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self-indulgently, two if you count the commute.
(She counted the commute. All hours killed are good hours.)
But she couldn’t afford it anymore, and she couldn’t feel alright about asking her
father for $125 a week just so she could externalize and have this woman say Break
the pattern! when she knew to break the pattern anyway. She had long since learned
how to identify patterns and now she broke them without even noticing she’d broken
them. She’d feel new and happy and wonder why and then she identified that it was
because she’d broken a pattern; it was the relief she felt specific to pattern-breaking.
She didn’t feel that relief right now why? Oh it’s because deriving cheap and
momentary happiness from breaking a pattern had, sadly, become a pattern. So she
had broken two patterns. She held her face to the sun to get a tan.
Her summers/winters pattern was that she always used to be sad in the winter
and happy in the summer, but today, in the summer, she was sad.
There are only so many things a person can do on the Internet and at this point it
has become just as boring as the real life it was once meant to help avoid. So this was
her job, and her life, and things. Every night, she’d think back upon her day, and the
morning seemed like it happened a hundred years ago. Every day was like a little life.
Jessica, said Matt Fletcher.
Samantha, Sam corrected.
I’m sorry, said Matt, Samantha.
Sam, actually, she half-smiled, shrugging, Really. Just Sam is fine.
Okay! Matt replied, Sam. Sam. I’ll make a mental note of that.
He tapped his skull with his right index finger to hammer home the point of how
serious he was about making a mental note of the new receptionist Samantha preferring
to go by Sam.
Um, there’s a message for you, said Sam, I understand that what I’m supposed to
do in this situation is email you the message and who it’s from in, um, the template,
you know. I’ve done it before.
Matt Fletcher made no effort to indicate that he had any memory of her having
correctly done it before with the template. He just stood there.
This man called, Sam continued, Keith. He was British. Um, he said you’d know
who he was? I tried to get more, um, information out of him, more, um, specifics, but
he was really like, resistant? To it?
Matt Fletcher looked at Sam. He looked very hard at Sam.
Keith, said Matt, Is Keith Richards.
Oh! From the Rolling Stones?
Matt didn’t answer her question; the answer was too obvious. He cocked one
feathery eyebrow, seeming excited, laughed a little, and trotted off to his office,
where Sam could only assume he would call Keith Richards.
She felt lightheaded and thought of every time she’d ever listened to the Rolling
Stones song Happy, and it meant something about herself to herself, that she had
liked him on her own.
It really was summer now. The air smelt like bee bodies, and white little flowers
fluttered down and off the trees all around her, summer’s snowflakes. It would be
most convenient to cut through the park but it was hard for her. Everybody loved
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