Kiss Her Once for Me (41)

I wait for her to let go of me, but she still has my foot in her hands. There’s something so startlingly intimate about it. Her rough fingers, my cold foot, skin and skin and skin. There is something about the vulnerability of her hands on my body and the snow surrounding us that takes me back to that day, to the honesty game and the openness.

“I got fired from Laika,” I blurt into the quiet of the woods. As soon as I say it, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my chest, the hole inside me filling a little bit. I keep going. “I couldn’t hack it, and I got fired after three months. Like a total failure.”

Jack doesn’t look up from my foot, from the place where her fingers are still absently massaging my skin. “I know what that job meant to you, and I’m sorry. But people get fired, Elle,” she says with a shrug. “Failure happens. That doesn’t make you a failure.”

I shake my head. “You don’t understand.”

“Okay.” She sounds so casual, so unconcerned. “Then make me understand. Tell me what happened.”

I close my eyes and see my supervisor pulling me into his office; he had a thick beard obscuring his expression, and he was wearing a Patagonia pullover that smelled like patchouli and burned coffee. My stomach felt like a wrung-out dish towel because my gastrointestinal distress always knows bad news is coming before my brain does.

I’ve avoided thinking about that day for the past year, tried to block it out and ignore it. “It was… it was really challenging,” I say with my eyes still closed, her fingers still on my skin. “I’d always been at the top of my class, and I’d never really… struggled. Not like that.”

I inhale slowly through my nose and the cold stings my sinuses. In the distance, there is a peal of laughter, followed by a shout of mock anguish. I close my eyes. “I was working all the time, putting in extra hours to try to catch up. My anxiety was terrible—I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat, and I knew I was disappointing the people who’d hired me. Then, three months in… there was a budget issue.”

That was why my supervisor pulled me into his office. “I’m afraid our quarterly earnings fell short of our projections, so we can only keep on two of the three new animators we hired at the end of last year.”

The shame that gathered on my skin, rolling up and down my limbs in hot waves. Shame like terror, like a sound you hear in the night, half-asleep, when you wake up in a confused panic.

“I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.”

My supervisor kept talking after that, but I couldn’t hear the rest. There was a deep, pulsating thud in my ears, and all I could do was stare at the naked tree branches outside the window, unblinking. Because if I blinked, I would cry. I was sitting in a chair, hearing what I always suspected deep down.

I was just like my parents. Not good enough. A failure. A fuck-up.

“So, you weren’t fired at all,” Jack says after I’ve told her everything. “You were laid off.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “They’d hired three new animators, all fresh out of grad school, and I was the one who couldn’t keep up. I was the one they chose to let go.”

Jack doesn’t say anything, doesn’t argue with me about my interpretation of events. When I open my eyes, she’s sitting in the snow beside me, looking at me the way Jack looks, like she can see through everything, to all the holes I still keep hidden on the inside. “I’d had this whole ten-year plan—this goal I’d been working toward my whole life—and it just collapsed in an instant.”

I’d failed, and the worst part was, everyone would know. Those professors who’d praised me, and the peers who’d been impressed when I’d landed such a coveted position at Laika right out of grad school. My parents, who’d never believed in my dreams or noticed my talent. Guidance counselors who told me I would never be able to support myself as an artist. Meredith. Everyone.

I take another deep breath, and for the first time in months, I don’t feel the sharp snag in my ribs at the inhale. It feels like someone has untangled the aching knot in my chest just a bit.

“I’m sorry,” Jack says. My foot is in her lap. Her fingers are on my skin. Somewhere across these woods, her family is throwing snow at each other. “But did you even like working at Laika?”

“Of course I did,” I answer automatically.

“You just… you didn’t seem very happy there, last year.” Jack absentmindedly squeezes my foot. “You seemed like you wanted to be happy there, because it fit with this idea you had of your life—this ten-year plan—but did it really bring you joy?”

I run my tongue along my bottom lip, considering. Was your dream job supposed to bring you joy?

Jack drops my foot so it sinks into the cold snow. “Sorry,” she says, dropping her gaze, too. “Sorry, that was presumptuous. I–I shouldn’t have forced you to open up about all of that.”

I reach for my discarded sock. “You didn’t force me.”

Jack rises clumsily, her boots slipping before she’s able to right herself. “Yeah, but I just…” She whips off her Carhartt beanie, ruffles her hair, then shoves it back on her head. “I just think, probably, we shouldn’t—Is your foot okay?”

It hurts a bit as I shove it back in my boot, but I nod.