Friend Is a Four Letter Word

by Steph Campbell

  It occurs to me that I claimed I liked him as friend, but never treated him like one. I never opened up to him, and I never took the slightest interest in his life.

  “I’m—I’m well.” My answer is cautious, because I’m unsure just how much my parents may have told him after I bailed.

  “That’s good to hear. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but I’m in town. It’s a long story but I’d love to take you to dinner if I can.” The friendliness in his voice is tinged with the slightest hint of crazed desperation.

  “Wait. What? You’re in what town? Nolan I’m in California,” I explain, half relieved I can dodge the awkward ex bullet for totally unavoidable reasons

  He clears his throat and speaks slowly, like he’s making a case for himself. “I know that. I had to make a trip to interview for a position in London. The corporate office is in Los Angeles. When your parents heard I was making a last minute trip out, they told me that you were already on this end. Are you touring schools?”

  He’s asking to be polite. Now I’m sure of it. He knows all of the gory details. I’m positive that my parents had a prayer circle to try to heal me and my sins the day after I skipped town. I slow my steps, to concentrate better.

  “No, not exactly. I’m just visiting with friends. Dinner, huh? That’d be really nice, but I’ve got plans tonight, Nolan, I’m so sorry.” There’s no way in the world I could skip out on dinner at Quinn’s no matter how awkward it’s going to be. Not after Carter and I left her and Ben hanging last time. She’d never let me live it down. I glance over my shoulder, wondering how far Carter is behind me now, or if he’s even coming back. He may just keep the wine and go back to his place.

  I mentally scold myself for the thought. Real supportive, Shayna. Not that he deserves my support right now. He’s determined to be alone, fine.

  “That’s no problem.” There’s some background noise that takes his attention away for a second, while I search my mind for an acceptable way to turn him down. “I’m here for a couple of days. You free tomorrow?”

  “Um…” I weigh my options. If I go to dinner with Nolan and convince him that I really am doing amazing, he’ll report the good news back to my parents and maybe that’ll lessen their heartache a little. That means more to me than I can process, so the decision winds up being an easy one. Except lunch seems less committal than dinner. “How about lunch? If that’s alright, I can absolutely do tomorrow. That sounds great.”

  “Okay, perfect. Let me see where I can get us a reservation and I’ll text you the details,” he says with the kind of in-charge efficiency that makes me doubt if he’s the same guy who struggled to eat spaghetti a few weeks ago.

  “Oh, Nolan, don’t bother with reservations,” I rush to say. The last thing I need is a romantic, candlelit meal with the two of us dressed up and totally uncomfortable in every way. “Casual is great. In fact, I’ve got a little place in mind if that’s okay?”

  “That’ll work, Shay.” he says. “And one more thing before I hang up.” I press the phone close to my ear, wondering if I lost him when I don’t hear his voice for a few seconds. When it comes through, I can tell he’s embarrassed. “I wanted to apologize for the last time that we saw each other. I know that things ended a little awkwardly and that wasn’t my intent at all, Shayna. I care about you a lot.”

  “I know that, Nolan. And I… I’m so sorry, too. I’m really glad we’re going to see each other. I’d hate that last time to be it for us,” I say. And I mean it. “Thanks for calling. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.”

  Dinner at Quinn’s isn’t nearly as insufferable as I expected. The food is delicious. Quinn outdid herself with the short ribs and pasta. She tells witty anecdotes, talks culinary school and new recipes and keeps everyone entertained.

  Until about halfway through the meal, Carter excuses himself.

  “I forgot to do something at the office,” he mumbles, picking up his plate to bring it to the kitchen.

  “And you can’t finish it tomorrow?” Quinn asks with all the authority of a family matriarch.

  Carter shakes his head. “Nope, it’s got to be tonight.”

  Quinn looks at me and then back at her brother. “You can’t even wait until you finish dinner?”

  “Quinn, I said I had to leave,” Carter snaps. He tosses his napkin onto the table then looks at me. “The apartment is unlocked, if you’re coming back.”

  I stare back at him, trying to read in his eyes if he even wants me to. What a shit day it’s been. For a moment I think I can just slide into bed, wearing nothing but Carter’s soft sheets and wait for him to come back from work and everything will be okay. But that’s the old Shayna. The new Shayna didn’t deserve to be lied to and didn’t deserve the way he talked to me at the liquor store.

  “Stay here tonight, Shay,” Quinn says, clutching at my arm. It’s not like her to be touchy, so I know it’s for my benefit. “Ben is probably going to sneak out to the lab after dessert anyway, right?”

  She looks at her boyfriend who already looks guilty. He raises a single brow and says, “Maybe.”

  “See there. I was going to be abandoned. Please stay,” Quinn says.

  I glance back at Carter. He looks tired and sad and I start to wonder if he’s really going back to the office, or if he’s going to a meeting—or the opposite. And it’s not even my place to worry. He isn’t mine. “You go ahead, Carter. I’ll crash here.”

  He gives me a sharp nod, then turns away.

  “Carter!” I call after him.

  He turns around quickly with the slightest bit of hope in his eyes. “I hope everything works out. With work, I mean.”

  “Enjoy dessert,” he says. His eyes go dark and full of disappointment.

  “You’re up next,” Damien, the guy who occupies the cube next to me, says, passing the proverbial baton to me.

  I shuffle the papers on my desk so it looks like I’ve been doing anything productive today—anything that wasn’t trying to figure out how I fucked things up with Shayna so badly.

  I wish there was a way to make her understand.

  Make her realize how much she means to me—how much she’s always meant to me. How it killed me the last few months when she’d text me and I couldn’t tell her what was really going on. How I’d know she was out with some other guy. I wanted to be that guy.

  “Thanks, man,” I say.

  I rub my eyes with the heel of my hand and take a deep, shaky breath. Today is the day of our yearly evaluations at the firm. While I don’t expect to be fired or anything, it’s still unnerving and feels like I’m in third grade and on my way into the principal’s office because I put gum on the back of my desk that Jill McNair then leaned back into, tangling it into her long braid.

  Or, more recently, my third year of college.

  “Carter, is there a particular reason that you continue to underperform?” my Business Statistics professor asked.

  “No, ma’am,” I said, swallowing the hiccup that bubbled up in my throat. I was still drunk from last night, that’s why.

  “You’re incredibly bright. I remember you from your freshman Taxation class. From then to now is a complete turnaround. And not in a good way.”

  I wanted to apologize but I was mostly just having trouble staying awake at all, much less forming actual, sincere words.

  “If you don’t get it together, Carter, there is no way I’ll be able to recommend you for the internship you inquired about. Is that what you want?”

  “Carter?” Tracey says. “Daydreaming? Really? I didn’t think there were any dreamers in this place.”

  I’m leaning up against my bosses door frame. I shake my head to clear the fog.

  “Sorry about that,” I say. I’m not drunk this time, but I’m just as out of it. I don’t want to talk about my future with the firm right now, I want to fix things with Shayna.

  “Are you ready to get started?” Tracey asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Alrig
ht then, have a seat.”

  I sit down in the deep chair expecting to sink into the buttery leather. It looks like it should be incredibly comfortable but it’s deceiving. It’s stiff and forces me to sit up straight and proper. I guess that’s the point here—all business.

  Tracey flips open a manila file folder on her desk and starts thumbing through it while she talks like she’s reading from a script.

  “As you know, the purpose of this meeting is to evaluate you, your performance and talk about the firms’ goals and projections and what we feel your strengths and weaknesses are in helping us attain those goals. An audit of you as an employee, if you will.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “And I apologize, Jim was supposed to join us but his wife has just gone into labor so it’s just you and me.”

  “No problem,” I say. Jim never much cared for me anyway. He’s an old buddy of my dad’s, which is probably why I landed the internship here in the first place and eventually the job—because I never did get that recommendation from my professor. But even though I took the same career path as my dad, I don’t play golf, and I don’t condone sleazy accountants cheating on their wives—two of Jim and my father’s favorite past times.

  Tracey is a petite woman in her mid-forties who at first glance at her tiny frame, you think, “she’s cute,” but once you really look at her sharp features, her perma-frown and get an earful of her fierce voice, you know she’s all business.

  “Okay. You’ve been with us since your internship your senior year, that’s what… how many years? Three? Help me out, my math is shit,” Tracey jokes.

  “Yes, three years.”

  “We hired you as a junior accountant right out of college.” She flips through a file even though she’s been here since the beginning and knows all of this. “In that time you’ve worked on several big files. Graham. Lindsay. Fettero. And most recently the Brew file.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How’d you enjoy that? Taking on the Brews as clients is a huge deal for the firm. We stand to profit exponentially from their case.”

  “It was… good. It was a good learning experience,” I say.

  “Good.” Tracey repeats back. Her tone is ambiguous enough that I can’t tell if she’s asking a question or not.

  What other word could I use to describe alphabetizing files and triple checking math? I may have been here a few years already, but I’m still just a junior accountant, they don’t trust me with much.

  “I would have thought you would have been more excited about it.” She frowns at me. “I think that’s one of the problems that each of the partners has noted in your file here, Carter. You lack passion.” I fight the eyebrow that wants to dart up at her use of the word passion. In accounting. “Jim commented here that when you first started you showed a lot of ingenuity and gumption. Now, the general consensus of the partners is that you’re doing just enough to get by. We don’t need that in this firm. We need hungry, driven individuals who will help propel us to the next level.”

  What can I say to that? That I was probably drunk most of those early days? That my main drive and motivation stemmed from not giving a fuck. There was nothing holding me back. I was extremely productive, because my fear was retracted and my ego was in power. If I wasn’t sober I couldn’t give in to my depression and apathy.

  “I’m still incredibly passionate about my work,” I lie. I got into accounting because it was easy back in the day. Because my dad had connections and when I started to get scared that I wouldn’t have a future in anything, it made it an easy jump from “undeclared major” to “internship in the bag.”

  “We don’t see it that way, Carter. You need to do more to prove it.”

  “I completely understand, and I’m sorry that you feel that way,” is all I say. “I’ll definitely keep that in mind going forward.”

  Tracey taps a paperclip on her glass topped desk. “There’s also the matter of the missing paperwork, Carter.”

  “What missing paperwork?” Alright, so I’m not as gung-ho as I was in the early days, but I still do my job.

  Tracey tucks a short piece of shiny, dark hair behind her ear and says, “On the Brew file. You were missing a handful of receipts we needed to prove corporate deductions and schedule K-1 in its entirety.”

  Shit.

  “I asked the client for those items several times,” I say. I rub the back of my neck, trying to ignore the nervous tingling that sweeps across my neck and face. “I called. I emailed. I even asked Mrs. Brew in person the last time she was in meeting with Jim. I told her we had to have them as soon as possible.”

  “Right,” Tracey nods. “But she never brought them in. Badgering a client isn’t the same as actually making sure that she gets them to us. We were almost late filing her returns and the paperwork for the new shell corp because it didn’t go on the calendar until all of the paperwork was in. Jim caught it at the last second. If he hadn’t…” Tracey shakes her head looking oh-so-serious. “We would have had a malpractice case on our hands, you know that?”

  I grit my teeth and sit there stunned. “I didn’t…”

  “You didn’t follow through. Because, frankly, we just don’t feel like you care.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “I do care. I love my work.”

  That’s a lie. It pays the bills. I’m good at it. I thought I was good at it.

  “Carter, all I can tell you is that you need to start showing it then.” Tracey leans in on her desk. “Look, we’re accountants. I know we aren’t a rowdy bunch, but we all want to be here and do the best job we can. We think it’s an important job. Don’t you?”

  “Of course.” I fidget with the neatly pressed cuff of my shirt.

  “Good. We want the old Carter back. The one that jumped up and volunteered extra time. That was here late and in early. Who always had new ideas for increased productivity. If we wanted a warm body to fill a chair—well the point is—we don’t. It’s time to step it back up.”

  “I understand.” Fuck. My chest tightens as I take a deep breath and ask, “Am I getting fired?”

  Tracey shakes her head. “No one is getting fired today, Carter. But I am giving you a warning. We need to see improvement. We can’t have this type of conversation again. You just need to fix it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say. My face and the tips of my ears feel impossibly hot. I can’t believe this is happening. They liked me better when I was drunk.

  “Alright then. Glad we had this chat. I’ll mark your file accordingly to indicate that you were disciplined and received a verbal warning.” Holy shit, I am in third grade again. “You’re free to go.”

  I walk back to my desk like I’m walking the god damned Green Mile. Head down, heart racing, pride decimated. I lean over the side of my cubicle and grab my keys off of the edge of my desk.

  “You headed to lunch, Carter?” Damien asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. I avoid looking at him, I don’t want him to ask—

  “You want to grab something together? I’m about to head out too.”

  I shove my hands into my pants pockets and glance around for an exit, knowing full well it’s back the way I came but wishing one would magically appear on this end of the building—or that the carpet tiles would swallow me up so I don’t have to slink past Tracey’s office again.

  “Nah man, I’ve got a few errands to run. Maybe next time.”

  And for the first time in days, Shayna is the last thing on my mind because all I can think is: I need a fucking drink.

  I eye the clock on my dashboard one last time before I decide that ten minutes is fashionably late enough to meet Nolan and walk the length of the pier to the restaurant at the very end. It’s a 1950’s inspired diner that has walk up service as well as an eat in dining room. Me, Quinn and Ben stopped by the other day for shakes and fries before heading home after our day of playing tourist. I picked this place not only because I knew I wouldn’t get lost trying to find it, but mo
re specifically because it’s casual and loud and I knew that if Nolan had his choice, he’d pick a private colonnade ballroom.

  The wind is whipping around over the water so I twist my long, blonde hair back into a bun, completing the casual look of my white linen shorts and lavender v-neck. Just because I’m dressed in beach gear and we’re meeting at a place that serves burgers almost exclusively, Nolan still stands like a gentleman at the table when he sees me push through the door.

  “Shayna,” he says, waving me over as I slither past the round tables and crowds of people.

  “Sit down,” I say. But instead he pulls me in for a hug. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good. To be held by strong arms that clung to me, rather than trying to push me away.

  “It’s really good to see you,” he says.

  “You too. California suits you,” I say, motioning to his polo shirt and cargo shorts. I really expected him to be dressed more formal. It’s the most dressed down I think I’ve ever seen him.

  “I looked this place up. Figured you went casual for a reason,” he says with a wink before finally sliding into the booth while I take the chair across from him.

  “Did you order?”

  “Only a strawberry shake for you.”

  My favorite. Of course he would remember that one detail. For the most part, all of the dates Nolan and I went on were so innocent. No drinking. No fighting.

  No chemistry.

  “So tell me everything, how’ve you been?”

  “It hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen you,” I say.

  “That’s true,” he says. “Feels like it though. I’ve missed you.”

  For the months of hibernation, as I slunk into the routine of Shayna Gillan, daughter of my parents dreams, Nolan was the only standing appointment in my social calendar. Even if it was just coffee once a week and fencing on Thursdays. It was something to get me out of the house. I didn’t appreciate that for what it was until now.

  “I missed you, too.” I ache to ask how my parents are but I don’t have the nerve. I’m still not convinced that they didn’t send him here to gather intel, and if they did, I need to make sure I live up to what I think they want to hear.