Page 12 of Guy's Girl
She’s excited about her job in internal communications. In Minnesota, she was left off every announcement, every all-hands, hardly a part of Sofra-Moreno at all. She knew firsthand how itfelt to be forgotten by your company. She would fix that. She would be the bridge that connects everyone.
On the side, she imagines learning the ropes of external media from her boss—how to liaise with journalists, pitch a story, navigate a crisis.
New York. She can hardly believe her luck.
For the longest time, Ginny thought she could make things work in Minnesota. She made it to Harvard, didn’t she? How difficult could it be to last a few years in the Twin Cities?
What she didn’t account for was the loneliness. The grief. How badly she would miss her brothers. How badly she would miss her friends. How she needed them around. A year of starving herself and crying herself to sleep and convincing herself, each and every day, that she was okay, even though she wasn’t. A year, then she was gone.
And when the boys’ lease came up for renewal last month and Adrian Silvas announced he was moving to a studio, she thought she might perish from happiness. Two days ago, she moved into his old bedroom, hanging her posters on his bare walls and setting photo frames on his bare desk. When she inhaled, she thought she could smell the secrets he left behind.
Now Ginny spends every minute of free time in the living room. Now she sleeps with her door open, just to hear the sounds of her friends’ existence.
She’s starting over. Anything is possible.
If Heather were in her place, she wouldn’t be nervous. She runs her own business, for Christ’s sake. Nothing scares her sister.
Clay, Finch, and Tristan helped her move in. They carried her boxes—only six in total since she left half her life in a dumpster in Minneapolis—up four flights of stairs and deposited them in Adrian’s old room. Tristan made continuous jokes about Ginny moving into Adrian’s old room, dubbing it “the last place shetouched a penis.” Finch told Tristan to stop obsessing over other men’s genitalia. Clay told them both to never mentionGinnyandother men’s genitaliain the same conversation again or he’d have to throw up.
Little do they know, Ginny thought as she watched them argue.
Adrian Silvas. Ginny spent the last six months thinking about him. Not constantly but consistently. He followed her to sleep, appeared in her dreams, popped into her mind as she dozed off in meetings. To be honest, it was somewhat unsettling; for years, her brain only had space for food, exercise, and work. Food, exercise, work. Food, exercise, work. But when Ginny woke up the morning after her first night in New York, it was as if a new pocket had opened in her brain. And into that pocket slid Adrian Silvas.
She didn’t try to repress the fantasies. Part of the fun of Adrian Silvas was that he lived a thousand miles away, which meant their relationship could never come to anything. There’s safety in that.
But then her company finally assigned her to a new role, this time in their corporate strategy office in New York. And suddenly, Adrian Silvas went from fantasy to reality.
Not that she’s seen him yet. But she will. She knows she will.
And when she does, she can’t wait to see what will happen.
***
Her first day is a blur. Back in Minnesota, Ginny would get to work at nine, greet her coworkers, chat by the coffee machine, then sit down for a leisurely day of work. The New York office is something else entirely. Bright lights. Open-concept seating. Glass conference rooms. Cold brew on tap and a fridge full of free beer. Coworkers weave throughout the space, holding laptops and plastic containers of salad. Someone is always getting up to take a call. Someone else always has to jump onto averyimportant meeting,rightthis very second, I’ll berightback with you.
It’s madness. It’s a buzzy hive of productivity.
Ginny loves it.
She’s a good worker. There’s no other way to say it: just as she threw herself into her college studies with a kind of manic obsession, so too does she attack the tasks assigned by her new boss, Kam. She pulls her desk up to a standing position. Opens Slack and Outlook. Delves into her first assignment and doesn’t come up until lunch.
As a global manager of communications, Ginny’s first task is to create the newsletter that will be sent out each week to the entire company. She has total creative control over the newsletter’s design. It’s a test. She knows it is. How well can she establish communication within such a disconnected organization? How deep is she willing to dig? How the hell will she figure out what is happening inside a division with more than two thousand employees and offices on five different continents?
Ginny isn’t worried. She got perfect grades in high school. Earnedmagna cum laudewith her college thesis. Lost twenty pounds while living in a state whose primary foods are tater tots and cheese curds. Never touched a slice of bread. Ran every morning.
She can do anything.
***
After work, Ginny meets the boys for drinks in Washington Square Park. Technically, drinking outdoors is illegal, but, as Clay said, “Anything is legal when it’s wrapped in a paper bag.”
“To our girl in the Big City,” he says now, raising his paper bag over their blanket.
“To our girl!” echo Finch and Tristan, clinking their beers together. Ginny grins, stupid big, and takes a long pull from her bottle.
It’s almost eight o’clock. The April sun has only just set, casting their group in long shadows that play over the matted grass. No one has eaten dinner.
“Do we want Thai or shawarma?” Tristan asks, scrolling through his phone.
