Chapter 2
Chapter 2: First Contact
The thing about talking to someone who doesn't know what you look like is that you are, briefly, only what you say.
This is either freedom or a slow-motion problem, depending on which day you ask me. On good days it feels like standing in a room with the lights off and being allowed to take up whatever space you actually need, unchecked. On bad days it feels like exactly the kind of cowardice Dana would identify on contact and name out loud at dinner, which is the thing Dana does best.
Jake Callahan DM'd me on a Tuesday. By Friday we had exchanged forty-three messages and I had told him about Winifred the frog and he had told me about the first time his shoulder gave out — not the press-release version, the real one, where he cried in a training room bathroom for twenty minutes and then came out and told his coach it was an equipment issue.
"Why equipment issue?" I asked.
"Because I was twenty-three and couldn't say I was falling apart," he wrote. "Easier to blame the gear."
"Do you still do that?"
"Do what?"
"Blame the thing instead of the feeling."
There was a pause — four minutes, which I'd already learned was his thinking-pause, distinct from his reading-pause (shorter) and his typing-and-deleting-and-retyping-pause (the longest, always worth waiting for).
"I'm getting better at it," he wrote.
This is the version I got from the beginning. Not the bus-ad version. The version that had clearly been in therapy and was doing the work — imperfectly, with humor, which is the only honest way anyone does it.
Becca found out on Thursday.
Not because I told her. Because Becca has a preternatural ability to detect information I'm withholding and will simply look at me until I give it up, which takes between four and eight minutes on average.
"You're texting someone," she said at lunch.
"DMing."
"Who."
"A person on Quillr."
"Nora." She put down her fork with the weight of a verdict. "Is it a man."
"It is a person."
"Is the person a man."
"The person is — yes. But it's not—"
"Tell me everything."
I told her almost everything. I left out the part about recognizing him immediately, because explaining that I was DMing the agency's new client under a name that was technically my middle name had a specific energy I wasn't ready for at a Thursday lunch in November.
"So he doesn't know your real name," Becca said.
"He knows my name is Ellie. Which is my middle name. Which is real."
"Does he know you work here."
"No."
"Does he know what you look like."
"Nobody on Quillr posts face photos."
"So he's imagining you."
"He's—" I stopped. "He's responding to my writing. Not an image."
Becca was quiet for exactly the right amount of time to make me uncomfortable. "The point at which this stops being fun and starts being—"
"I know."
"I'm just saying—"
"I know," I said. "It's just talking. It's a writing app."
"Sure," she said.
She ate her lunch. She did not look convinced. I ate mine. I was not convinced either.
He was from Ohio. Cincinnati, specifically, which he described as "a city that has one perfect thing about it and that thing is the chili and don't argue with me about this." He'd moved to Chicago nine months ago — not because of the injury, but after, when he'd needed somewhere that was still a sports city but wasn't the specific city that had just watched him break. Chicago, he said, felt like a place that understood graceful losing, which was dark but accurate if you followed the Cubs.
His apartment was on the north side. He had two close friends he mentioned regularly: Marcus, who'd played with him in the minors and was now coaching at a community college, and Tyler, who he'd known since his freshman year of college and who seemed — based on scattered evidence — to be the kind of person who was a lot of fun in two-hour increments and exhausting in eight-hour ones. He had a sister, Amy, in Milwaukee, who he talked about with the specific warmth reserved for people who love you without editing your flaws out of it.
He was writing a memoir. Not polished — raw material, a first pass. He'd come to Quillr for accountability, for a community that would actually engage with the writing rather than just say great stuff man. He'd found my page because of an essay I'd written about the grief of loving something you're not allowed to do publicly, and something in it had landed before he knew why.
"What are you going to call it?" I asked.
"Working titles so far: 'The Shoulder.' 'Rotation.' 'Swing and Miss.'"
"Those are all bad."
"I know."
"What's it actually about? Not the injury. The thing underneath it."
His four-minute pause.
"The version of yourself you built for other people," he wrote. "And the moment you have to figure out what's left when that version breaks."
I looked at this for a long time.
"Title: 'What's Left,'" I said.
"...that's actually really good."
"I know. I'm a professional."
He sent a single question mark.
"Copywriter," I said. "Among other things."
"What other things?"
I thought about the second desk on the left. About the billboard I'd been near in September when David photographed the final installation and I'd been cropped out of the picture entirely, standing six feet to the right.
"I write things that go places," I said. "I just don't usually go with them."
"That's the most depressing sentence I've heard this week," he said.
"Is it inaccurate?"
A pause. "No," he said. "Which is why it's depressing."
The point at which things shifted: a Thursday, three weeks in.
He'd sent me a draft chapter — the chapter about the last game before the injury, which he'd been circling for weeks without being able to land it. He asked what I thought. I gave him actual notes. Not this is really brave and honest notes, which would have been useless, but editorial notes: you're starting from the injury and working backward, which is technically correct but emotionally wrong. Start from the thing you loved. The injury only means something in relation to that.
"This is the most useful feedback I've ever gotten," he said. "My writing group told me it was 'really raw and honest.'"
"That means they didn't understand it," I said.
"Exactly."
Then: "How do you know so much about what writing needs?"
"I've been doing it for other people for three years," I said. "You learn the shapes of it."
"Why for other people? Why not for yourself?"
I looked at the question on my screen. Because writing as yourself requires believing you're worth reading. "I'm working on that part," I said.
"Is the Quillr stuff for yourself?"
"It started as — a way to exist without taking up space," I said. "And then it became real. I'm not sure when."
"Ellie," he said. Just my name. No sentence attached.
"Yeah."
"I think you've been worth reading for a long time."
I put my phone down and looked at Winifred.
"We have a situation," I told her.
Winifred, as always, offered nothing. She is in this sense the most consistent presence in my life.
At the office, the following Tuesday, Jake came in for a campaign check-in. He was early. I was the only one in the conference room, setting up the presentation screen.
He sat down at the table. He had his phone out but he wasn't looking at it — he was looking at the Chicago skyline through the floor-to-ceiling window, doing the thing people do when they're in their own head.
"It does that to you," I said.
He looked at me.
"The view," I said. "It's distracting."
"Yeah." He looked back at it. "I grew up in a flat place. Never had big views until Chicago."
"Do you like it?"
"I keep looking at it when I'm supposed to be looking at other things," he said. "So yeah, I think so."
We were quiet for a moment. Not awkward — just the particular quiet of two people who don't know each other well enough to fill a silence automatically.
"You're the copywriter," he said. Not a question.
"Nora. Yes."
"The tagline for the spring campaign. 'Move Like You Mean It.'" He looked at me. "That's mine. That's exactly what I've been trying to say for three years. How did you know?"
I almost said: You told me.
I said: "I read the brief carefully."
He looked at me for a moment longer than the sentence required. "Cool," he said, and looked at his phone.
The rest of the team arrived. The meeting happened. He looked at David when things got decided and at his phone when they weren't interesting and at the window twice more, briefly, in the way of someone who keeps getting pulled back to the thing.
He did not look at me again.
I went back to the second desk on the left and opened Quillr and there was already a message from him:
working on the new chapter. the thing you said about starting from love instead of loss. I tried it this morning. it's different.
Better different or worse different? I wrote.
Truer, he said. Which I think is the same as better, mostly.
Mostly?
Sometimes the truth is worse than the lie.
Yes, I said. But it's the only thing that actually lasts.
I hit send and stared at my screen for a moment.
The second desk on the left. The window he kept looking at. The tagline he'd said was exactly right, to someone who hadn't written it.
I was telling him the complete truth in one direction and none of it in another, and both things were getting harder to manage.