Not Emily

By Gaby Holly

Emily sat in her office, reading the resume on the laptop, about to send an email to schedule a phone interview, when she read the name again. The cup of coffee she held in her left hand froze in the air between her the top of her desk and her mouth. The name didn’t change no matter how many times she read it. Charles Miller had applied for a job at the same office where Emily worked. Charles Miller, a name that she thought her brain had buried in the place where her brain kept all her traumatic memories. But just seeing the letters that made up his name, one after the other, excavated the memories and shoved them through the layers of her subconscious. She put her coffee cup down and sighed. 

She looked around her office. She touched the bronze plaque on her desk that said Senior Recruiter. The rest of it was bare, except for a fake bonsai tree in the corner and a copy of her college diploma on the wall opposite her desk. When she was in college, the other students used to make fun of her for studying a major that would lead her to working in an HR department. They were right, but billion-dollar tech companies have HR departments too, plus she made six figures and got to reject other people from working there, she took secret pleasure whenever she rejected someone from her school.

Charles Miller’s resume was crafted in a way that beat the computer program that reads the resumes and sends those short but painful rejection emails to the ones that don’t meet its requirements. Another sign that it was crafted, was because it beat the computer without a referral. His resume had all the verbs in -ed form and quantifiable experiences that could be measured. Her job now was to schedule the phone interview and if Charles got through those, there would be an onsite interview that she might have to facilitate. It had been a long time since she’d been alone in a room with Charles, and she hated her body for getting a bit warmer at the thought of it. 

She checked the clock: 12:01 PM, she could do some personal research before she met the other recruiters for lunch that would be full of barely veiled jabs and barbs with a side of cruel laughter as they compared who scheduled the most phone interviews, the recruiter with the most phone interviews at the end of the year got bragging rights for six months. Emily won for the past 3 years. She turned on the VPN on her phone, opened a Google Incognito tab and went to LinkedIn. In the search bar, she didn’t even have to type his full name, after she typed Charles, he was the first one in the search bar as a 2^nd connection. She clicked on his name. He didn’t pay for LinkedIn Premium, so he wouldn’t be able to see that she’d been on his profile page. 

He’s wearing a suit in his profile picture. He’s not smiling that killer smile he was famous for in college that let him get away with everything. His mouth was in a straight line, and he had that glazed bored look on his face she recognized from when they had class together, and a professor was droning on and on about something. He was in a black suit with a red tie. She scrolled underneath his profile picture and read his bio. “After a 3-year stint in Switzerland where I finished my MBA and had extensive sales experience working for some of the biggest banks in the world, I’m looking to move back to the States and transition into tech to bring my skills and make an impact while learning.” Someone had written that for him. In college, the thought of having to write a 200-word response to a 20-page reading was like asking him to climb up Mt. Everest. His hands would ball into fists, his teeth would grind, and a vein on the left side of his temple would stick out purple and angry. 

She scrolled further down, to the “Education” section of his profile. He did go to business school, and not just any business school, the International Institute for Management Development Business School, one of the best business schools in the world, the Harvard of Switzerland, some might say. She scrolled up to “Work Experience”, and he spent the last two years as a Sales and Trading Analyst at Credit Suisse, before he did a sales internship at Credit Suisse, the summer before another internship at UBS, so he wasn’t lying about that either. His first work experience, the one listed at the bottom, was a “Professional Hockey Player” for four years. Someone or something had told him that once you reach the age of 27, your chances of going to the NHL are slim to none. In the description, he wrote some cliche paragraphs about how being a part of a team had fostered his collaboration skills and his competitive spirit, because while he was on the team, he had the desire to be the best. It was after four years he went to Business school, so he met someone who wrote a killer recommendation letter from him in Switzerland.

It was 12:15 and she didn’t want to be caught by another recruiter stalking someone she hadn’t spoken to in over four years, so she got up. She went to the cafeteria, where the chicken in her salad tasted like cardboard. She didn’t participate in the barbs as much, didn’t say how many phone interviews she scheduled, and “Looked like she was on a different planet” according to one of the other recruiters.

She managed to make it home, only getting distracted on the road twice and the horns of her fellow Silicon Valley drivers made sure that no accidents occurred. She walked into her condo, that her tech salary and percentage stock in the company afforded her and tried to focus on the lemon verbena scent that wafted through the air. Lemon verbena was the only scent that made her calm down, so she had these aerosol spritzers that went off every 2 hours. It wasn’t calming her now. She tried to get rid of this antsy feeling inside her. She changed into active gear, took out her workout mat and did an hour long HIIT workout. She lay in a pool of her own sweat panting like a dog when it was over, nothing. She took a shower, a long one, and rubbed peppermint oil into her hands and pressed them against her temples. That didn’t do anything. She organized her clothes in her closet, organizing them by fit and color, nothing. In her pajamas, on her couch, she turned on her TV and tried to calm down by watching reruns of Friends, and that didn’t work together. Her phone was right there, she could see her reflection on the black screen.  She’d only look tonight, she told herself. 

She grabbed it and went to Facebook, no one really used it anymore, but she was pretty sure that Charles was still her friend there, so it would be the best place to start. She checked, they were still friends, and she hated her body again for feeling happy at that fact. He had the same profile picture as his LinkedIn profile. He hadn’t been active, his timeline made up of birthday congratulations over the years. There was one notification there after she’d spent a minute scrolling. In a Relationship with some woman named Lara B, as of two years ago. There was no picture of her, and she wasn’t about to scroll through the likes to try and find her, so Instagram it was.

It was one of those days when Internet stalking happens without a glitch, because Charles’ Instagram wasn’t private. He had more than 5000 followers, he’d always had more than the usual, but that’s what happens when you play for a team that’s nationally recognized by the NCAA, get broadcast on ESPN, and then go to play for a professional team in Europe. She didn’t have to look for Cecile for long. She was in his second most recent picture. She was beautiful, in that blond, blue eyed way, straight teeth, and she had natural golden colored skin that people in California paid thousands of dollars at the tanning booth to get. Lara wore a lavender tuxedo dress that Emily would never be able to pull off. Lara had tears in her eyes, Charles’ hand wrapped around her and there was a diamond ring on her finger. 

A part of her was relieved there was someone else because she didn’t trust her mind to not fantasize if he was single. The other part was sad, and she felt feelings that she hoped she’d never felt again. 

In college, she and Charles had been inseparable since they had the class, Organizational Labor together. She wouldn’t lie, she knew who he was it was hard not to know. He and his friends were over six feet tall, fawned over by professors and always had a cloud of stray girls right behind them. At the libraries, dining halls, class, even on the way home from practice. She felt so special at a party one night, when he sought her out and asked for her phone number. She’d felt like she was walking around with a tiara on her head for a month after. When they were studying together in the library, she made sure to look nice, she had to look better than the strays and his teammates were always hanging around the library and she didn’t want to give them anything to make fun of should they discuss her. Along the way they became friends, they would talk about their fears and dreams. She would admit that she feared the future and not being able to provide for herself the way she wanted, that she should be doing more with her life. He admitted that he didn’t know what he was going to do if he didn’t go pro in hockey, it’s what he did his whole life, and no one talked about what to do if it didn’t go well. 

Their friendship ended when one day they were studying for another final in the library, but he was late. She got started, pulled up the study guide on her laptop and reviewed why it was important to have transparency in the workplace, when she became aware of a presence standing over her. Two presences. It was him, wearing a black hoody with the university’s athletics logo on it. Then there was the girl, if she thought about it, she was the American version of Celine. So, he had a type. Not Emily. 

A burst of laughter from the TV made her realize that she’d been looking at the photo for an entire episode of Friends. That was enough. 

The next day at work she sent the email to schedule a phone interview, putting him in contact with a phone recruiter and tried to forget about it, dedicating herself to try and beat her phone interview count from last year. She still used the company email at this stage, so he didn’t even know that he was communicating with her. He passed the interview, and when it came to scheduling an onsite interview, she let another senior recruiter conduct it. In all these years, he’d never reached out to her, and she’d never reached out to him. There was no reason to break the silence. He clearly moved on. Sales and Recruitment never interacted, so there was no reason that they’d run into each other. She’d made it too far to get sucked back into the past, so she would move on too. Or keep telling herself that she would until she could say that Charles Miller had no impact on her anymore. 

Gaby Holly is a fiction writer from South Florida.