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  “Get back to your desk,” he says.

  I obey.

  At the pod, Vivienne is waiting for me. I don’t want to know what she finally decided to say. Tripp, Chloe, and Puja are clearly not fucking doing anything at their computers. Tripp toggles between the up and down arrows on his keyboard in a blank Excel doc, listening closely.

  “Hi, Vivienne,” I say.

  She prepares herself.

  “I don’t just write reviews,” she says at last. “You earn them.”

  * * *

  “Anyone want my twenty-five dollars tonight?” I ask.

  “Obviously,” Tripp says.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “Gin and tonic,” he says.

  “Tripp, what do you actually want?”

  “Mai tai!”

  “Forget it.”

  After the Titan meeting disaster, I assured Tripp that I was fine, just normal miserable. He took my word for it. Since then, apparently relieved, he has been upbeat and calling my performance at the meeting “legendary.” Chloe and Puja laughed at first, but then got absorbed in finishing as much work as they could before Jason boots everyone out of the office at 9 p.m.

  Tripp and I are supposed to be putting together a deck of target alternatives to Sierra in a format known as “strip profiles.” Each profile is a row across a PowerPoint slide listing the market cap, revenue, and headquarters location, accompanied by a brief company description. Tripp and I split the list down the middle, and I have done none of mine. It took me twice as long to finish shit for my other teams, and Vivienne’s reviews are earned warning haunts me like a ghost. Feel the light is long fucking gone. Now it’s 8:59 p.m. I’m in a faded hoodie to stay warm, typing adagio, and only just started the strips, like an absolute stoner.

  I open PowerPoint.

  “And, done,” Tripp announces. He flips the bottom of his keyboard up in a gesture of triumph. “Where we at, team?”

  Tripp looks at my blank PowerPoint file.

  “A, what the fuck?” he asks.

  Jason begins his closing-time walk around the floor. Tripp and I do not have a pass for the strips, which means we need to start working from home. Tripp digs his heels into the carpet to drag his wheelie chair closer to mine. His tie is swept back over his shoulder, where he kept it clean during dinner.

  “You know, just putting some of your shit together,” he says, as if he is thinking out loud. “I don’t think you’re just normal miserable.” Oh, really? “I think you have something else in your life going on.”

  “Wow, Tripp,” I say. “How did you know?”

  “Easy now,” he says. “I’m just saying I noticed.”

  He opens his arms and raises his eyebrows, inviting me to reveal something or vent. He cranes his neck toward me, probing a bit further.

  “Another . . . team?” he tries.

  “Nope,” I say.

  “Boyfriend keeping you up?” he asks. He jiggles his eyebrows.

  “God, we are so done here,” I say.

  “Is that a yes?” he asks. “Yes, boyfriend? Some guy feel sorry for you?”

  “Har har,” I say.

  “All right,” he says reluctantly. “Fine, fine. Anyway, I told Viv tomorrow, so get your shit to me tonight. K?” He tousles my hair and snaps his hand back as if my hair bit him. “God, when was the last time you showered?”

  I might not make it to Skylar’s before I collapse.

  chapter 14

  On the subway to Skylar’s, I earnestly try to recall my epiphanies. Oh, right, now I remember: “I’m not a complete asshole.” Groundbreaking.

  With one arm, I cradle a crinkling Duane Reade bag full of snacks. With the other, I grip a subway pole to which arms are tethered like ribbons on a maypole. When the car shakes, my slippery pole hand slides up and down.

  Every new AS full-time is assigned a “mentor” to help them through their transition to the firm. I got an MD named Nicole, who wears sequin-covered jackets and works out every night at midnight. Rumor is she “whips her husband’s noodle dick.” Nicole gave me a lot of advice during our one conversation in the Sky Lobby, including a tip to take public transportation in order to “stay in touch.” The memory comes back to me now. I’m still not sure what she meant, because I look way worse than everyone else on this fucking car. I would have better peace of mind taking cabs and staying in touch with a reward from my job.

  Skylar has made more of an effort to help me in less than two weeks than the entire AS community has in two years. Your life advice for today: To select a whole row, use the shortcut SHIFT + SPACE BAR. At the threshold to her apartment, I knock and look down at the pale-pink woven doormat that reads SHANTI, Sanskrit for “peace.” I am so close and hug my snacks even closer: 5-Hour Energy drinks and the whole fucking candy aisle of Duane Reade. I’ve never had a 5-Hour Energy drink before, but my caffeine-withdrawal headache feels like a helmet two sizes too small. I need to down a few of these just to get back to baseline.

  Skylar opens the door, cueing me to unwrap the small bottles. Without her explicit permission, I begin to suckle one of them as I stagger down her hallway. I never knew a concoction of unpronounceable chemicals mixed in a factory vat could feel so deeply nourishing. This highly processed whatever goes down as if it is the exact piece missing from my nutritional puzzle. Fucking tonic. I finger-tap tap the final drops stuck to the bottom into my mouth.

  “Oh my God,” I say, relieved.

  “You do not look good,” she says.

  I lean on her marble dining table. She stands beside me in beige cashmere pants and a matching cardigan. I focus on the food. On the table in front of me waits an elaborate spread, apparently from the to-go counter at a vegan cafe: beet balls over squash spaghetti, curried pumpkin stew, a bunless tofu burger, mushroom-walnut pâté next to a fan assembly of Wasa crackers, and a bowl of fresh fruit. I don’t even like this stuff, but I fork a beet ball and swallow it whole. If she tells me to eat mindfully, I am going to fucking lose it. Why are yogis so afraid of food? They substitute the most common ingredients, as if everyone else is just fucking poisoned.

  Where is Rosie’s pizza now?

  “There’s more in the cupboard,” she says.

  Is there any normal shit in there? Seriously, where is Rosie’s pizza? Either way, I go to her cupboard and open it just to see more food. The bags of non-wheat pasta are neatly arranged, and I reach for a jar of almond butter in the far back like a caveman in a grocery store. Back at the table, I spread it across crackers and eat. Skylar waits across from me, perched gracefully like a flower floating on the surface of a still pond. God, food is straight crack cocaine when you are hungry. It is sex. It is everyone who owes you a favor winning the lottery.

  “You know, how genius was it of the first nut-butter guy to put the word butter into his food creation?” I ask. “I mean, ‘almond butter’ could have been ‘almond slop.’ Or ‘almond mush.’ ”

  I’m actually savoring the food now. Taste hasn’t been this salient for as long as I can remember. I have hit reorder on Seamless every night for weeks. Tripp accidentally ate half of someone else’s dinner yesterday before he noticed it wasn’t what he ordered. (Tripp had ordered a sashimi dinner box and a side of scallion pancakes, and he had eaten a wedge of Todd Thomas’s steak panini before he said, mouth full, “Wait a sec.”)

  “Allegra, I’m worried about you,” Skylar says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “Right, sorry.” I pause to reflect on the destruction that has befallen my professional life in the span of less than a couple of weeks.

  “You know, shit is getting chaotic,” I say.

  She gestures gently for more.

  “Well,” I start, “it’s hard to overstate the number of mistakes I made in two days. I stuck to the fast, but I fucked up all of the shit I get paid to do.” I shake my head. “I submitted calculations that were ridiculous. My coworkers started mo
cking me and making jokes about my dick getting in the way of my job. Then I fell asleep in an incredibly important meeting in front of a VP who already wants me dead.”

  Skylar gestures, keep going.

  “So my bosses surrounded me in this pack and basically threatened to fire me, and it’s getting so close to bonuses. One of my bosses said, ‘I don’t write reviews, you earn them.’ It just felt out of control, like I can’t fucking do everything.” Skylar is still paying attention. “Thank you for listening, by the way. That really means something.” I pause. “Also, I was thinking about it, and you’re right, I do have this people-pleasing part of me that’s getting in my way.” I throw up my hands. “That’s the whole truth. I’m doing my best. Oh, and I owe this pretzel guy a dollar. And I still have more work to do.”

  The strips.

  “That’s a lot to take in,” she says. “Can I help?”

  “With my job?” I ask, perplexed.

  She nods.

  “In the spirit of our partnership,” she says.

  I actually run through the help scenario in my mind, even though my gut reflex is to enunciate, NO. NONONO. Anderson enforces strict rules to protect client confidentiality. Whenever you visit a client’s headquarters for a deal, for example, you can’t tell people outside of the office which city you are going to because this could tip them off to a potential transaction. Instead, you have to be vague and say “Washington” or “West Coast” when you are traveling to “Seattle.” You are not allowed to read deal-related materials in public places without vigilantly guarding your shit. All email services other than Anderson’s are blocked on work computers, and if you send anything deal-related to your personal email, it’s a breach of security and grounds for immediate dismissal.

  But strip profiles collect publicly available information. Skylar wouldn’t be exposed to any MNPI, or “material, nonpublic information.” She wouldn’t see Titan or Sierra named, and she would be none the wiser about the deal. It’s a somewhat delirious judgment call, but it sort of feels okay.

  “There is actually some stuff you could help with,” I say, resigning to the fact that my job is now officially a shit show. “If you googled some stats on a couple of companies: where they are headquartered, how much they make a year in sales, those kinds of things.”

  Skylar leaves the room and returns with a laptop. She beckons me to follow her into the living room, where she positions herself on the yellow carpet in pigeon pose. Her back leg is split-straight and her front leg is bent 45 degrees at the knee. The full pose would entail bending the knee at 90 degrees. Meanwhile, I sit on the sofa and log into my work computer remotely using a combination of randomly generated and prespecified passwords, until I am staring at my desktop exactly as I left it.

  “Okay, so . . .” I begin.

  * * *

  Skylar’s finger pecking sounds like a clock ticking. In the background, she plays music from a Spotify playlist—the free version with ads, like me—so that she can simultaneously scan for songs to work into her classes and lessons. She lives under an eclectic taste umbrella that includes the theme to Star Wars, chapel hymns, and plain, tribal drums.

  “Skye,” I say.

  “Allegra,” she says.

  If tonight is any preview of working with her, it’s relaxing and pleasant. I finish before Skylar does and open Instagram to her latest post, a picture of her and Rosie on a bench in Central Park. Skylar wraps one arm around Rosie’s shoulders and flashes a peace sign while smiling wide at the camera. Rosie is mid-laugh, enjoying something apparently so funny that she’s lost self-control. Her eyes are squeezed shut, her mouth open, her teeth bared. The caption is about friendship, but it’s not the one I wrote.

  @SkylarSmithYoga: A real friend is happy when you are happy. In Sanskrit, we call this mudita.

  For my best friend, my sister, Rosie. Your happy makes me happy.

  #mudita.

  Love, Skye

  Like. I click through Rosie’s tag to her profile: 2K followers.

  A red notification appears at the bottom-right corner of my app. Weird. Sometimes, though, I do get spam attention. At the moment, I have two new followers, the most recent being @LovePiglet_2. Its bio mandates “Follow us if you love pigs” with a link to a website where I can buy mugs or T-shirts tiled with pig pictures and have my satisfaction 100 percent guaranteed. The next follower is a carbon copy of @LovePiglet_2 but for cow shit: “Follow us if you love cows.” Oddly, getting followed like this is always briefly exciting. How lonely am I? These fake fucking people.

  “Done,” she says. “Just sent.”

  I open her email’s attachment.

  “Wow,” I mutter.

  The company logos are aligned perfectly down the leftmost column. Every line partition between columns is ruler-straight. Every number has the same amount of decimal places. Every bullet point ends with a period. She mimicked the starting template exactly.

  “You would be an incredible banking analyst,” I say.

  “Good to know!” she says.

  I laugh and slot her slides behind mine, where it’s clear that hers are better. I send the final deck to Tripp and wonder if he will comment on the improvement.

  From: Tripp Thompson

  To: Allegra Cobb

  Fri 17 Nov 11:30 p.m.

  I’m out will look tmrw

  Or not. I fold my laptop.

  “What a fiasco,” I mutter.

  “Now,” Skylar begins. “To the real work.”

  I laugh and drop my neck back until my head rests on her sofa. That was exhausting. Skylar sits beside me. Her cashmere sweater looks soft. I have an urge to ask her to make me a cup of tea, tuck me in, and say good night.

  “How are you?” she asks.

  “Overwhelmed,” I say.

  Skylar smiles as if this is exactly what she wants to hear.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You’re doing it!” she says. She jostles my shoulder, and I wait for the other shoe to drop. “This is real openness.” She looks joyful. “You’re being honest, not ashamed of your feelings. Now we can go even deeper.”

  “Even deeper,” I repeat faintly.

  “Yes,” she says. “We have good momentum now. As a next step, I will send you some gentle postures you can do right at your desk.”

  At my desk.

  “You can start small,” she says. “The right intention, with the right gestures, will open your spirit even more. Gestures like upward-facing cup with your hands.” She demonstrates. “Then, breathe deeply. Receive energy through the cup.”

  At my fucking desk.

  “If you feel comfortable, you can raise your arms to welcome possibility.” She demonstrates. “Physical gestures have power.”

  She stands and disappears to her bedroom. When she returns to the sofa, she extends two plastic bottles of oil labeled with brands I don’t recognize, subtitled in Chinese. The syrups look thick as shampoo.

  “Then, these oils you can rub on your body,” she says. “The way you might in abhyanga, or a massage, in Ayurveda. The flower smell might seem a bit much at first, but the oils will help calm you. There are instructions on the label. You can wash them off at the end of the day.”

  End of the day.

  “Scalp, face, neck,” she says. She imitates the rubbing motion. “If you like, you can massage these onto your chest and back, too. People usually rub clockwise, but I don’t think that matters.”

  “I leave the oils on?” I clarify.

  “Yes,” she says. “Treat yourself.”

  Her bottles of amber oil remain untouched in her hands.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I lie.

  She waits, blond eyebrows stitched.

  “Nothing,” I repeat the lie.

  I can’t go into work covered in oil.

  Skylar takes them back into her lap.

  “So, these are not speaking to you,” she says.

  Yeah, no shit. Titan i
s up to its eyeballs in Sierra. Mark is mindfucking me. Vivienne wants to kill me. Tripp is asking about my feelings. Tripp is asking about my feelings. Jason could staff me at any moment on a triple trans-border fucking reverse merger, and then I’d get paired working with an Anderson team in a whole other time zone and deal with exchange rate bullshit. My schedule twenty-four hours ahead is unpredictable as shit. I am at fucking capacity. Oils?

  “Allegra, I am on your side,” she says gently. “I thought we were working together to center you. Then we could spread the peace together. Now I feel you resisting me again. I can’t teach you if you won’t stay open to the process.” She pauses. “I thought we would have made a good team, but I won’t force anything on you. If this isn’t meant to be, it isn’t meant to be.”

  “No, I’m with you,” I say. “I just can’t go to work covered in oil.”

  “What do you want to do?” she asks directly.

  Without thinking, I answer, “Teach.”

  She reflects. I see the wheels turning in her head.

  “You know what? That is a great idea,” she says. “Maybe it’s in a studio that you really shine. And that’s where we want you to end up anyhow, right?” She laughs. “Sometimes, the right answer is the simplest one. So, would you like to sub in and teach for me? Monday night?” The tail end of her question beckons me invitingly. I must be showing my answer, Yes. “Great!” she says. She prayers her hands. “Then you emerge truly as a teacher, or . . . maybe the time isn’t right. We won’t force anything unnatural.”

  * * *

  I left Skylar’s apartment that night with a sense of urgency. She didn’t say it outright, but the Monday class felt like my last chance to earn the opportunity to work with her. Her patience was wearing thin.

  Skylar gave me no parameters aside from time and place—Yoga Cyclone, Monday, 8 p.m.—so I could structure the class as I saw fit. Of course, I’ve never taught a yoga class before on my own, nor have I trained as a teacher. I’ve done thousands of hours of yoga in my life and competed onstage in front of yogi masters, which should be enough to guide a class. At least, I think so. And Skylar does, too. But, really, I would be winging it.