“Are you joking?”
“I really want to know,” I said. I thought of all those nights I spent at the office, sending emails, staring at spreadsheets until my eyes crossed, adding emojis to the interns’ idiotic posts on Slack so they felt appreciated, while the two of them were together, that whole time, leading a life that didn’t include me. I felt like the hired help, the virtual assistant in another time zone.
“Whatever I say, you’re going to twist it around to make him the bad guy.”
“Is that why you never talk about him?”
She pulled down the jacket to reveal her face. The color was coming back to her cheeks. “We’re very private people. We just like being at home together, like you and John. I don’t have to post every part of my life on social.”
“This is different. This is me. I’m not a digital platform. If you met someone you were totally crazy about, I’d want you to tell me.”
“So you could stalk them online.”
“So I could stalk them online,” I repeated, and this made Devin laugh. I drank from the bottle.
“I think I should go somewhere,” she said, rubbing her eyes. I couldn’t tell if she was still laughing or about to start crying. “To find out what’s wrong with me. Like rehab.”
“Rehab for what?”
“Like a detox.”
“You’re already the queen of detox,” I said. “You need whatever the opposite of detox is. You need retox.”
I held the wineglass to her mouth.
“This is awkward, but I have to ask, so drink up. Has Evan ever been physically violent with you?”
“He’s not like that. You know him.”
“Is that what he told you to say?”
“It’s not Evan, it’s me. There’s something wrong with me. I think I might have burnout.”
No you don’t, I thought. That’s what I have.
How was I supposed to succeed in my role as the concerned friend in the “so you think your friend might be in an abusive relationship” script when Devin kept deflecting? Devin didn’t have body dysmorphia; she had celiac disease. She wasn’t lazy; she was mindful. She wasn’t bulimic; she was cleansing her colon. She wasn’t a victim—just burned out. She worked so hard. She just needed a break.
I put my hands on her ankles and held her to the couch.
“You don’t work hard enough to have burnout,” I said.
She blinked at me.
“Look at our lives. You leave work at six on the dot to take a thirty-five-dollar aerobics class. You live here. You have a wine fridge. You subscribe to a fresh juice delivery service. You ‘unplug’ on weekends and put your phone in a special handwoven basket. Look at me. I’m wearing a dress that makes me look like a sausage because it was forty percent off. Look at my—” I held up my wrists. “My hands are numb right now.”
“What about my eczema!”
“You know I put in more hours than you at the office, but you won’t admit it because you think your beauty and grooming routines should count as work.”
She stood up so fast she kicked me and her jacket flew off. Her arms were pale, unblemished, delicately defined in the Tracy Anderson mode. The scent of her body was sweat and period blood, hardly masked by her useless natural deodorant.
“I just think if we’re being radically honest with one another—”
“Fuck you, Maren.”
“Tell me what’s really going on with Evan and then I can help you.”
“I don’t need your help. I’m not the sick one. You’re the one who thinks she deserves a trophy for having no life. Good job, Maren, here’s a sticker for answering all your emails instead of sleeping. Congratulations on all the weekends you’ve spent at the office alone. It’s pathetic. You think everyone should feel sorry for you just because you don’t know how to take care of yourself.”
She was wrong. I wanted so much more than a trophy or sympathy—I wanted damages. I wanted financial compensation for working the hardest and sacrificing the most to the cause: my own health and well-being. I wanted Devin to die and leave me her apartment in her will. No, that would take too long. I wanted her to Venmo me $10,000 right now. You deserve this. You’ve been a good girl. You’ve helped so many people. With more money, maybe I could be a beautiful, skinny bitch, too. What a luxury, to be able to devote so much time and attention to your body’s inputs and outputs, to be able to say your biggest flaw is your perfectionism. I took a long swig from the bottle, looking her right in the eye, daring her to name my problem out loud.
“I get it,” she said, refilling her glass from the refrigerator water dispenser. “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You think I’m just a walking selfie. You’re wondering why I was interviewing Arianna this morning, and not you. You’re like, Why do we need her again?”
“That’s not true. I do need you.”
“Your feminism”—she hiccupped—“is pretending you don’t think less of other women, but you’re full of shit. You think less of me.”
Something had happened to her. When I first met Devin, she was ambitious and effervescent. Her desk at work was covered in unicorn plush toys and bouquets of pink flowers and books about being boss. She went after every project with the confidence that she would figure it all out as she went along. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been dating Evan, but he had efficiently sucked out all her life force, her self-esteem. He’d damaged us.
This was the moment when I should have completed the game of telephone and told her to love herself the way other people loved her. The way I loved her. She couldn’t see it.
“Hey, Devin,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you so upset.”
I followed her to the bathroom, but she slammed the door in my face. I listened to the sounds of her puke hitting the toilet water. She didn’t even turn on the faucet. She wanted me to hear.
Khadijah
Are you sure I’m allowed to be in here?” Adam asked, gesturing at a three-tier cake made of boxes of organic cotton tampons that a company sent over as a thank-you for writing branded content that was so good they were going to use our words as an endorsement in their next ad campaign: “Absorbent AF.”
I knew that no one would be at the office. Devin and Maren were both at a conference. Chloé had called in sick. Diana was MIA. Katelyn left a Post-it on my desk to say she was going for a coffee run, but it was 10:30 and she still wasn’t back.