Tess gifted me when I got the job and a picture of Finn, but after seeing Anita’s office, I thought better of it. So instead, my area is as cold and impersonal as hers. Each day when she stops by my desk, I give her a brave smile.
It would be one thing if I were in training—watching videos about Catapult or building some sort of work plan. But I’ve been given zero direction except for Anita’s advisement to play games and insisting Jack Palmer will include me in projects soon.
It’s not until the Friday of my second week that I am actually invited to a meeting. And by invited, I mean self-invited. When Jack Palmer walks by my desk around ten that morning, I take his venture to my far corner of the Catapult galaxy as a sign.
I leap out of my chair to greet him. “Mr. Palmer!”
He halts mid-step. “Jack,” he says, then goes quiet. He pulls a chocolate chip cookie from the breast pocket of his maroon tee and takes a bite.
“Right, Jack. I just wanted to say hello. I wasn’t sure you remembered me. We haven’t had a chance to interact since I started working here. Sloane Cooper, your new game designer.” I hold out my hand.
“I know who you are,” he says through a second and final bite, with a barely there handshake.
I rub the crumbs from my hand against my pants. “Right, well, over the last two weeks I’ve read every policy and played every game, and I wanted to see if perhaps I can start learning the business in other ways. Join some of the design meetings, perhaps? Or whatever you think is relevant or important. I’d love to learn and start contributing to the team.” Other than as the token broad.
He eyes me for a moment, then releases his breath. “I suppose you should. Zelda in ten,” he calls over his shoulder, already making his escape from my lonely corner.
When I enter the conference room nine and a half minutes later, I try to hide my delight.
I take the last seat at the far end of the long glass table. The level of adrenaline pulsing through me is equivalent to when I was competing against Charlie during Andres’s field day. Maybe higher.
As man after man trickles in for the meeting, I shift awkwardly, waiting to be acknowledged, though no one seems to notice the lone female in the room adjusting the height of her chair up and down and up again. They’re all chatting one-on-one or in small groups, and I’m decidedly the odd woman out, as if there were any question.
Ross Feldman leans over to the guy seated next to him, holding up his phone, and they share a chuckle at whatever is on the screen. The two guys at the far end of the table laugh extravagantly at a joke about truffle butter.
I cringe. I’m in the proverbial locker room, this one made up of twentysomething gamers whose most exercised body parts are likely their thumbs.
Jack is already stationed at the head of the table, the cookie earlier apparently an appetizer to the platter of BBQ he now has in front of him. He picks up a slathered rib and holds it before him. “Please welcome our new designer, Sloane Cooper,” he says, and the room quiets. He doesn’t point or nod or motion in any way in my direction. He doesn’t have to.
I straighten in my chair, smile as confidently as possible. I’m met with a few mediocre smiles, a half wave, and one slow clap. Oh, and one glance at my chest from the one who made the joke about truffle butter.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. I’ll win them over with my work ethic and design skills.
The meeting begins with a recap of numbers for the company’s newest release, Shelf Life, for which sales have been good, though lower than projected.
“Yeah, but the TTP was on point,” Ross says, nudging the guy beside him with a pointy elbow.
I lean forward, clear my throat. “Sorry, what is TTP?”
There’s a collective chuckle. “TTP. Time to Penis,” he answers. “It’s a metric for how long it takes players to build a penis using available materials in a game. Our games have the shortest TTP on the market.” Ross proclaims this last part as if he has personally just won the Nobel Prize for this achievement, and I immediately regret the question.
The meeting moves on, and as Jack Palmer speaks, I quickly divine that this is a strategic planning session focused on gaining market share outside of the genre Catapult already dominates.
“So, what, you want us to start developing puzzles?” Ross says merrily, his round belly jiggling, and the room bursts into laughter again.
Jack Palmer doesn’t seem to mind the comment. “No, that’s not what I’m saying, guys. There’s no Words with Friends in our future. But we need to develop some new concepts besides just apocalypse games. We can’t become a one-trick pony.” He takes multiple bites from a new rib as he rotates it in his fingers, like it’s an ear of corn.
Kenji shakes his head. “Yeah, right, people clamor to buy whatever we put out. We could build a game about a one-trick pony, slap the Catapult logo on it, and sell the hell out of it.”
Jack licks sauce from his bottom lip. “You may be right,” he says, pointing the now impressively bare rib at Kenji. “But I want to see what else we can come up with. What genre can we take over next?”
Everyone looks at one another, and I’m unsure whether Jack’s question is rhetorical.
“New genres. Got it,” Ross says with a salute, and once again, the room erupts into laughter.
Anything anyone says is hysterically funny to everyone else. It’s as though I’ve walked into some gnarly, bro’d-out version of The Stepford Wives.
“I’ve got something. Should be ready to share next week,” Kenji says.
“Great. Anyone else got anything on this topic before we move on?” Jack asks, raising a fresh rib into the air.
As I tentatively raise my hand, Kenji smirks. Right, raising my hand has likely made me look both too formal and childish at once.
“Sloane?” Jack Palmer says, giving me the floor.
I clear my throat. “First and foremost, I just wanted to say how excited I am to be here. To be part of this team.” I attempt to avoid being deterred when Ross pulls his phone from his pants pocket and busies himself with it. “I’ve followed the gaming space closely the last several years, and I did quite a bit of research during the interview process here, including a deep dive into the competitive landscape.”
“And,” Jack says, leaning forward.
“And I’d be happy to take a deeper dive into researching market share, competitors . . . whatever might be helpful to the team.”
All eyes in the room shift from me to Jack Palmer.
“Hon,” he begins, and I know whatever comes next doesn’t end with me feeling particularly good about myself. “We’ve been in business for over thirty years. I think we have a pulse on what our consumers want. We’ve got that covered.”
“I thought this was a meeting to collaborate on expansion ideas,” I say in a wimpy manner that reminds me of who I was with Zane. Jack Palmer’s severe jaw and narrowed eyes across the table make it all clear. Yes, that is what this meeting is for. For everyone but me.
Ross Feldman and Truffle Butter snicker. I stare at my feet through the glass table, wishing I had stayed at my desk.
Entering my apartment lobby that evening, I’m completely exhausted in a “trying to look casual at a party where I know nobody for eight hours” sort of way. It’s Friday, I remind myself, and I’m about to have two days off from staring at my strip of eggshell-colored wall while desperately attempting to avoid further embarrassment. Come Monday, I’m inclined to use my Catapult-branded pen to dig a little nick into that space of wall by my desk, just to give myself something new to look at.
When I return downstairs a few minutes later with Finn, I immediately spot Charlie. He’s returning from a run, sweaty and red-faced. His breath is heavy and I can’t avoid the sense memory of it against my ear. At least he’s in a shirt . . . nope, wait, he’s removed that, and now he’s toweling himself off with it, wearing only a pair of black running shorts.
It’s not just lust I feel seeing him in this state. It’s longing. It’s a rigid awareness of the void he briefly filled, now empty again. With him, I was my best version. Fun, carefree, creative, and most of all, true to myself. But I’ve ruined it all with this job, by not being able to be as vulnerable with him as he was with me.
He starts in my direction, toward the elevators, his tennis shoes squeaking against the linoleum like an alert siren, and I duck behind a column on the far side of the lobby. Finn looks up at me with disapproval. He needs to pee. I stand there, shoved up against a column, pulling Finn to my side, hiding from the one person I want to talk to more than anyone.
As soon as he passes, I rush Finn out the lobby doors, tears welling. I can’t admit to Charlie that the dream job I wanted more than anything, the one he cheered me on for with more backing than anyone has ever provided me, is actually a Freddy Krueger–level nightmare. I may have to move out of my apartment—running into Charlie and having to keep my distance is a greater burden than I may be able to manage.
I put everything on the line for this job, this new start on the career path I’ve always wanted, and two weeks in, I’m miserable, wishing I could share it all with Charlie, knowing he’d know exactly what to say. That he’d take this massive, complicated thing and simplify it to a sharp point that makes perfect sense.
But I’ve already lost him.
And I can’t go back.