
Harper’s college degree was useless.
Ok, maybe it wasn’t useless. It was the only document she’d ever framed. It was also the sole piece of art strategically hanging in the corner of her Ikea-filled apartment meant to impress Zoom interviewees. But that was about it. It wasn’t helping her get a job. Harper had graduated from the University of Miami Chicago which was admittedly a confusing name. She’d never even stepped foot in the state of Florida but there it was in old English font on her diploma and the diploma looked official. The smiling graduate looked competent. So, what was the problem?
It was the market. At least, that’s what everyone was saying. Her friends spent the weekday hours from 9-5 sitting in small cubicles all over the city, overqualified and underpaid. The ones who could afford it went back to school for an advanced degree, hoping that there was some intelligent strategizing behind putting off their entrance into the real world for a couple of more years.
In the meantime, Harper found herself glued to a dozen employment forums, emailing a handful of recruiters, offering up everything in her power to land the right job. She was even willing to move to the tip of Oklahoma to get her foot in the door at a company patenting new farming technology. Harper had terrible allergies and, most likely, could not have stepped foot anywhere near anyone’s fields or livestock without requiring copious amounts of Bendaryl. But, hey, desperate times call for… Oklahoma. (Sorry, kidding, we love The Sooner State!)
“They can smell your desperation,” was her best friend, Chuck’s, super unhelpful opinion. Chuck was brilliant and handsome and charismatic and gay and lived in a bubble where strangers stepped out of the way for him to cross a street. He’d been hired before graduation, had already been promoted and it was only Halloween. Chuck was an anomaly. From what Harper could tell, on her employment opportunity Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats and lengthy conversations with one recruiter or the other, it was a tough market for anyone to land a good job. Especially one in her chosen field. Which was Art History. Yes, if you have to know, she was deeply regretting this.
Look, Harper wasn’t dumb. She loved art, history, design, and academia. She wanted to teach one day. It just hadn’t occurred to her that a PhD would be an eventual necessity. A PhD? Yeah, no thank you, there was no way that she was going to be a student for the next six years. First, it was financially uber-irresponsible, which Harper knew even though she hadn’t taken a single finance class in any of her four years of higher education.
Second, she was done sitting in lecture halls, learning about the people who had come before her and done something noteworthy with their lives. She didn’t want to learn about those people anymore; she wanted to be one of them. But, this endeavor was proving to be a shit load harder than she’d anticipated. And her current mishmash of bill-paying avenues was running her ragged.
Harper spent about ten hours a week running errands for a highly motivated and Botox’ed Real Estate agent in town who badgered Harper to get her own license. But our under-employed art history major had no motivation to sell houses or write contracts or meet with indecisive people at random empty penthouses. And, she could not imagine spending the day in the towering heels that her employer collected in a bedroom-turned-shoe closet. This woman’s life was glamorous on the outside, but looked empty and lonely, both figuratively and literally, from within. And, there was no way that Harper was going to venture into a career that required tri-weekly trips to the dry cleaner. That level of personal maintenance was just totally out of the question.
So Harper double parked and traipsed around town with dry-cleaning and green juice pickups and a bi-weekly fresh flower situation. She then waited tables at a tiny French restaurant which was only open on the weekends when she may have had a dating or social life. Then there was the bookkeeping for her uncle who’s business did not really require a bookkeeper but she was pretty sure that his relationship to her father included a lot of favors. Then, there was the freelance editing where Harper would spend way too much time mulling over a person’s self-published memoir and be late to the florist who had no problem chastising her. It wasn’t exactly a super ideal situation on paper.
But, there were some elements of Harper’s life that worked for her.
“It’s weird how you like it,” was Chuck’s very insightful opinion on the goings of his best friend’s week. “Like, you actually like bookkeeping. And reading stranger’s weird secrets. And I’ve seen you smelling those flowers like thirty times. Too bad there’s no job for that random skill salad.”
Harper mostly drowned out Chuck as she poured them each a glass of rose to sit out on beanbags on her fire escape and watch the sunset. That was kind of their “thing.” But her ears perked up when she heard the phrase “skill salad,” and shuffled to her notebook sitting next to her laptop to jot it down. Since she’d been spending more and more of her time editing, she found herself sensitive to interesting phrases these days. Skill salad… Anyway…
“You could, like, cook the books for mafioso’s trophy wives while writing movies about them and hiding in the back of a gardening center.” Harper laughed at the image. It wasn’t hard to picture herself on a laptop in a greenhouse writing words to be said by some movie star on the silver screen. They would all be period pieces. And all about the art. She handed Chuck her glass so she could scooch out the window, across the metal grating, and they could toast the fact that it was Wednesday and both had managed to survive the first half of the week without doing anything stupid. Well, Chuck probably had but he was in the habit of only sharing his wins.
“To us,” he raised his glass. “But really, why do you keep waiting for someone to hire you? Just do your own thing.”
“Yeah, great,” Harper felt a clenching in her stomach. Chuck made everything sound so easy. “I don’t even know what that is.”
Harper checked her phone for the four thousandth time that day. There were dozens of emails about job opportunities, updates to the policy on the employment forums, questions from way too many recruiters… She sighed and put the phone face-down on the bean bag. Her inbox had become her oxygen.
“I just need someone to hire me. To be validated by a real, successful, legitimate company. Sorry, I’m not as confident as you.”
Chuck made a face but it may have been because he didn’t like the wine. In the four months that Chuck had landed a respectful employment position, he’d developed a taste for “not shitty” wine. Shitty wine was the only kind of booze in Harper’s budget and it did the trick just fine. Chuck swallowed.
“You're also not as hot. But, some of that has to do with your unflattering choice in denim.”
Chuck also did not like high-waisted jeans. He thought they were frumpy. Harper wasn’t in the mood to discuss her obsessive job search or choice in pants.
“Can we talk about something else?” And, because they were best friends, they did.
They talked about how nice it would be to get an apartment together, even a small house, just something with a yard. As the first bottle was drained and the second opened (easily, a twist-off,) the conversation got a bit deeper. Three glasses in, it turned out that they both loved the city but missed the outdoors. They’d both grown up camping on lakes and hiking through cool summer mornings. Harper wished she could have a dog. But the combination of never being home and having a landlord who was very vocal about her Cynophobia, bringing home a pup was not in the cards for her.
The two friends sighed. They were anxious to grow up, to have things figured out, to at least have options, but while your twenties can be loads of fun, the journey through the decade is rarely a simple or straightforward path. Chuck poured the last of the second bottle into their glasses.
“This is going to be it for me,” he said in a tone begging Harper to ask, “Why?” And because she loved him, she did.
“Why?”
“Oh, tomorrow is a huge day. Massive presentation. The entire company will be attending. I have to go start it.” Harper gaped at her friend.
“You haven’t even started?” Chuck shrugged. Everything came way too easy to him. Harper stopped herself from going off the rails on this crazy thought train. Because, the truth was, after her fifth glass of wine, she couldn’t articulate exactly what it was that Chuck Peterson did for a living. She watched her friend crab walk back through the apartment window, reflecting the pastel colors of a summer sky. She followed him with significantly less grace and placed the mismatched glasses into her tiny kitchen sink.
They hugged goodbye. Harper set her buzzed but still anxious self up on her Goodwill sofa, propping herself up on a bed pillow with her laptop. She wrote a story about the night. She didn’t know why.
That night sleep did not come easily to our frazzled heroine. She couldn’t put her finger on what was bothering her. Of course, it was the job search. But that black hole wasn’t any worse tonight than usual. It was something else. A deep, uneasy feeling at the base of her gut that maybe, just maybe, something Chuck had said was right. Maybe she should go out into the world and do her own thing but she couldn’t even tolerate that thought.
Sometime around 2 am, Harper’s brain gave her the gift of turning itself off and let her drift into a dreamless sleep. Maybe that was part of the problem. We all need dreams.
The next day, Harper woke feeling strange. It was like Chuck had so casually flicked open Pandora’s box and closing it wasn’t an option.
While signing the bouquet bill to her boss’s account at the florist, Harper felt weird. That afternoon, when she submitted the expense report to her uncle, she felt uneasy. The next two nights at the restaurant, she felt like she was in someone else’s body, speaking with someone else’s voice. There was just something that felt totally off about her existence. She didn’t want to hang out with Chuck over the weekend and didn’t even want to check her email. Was it a reality check? Was it acknowledgment that she’d been running from something instead of towards it? Let’s be honest, Harper didn’t know. She was only 21 and how much perspective was she really supposed to possess?
On Saturday, she put in her headphones, jumping from one self-help and motivational podcast to the next. That afternoon, she sat on her fire escape in the yellow pleather bean-bag chair and edited a woman from Minnesota’s manuscript. It was about finding her true calling as a writer at 50. It was actually quite well written and should have been inspiring but to Harper, twenty-five years this woman’s junior, it was a depressing realization that a person could waste half their life if they didn’t know what they wanted. Was this Harper’s future? She ignored the texts from Chuck. His presentation on Thursday had been a slam dunk and he wanted to celebrate. She just couldn’t will herself to be in the mood to socialize.
Sunday rained. The grey skies charged in and refused to surrender to the sun. The day was choked in a dark mist where any hope for light felt futile. It matched Harper’s mood. Her phone rang. It was the real estate agent. She needed more dry cleaning before they closed at noon. So Harper had no choice but to put on a real pair of pants and her raincoat and leave her cozy cocoon. As she squinted through the wet air, her brain would not let up.
Why are you doing this?
Well, because I don’t have a choice, she told herself.
No, said some intuitive thought that she didn’t recognize, you do.
When Monday morning rolled around and the sun had found its way out and her paycheck had cleared in her account, Harper willed herself to feel more optimistic. She made her coffee, walked to the flower shop, picked out the incredible arrangement of peonies and begonias, and didn’t let herself check her email until lunch. And that’s when her phone rang.
“Harper Fenton?” The voice on the other end was irritated, huffy.
“Speaking.”
“Ms. Fenton, due to your inability to show up on your first day of work, we are forced to terminate you. This has never happened before in the history of our company. We are extremely disappointed.”
Harper’s stomach did a back handspring. What? What job? She hadn’t interviewed for anything in almost two weeks. She’d never accepted an offer, filled out paperwork, or shook a hand. She was pretty sure she would have remembered that chain of events.
Wait- she suddenly began to question herself, what if the reason that I’ve been feeling so off is that I’ve been having an out-of-body experience and all those things really did happen and I don’t remember?
Even with all of her unease and anxiety over the past few days, Harper knew that this was a far stretch to a reasonable explanation.
“I’m sorry,” Harper replied, willing her tone to stay even and in control, “What company are you referring to?”
“McCormick and Sons. Just to reiterate, you have been terminated.”
“But I never even-”
“Ms. Fenton. I have no time or patience for the lack of work ethic that your generation flaunts. Do not contact us again. Goodbye.”
Harper’s phone indicated that the angry man had hung up. She just stood there, peonies held lovingly in the crook of her right arm, mouth agape, absolutely stunned. Motionless on the sidewalk, Harper felt like her feet had turned to cement and would not let her move. The cars honked. The birds chirped. And Harper had been unceremoniously fired from what sounded like a very serious company.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was calling Chuck, reiterating the “conversation.”
Chuck couldn’t stop laughing.
“Oh my god. You are the only person I know who’s been fired from a job that they didn’t know that they had.”
“I… I … I know…” was all the words that Harper could form.
“You’re on so many of those forums and websites and recruiter thingies that your name probably just got mixed up with someone else’s.”
“Uh huh…” Harper was now blinking rapidly, attempting to force the last three minutes of her life into focus.
“This is exactly what you wanted though.” Chuck threw out while clearly ordering at a Starbucks. Somehow, this confused Harper even more.
“Huh?”
“Well, no, I said a grande sugar-free vanilla six pumps no foam almond milk extra hot, you said you needed to be hired by a company to be validated before you went out on your own. Like, technically, that has happened - extra hot!”
Harper shook her head and hung up with her best friend who was (just occasionally) wise beyond his years.
As she let herself into the real estate agent’s cold apartment, placing the bouquet in a fresh vase on the kitchen island, she pondered what Chuck had said. He was right, technically.
She looked around the pristine but depressing apartment, seeing it clearly for the first time. No one ever sat on the sofas or put their feet up on the coffee table. This wasn’t her calling.
Harper walked home with more purpose than she’d felt since crossing the University Of Miami auditorium stage in her cap and gown.
Over the next month, our heroine made herself a website, invested in social media advertising, took on four more editing clients, and “regretfully” told both her uncle and the real estate agent that she would no longer be able to provide her services. She was going to be an editor. And a writer. It took an entire year, a few tears, a lot of late nights, and the occasional breakdown, but soon Harper was able to buy her own flowers. And a dog.
Now she sits in her office, overlooking the small but manicured backyard in the townhome she shares with Chuck, as she writes, surrounded by gorgeous bouquets of flowers. A few of them were sent by happy clients. And, in the corner, just to remind her where she came from, is the yellow beanbag chair. She looked over at it and smiled, an invaluable sense of calm in her stomach when Chuck burst through the door.
“O. M. G. Guess who my new client is??” He didn’t wait for Harper to answer, “McCormick and Sons, who fired you! Can you believe it??”
Harper could not believe it. Because, even now, with Chuck being her best friend and roommate, she still wasn’t entirely sure what he did for a living.
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