Free Personal Days by Ed Park Page B

back the way he came, not saying anything to the people he’s just passed. He unlocks his door and grabs his briefcase and sprints back to the elevator, which has long since gone.
    The layoff narrative
    We have assorted dietary restrictions and particular aversions, which makes group meals untenable, generally speaking, and so the decision to lunch together is sort of impulsive.
    Jill is in Siberia and no one feels like going up to get her. She sits too far from the elevator. We could e-mail her, but no one does. Pru says she thinks Jill might be out, taking a personal day to help a friend move into an apartment. This relieves us of guilt.
    Our high hopes for the new Chinese restaurant are dashed by the time the soup arrives. Everything tastes a little like soap.
At least we know it’s clean,
Jonah says.
    Whatever you say, Joan,
says Pru.
    Oh, stop it,
says Lizzie.
Seriously.
    We talk about how getting fired might not be the worst thing. We calculate severance, add it to how much we’d get in unemployment. The sum would be distressingly close to how much some of us are making as it is.
It’s inhumane,
someone says.
    I’d be OK for three months,
says Laars.
Unless I got in an accident.
    Define
OK, says Lizzie.
    They always try to wriggle out of paying severance,
says Jonah. There’s a disobedience clause that they like to use. Jules made out decently, but Jason didn’t get a penny. The Original Jack signed a nondisclosure agreement and made out so-so. You can’t get him to tell you what happened, why he was fired, even if you say
I promise I won’t tell anyone.
    Pru says what we’re doing is constructing a layoff narrative. The idea is that you look back on your period of employment, highlight all the abuses suffered, tally the lessons gained, and use these negatives and positives to mentally withstand what you anticipate will be a series of events culminating in expulsion. You look to termination as rebirth, liberation, an expansion of horizons.
    Once you start constructing the layoff narrative, it’s only a matter of time. It starts to feel like a fait accompli.
    Nobody knows what to say. Suddenly we wish we’d invited Jill, a collective guilt twinge. We talk about Jules and his screenplay,
Personal Daze.
We speculate, a lot, about Maxine’s sex life. Laars describes a TV show he saw last night, some stalker drama or cancer drama, possibly stalker cancer drama, with that guy from the
X-Files
spin-off and the woman from a French movie none of us have seen.
I should write a pilot,
he says. It’s his new thing to say.
    Jack II says he’s started a blog. He tells us the address, but nobody writes it down.
    Pru’s fortune is a good one:
You are the master of every situation.
    On the back it gives the Chinese word for
ninety.
We aren’t sure of the pronunciation, though there are accent marks galore. It seems like a singularly useless piece of information. Imagine going to China knowing how to say a single number. Someone in the fortune cookie factory was clearly slacking, perhaps just translating all the numbers from one to a hundred.
    Pru puts the slip of paper carefully in her wallet. She says she’s been reading her horoscope every day this week.
    We remember that Jules used to eat fortunes if he wanted them to come true. Once he got one that said
What goes around comes around.
We can’t remember whether he ate it or not. A month later we saw that it had become the motto for Jobmilla.
    The punctuationist
    When we return to the office, Jill’s gone. We wouldn’t have known—it could have been like one of those situations where a dead body isn’t found for weeks, and then suddenly there’s a smell—except she’s left a very brief note on Jenny’s desk. It’s on Hello Kitty stationery. She writes that she wanted to message all of us individually but her e-mail account’s already been eliminated and she’s being escorted out of the building.
    I’m sad to go. Please water my plants
    Who does the