Pineapple Street(6)

Everyone laughed, Cord walking up to rub her shoulders to make sure she thought it was funny too, and Sasha played along, knowing deep in her heart that she would never wear a white blouse to a Stockton family party again as long as she lived.





TWO


    Georgiana


Georgiana had a problem, and it was mostly her traitorous cheeks. She had always blushed easily, but lately it felt like she had become some sort of character out of science fiction who wore their emotions entirely on their skin. She would feel the heat rising in her face, a slight prickle on her neck, and then—poof—scarlet.

What had for years been a mostly adorable trait had turned into a professional liability now that Georgiana had a real job and, problematically, an enormous, goofy, childlike, and mortifying crush. His name was Brady and she couldn’t even look at him in meetings. They had hardly ever spoken—he was older than her, maybe early thirties, and a project manager who had no reason ever to even think of the small pink person frantically glaring at the floor—but whenever Georgiana passed him in the halls, sat in the same conference room, or ran into him at the copier, she had to avert her eyes like he was a solar eclipse and she needed those dorky paper glasses.

They worked for a not-for-profit and the offices were in an old mansion on Columbia Place that was still set up like a home. To get to her desk, Georgiana walked through a beautiful foyer where their receptionist, Denise, sat behind a heavy mahogany desk, up a spiral staircase, through a grand room that they used alternately as their conference room and cafeteria, then through a large bedroom where four desks were arranged for the grant-writing department, and into a tiny space that must have originally been for a maid or a wet nurse. They were all crammed in like sardines, but it was wonderfully charming. Georgiana’s little two-person office had a big window that looked west over the Promenade out across the East River. The mansion’s bathrooms were scattered throughout the house and decorated with maps of the various regions where they worked, and hanging over the printer, along with instructions on refilling toner, was a gilded portrait of a duchess taking a harp lesson.

The mansion belonged to their founder, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. He had traveled the world as a young man and become aware of the lack of medical care available in developing countries and set up a not-for-profit to teach local organizations how to build sustainable health systems. They operated mostly on grants from places like the Gates Foundation and the World Bank, and also had some wealthy private donors. Georgiana was in the communications department, so her job was to suck up to the aforementioned donors, and to cull photos of their work abroad for their website, edit articles about their projects for the newsletter, and manage their social media accounts. It wasn’t because she was especially interested in social media, but because she was under thirty everyone assumed she would be, and it helped her land the job to casually mention that she had eighteen hundred followers on Instagram. (Who didn’t? All you needed to do was remove your privacy settings and post the occasional picture of your cute friends at a party.)

But this was the main difference between Georgiana and Brady: she was lowly support staff, fangirling the organization’s successes in the field and writing it up in the newsletter, and Brady was at the center of the action. He had been to Afghanistan and Uganda, he was featured in the photos Georgiana pored over, speaking to a group of doctors in a makeshift hospital, kicking a soccer ball with adorable kids in front of a banner with information on vaccines, looking deeply into the eyes of a doctor in India as they reviewed their contraceptive distribution plans. He was the star of the play, and she was painting the sets, simultaneously desperately wishing he would notice her and dreading the moment when he might, sure her cheeks would go aflame.



* * *



—

It was a Friday, and Georgiana was standing at the mailboxes under the stairs sorting envelopes by destination, domestic into one bin and international into another. As she sorted, she double-checked each address to make sure it looked right—she had updated their contacts so that they could do giant mailings without having to enter the addresses individually, but it was still a slightly imperfect system. She was puzzling over an envelope, lost in thought, when a voice startled her.

“You okay?” It was Brady. He leaned past her to retrieve his mail from a box with his name below it.

“Yeah, just trying to figure out if this one is addressed correctly.” Georgiana held the letter out so that he might see it. They were standing so close she could have kissed him if she lurched fast enough. Oh my God, why would I lurch-kiss this person? She briefly hated her own brain.

“It looks fine. What’s the problem?” Brady asked.

“But is it domestic or international? It doesn’t have a country on it,” Georgiana replied, perplexed.

“United Arab Emirates,” Brady read slowly, pointing to the bottom line of the address. Was the envelope shaking? Georgia felt like it was shaking.

“Right, but shouldn’t there be a country under that?” she asked.

“United Arab Emirates is a country.”

“Oh, I just—” Georgiana stopped talking.

“It’s on the Arabian Peninsula by Saudi Arabia and Oman?”

“Yeah.” Georgiana had literally never heard of it in her life.

“Dubai is one of the cities there.”