Chapter Text
There's something eerie about being the first person to join a video call, Henry thinks. It’s a bit like staring into a mirror and knowing that, at any moment, the mirror will begin to stare back.
He sits alone in the breakout room, his laptop screen cheated away from the glass wall looking out into the hallway. It's technically a violation of company policy to monopolize breakout rooms for non-work purposes, but needs must. Bea, Philip, and their mum will be in California in less than a month, and Henry's lunch break is the only sliver of time the Fox-Mountchristen siblings could find to hop on a transatlantic call after two weeks of botched attempts. Hotel bookings need to be double-checked. Itineraries need to be ironed out. They all need to all figure out how to be in the same room again.
The official reason for the visit is the Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony. Their dad is being awarded a posthumous star, which they'll accept on his behalf. Schmoozing and glad-handing will likely be involved. They probably would have turned the invitation down, as they usually do with these things, if it weren't for the unofficial reason for their visit: Henry, himself. He's been living in California for two years and hasn't been home for longer than that. And it’s not like he’s invited his family to visit him, either.
Henry pushes down his guilt, takes a bite of slightly damp summer salad, and checks his email while he waits for Bea and Philip to join the call.
From: Nora ([email protected])
To: Henry ([email protected])
Subject: SEEKING HUMAN CONTACT
i've pulled a Beautiful Mind and barricaded myself in breakout room 804 trying to figure out how to make this fucking API call without the use of the fucking infinity gauntlet. please come visit me later?? i need to hear stories about boomers falling for phishing scams. it'll make me feel smart again.
From: Henry ([email protected])
To: Nora ([email protected])
Subject: Re: SEEKING HUMAN CONTACT
I'll try to come up around 3:00. Assuming I survive this call with my family.
Zoom chimes just as Henry presses send, and Philip's image blinks onto the screen. It's evening in London, and Philip's study is diffused in warm, yellow lamplight. He looks rather stately, sitting at his mahogany desk backed by the original Rembrandt that Gran gifted him and Martha for their wedding. Henry is suddenly very aware of the half-erased whiteboard behind him, littered with phrases like "ROI" and "end users."
"Hello hello," Philip says, overloud and falsely cheery.
"Hello, Pip." Henry chucks his salad into the bin, his appetite evaporated. "How're things?"
"Oh, can't complain. Just got back from drinks with the lads. We were out celebrating. Will Cavendish says hello, by the way. I remember the two of you used to get on."
Henry used to suck his cock, to be precise.
"He and Lucy are finally getting married," Philip continues. "Spring wedding."
"Mm, good for them," Henry says mildly.
"They'll be at Gran's retirement party in November, you know. I'm sure they'd love to see you."
Of course they'll be at Gran's retirement party. Everyone will be at Gran's retirement party. Because Gran's retirement party isn't actually about Gran's retirement. It's about loudly telegraphing the Mountchristen dynastic plan. Gran will announce she's stepping down from the board, ushering Philip into the position he's been groomed for since birth. It's a coronation, more than anything. As such, Henry is expected to be in attendance and polished to a high shine.
Philip seems to note his hesitance. "You’re still planning to come home for the party, right?"
"It might be hard to get the time off,” Henry hedges. “You know how it is here."
Except Philip doesn't know, really. Henry hasn't exactly made a point to spell out the more unglamorous details of his job, and Philip seems content telling people his brother works at Google and letting them draw their own conclusions—ideally that Henry is some sort of tech genius.
Henry is not a tech genius. He earned his degree in Human-Computer Interaction without honors and by the skin of his teeth. It had been the closest thing to a liberal arts degree that Gran would agree to finance. Not having much of a say in what he studied, he’d decided to focus his attention on where. Having fancied the idea of writing in New York and eager to put an ocean between him and his family, he’d chosen Columbia. He’d pictured himself sitting by a bay window in a Brooklyn brownstone, scribbling love poems about some dashing, dark-haired American into a leather-bound journal.
In hindsight, he's not sure how he’d intended to materialize that romantic, writerly life. Columbia's in Morningside Heights, so a Brooklyn address would have been entirely impractical. Not to mention that opportunities to fall in love with poetry-inspiring American men had been thin on the ground. Most of Henry's time in New York had been spent simply staying afloat. And before he knew it, that time had run out.
They’d still been posing for photos at his graduation ceremony when Gran had handed him a business card emblazoned with a name he hadn’t recognized.
"My associate has arranged an interview for you. Give him a call to sort out the details." Gran's tendrils stretched across the Atlantic, after all.
The interview, it turned out, had been for Google's famously good UX team. Google was also famous for sponsoring its international employees’ visas. Worried that if he didn't jump at the opportunity he'd have no choice but to return to London with his tail between his legs, Henry had flown from JFK to SFO the next week.
And then he’d promptly bombed the whiteboard portion of his interview. It had been his Ivy League degree and Gran's connections that secured him his consolation prize: a job in customer support.
He’d spent four grueling years studying the leading edge of interactive computing, and now he earns his living explaining to confused widows that, no, they probably shouldn’t have clicked on the suspicious link that their overseas penpal sent them.
Zoom chimes again as Bea appears on the screen.
"Sorry I'm late," she chirps before launching into a story about how one of her music students dropped their pet guinea pig down their tuba. Apparently Bea spent most of her evening trying to fish the poor thing out.
"Is it all right?" Philip asks, caught halfway between concern and disgust.
"The guinea pig is fine," Bea says, then she grimaces. "The tuba is not."
After that, they fall into a rhythm. Henry volunteers to check on the hotel reservations. Philip forwards Bea their flight information, and Bea promises to relay it all to their mum. Philip and Bea ask Henry for suggestions of things to do in LA, and he reminds them that LA is a 6-hour drive from where he lives in Mountain View, so he’s hardly an expert. They both look at him blankly before he relents, agreeing to compile a list of potential activities. And then it's over.
Philip signs off, and the tension drains from Henry's shoulders. Bea gives him a knowing look.
Henry groans. "He was asking me about coming home for Gran's party before you got here. I haven't come up with an excuse yet."
"Would it be so bad?" she asks, her eyes soft and her head cocked a bit to the side. "To come home for a while?"
"Bea—"
"Yes, fine, fine. Let's survive each other in California first, then we'll worry about tackling things across the pond."
#
Alex would swear to any reporter that the Claremont-for-Mayor campaign is proud, actually, to be headquartered in a dilapidated strip mall next door to a Chinese takeout restaurant and a head shop with irregular hours. China King has the best soup dumplings in town, after all.
The place really is a steal. The previous tenant had been one of those creepy evangelical storefront churches, and the landlord had cut the Claremont campaign a great deal after the church broke their lease. Apparently, their pastor had heard a call from God instructing him to spread His word in the Cayman Islands. Alex suspects the only call he got was from the IRS. Either way, they’d left in a hurry, which meant the Claremont campaign had inherited all their old furniture and tech equipment. Not that any of it is exactly state-of-the-art.
Zahra's at the front of the sanctuary-turned-conference room, cursing vaguely as she tries to plug an ancient projector cable into an HDMI converter.
"Got you the good stuff from that bougie place on Lamar," Alex says as he places a 20-ounce cup of black coffee on the pulpit-turned-podium beside her.
"Thanks," she says without looking up. "Now go away."
He snorts. "As if I'd try to start a conversation with you when you're knee-deep in Jesus tech."
She looks up at him slowly, eyes narrowed. "What do you call what you're doing right now?"
"Fair enough," he answers as he backs away, free hand raised in mock surrender.
He finds his mom sitting squarely in the middle of the conference table—the only piece of furniture they’d bought new after they moved into this place. He sets her coffee down directly in front of her. Her eyes dart up to it, then to him.
"Thank you, sugar, that's sweet of you."
"I'm buttering you up, actually."
"Oh?" She raises her eyebrows at him before stealing a quick glance at her phone.
"Yeah." He's suddenly very aware of the dozen-or-so campaign staffers filtering into the room and helping themselves to the stale bagel spread at the far end of the table. He lowers his voice. "I need to talk to you about something."
"All right," she says slowly. She puts her phone down on the table and regards him steadily. "What's going on?"
"You know how I've been thinking about going back to—?"
He's cut off by the sound of every phone in the room pinging simultaneously. He feels his own buzz in his pocket. His mom's eyes widen, then narrow, as she studies her screen. Alex whips out his own phone to confirm what he already knows.
The article just came out. The big one.
When The New York Times contacted their campaign to do a piece, it had felt like a windfall. The Times doesn't do write-ups on local Texas elections unless there's something very strange or very special going on. But The Times hadn’t wanted to do a piece on the campaign itself. They’d wanted to do a glossy human interest piece on Alex. About how a Texas kid had graduated at the top of his class at A&M, and, instead of accepting a once-in-a-lifetime job offer from the Progressive Policy Institute, he’d moved back home to help run his mom’s mayoral campaign. This was Beto-level publicity. If he did the article, if he convinced people to care about his mom, she could win the election. She could become a household name. She could go on to run for governor next. Maybe even president.
The idea that he could have said no—that he could have left some small piece of himself out of it, that he could have offered less than everything he had—hadn't even occurred to him until now, with his thumb hovering over the link and his heart hammering in his throat.
The room plunges into silence as the staffers read the article. Alex sinks into a chair beside his mom and loads up the page, his gaze immediately snagging on the byline. It's disorienting to see a name he knows from late night texts and the bottoms of bar receipts in such a formal setting. Caleb Hart.
He skims the article and tries to steady his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Okay, Caleb followed him around for an entire month, so there's a lot of stuff here. He knew that would be the case, so he tries not to feel betrayed by it. It's not like there's anything bad, exactly, there's just... a lot.
The picture Caleb paints of him is intense, driven, a bit bull-headed. A bit too much. Then the focus of the piece shifts to the stuff about his dad that he really shouldn't have said on the record. But he'd been pleasantly buzzed from the pitcher of beer they'd split, and Caleb's eyes had been boring into him, like he was the most interesting man in the world, like he'd listen to him talk for hours, and it had felt so good.
And now Alex feels like a fucking idiot. Caleb had known exactly what he was doing when he’d pressed his leg against Alex's under the bar, when he’d bent his head closer to better hear what Alex was saying, his warm breath caressing the shell of Alex’s ear. It was Alex who hadn’t understood. It was Alex who hadn’t seen that Caleb had just been trying to get the best possible story. It was Alex who, somehow, naively, thought he could do this—the campaign job, the story—without bleeding himself dry, without offering every piece of himself up for the taking, and—
"It's great, sugar!" Ellen rises out of her chair and kisses him on the cheek. "It's a little intense, but voters will like that. Authenticity, vulnerability, all that. You did good."
Alex nods absently. His face is hot, and he can feel beads of sweat forming on the back of his neck.
Zahra, still at the podium and clearly ready to start the meeting in earnest, clears her throat.
"Good work," she says, eyeing Alex with reluctant approval. "A major, national write-up on a mayoral election is a big deal, and you didn't completely fuck it up."
Ordinarily Alex would be amused by her attempt at a compliment, but right now he's too distracted by the roiling nausea in his gut. Zahra clicks on the projector and launches into her analysis of the latest polling numbers.
Her voice fades to static as Alex pulls up the article on his phone again. He looks at Caleb's byline until his vision swims. It's only when the pixels start to blur together that he lets himself remember the feel of Caleb's lips pressed against his. He lets himself remember the scrape of Caleb's stubble against his jaw, the minty scent of his aftershave, the narrow set of his hips.
Which parts of that had been real, and which parts had just been Caleb angling for a juicier story? It's a punishing, downward spiral of thoughts, but it feels like there's a conclusion waiting for him at the bottom, if only he could reach it.
"Alex?"
He looks up. All the staffers and his mom are looking at him expectantly. Zahra's lips are pursed in annoyance.
"Just zoned out for a sec, sorry. What'd you say?"
"Zahra was asking if you could get in touch with Liam."
Alex blinks, his brain whirring to catch up. "Uh. Liam, like, Liam from high school Liam?"
"Like I was saying," Zahra says pointedly. "He was just elected president of Equality Texas. It'd be great to get an official endorsement."
Equality Texas is the state's preeminent LGBTQ+ rights group. Their endorsement would be gold. And Liam's president, which means... Alex's brain whirs again. Liam's gay? Or maybe bi or pan or something Alex hasn’t even heard of. Which is obviously fine, Alex reminds himself, so he's not quite sure why his head is spinning with the news.
He should say, Yeah, of course, I'll do it today, but the words die in his throat.
"So, you'll get in touch with him?" Zahra prompts.
"Uh, I guess, but..." he trails off. His mom's eyebrows are inching up her forehead—a reasonable reaction to Alex not jumping headfirst into an assignment. "I mean, it's been a long time."
Ellen's expression settles into a no-nonsense look that makes him feel like he's a kid again, trying to weasel his way out of mowing the lawn.
"The two of you were attached at the hip from sixth to twelfth grade," she says flatly. “I think he'll remember you."
He looks away and clears his throat. "Um. Yeah, okay, I'll reach out."
Satisfied, Zahra clicks to her next slide, and all the heads in the room swivel to focus their attention back on her.
Alex unlocks his phone and stares down at Caleb's byline again. He’d thought this weird crush was a fluke—a symptom of his cracking under the immense pressure of co-running a grassroots mayoral campaign on a shoestring budget. But that's not exactly true, is it? Because before Caleb, there’d been Liam.
Liam and his low drawl and his shy smile and his broad shoulders. Liam and his full lips sliding against Alex's for what felt like hours, their bodies pressed together on Alex's twin-sized bed. Liam and his long fingers wrapped around Alex's cock.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. The onslaught of memories is overwhelming, opening a door in his mind that's been slammed shut for years.
When was the last time he’d even talked to Liam? They’d exchanged sporadic emails in undergrad that had gradually tapered off before finally stopping altogether. Alex always thought they’d drifted apart because that's just what happens with high school friends, but what if they’d stopped talking because of what happened between them? What if there had been something there all along that Alex hadn't seen?
He vaguely remembers the last time they spoke—an email exchange so awkward and forced that Alex had finally allowed himself to abandon their friendship entirely. Alex can't just cold call him after that, asking for an endorsement, acting like nothing happened, and tacking on, "Congrats on being gay, and by the way, what does that mean about what happened between us? Was that gay too?"
He has to figure out the facts first. He has to track down their old emails, reread them, and possibly whip up a spreadsheet or two to organize his findings.
This is good, he tells himself. This is a problem he can solve.
Zahra wraps up her presentation and Alex is halfway out the door when he hears his mom call out to him.
"Didn't you want to talk to me about something?" she asks.
"Sorry, Mom, I've gotta go," he says over his shoulder.
He drives straight home. He's supposed to log some phone banking hours this morning, but he blows it off. Instead, he cracks open his laptop, opens Gmail, and starts combing through his emails from the past six years.
He knows, deep down, that this isn't the real problem. He knows there's something beneath the surface, huge and unfathomable, that he isn't quite ready to face. Finding an old email chain from a guy he fooled around with in high school isn't going to give him the answers he needs. But it's a start.
The problem, he's forced to admit several hours and one skipped lunch later, is that he can't actually find the damn emails. With a sinking feeling, he realizes he might have deleted them in a fit of not-wanting-to-look-too-closely at things a few years back. But surely nothing on the internet is deleted forever, right?
And so his current problem morphs into another, even more tangential problem. He Googles "how to retrieve deleted emails from Gmail." He trawls through relevant help articles and learns more than he ever wanted to about search operators and smart filters before deciding that he desperately needs to talk to a human being about this.
Maybe a therapist is the sort of human he should actually be trying to talk to. But, then again: one problem at a time. He's not sure how to untangle everything right now, but he is sure that solving his deleted email problem begins with the "Get Help" button on the Gmail customer support page. So, he clicks it.
#
Henry sits down more heavily than he means to. Wesley glances up at him from across the cork board half-wall that separates their desks. He raises his eyebrows a fraction.
"Family stuff," Henry explains. Wesley just nods.
Besides Nora, who's Henry's coworker in only the loosest sense, Wesley is the closest thing Henry has to a work friend. They gossip and commiserate and exchange significant looks during meetings-that-could-have-been-emails. They do not, however, talk about their personal lives. If Henry's honest with himself, he's worried about what he might discover if they did. If he finds out that Wesley rock climbs or drinks IPAs or goes to Mormon temple on Sundays, their easy friendship—currently one of the load-bearing pillars of Henry's sanity—might collapse entirely.
"What do you think?" Wesley asks, looking pointedly over Henry's shoulder. "New intern?"
Henry cranes his neck around in time to see Hunter opening the door to his glass-walled office for a young woman he doesn't recognize. She's got the wide-eyed look of someone who hasn't yet realized that this place is where dreams come to die.
"New intern," Henry agrees.
"Great," Wesley sighs. "That means he'll be in super-mega-manager mode for the rest of the week trying to impress her. That won't be annoying at all."
Henry looks over his shoulder again, more surreptitiously this time. The woman's sitting in the chair opposite Hunter's desk now, pen poised above a notepad. Hunter's speaking animatedly, smiling widely as he gestures toward the Outstanding Service plaques mounted on the wall, preening like a peacock in a Patagonia vest.
Henry can admit that his intense dislike of Hunter is, at least in part, his own problem. Henry and Hunter had been hired at the same time for the same role, and they’d completed all of their initial training together. But it was Hunter who’d been promoted. It's Hunter who's now Henry's boss.
It makes sense, really. Hunter is the perfect encapsulation of what this place values. Hunter stays late. Hunter goes the extra mile. And, of course, Hunter is unambiguously heterosexual in a way that Henry's never quite been able to to emulate.
Henry still cringes when he remembers how he came out to Hunter, just a few weeks after they started working together. Hunter had been rounding up a group to go out for drinks after work, and Henry had tagged along, still optimistic that he could make some real friends here.
They'd gone to a brewery that was tech worker-hip, complete with Edison string bulbs and $10 craft beers. It had been fine at first. Henry made the rounds, participated in polite small talk, even lightly flirted with Darius from Accounting. But he’d kept running into Hunter, who’d slap him on the back and ask him what he thought about this girl and that girl, his comments getting louder and raunchier as the night wore on.
After one particularly lewd remark Henry had finally snapped, "I don't have any opinion on that poor woman's breasts, Hunter, because I am very, deeply gay." It had so effectively shut Hunter up that Henry hadn’t even regretted it. At least, he hadn’t regretted it until the next morning, when Hunter had cornered him in the break room and aggressively assured him that his being gay was absolutely, definitely not a problem, and actually his sister's hairdresser is gay, and did Henry know him?
Since becoming his manager, Hunter's made sure to repeatedly mention to Henry and everyone else within earshot that it's important for Google to cultivate a diverse team. But despite his speechifying, Hunter's already managed to find two excuses to audit Henry’s work—more audits than he's conducted for any other support agent, despite Henry receiving the fewest customer complaints.
A performance audit is every support agent's worst nightmare—every word you've typed to every customer combed through and mined for the tiniest infractions, with the best possible outcome being a torture device known as a Performance Improvement Plan. It's hard not to think Hunter isn't targeting him on purpose.
He knows he's being a bit paranoid. He knows Hunter isn't out to get him—not because Hunter's incapable of it, but because he doesn't think Hunter bothers to think about him much at all. Which is exactly how Henry wants it. The best strategy to survive this job is to keep his head down, make his quotas, and do his job just well enough—not slacking off enough to hamstring his coworkers, but not performing so well that he draws extra attention to himself.
In other words, his job is to be thoroughly unremarkable. He allows himself a moment of unrepentant self-pity as he clicks open the ticket queue.
By Google's customer-facing design standards, the ticket queue is an ugly thing. It's just an unstyled, clickable list of numbers and timestamps, really. Additional details are hidden until you click on the ticket and assign it to yourself. It's meant to keep agents from picking-and-choosing the easier, more straightforward cases.
The result is a game of roulette. It's actually nice, Henry thinks, in this place where every decision is made through an inscrutable chain of internal politicking—through corporate lunches and rounds of golf and entirely heterosexual slaps on the back—to have the results of this one choice be truly and utterly random.
He clicks on a ticket.
To: Google Support ([email protected])
From: Alex ([email protected])
Subject: Help finding an old email thread?
This is kind of weird, but I was wondering if y’all could find a super old email chain for me? I'm pretty sure I deleted it a few years ago, but I figured it might be stored in the cloud or in one of those big server rooms that are contributing to rapidly accelerating climate change or whatever?
I’ve cross-referenced all my calendars and have figured out that the last email would have been sent in March 2019. I can’t remember the recipient’s email address exactly, but I know "Liam" was somewhere in it. Lmk if there’s more info you need.
Thanks,
Alex
Well, this one’s easy enough.
From: Henry ([email protected])
To: Alex ([email protected])
Subject: Support Ticket #922845
Hello Alex,
Thanks for writing in. Unfortunately, there’s no way to retrieve permanently deleted messages that are over 25 days old. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with, otherwise I’ll close this ticket.
Henry F.
"Henry." He hears Hunter’s voice from behind him as a firm hand grasps his shoulder. Henry takes a deep breath and braces himself for what’s sure to be, at the very least, a mildly annoying interaction. But when he spins around he sees that Hunter’s not alone—the new intern is standing beside him, looking at Henry expectantly.
“This is Samira,” Hunter says, removing his hand from Henry’s shoulder and placing it briefly on the small of Samira’s back. “She’s gonna be interning in Support for the next few months. I thought she could shadow you for a bit this afternoon.”
“Oh, er—” Henry stammers. It’s a request he’s sure is designed to catch him off-guard. These things are usually scheduled well in advance.
“Of course,” he eventually says, but Hunter’s already walking back to his office—a not-so-subtle reminder that his request isn’t a request at all. Henry valiantly resists the urge to roll his eyes.
“Nice to meet you,” Samira says, lifting her arm in an awkward sort of half-wave.
They pull a chair over from a vacant desk, and Henry spends the next hour teaching Samira how to operate the ticket queue. They open a few new tickets that all turn out to be blessedly straightforward. Samira’s clearly done her homework, and what little she doesn’t know she absorbs like a sponge. She’s able to respond to the third ticket—one asking about the difference between Google Hangouts, Google Duo, and Google Meet (they're different names for the same product)—mostly on her own.
He’s just finished explaining how emails to customers should always be signed with your first name and the first initial of your last name (for “warmth and verisimilitude,” as Hunter had reminded him during his last audit), when his email pings.
“Oh, this one's from earlier,” Henry says, scanning the subject line. “It's not an issue we can resolve, though. Sometimes people get upset when that happens, so just remember to be polite, yet firm."
From: Alex ([email protected])
To: Henry ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Support Ticket #922845
Damn, that sucks! I guess you’re super sure there’s nothing you can do? There’s no way you could check in the back or something? I mean that metaphorically, I guess, unless y’all actually have a back? I guess the climate-destroying servers have gotta live somewhere??
Sorry, I know I’m probably being annoying. I wouldn’t be bugging you like this if I weren’t in the middle of a sexual identity crisis, or if I knew how to process that fact or talk about it like a normal fucking person. But for reasons that I can’t totally explain (and that honestly feel vaguely mystical?), I just really, REALLY think these old emails are gonna crack this case wide open.
Alex
Henry blinks at the screen. None of his canned polite-yet-firm responses seem appropriate here.
“What are you going to tell them?” Samira asks. The hint of concern in her voice is oddly touching.
"Er," Henry stalls, feeling inexplicably caught out. “Since they already know it's not an issue we can resolve, I’ll send a final response and close the ticket.” It’s what he should do, at least. He’s not sure why he isn't.
His email pings again.
From: Nora ([email protected])
To: Henry ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Re: SEEKING HUMAN CONTACT
IT'S 3:02 WHERE ARE YOU
allow me to remind you that I HAVE ONLY SPOKEN TO ENGINEERS TODAY. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT DOES TO A PERSON
Henry squints at Samira. "Would you like to see the Engineering floor?"
#
They find Nora in breakout room 804, perched precariously on a rolling chair in front of the room’s massive whiteboard. She’s writing something in tiny, scrunched up letters on its last remaining bit of available space. True to her word, she’s covered every inch of the thing with what might appear, to the casual onlooker, to be ancient hieroglyphics. Henry’s fairly certain it’s a combination of C++ and Spanish curse words. He hadn’t even known Nora spoke Spanish.
"Are you all right?" Henry asks.
"No," Nora barks, capping her dry erase marker and collapsing into her chair.
"Wow," Samira says, taking in the scene with wide, curious eyes.
"Nora, this is Samira, our new Support intern," Henry explains. "Samira, this is Nora."
"Hey," Nora says, then adds simply, "I do infrastructure engineering."
"That's a bit of an understatement," Henry points out.
Nora rolls her eyes. "Fine. I'm the youngest ever engineering manager in the history of Google." She sticks her tongue out at him. "Happy?"
“Delirious,” Henry deadpans at the same moment that Samira says, "That's amazing." Bless her, it sounds like she truly means it.
"Thanks, but can we talk about literally anything else?” Nora groans. “I’ve been trying to figure out this fucking API call all day, and I’m about to pluck my own eyeballs out just so I can focus on something else for literally one second." She grabs her water bottle and throws it back like a shot. "Any good gossip from Support?"
"I got an interesting ticket," Henry says as he lowers himself into the chair next to her.
"Ooh," Nora says, eyes lighting up. "Like the one with the pickle and the thumb drive?"
He grimaces at the memory. "No, not like that. It was about a crisis of sexuality."
"Relatable," Nora snorts. She takes another swig of water. "So, like, a trauma dump?"
"Not really, no." He thinks back on it. "They were actually trying to retrieve some old emails. The part about their sexuality seemed to sort of... slip out."
Nora tilts her head thoughtfully, then shrugs. "Sometimes it's easier to tell that kind of stuff to strangers, I guess."
"Um, sorry to interrupt," Samira says. She’s moved to the front of the room to look more closely at the whiteboard. She fidgets self-consciously, then blurts out in a rush, "But have you tried multiple API calls?"
“What,” Nora says, more a statement than a question.
“It’s just—” Samira gestures at the whiteboard. “—It seems like you’re trying to solve all this with a single API call? But maybe you could make multiple calls, and that way each individual JSON response could be a lot simpler.” She tacks on, a bit bashful, “But I’m sure you’ve already thought of that.”
"No," Nora says slowly. "I haven't." Nora looks at Henry, then back at Samira again, as if seeing her for the first time. "You said you're interning in Support? With Hunter?"
"Well, Engineering was my first choice. But I applied for everything, and it was Support who wanted me in the end. I guess because that’s kinda the vibe I give off," she explains, gesturing vaguely at herself. Henry sees what she means. She’s pretty, but approachable. Freckles dust her brown skin, and doe eyes accentuate her wide smile. She wouldn’t look out of place at a romcom casting call for the girl-next-door. She’s just Hunter's type, Henry realizes darkly. Next to him, Nora is scowling.
Seeming to sense the shift in mood, Samira adds, "I was lucky to get in at all. Really, I'm excited to be in Support."
Nora harrumphs. “If you want to intern in Engineering, you'll intern in Engineering. Come on, let's go have a little chat with Hunter." Nora pauses, looking back at Samira. "If you want to, I mean."
Samira stares open-mouthed at Nora, but she recovers quickly, her face splitting into a smile. "Yes, please."
"Great." Nora’s already out the door when she calls back to Henry over her shoulder, "Thanks for bringing me the genius."
"Yes, thank you," Samira echoes, still grinning, before scurrying to follow Nora.
"Happy to help," Henry says to the empty room.
When he returns to his desk, Nora and Samira are in Hunter's office with the door closed. Nora’s standing with her hands on her hips, wearing an expression that brooks no argument. Hunter’s lips are pressed into a thin, irritated line.
For the first time in his tenure at Google, Henry’s grateful for all the glass walls. Normally they feel panoptic, but now that he has a front-row seat to Nora stealing Hunter’s pretty, hand-picked intern out from under him, he suddenly understands the appeal.
It probably shouldn’t make Henry feel downright giddy to have been the unwitting catalyst in this chain of events, but it does. And it’s not just Hunter’s irritation that he enjoys. He’s reminded of the real reason he’s still doing this job after two often frustrating, soul-deadening years. Sometimes, he actually gets to help people. If not always in the way he expects.
He opens ticket #922845.
From: Henry ([email protected])
To: Alex ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Re: Support Ticket #922845
Alex,
I'm sorry, but there's truly nothing I can do about the emails. There are no secret back room servers. Or if there are, they haven’t told me, a lowly support agent, about them.
But if it helps, I’m gay. I think I might understand a bit of what you’re feeling.
Henry F.
From: Alex ([email protected])
To: Henry ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Support Ticket #922845
Oh shit, so maybe you can help me after all??!!
Like, okay, so. I'm a guy. And I'm definitely attracted to women. That’s a well-documented fact. But I’m starting to think I might also like guys way more than I ever allowed myself to admit.
It’s like… I’ve always liked LOOKING at guys, but I thought that was just because I wanted to look LIKE them? Like I was picturing myself as them, kinda?
But now I’m thinking it’s more than that.
… Is this TMI?
Alex
From: Henry ([email protected])
To: Alex ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Support Ticket #922845
"Too much information" is a relative concept, I think. Exploring your sexuality might be a bit too intense of a topic for your barista, but I work in tech support. I help customers recover nude photos on a semi-regular basis.
And I can only speak for myself, of course, but what you’ve described isn’t unlike how I feel when I’m attracted to someone. There’s an inherent commonality there, but there can be desire too, and it’s not always quite clear where one ends and the other begins.
Henry F.
From: Alex ([email protected])
To: Henry ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Support Ticket #922845
Yes, that’s it, that’s the thing!! Do I want to BE him or do I want to be WITH him, and what if it’s both???
I guess I just feel like… Okay, so, you know that scene in Ferris Bueller, when Cameron’s looking at that famous painting of all the people in the park? But the painting’s just made up of dots, and it only makes sense at a distance. But he just keeps looking closer and closer, and in the end it’s zoomed in so much that he’s just staring at this ugly, muddy blob of nothing?
That’s how I feel right now. It’s like I can’t take a step back to look at the whole picture. Every time I try, I just wind up getting closer, and the picture gets even muddier. So I guess I was hoping if I could find those old emails, it’d feel like taking a step back. Like maybe I’d see something in them that I wasn’t able to see before, y’know? ‘Cause I was too close?
Alex
From: Henry ([email protected])
To: Alex ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Support Ticket #922845
I think I understand what you mean. I haven’t seen Ferris Bueller, but I did see that Seurat painting in person, once.
My dad was working in New York at the time, and he flew the whole family out from London to spend a long weekend together—my brother, my sister, my mum, and me. It was my first time visiting the States. The painting was on loan to The Met, and my mum in particular was eager to see it.
I knew the painting was very famous, but I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I was only 12, and I distinctly remember standing in front of it and thinking those old Magic Eye illusions were more interesting, because at least they had a neat trick to them.
But then I noticed my parents. They were sitting together on the bench in front of the painting. Dad’s arm was wrapped around Mum’s shoulders, and their heads were tilted towards one another. They were looking at the painting, but they were looking at each other, too.
Before that moment, the painting had only been a flat image to me. It was something I might as well have been looking at on a page of a book in the quiet of my bedroom. But when I saw my parents see it together, it wasn’t just a painting anymore. It was a painting and my parents, on a bench, in love with each other, looking at it. The painting had transformed into something more than itself, right in front of my eyes. It was like a Magic Eye illusion after all.
So, maybe you can’t take a step back to look at the whole picture right now. Maybe that sort of thing just can’t be forced. But maybe what you need is someone looking at you, looking at it. And I know I’m just a stranger, but I can try.
Henry F.
From: Alex ([email protected])
To: Henry ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Support Ticket #922845
Damn. That’s really beautiful. I hope your parents know you saw them like that.
And it’s nice of you to let me rant like this. I mean, I know this isn’t actually your job. And I could always just fucking talk to Liam (that’s the email guy). I don’t think he uses his old email address anymore, but I’m sure I could get in touch with him again if I tried for, like, a second. I’m just nervous about it, I guess.
Sorry for TMI (again), but he and I fooled around in high school. Maybe you already figured that out. The fucked up thing is that I barely even thought about it at the time. It's like I put the whole thing in a box and closed the lid and shoved it in a corner and never looked at it again. And now it’s like, why the fuck did I do that? Well, I know why, I guess. I did it to protect myself. But I’m realizing now that protecting myself might have meant hurting someone else.
I guess I just thought that all the answers would be there waiting for me when I was ready to, like, open the box. And now that I have, I’m just mad at myself for keeping it closed for so long. But I also kinda get why I did, because it's all just so much that I don’t know where to start.
Alex
P.S. You’re British?!
P.P.S. More importantly, you’ve never seen Ferris Bueller?!?!?!
When Henry finally glances at the clock, it's already 5:07. On a normal work day, he would have been out the door six minutes ago. He types one more message.
From: Henry ([email protected])
To: Alex ([email protected])
Subject: Under the seams runs the pain
I don’t know Liam, of course, but I’ve been in his shoes. Growing up, I always knew I liked boys, but even when boys liked me back, they weren’t always careful with my feelings. I won’t lie to you—it’s painful to be collateral damage on someone else’s path to self-discovery. Even though I always laughed it off with them and pretended things meant less to me than they did.
I’m sorry, that turned rather maudlin, didn’t it? Feel free to tell me to sod off if this is unhelpful. I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that I don’t resent them now. Maybe I’d feel differently if we lived in a softer world, but I know they each had their own troubles. And, in the end, if someone means something to you, the only way to tell them is to properly tell them.
It’s time for me to log off for the day, but you've given me a lot to think about. Maybe we’ll speak again tomorrow?
Henry F.
P.S. Yes, I’m British. English, to be obnoxiously precise. I grew up in London, but I moved to the States for university and never went back. In a few weeks my family will be visiting me in California for the first time, actually. I’m ashamed to say I’m not looking forward to it. I’m dreading seeing my brother, in particular. Our relationship’s been strained since Dad died, and my coming out only exacerbated things. I suppose I thought I’d just do everyone a favor and stay away. So I think I know what you mean about putting your problems in a box. Except in my case, the problems are on the outside, and I’m the one who’s shut myself in.
Henry presses send and is out the door at 5:18. He tries not to think about how much he just revealed to a virtual stranger. Or how long it’s been since he’s revealed as much to anyone else.