The Circle

She’d handled forty-nine
     queries and her score was at 91, her lowest aggregate yet.
    Don’t worry
, Jared messaged.
Par for the course on Monday. Just go after as many follow-ups as you can
.
    Mae had been following up all morning, with limited results. The clients were grumpy.
     The only good news that morning came from the intra-company feed, when a message from
     Francis appeared, asking her to lunch. Officially she and the other CE staff were
     given an hour for the meal, but she hadn’t seen anyone else leave their desk for more
     than twenty minutes. She gave herself that much time, though her mother’s words, equating
     lunch with a monumental breach of duty, rattled in her mind.
    She was late getting to the Glass Eatery. She looked around, and up, and finally saw
     him sitting a few levels above, his feet dangling from a high lucite stool. She waved,
     but couldn’t get his attention. She yelled up to him, as discreetly as she could,
     to no avail. Then, feeling foolish, she texted him, and watched as he received the
     text, looked around the cafeteria, found her, and waved.
    She made her way through the line, got a veggie burrito and some kind of new organic
     soda, and sat down next to him. He was wearing a wrinkled clean button-down shirt
     and carpenter’s pants. His perchoverlooked the outdoor pool, where a group of staffers were approximating a game of
     volleyball.
    “Not such an athletic group,” he noted.
    “No,” Mae agreed. As he watched the chaotic splashing below, she tried to overlay
     this face in front of her with the one she remembered from her first night. There
     were the same heavy brows, the same prominent nose. But now Francis seemed to have
     shrunk. His hands, using a knife and fork to cut his burrito in two, seemed unusually
     delicate.
    “It’s almost perverse,” he said, “having so much athletic equipment here when there’s
     no athletic aptitude at all. It’s like a family of Christian Scientists living next
     to a pharmacy.” Now he turned to her. “Thanks for coming. I wondered if I’d see you
     again.”
    “Yeah, it’s been so busy.”
    He pointed to his food. “I had to start already. Sorry about that. To be honest, I
     didn’t totally expect you to show up.”
    “I’m sorry for being late,” she said.
    “No, believe me, I get it. You need to handle the Monday flow. The customers expect
     it. Lunch is pretty secondary.”
    “I have to say, I’ve felt bad about the end of our conversation that night. Sorry
     about Annie.”
    “Did you guys actually make out? I tried to find a spot where I could watch from,
     but—”
    “No.”
    “I thought if I climbed a tree—”
    “No. No. That’s just Annie. She’s an idiot.”
    “She’s an idiot who happens to be in the top one percent of people here. I wish I
     was that kind of idiot.”
    “You were talking about when you were a kid.”
    “God. Can I blame it on the wine?”
    “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
    Mae felt terrible, already knowing what she did, hoping he would tell her, so she
     could take the previous, secondhand, version of his story and write over it with the
     version directly from him.
    “No, it’s fine,” he said. “I got to meet a lot of interesting adults who were paid
     by the government to care for me. It was awesome. What do you have left, ten minutes?”
    “I have till one.”
    “Good. Eight more minutes then. Eat. I’ll talk. But not about my childhood. You know
     enough. I assume Annie filled in the gory stuff. She likes to tell that story.”
    And so Mae tried to eat as much as she could as fast as she could, while Francis talked
     about a movie he’d seen the night before in the campus theater. Apparently the director
     had been there to present it and had answered questions afterward.
    “The movie was about a woman who kills her husband and kids, and during the Q&A we
     find out this director’s involved in this protracted custody battle with her own ex-husband.
     So we were all looking around, thinking, Is this lady working out some issues on-screen,
     or …”
    Mae laughed, and then, remembering his own horrible childhood, she caught herself.
    “It’s fine,” he said, knowing immediately why she’d paused. “I don’t want you to think
     you have to tiptoe around me. It’s been a long time, and if I didn’t feel comfortable
     in this territory, I wouldn’t be working on ChildTrack.”
    “Well, still. I’m sorry. I’m bad at knowing