The Circle

above
     her. Only sky, which was mostly clear, with wisps of grey clouds moving swiftly across
     the campus and heading out to sea. Mae’s eyes felt heavy, and she knew it was not
     late, not past ten anyway, and she didn’t want to do what she often did, which was
     fall asleep after two or three drinks, so she got up and went looking for Annie or
     more Riesling or both. She found the buffet, and found it in shambles, a feast raided
     by animals or Vikings, and made her way to the nearest bar, which was out of Riesling
     and was now offering only some kind of vodka-and-energy drink concoction. She moved
     on, asking random passersby about Riesling, until she felt a shadow pass before her.
    “There’s more over here,” the shadow said.
    Mae turned to find a pair of glasses reflecting blue, sitting atop the vague shape
     of a man. He turned to walk away.
    “Am I following you?” Mae asked.
    “Not yet. You’re standing still. But you should if you want more of that wine.”
    She followed the shadow across the lawn and under a canopy of high trees, the moonlight
     shooting through, a hundred silver spears. Now Mae could see the shadow better—he
     was wearing a sand-colored T-shirt and some kind of vest, leather or suede, over it—a
     combination Mae hadn’t seen in some time. Then he stopped and was crouching down near
     the bottom of a waterfall, a manmade waterfall coming down the side of the Industrial
     Revolution.
    “I hid a few bottles here,” he said, his hands deep in the pool that received the
     falling water. Not finding anything, he kneeled down, his arms submerged to the shoulder,
     until he retrieved two sleek green bottles, stood up and turned to her. Finally she
     got a good look at him. His face was a soft triangle, concluding in a chin so subtly
     dimpled she hadn’t seen it before that moment. He had the skin of a child, the eyes
     of a much older man and a prominent nose, crooked and bent but somehow giving stability
     to the rest of his face, like the keel of a yacht. His eyebrows were heavy dashes
     rushing away, toward his ears, which were rounded, large, princess-pink. “You want
     to go back to the game or …?” He seemed to be implying that the “or” could be far
     better.
    “Sure,” she said, realizing that she didn’t know this person, knew nothing about him.
     But because he had those bottles, and because she’d lost Annie, and because she trusted
     everyone within these Circle walls—she had at that moment so much love for everyone
     within those walls, where everything was new and everything allowed—she followed him
     back to the party, to the outskirts of it anyway, where they sat on a high ring of
     steps overlooking the lawn, and watched the silhouettes run and squeal and fall below.
    He opened both bottles, gave one to Mae, took a sip from his, and said his name was
     Francis.
    “Not Frank?” she asked. She took the bottle and filled her mouth with the candysweet
     wine.
    “People try to call me that and I … I ask them not to.”
    She laughed, and he laughed.
    He was a developer, he said, and had been at the company for almost two years. Before
     that he’d been a kind of anarchist, a provocateur.He’d gotten the job here by hacking further into the Circle system than anyone else.
     Now he was on the security team.
    “This is my first day,” Mae noted.
    “No way.”
    And then Mae, who intended to say “I shit you not,” instead decided to innovate, but
     something got garbled during her verbal innovation, and she uttered the words “I fuck
     you not,” knowing almost instantly that she would remember these words, and hate herself
     for them, for decades to come.
    “You fuck me not?” he asked, deadpan. “That sounds very conclusive. You’ve made a
     decision with very little information. You fuck me not. Wow.”
    Mae tried to explain what she meant to say, how she thought, or some department of
     her brain thought, that she would turn the phrase around a bit … But it didn’t matter.
     He was laughing now, and he knew she had a sense of humor, and she knew he did, too,
     and somehow he made her feel safe, made her trust that he would never bring it up
     again, that this terrible thing she said would remain between them, that they both
     understood mistakes are made by all and that they should, if everyone is acknowledging
     our common humanity, our common frailty and propensity for sounding and looking ridiculous
     a thousand times