Promotion

6.25am

It’s six twenty-five, the default iPhone alarm tells me, and I wake up not feeling groggy for the first time in five years. I feel alert, surge upwards and don’t hit snooze, also for the first time in five years. This morning is different because this is the day my life will change.

I go through the usual motions: get in a cold shower, turn my head up towards the stream like a lizard bathes in sunlight. Stay in this position for three minutes, my skin becoming goose-pimpled and red, the pain fading to nothing. Brush teeth, put on the make up I bought yesterday from CVS. I pull up a TikTok video of a sixteen-year-old in Tennessee who walks me through each step meticulously, pausing it when I need to blend in the bronzer, rouge my cheeks with the blush, apply the small fake lashes with glue, dropping them in the sink by accident. It all cost me over two hundred dollars, but no matter. I needed it.

I finish by spritzing myself with a spray that promises to keep it on my face all day. I will need it intact for celebratory drinks this evening. Stow some in my bag to top up later anyway.

7.30am

I catch an Uber to the train station instead of taking the fifteen-minute walk, a luxury I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing before today. But everything is about to change. The train isn’t too packed at this time; I take a window seat and vibrate with anticipation, chugging the vanilla latte I picked up from the station Starbucks.

My outfit is new too. I splurged on an expensive brand of tights, sick of getting ladders, a black boat neck dress that cuts just above the knee, ankle boots and a trench coat.

I drew the line at getting my hair cut, but maybe I’ll book in for next week. I look now at my phone: 137 pictures of popstars and models with bangs and wispy bangs and layers and highlights, all saved into a file titled ‘Hair Inspo’. In my carefully curated albums it sits between ‘Body Inspo’ and ‘Meal Inspo’.

I open the first and scroll through the 463 photos. Some are screenshots from Instagram, zoomed in so there remains only a perfectly bronzed and brittle pair of abs, or perhaps a bikini clad ass, so scrolling quickly creates an amalgamation of dissected limbs and body parts.

I lock my phone and hope no one can see over my shoulder.

The train rolls into the city, I alight at the most popular stop, the one slap bang in the middle of the financial district. I get jostled a little by the crowd but don’t care. Usually, my brain would start on a rampant tirade about how if I was a beautiful woman I wouldn’t be pushed and disregarded in such a way, I wouldn’t be invisible. It’s quiet today.

8.15am

In the elevator I play with the lanyard around my neck, then I scan into the floor. The office is relatively quiet. I shrug off my trench coat, make a coffee with the machine in the kitchen and give everyone who passes me a beaming smile. They regard me with surprise.

9.20am

I go to the kitchen to get my cinnamon overnight oats before eating them at my desk. They’re full of protein. Carol, my desk buddy, sniffs and tells me it smells good. Carol is the embodiment of everything I fear most in life: late-fifties, greying hair, overweight. Hasn’t had a promotion in years, I’m twenty-six and the same position as her. Content just as things are. She tells me about her boring kids and unloads her grievances onto me: son won’t call often enough, daughter is dating a loser, husband is lazy. It makes my skin crawl and reverberate with the rejection of that life.

I go to the bathroom and put my legs up on the door to have a shit, I read online that it helps. I silently say a prayer that I won’t end up like Carol. I flick through some videos and scroll through Instagram and reply to some message and realise my butt has gone numb, and I’ve been in here for twenty minutes. Swearing, I flush and run out, forgoing washing my hands.

10.50am

My meeting is at two pm. I can barely concentrate on any work. I get so excited I feel like I could do back flips off my desk.

12.00pm

I take my lunch break with Gillian. She’s tall, extremely muscular, runs marathons and calls me dude. I feel unduly safe in Gillian’s company, her non-threatening masculinity and quiet self-assurance. She pounds down a Caesar salad and brown bread roll, I eat a pack of sushi and log it in my calorie tracker. Gillian tells me to get a life.

1.50pm

I do my lipstick in my front-facing camera. My legs jiggle up and down.

I walk to my boss’s office, one foot in front of the other, shaking my hips from side to side like I’m in a movie. Her assistant tells me to wait outside.

2.04pm

“Good afternoon.” Vanessa says. I sit down, smiling with my lips shut and my cheeks aching.

Vanessa is Carol’s antithesis, the embodiment of everything I do want to be: chiselled body, toned forearms poking out of her designer dress, straight dark brown hair, impeccable skin that has been jabbed and stretched taut over her face. Insanely wealthy on her own merit and probably with a husband who loves her.

“I just wanted to hold this meeting with you to have a quick chat about the position that has become available in the department.”

“Yes.” I say, beaming.

“It’s a huge step up, and I know you have been with us for a couple of years now. I do want to recognise that.”

I’ve been there for five, but I don’t correct her. Stuck in monotonous stasis with barely a pay rise…

I start to feel a little nauseous.

“Amy told me you’ve been vying hard for the position, and I admire that tenacity. You remind me of myself. Keep that up, you will go far.”

I begin to want to vomit on her face.

“But I just wanted to personally give you a heads up that we will be promoting Caitlyn to the position.”

My heart sinks as aggressively as the day my mum told me dad had been in a car accident. I struggle to speak.

“I…Amy said I was a shoo-in…she lied to me.”

“She should never have said that, and I will be speaking to her. Keep up the good work. Next time.” And she looks down to the iPad on her lap, my dismissal. I walk out of the room.

2.17pm

In the bathroom I wretch but nothing comes up. I don’t cry. I feel numb. That was mine...that was mine...is all that rings around my head. I have to pull myself together, can’t be breaking down like this. Maybe I take the afternoon off sick, tell Amy I have cramps…but the thought of returning to my apartment like this, alone, horrifies me. I stand up.

I’m washing my hands at the sink when Caitlyn walks in. Smiles at me.

She is tall, beautiful and thin. Everything in life comes a little easier for Caitlyn, a little sweeter and softer around the edges.

I stare at her, and without thinking much, as she turns into a cubicle, I push her hard. She lurches forward like a puppet with the strings cut, and in her heels falls down easily and smashes her head on the porcelain toilet bowl.

The blood is really quite ceaseless.

Two weeks later

My alarm goes off. I get dressed in my new clothes; the job came with a huge pay rise, and I allowed myself to splash out, designer this time. Gone are the days of Shein and Ali Express. I’m not who I used to be anymore, she’s gone, I killed her.

I get to work early and immediately busy myself with emails. I have a new, slightly larger desk near a window now.

After an hour of emails and one Zoom call I walk to the kitchen and pull my overnight oats out of the fridge, but there’s a pink sticky note on the container that I know I didn’t write.

I know what you did.

My head snaps up and I look around the empty room. I examine the writing but it’s unrecognisable. I pull it off immediately and scrunch it into the bin, my heart hammering.

I go back to my desk and eat it slowly, scanning the office. I got in at 8.05, it had been in the fridge for just over an hour. Who knows who knows who knows who knows who knows…

Carol is walking over to me. Shit, not Carol? Surely not, she’s as thick as a plank.

“We need to speak, young lady.” She says, wagging a finger at me.

“Huh?” I squeak.

“I know what you’ve been doing.” She raises her eyebrows. “I know you’ve been stealing my oat milk from the fridge for your own coffees. I saw you this morning.”

The relief is immense.

“Carol, sorry, but I’ve told office management I can’t eat dairy- what do they expect me to do, not have coffee?” I laugh falsely, “I just assumed that was a general milk for everyone to use! I only had a splash.”

I knew it wasn’t generic, but I didn’t know it was Carol’s. I have a sudden vision of her swigging straight from the bottle and backwashing into it and it makes my stomach turn.

Carol admonishes me for a while longer, I promise not to do it again, and she waddles back to the other side of the bullpen. I breathe.

I open Instagram. Tributes to Caitlyn are still pouring in, she had over ten thousand followers, modest but enough for it to cause a stir in the city. My jealousy gripes.

*

I saw something I wanted, and I took it. That’s not a crime, it’s what we’re told to do every day since birth pretty much. I have done nothing wrong. It was an accident.

I flick through dating apps, matching with people and never responding to their messages. I just wanted to be told I was beautiful, and they did that by hitting ‘like’.

I attempt to make new friends, but people seem to avoid me, as if they can smell the bad things I’ve done leaking out of my pores.

I take up a twelve-step skincare routine. I join a new gym. I go out for martinis in the city with a group of girls who, if I moved to a different city tomorrow, would probably never message me again.

Two years later.

There’s an opening for a manager position and I’m eligible. I’ve been grinding harder than anyone in the department, early starts and late nights. Gillian has long since quit, said the pressure wasn’t worth it, chose her mental health. Carol is nearing retirement and won’t stop talking about it.

I’ve got a one-on-one with Vanessa later this morning to discuss the role. I can’t focus, don’t really listen on calls, do some internet shopping to calm my nerves.

I’m two minutes late to the meeting, I want to signal to her that my time is important as well. I’m no longer the young woman who’d drag herself along a dirt road on her hands and knees to make her happy.

Her new assistant, Kinsey, eyes me. She has big brown eyes and blonde hair and once told me she gotten her boobs done by a ‘doctor’ she found on Instagram, in his own house in Miami when she was nineteen.

She tells me to wait, Vanessa is finishing up with someone.

Three minutes later out walks Jeb, a skinny grad hire. He looks like he’s been eviscerated. I enter confidently.

“Good morning. Thanks for coming to see me.” She crosses her lacquered legs under her glass desk, black pumps with red bottoms pointing towards me. “Now, let’s cut to the chase. You’ll know that I’m looking to hire a new manager, after Amy goes on maternity leave.”

Maternity leave is a euphemism for ‘now that Amy’s been fired’.

“Yes, I was aware the position might be becoming...available.” I’d noticed Amy’s swollen belly a month ago and felt an immense happiness that had nothing to do with her impending bundle of joy.

“Mm, mm. You know, I’ve just been so impressed by your performance over the past two years. But that doesn’t mean your progression is guaranteed, there’s a lot of girls here who would be great and capable in that role.”

“I know, but I also know that I’ll be better than them.”

Vanessa nods. “That’s the attitude I like. Because you’ve got to want this, badly. You’ve got to kill for it.”

I look into her eyes and she stares back at me coolly. Raises half an eyebrow.

I know what you did.