Rae began replying to the text, but Ellen snatched the phone away. “No work tonight,” she said.
“But—”
“The global economy isn’t going to collapse if you don’t fix a fucking decimal point.”
Ellen drowned Rae’s protests with the Quarter Century Club playlist she’d made. The first song was well-selected—poppy without the sugar—and stirred a certain optimism in Rae.
Twenty-five was the year she’d finally be promoted, rising from Wall Street’s bottom rung to its second-to-bottom rung. And it felt like a more low-key era when she could meet up with the Scramblettes for sushi on a Friday night and then be curled up in bed before the just-out-of-college crowd had even wiggled into their constricting miniskirts and stilettos.
Sure, it was more than a little disconcerting to compare her mid-twenties reality of fifteen-hour workdays and takeout meals for one to the married-with-a-dog-and-kid-on-the-way lifestyles of her friends back in her Indiana hometown, but at least in Manhattan she felt like she was moving. She wasn’t exactly sure where all the motion was leading, but there was some sense offorward, and on good days, evenupward.
Turning up the volume on the speaker, she and Ellen pranced around the apartment, twirling their robes for effect.
Many songs later, Sarah arrived, wearing an oversized sweatshirt rather than a robe. “It’s basically the same,” she said, when Rae asked why she hadn’t adhered to the theme.
“No,” Rae said, voice clipped. “Sweatshirts say, ‘I’m lazy and haven’t showered in days.’ Bathrobes say, ‘I’m effortlessly seductive and smell like fresh peaches.’”
“She’s right,” Ellen said, as the three of them formed a lopsided triangle on the floor, leaving room for Mina.
The couch wasn’t big enough to fit all four of them, even if they squished, and they preferred collectively suffering on the hardwood to relegating just one of them to the floor.
“I think twenty-five is going to be the year Rae meets the great love of her life,” Ellen proclaimed, topping off their mugs.
“Definitely,” Sarah agreed.
“No,” Rae said, bad mood about work spilling now into a bad mood about love. “I’m focusing on my career.”
“And you’re crushing it,” Ellen said, as she often did. “I just think it’s time to join the modern age and get a dating app.”
“I barely even get to see my friends,” Rae said, resenting her job for consuming her life and herself for letting it. “Why do I want to waste my time on complete strangers?”
“Everyone starts out as a stranger,” Sarah said.
Rae thought about how, when she’d first met her college boyfriend in that over-capacity, beer-soaked frat basement, he hadn’t felt like a stranger. She didn’t like it, how she still remembered the untainted beginning. They’d dated for a few years before he’d cheated on Rae with the girl Rae had been living with right after college. He’d spun the blame on her: “You’re in an exclusive relationship with your job!”
“It’s good to keep working your relationship muscle,” Ellen said. “So it doesn’t atrophy too much.”
“My relationship muscle is very strong, thank you,” Rae said, feeling a stab of betrayal at how Ellen was lecturing her about love, on her birthday no less.
“How many dates have you been on since you and Jake broke up?” Ellen asked. Ellen went on first dates just about every week. None of them had stuck yet.
“Plenty,” Rae said, though it wasn’t true. She hadn’t technically been on any dates since her breakup two years ago, not unless you counted the time she’d gotten drinks with a client—a networking event, she’d thought—and he’d ended up hitting on her.
Maybe it was recalling the way his hand had slid assertively up her thigh that night, or maybe it was the way she was now sitting on the floor eating blocks of cheese at her own birthday party, but something made her see her dating life in a new light—a very dim, very dark light that was flickering ominously, as if to warn her it was about to go out altogether.
Reminding herself that she had more important things to focus on than meeting guys, she tried to push back against the angst, but the angst pushed back with a mind of its own, like it was staging a coup on her own brain, a coup it had been planning for a long time now and had chosen tonight to execute, knowing how vulnerable she’d be to a quarter-life crisis.
The anxiety escalated into full-blown panic. She’d completed twenty-five laps around the sun and yet was still at square zero when it came to love. In trying to climb up the corporate ladder, she’d fallen completely off the romantic ladder.
Chugging the rest of her rosé, she reached for an unopened bottle of room-temperature Chardonnay. “Shit,” she said, yanking on the corkscrew. She still struggled to open wine bottles. She should’ve mastered more of these adult things by now, but she hadn’t, and in this moment, she was certain she never would. “I’m in a romantic recession.”
Ellen and Sarah rattled off a string of supposed-to-be-soothing words, but Rae’s screeching escalated as she kept tugging the cork,which was shredding as it stayed stuck in the neck of the bottle. “A romantic recession!” she cried, latching on to the alliteration. “And my dad didn’t even send me a birthday card.” The negative spiral was all intertwined. “And I hate my mom’s boyfriend. And I’m going to be staring at pointless spreadsheets for the rest of my life and never write a single poem. And I’m going to die alone, surrounded by cats!” she concluded in crescendo.
“Well, then that’s not really alone, is it?” Sarah asked, trying to lighten the mood. “Since you’ll have the cats.”
Rae tried to glare, but her eyelids were too tired. The thought of work tomorrow made her want to simultaneously curl into a ball and teleport away, away,away.
A serrated blade of clarity woke her up. “I have to meet someone this year or it’s all over,” Rae announced, pivoting to her no-nonsense business voice.
