It's Only Temporary

Chapter 2: Indelible Ink

Penny rubbed her eyes and glanced at the time on her bedside clock: 12:23 AM. It was no use trying to sleep - not with the voices that kept running through her head in an endless loop. And studying was a joke too, obviously. She'd been staring at the same two pages of her MCAT review guide for the past hour and a half.

"Don't sweat it, Dave. If the temp agency sent me over a piece of ass like that, I'd keep her around too."

It shouldn't have bothered her so much. She didn't even know those guys. It wasn't like David said it. He would never say anything as crass as that. He might be a womanizing hound dog, but he wasn't disrespectful. Was he? Maybe he was. Maybe he just knew better than to say it within her earshot.

"See, I knew there was a reason I keep you around...."

Wasn't that what David always said to her? Was he really any better than the rest of them? Pigs. They were all a bunch of misogynistic, lowlife pigs, David included. Penny tried her best to summon up some righteous indignation, but she couldn't shake the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

It wasn't even really the off-color gossip that bothered her the most. She could pretend to herself that her feminist sensibilities were offended, but she knew deep down it wasn't that. It was the part that came just before.

"The thing that gets me, Powers, is she isn't even your type!"

"What's his type?"

"Oh, you know. The overeducated, 16-letters-after-her-name, smarter-than-he-is type...."

She closed her eyes and laid her forehead down against the smooth surface of the study guide in front of her. It wasn't like that was news to her either.  She couldn't even count the number of nights she'd spent just this way: sitting in her jail-cell-sized excuse for bedroom, pretending to study, and counting all the reasons she wasn't David Powers' type.

How had she become so cliche? The secretary, secretly in love with her boss. Not even a secretary. A temp. At least the secretaries got their own names listed in the company directory. She was nothing. No one. The nameless voice that answered David Powers' phone.

"Pathetic," she whispered to herself. How had she gotten her life this far off track? The MCATs were only a few weeks away now, and she had yet to start studying - not unless doodling your boss's name on the empty notes page of your review book counted as studying.

"You should be two years into med school by now!"

Penny cringed, remembering Lauren's words from earlier that evening. Her friend was probably right. Not that it was any of her business. Not that she actually cared. No, Lauren had made that clear enough, hadn't she?

"It might be nice to get our living room back someday. That's all I'm saying."

Penny didn't know if her roommates had tried to follow her after she ran out of the bar. She hadn't stopped to look back as she stumbled out into the street. Cora had tried her phone at least. Penny saw the texts when she came up out of the Smith Street subway stop in Brooklyn half an hour later, but she hadn't bothered to reply.

"I'm studying," she'd called, when she heard them come home and knock softly on her bedroom door. "I don't want to talk!"

It was Lauren's voice, not Cora's, that called back to her. "Are you OK?"

OK?

No, Penny thought with a sigh. Probably not. But Lauren was the last person on Earth she wanted to talk to about it. Honestly, she didn't know how she was ever going to face her friends again after the conversation they overheard tonight.

With a sigh, Penny picked up her pen and pressed the point against the wall beside her. "Wall," she chuckled to herself, watching the point crack through the whitewashed surface and sink into soft material beneath. More like a piece of cardboard with some house paint slapped on top. It served its purpose well enough, carving out a makeshift third bedroom in what should have been the apartment's spacious common living space. A temporary pressure wall. That's what the company called it when they came to install it two years ago. Held in place without so much as a nail or a piece of glue. That was the beauty of it, they'd explained. Wouldn't leave a mark, once you were ready to take it down. Like it was never even there. Like it never even existed.

"You're throwing your life away over a crush, Penny."

That's what Lauren had said to her. That was one thing her know-it-all friend had wrong, at least. Not a crush. Penny knew better than that. A crush she could've dealt with. A crush she could've set aside. It used to be a crush. Once. A long time ago. Just a harmless little crush. A little spring in her step as she made her way each morning through the big, revolving office-building doors. A secret flutter in the bottom of her stomach at the sound of her boss's footsteps approaching her desk. Penny could close her eyes and remember exactly how that harmless crush had felt.

And she could remember the exact moment - the exact second - when the feeling changed.

She pulled out her laptop and flicked it open. Her fingers knew where to go without the need for conscious thought. She clicked the link to her work email account and opened the folder marked "Personal."

There they were: 39 messages. All from the same sender: dpowers80@gmail.com.

Penny scrolled to the bottom of the window, and her eyes came to rest on the very first timestamp. Saturday 7/19/2012 3:03 AM. The aftermath of a different Friday night, nearly two years earlier....

He'd sent it from his gmail address, of course. He knew better than to send a message like this one from his work account, closely monitored by the prying eyes of the firm's compliance office. The first sentence popped up in a preview pane as her cursor hovered indecisively.

*************************************************************

David (dpowers80@gmail.com)               3:03 AM

To: Penelope Stewart

Subj: cnan't sleep

you see penelope, there are certain rules....

*************************************************************

Penny didn't need to open it to know what the rest of the message said - or to remember every detail of the night she had read it for the first time.  She had heard once how disaster victims would sometimes fixate on the last moments before a trauma, replaying those few seconds over and over in their minds, haunted by them. For her, those final moments were composed of sitting on a lumpy futon, pulling out her laptop. Her heart had stopped beating in her chest for just a second when the new message flashed onto the screen. Her eyes had skimmed past the uncharacteristic typo in the lowercase subject line: "cnan't sleep." Greedily, without a second thought, she'd clicked the message open.

She didn't open it now. Instead, she moved her cursor to the little checkbox beside his name and right-clicked to pull up the menu of options:

Delete

Move to Junk

Mark as Unread

None of the above, she thought with a wry smile. Some words could never be unread. Moved or deleted, perhaps, but not unread. Never unread. Written on her memory with indelible ink.

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