I go outside of my apartment and knock on Terry’s door. When I hear his footsteps coming to the door, I plaster on a sweet smile. Terry grins when he opens the door.
“Morning, neighbor,” he drawls. God, I hope he’s not flirting with me. I would just die if he did.
“Hi.” An awkward second passes, during which he stares at me expectantly. I’m not good with conversations. Blame it on the friendlessness that plagued me all my school years. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to socialize. Sometimes I wonder if this is why Annette hired me: because she knows I’m good at being invisible.
Terry’s eyes move downward, to the container I’m holding. His face breaks into a grin. “Did you bake too many cookies again?”
“Oh. Yeah. Do you—” I don’t bother finishing the rest of the sentence as he reaches out and grabs the container from me.
“Your cookies are the best,” he says in a magnanimous way. “Your muffins, too, and your bread, and those little cakes you make.”
I smile shyly. Despite myself, he’s actually kind of winning me over a little. Ugh, get a grip, Fern. I take a breath and remind myself to stand straighter. “I was hoping that you could maybe lower the volume on your keyboard?”
Terry frowns. “What do you mean?”
My mind flails. Shouldn’t it be obvious what I meant? “Um, the keyboard ... it’s right up against the wall where my bed is, and I can hear you playing—very beautifully, by the way—in the morning ...”
“Thank you,” Terry says. He looks so pleased with my compliment, and there is absolutely no indication that he’s absorbed anything else I’ve said.
I try again. “So anyway, I was wondering if you could lower the volume or maybe move the keyboard away from the wall?” The smile trembles on my lips, begging to slide off. I valiantly fight to keep it on.
“Oh, Felicia, I’m sorry.”
“It’s Fern, actually, but it’s fine,” I mumble. “Thank you—”
“But I’ve tried other spots in the apartment, and none of them feel quite right, you know?” He places a hand on my shoulder, and I gaze down at it, marveling at the wrongness of it, the way I can feel his body heat on mine. He pats me like one would a dog. “The way the sound bounces off the walls and the items in the room—my keyboard belongs right there, in that spot. You understand, don’t you?”
“Um . . .”
“How about you move your bed to a different wall?” Terry raises his hands like he’s just been hit by a bright idea. “I’ll even help you. How does that sound?”
The thought of Terry inside my apartment makes my stomach squeeze like a fist. “That’s okay, thank you for the offer,” I say hurriedly.
Terry shrugs. “Well, if you ever change your mind, don’t hesitate to come to me for help.”
“Sure, thank you.”
“No worries. Always happy to help out a neighbor.”
It’s only when I get back inside my apartment that it hits me: How in the world did that conversation end with me thanking him? I smack a palm against my forehead. “Come on, Fern,” I mutter out loud. This has always been my problem. I’m not just a pushover, I’m a mat that people feel free to walk all over, and it’s no one else’s fault but mine.
This, me being a people pleaser, is just one of many of Haven’s legacies. Or so I think. I suppose I wouldn’t really know, since my torment at her hands started when we were just stepping into our teens, and even before that I’d always been a shy, retiring kid. There’s a reason why throughout my childhood, Dani was my only friend. So even without Haven’s cruelty, I probably would’ve still grown into a shy, retiring adult. But maybe not an adult who knocks on her neighbor’s door to complain about the noise and then ends up apologizing to him instead. God, sometimes I hate myself.
I give out another couple of containers full of cookies to my other neighbors. They’re very grateful, which makes me feel better about myself. See? I want to shout at the world. People like me. I’m a good person.
By the time I get back inside my apartment, I’m smiling. That saying about how spending money on others brings you more happiness than spending money on yourself? So true. Which is why I pack up my remaining cookies for Annette. Karma, I think to myself. If you do good things, good things will happen to you. And if you do bad things, well ...
Actually, judging from how things are going for Haven, if you do bad things but are good at hiding them, you’ll probably go on toflourish. But today is a new day, I remind myself, and we are not going to spare the likes of Haven a second thought.
I smile as I make my way to work, even though there’s honestly not much to smile about in my neighborhood and there was one guy who I was pretty sure was jerking off while eating a wheel of Brie on the subway. I’m not sure which disturbed me more: the public masturbation or the sight of him biting into an intact Brie wheel. I clasped my container of cookies like a shield, hoping he wouldn’t notice me. He didn’t, of course. I don’t have the kind of face that anyone notices.
At the studio, I arrange the cookies artfully on a plate at our snack corner and start making Annette’s coffee. She arrives ten minutes after I do, and the only indication I get of her appreciating my cookie offering is a single sniff when I bring her in one cookie along with her coffee. Pure Annette. It’s okay, though; I don’t mind. It brings me genuine pleasure watching people bite into my creations.
The first couple of hours at work fly by as I prepare invoices for Annette’s clients and update the books as well as load two sets of edited photos onto the cloud. Honestly, I have no idea what Annette is doing while I perform all these admin tasks for her. Whenever I glance up at her all-glass office, she’s clicking away at her computer, though I’m hard pressed to think of what there could possibly be for her to do. I do all the photo editing and the filing and uploading and emailing. She does the ... You know what? Doesn’t matter what she does. It’s none of my business.
Ten minutes before my break time, my phone beeps, and my entire body perks up because it’s the beep I’ve assigned to Poppy. An email! my mind squeals. Then, immediately following the excited moment of “AH!” is the realistic, sobering thought: It’s probably her forwarding yet another rejection. I try to temper my excitement as I reach for my phone. It’ll be another rejection, I remind myself. Just another—
But it isn’t.
