Inside the large cubicle-filled room of “We make money off of your money” Inc., our female protagonist slumps over her desk and pushes the keys of her keyboard down with her cheap French-manicured nails. The nail on her right index frames a small chip from a jammed Y button. The monitor screen frames her coded corporate creation, numbers tangled within words attached to other words; alphanumeric bullshit. She watches the 9 in the bottom right corner become a 0 and sits up with a smile in the corner of her mouth.
Imagine Mona Lisa as a number crunching Twenty-something with a quarter life crisis. Imagine her turning around in her computer chair; modern day Mona posing in a blouse from Saks hidden under an argyle from Macy’s, her eyes grazing within the black plastic fencing of non-prescription Wayfarers. Blue-green like Christmas lights, her eyes look towards the lunchroom. She waits until someone else walks in then leaves her cubicle.
She usually waits for more people to enter the lunchroom but today she doubled the distance of her morning run, mid-run, and had to miss breakfast. It’s Tuesday, and on Tuesdays she brown-bags her regrets, sprinkled lightly on homemade Caesar salad with a lot of dressing. There’s a Caesar dressing loophole in her rigid diet. Not that it matters.
She was a cross-country runner in prep-school. Her body is naturally athletic, slim and toned with legs that make pinstripes sexy. Her skin is a smooth light tan and atop her shoulders sits a pretty face with almond eyes and curved cheeks, one dimple on the left one. She was born with a naturally fast metabolism and can eat at least three solid meals a day but settles for two smaller meals after a big breakfast before work. One of an ever-shrinking list of similarities she has to her father, she tries not to work on an empty stomach.
She eats like a prisoner or a soldier. Hunched over her food, she eats like it’s a mission; with a steady rhythm, calculated chew to swallow ratio, and not a single moment to actually “taste” what entered her mouth. She doesn’t speak to anyone while she eats. She only responds when a coworker talks directly to her. It’s like church. When the guy next to you asks you a question, your answer is quick, quiet, and meant to end the conversation. Sometimes she’ll even bring a book to the lunchroom and pretend to read it. She has no desire to make friends at work. She has no desire at all while she’s at work. This job for her is like a waiting room; a waiting room where you get paid. But she’s not waiting for her dreams or her wishes to come true. She stopped wishing years ago. She’s waiting to have dreams again.
A quarter after and she stops eating before she gets full. Unlike her father, our heroine tries not to work on a full stomach. Meet Dylan. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Dylan works on an empty heart.
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