by Sarah Title
Chapter Two
Dear Maria,
My boyfriend won’t grow up. All he wants to do is hang out with his bros all night, either at a crappy bar or playing video games online. When I mention it might be nice for him to take me to a restaurant that doesn’t have paper napkins, he says sure, but he won’t do it. Sometimes I feel like I’m dating a child! How can I get him to change?
Feeling Like Peter Pan’s Wendy in Hayes Valley
Dear Wendy,
It sounds like your boyfriend has different priorities from yours. You want to hang out with him; he doesn’t. You want him to spend a lot of money on you; he doesn’t. You can sit around and pretend that, someday, he’ll grow out of it—but maybe that’s just his personality. The job of a girlfriend is not to take a shitty guy and make him great. I think the best thing you can do for your love life is to find a new man.
Kisses,
Maria
“YOU’RE NOT DEAD!” Colin heard as he tried to sneak unnoticed through the unlocked front door.
Colin scowled at his little sister as she sat at the kitchen table in front of her laptop. Working again, even though it was the weekend. “You knew I wasn’t dead. You gave me directions home, remember?”
Steph shook her head in disapproval. “You grew up in this city. Your lack of understanding of the public transit system is appalling.”
“You could have sent an Uber.”
“I’m not the one who lost his wallet in a bar last night. Someone brought it over, by the way. All your cards are in there. I took the cash.”
Colin muttered a curse and took the wallet from Steph’s outstretched hand. Sisters.
“She was cute. Seemed disappointed you weren’t home.”
“Shut up,” he told his sister, then went over to the coffeemaker. He drained the pot into the nearest mug and plopped down on the chair next to hers.
Steph held up her mug for a refill. Colin pretended not to notice. She muttered something unflattering, then got up to make another pot.
“What are you working on this weekend?” he asked, turning her laptop toward him.
“Hey!” she said. “What if I was looking at something personal?”
“This doesn’t look personal.”
“It could have been! What if it was a picture of boobs or something!”
Colin shrugged.
“What if it was a picture of MY boobs?”
“Fine,” he conceded. “Although why would you be looking at a picture of your own boobs on your computer?”
“Why would you be getting blackout drunk with strangers?,” she said.
“It was for a story.”
“A story on how it’s a man’s privilege to lose consciousness and end the night with only a lost wallet?”
“Yup,” Colin said, decidedly not taking her bait. It was too early for a discussion about the patriarchy. And by discussion, he meant a lecture from his little sister on how the world was designed in his favor, which would inevitably lead to a lecture on how he wasn’t doing the women of the world any favors by writing for a fashion start-up that perpetuated an impossible standard of beauty and tied those standards to rampant consumerism. He was well aware that Steph’s beauty would not be commodified; he had been told many times before. But he had to make a living.
Even if writing for Glaze was not how he really wanted to make his living. But he liked writing, and he was good at the kind of writing Glaze readers demanded of him (a slightly pandering version of “brutally honest guy’s perspective”). He didn’t totally hate it, usually. And sometimes it meant he was able to get into a new club or find out the top-secret location of a pop-up restaurant . . . or spend the night in a post-college dive bar and get blackout drunk with strangers.
He might not have Steph’s drive to better the world and fulfill her career ambitions, but, dammit, he was good at his job.
Mostly.
He ignored the little voice in his head—the one that sounded unfortunately like his little sister—that told him it sure looked like he was losing his touch.
Preferring exercising his rights as a nosy older brother to painful self-reflection, Colin scrolled idly through the message board for Steph’s softball team, not really reading anything, just waiting for his coffee to kick in. Then he got to one of the girls’ responses—a meme of a woman with a sour face and the caption “Disapproving Librarian Disapproves.” He snorted. The woman looked disapproving, all right. He should know. He’d gotten that look from women before.
“What’s so funny?” Steph said, retaking her chair and her laptop. The look she gave him as she shoved him out of the way was not entirely dissimilar to the Disapproving Librarian’s. “Holy—” she started as she flopped down into the seat.
“Funny, right?”
Steph didn’t say anything, just started typing madly.
“Steph?” He must not have read the messages closely enough. He thought it was just an argument about someone not cleaning the helmets right. He had no idea those helmets even got cleaned.
“This is terrible!” she said without taking her eyes from the screen.
“What is it?” Someone must have really broached some softball etiquette that Colin didn’t understand. In the interest of journalism (and nosiness), he reached for her laptop again, only to have his hand slapped away.
“Ow!” he said, mostly for attention, because Steph was ignoring his questions and he was the older brother, dammit.
“This can’t be right.” She squinted and leaned into the screen. She sat back. “It really is her.”
That was it. Colin had had enough of his authority not being respected (also, he was dying of curiosity). He stood up and put his sister into a headlock. “What are you talking about?” he asked, as he rubbed his knuckles into her scalp.
“Quit it!” she shouted, and then, because Colin’s ego was bigger than his brain, he momentarily forgot that, although he was older and bigger, his sister did that crazy workout that involved flipping tires, and soon he was facedown on the table, her forearm holding him in place.
At least the laptop was in his line of vision.
“Uncle?” she asked. He was tempted to kick her legs out from underneath her, but he didn’t think his pride could take two beatings from his little sister in one day.
“Uncle,” he muttered. “What are you so upset about?” He rubbed the back of his head when she let him up. It did not elicit an ounce of sympathy.
“I know her.” She pointed to the Disapproving Librarian.
“Yikes.”
“Shut up. She’s really nice.”
“She looks nice.”
“That is not her normal face! Someone is obviously playing a joke.”
“How do you know her?”
“She works at Richmond. Remember when I told you about that really cute librarian?”
“This is the cute librarian?”
“This is not how she normally looks! She’s very nice, and fun, and . . . stop laughing!”
“I can’t help it! This meme is speaking to me. God, I’d hate to be the one to let her down.”
“You’re a jerk. Anyway, don’t you have some story to write about how you’re way too old to drink like you’re twenty-one?”
Colin wanted to tell her to shut up, and that he could drink any twenty-one-year-old under the table. But his head was throbbing from a combination of hangover and headlock, and so he was grateful when she slammed her laptop shut and stormed out of the kitchen, shooting him a look that was decidedly more murderous than disappointed.
Women.
He went for a mouthful of sweet, sweet coffee, but his mug was empty.
Chapter Three
Dear Maria,
Is it possible to die of embarrassment?
I’ll Be Hiding Out Until You Answer in Nob Hill
Dear Hiding,
I hate to sound like an old fart, but whatever it is, this, too, shall pass. The good, the bad—it all becomes memories, and memorie
s fade like dust in the wind, to borrow a phrase from your grandparents’ favorite song. You know, time heals all wounds and all that crap.
But what should you do to get through the part before it gets better? Take comfort in the fact that you are merely a speck on a grain of sand in the great dune of the universe, and you’re probably more aware of the embarrassment than anyone else is. If that’s not the case, you better just own it. You did something dumb, you were made a fool of, but every supermodel that trips over her heels on the runway gets back up to sashay again.
Chin up, Hiding. You’ll get over it.
Kisses,
Maria
BERNIE LOVED HER JOB. Really, she did. Her students were mostly wonderful, the occasional flash mob notwithstanding. The college had a decent budget for resources and access to larger universities in the Bay Area. The staff was small but dedicated, she worked on research projects, and the campus had a really good cafeteria, thanks to the hospitality program. Sure, there were some things she didn’t love—professors who didn’t take her seriously as an academic equal, the weird hours during finals week, her pathetic salary—but on most days, the good far outweighed the bad.
Mondays were still a total drag.
Especially since she’d spent the weekend off the grid. One of her best friends, Marcie, led female empowerment workshops around Mount Tam, and she’d finally talked Bernie into going. It wasn’t easy to convince her—Bernie loved Marcie, but she imagined the workshops were all women in crushed velvet drinking homemade tea, and examining themselves with hand mirrors. But Bernie needed a break and someone had dropped out at the last minute and she liked tea, so she went.
In some ways—the crushed velvet and the tea and the hand mirrors—it had been exactly what she’d expected. But there was decidedly more naked bonfire-dancing and funny baked goods than she was quite prepared for.
Nonetheless, she returned to the city refreshed and empowered. Then her other bff, Dave, insisted that she meet him at work so he could hear all about it. He had a new job at a new bar, and it was sure to be dead on a Sunday night, he said. And it was, until it wasn’t, and then Dave insisted that she stick around so she could watch him flirt, and take notes as needed since she was notoriously terrible at flirting. She wasn’t interested in facing her return to normal life, so she did.
She wasn’t sure if Dave’s flirting methods would exactly work for her, but it beat doing laundry and making lunches.
This break from routine made her way happier than it probably should have.
Marcie said it was because she spent so much time adult-ing that her idea of rebellion was having a nonsensible dinner.
Which wasn’t fair. She rebelled all the time.
Okay, she didn’t rebel at all, she thought as she unlocked her office door. But she did enjoy the occasional popcorn for dinner.
Did she know how to party or what?
She reached over the pile of reference books she was supposed to have spent the weekend reviewing (rebel!) (or maybe just procrastinator) and turned on her computer. Her phone was lit up, which meant she had a voice mail, which was a little strange. People hardly ever used voice mail at Richmond anymore. It was all e-mail, which, frankly, she preferred. She pulled open her desk drawer to find the scrap of paper she’d written her voice mail password on. It was a whole mess of numbers, and Bernie didn’t have a head for remembering numbers. And since IT had made her change it from 1234, she couldn’t keep the darned PIN straight.
“Ha!” she said as she stumbled on the old Post-it: 4321. Very clever, she told herself. That’ll show those IT guys.
Rolling her eyes at herself, she went through the 6 million prompts that finally got her to her messages. Seventeen new messages, the nice robot lady told her.
Seventeen messages! She didn’t think she’d had seventeen messages altogether in the two years she’d been at Richmond.
As she listened, she realized why. There were fifteen hang-ups, one sobbing message from Carly saying she was “so so sorry,” which was alarming, and one vulgar message promising impossible things with the caller’s tongue that would “wipe that look off her face,” and which she assumed was a wrong number. An alarming wrong number, but how else to explain it? She’d never gotten dirty messages before. Hearing this one made her grateful for that.
The wrong number, plus the fifteen hang-ups, was concerning. She must have forgotten something. How else to explain why so many people were calling her? She didn’t think she’d ever gotten fifteen phone calls in one day, even during finals week. She didn’t think there were fifteen people at the library who wanted to talk to her.
Maybe that was it—finals week was coming up. She needed to get her stuff organized, make sure all of her LibGuides were up to date, get petty cash for late-night pizza for the procrastinators.
As she started to make a physical list, her computer finally came to life. She logged in, tapped her fingers as each icon popped to life, and then opened her e-mail. She tried not to think about the irony in the fact that the public computers in the library were state-of-the-art and replaced every year or so, but the staff computers were older’n dirt, as her friend Helen would say. They only got upgraded when whatever software they were running was so old that it was no longer supported by the manufacturer. And then they got complaints from professors that the new software was broken (a.k.a. they didn’t know how to use it). So Bernie supposed she understood IT’s hesitation. But still. When it was faster to work at public computers (which were always available since most of the students had their own laptops), it all felt a little silly.
Blergh. Mondays.
Also silly was the flood of e-mails in her inbox. She’d developed a pretty good rapport with a lot of students over the past few years, so she was used to coming back from a few days away with lots of requests for appointments and panicked questions about citing blogs according to The Chicago Manual of Style. Plus lots of meeting requests from colleagues. The new library director loved a meeting, and both librarians and academics loved a committee, and Bernie was always in the middle of both.
This, however, was ridiculous.
Three hundred e-mails.
In two days.
Her palms started to sweat.
She’d definitely forgotten something.
Part of her wanted to just turn the computer off and go back home. Retreat back to the woods with her hand mirror. Remember two days ago? she asked herself. Remember when there was nothing to forget so you couldn’t go into a panic about forgetting it?
But there was another part of her that was curious. She didn’t realize how important she was if one forgotten something warranted three hundred e-mails. She felt a little like George Bailey, and her inbox was her Clarence. Or maybe something terrible had happened in the library over the weekend. Security incidents tended to set off an explosion of reply-alls. Too bad she’d lost her cell phone charger somewhere between home and Mount Tam. She’d bet she had a butt-ton of messages there, too.
Well, only one way to find out what was going on, she told herself. She started at the top, with the newest messages. From Liz, her direct supervisor, asking what this was all about. Bernie had no idea what “this” was. She left it open and moved on. Carly had sent her fourteen apologies, without making it clear what she was apologizing for. Was it the flash mob? It was annoying, sure, but Carly hadn’t been involved in planning it—that much was clear based on the look on the poor girl’s face when Evan started dancing. Bernie’d seen Carly in plays before. She couldn’t fake that kind of enthusiasm. Was she apologizing for getting engaged when she was so young? Maybe she’d come to her senses over the weekend. Although why she would apologize to Bernie for that was not entirely clear.
Bernie shot off a quick reply—there’s nothing to apologize for, see you during your next shift—and moved on.
She eventually slogged into an e-mail from an old friend from library school. Liam had sent her a short message and a link to a tumblr page.
“You’re famous!” the message said. “Hilarious!”
Bernie thought back to what she’d done recently that was noteworthy. Occasionally the local media would do a story on something at Richmond—a display she’d put up, some new technology they’d spent a lot of money on. She’d been a talking head in several stories about e-books and textbooks. She didn’t love watching herself in the media—her voice always sounded strange and she wanted to tell herself to smile more—but curiosity got the better of her and she clicked the link.
And it was her face.
Up real close.
Scowling.
Above her face in big white block letters, were the words Disapproving Librarian Underneath her slight scowl-induced double chin was the word Disapproves.
Disapproving Librarian Disapproves.
With her face.
Holy crap.
She was a meme.
* * *
Colin pushed his way through the glass doors of the Glaze.com office. They’d moved in during their last round of funding after hiring an interior designer, so the whole place was very shiny and open. The result of this very modern and very expensive makeover was that it was a terrible place to work. Every sound echoed off the cavernous warehouse ceilings, and fashion people were not a quiet people. Nobody had assigned workstations, so colleagues were constantly fighting over scissors and pens and someone using someone else’s personal coffee mug for kombucha.
Colin avoided the office as much as possible. For one thing, all of the bright white surfaces and perfume smells gave him a headache. Jeanaeane Ng, the beauty editor who seemed to add an extra vowel to her first name every six months or so, was forever spraying samples around. He supposed it was fair—she did traffic in beauty products—but the fact that there was no barrier between her odors and the rest of the office made it . . . smelly. Never mind the fact that, as an online-only magazine, there was no way to actually get samples of the scent to the consumer. Logic did not deter Jeanaeane.