The Circle

she’d spent eighteen months in an office where they thought, of all the
     materials man and nature offered, the one their staff should see, all day and every
     day, was burlap. A dirty sort of burlap, a less refined form of burlap. A bulk burlap,
     a poor man’s burlap, a budget burlap. Oh god, she thought, when she left that place
     she vowed never to see or touch or acknowledge the existence of that material again.
    And she did not expect to see it again. How often, outside of the nineteenth century,
     outside a general store of the nineteenth century, does one encounter burlap? Mae
     assumed she never would, but then here it was, all around her in this new Circle workspace,
     and looking at it, smelling its musty smell, her eyes welled up. “Fucking burlap,”
     she mumbled to herself.
    Behind her, she heard a sigh, then a voice: “Now I’m thinking this wasn’t such a good
     idea.”
    Mae turned and found Annie, her hands in fists at her sides, posing like a pouting
     child. “Fucking burlap,” Annie said, imitating her pout, then burst out laughing.
     When she was done, she managed, “That was incredible. Thank you so much for that,
     Mae. I knew you’d hate it, but I wanted to see just how much. I’m sorry you almost
     cried. Jesus.”
    Now Mae looked to Renata, whose hands were raised high in surrender. “Not my idea!”
     she said. “Annie put me up to it! Don’t hate me!”
    Annie sighed with satisfaction. “I had to actually
buy
that cubicle from Walmart. And the computer! That took me ages to find online. I
     thought we could just bring that kind of stuff up from the basement or something,
     but we honestly had nothing on the entire campus ugly and old enough. Oh god, you
     should have seen your face.”
    Mae’s heart was pounding. “You’re such a sicko.”
    Annie feigned confusion. “Me? I’m not sick. I’m awesome.”
    “I can’t believe you went to that much trouble to upset me.”
    “Well, I did. That’s how I got to where I am now. It’s all about planning and it’s
     all about follow-through.” She gave Mae a salesman’s wink and Mae couldn’t help but
     laugh. Annie was a lunatic. “Now let’s go. I’m giving you the full tour.”
    As Mae followed her, she had to remind herself that Annie had not always been a senior
     executive at a company like the Circle. There was a time, only four years ago, when
     Annie was a college studentwho wore men’s flannel housepants to class, to dinner, on casual dates. Annie was
     what one of her boyfriends, and there were many, always monogamous, always decent,
     called a
doofus
. But she could afford to be. She came from money, generations of money, and was very
     cute, dimpled and long-lashed, with hair so blond it could only be real. She was known
     by all as effervescent, seemed incapable of letting anything bother her for more than
     a few moments. But she was also a doofus. She was gangly, and used her hands wildly,
     dangerously, when she spoke, and was given to bizarre conversational tangents and
     strange obsessions—caves, amateur perfumery, doo-wop music. She was friendly with
     every one of her exes, with every hookup, with every professor (she knew them all
     personally and sent them gifts). She had been involved in, or ran, most or all of
     the clubs and causes in college, and yet she’d found time to be committed to her coursework—to
     everything, really—while also, at any party, being the most likely to embarrass herself
     to loosen everyone up, the last to leave. The one rational explanation for all this
     would have been that she did not sleep, but this was not the case. She slept decadently,
     eight to ten hours a day, could sleep anywhere—on a three-minute car ride, in the
     filthy booth of an off-campus diner, on anyone’s couch, at any time.
    Mae knew this firsthand, having been something of a chauffeur to Annie on long rides,
     throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin and Iowa, to countless and largely meaningless
     cross-country contests. Mae had gotten a partial scholarship to run at Carleton, and
     that’s where she met Annie, who was effortlessly good, two years older, but was only
     intermittently concerned with whether she, or the team, won or lost. One meet Annie
     would be deep in it, taunting the opponents, insulting their uniforms or SATs, and
     the next she’d be wholly uninterestedin the outcome but happy to be along for the ride. It was on the long rides, in Annie’s
     car—which she