Fifty-Two Floors Up

Harper kicked off her heels, the red soles shining against the cold marble. Throwing her Prada briefcase and plastic take-out bag on the kitchen counter, she rummaged through her cabinets for the bottle of Eagle Rare she’d been saving for a special occasion and poured herself a glass. The scent of toasted oak and butterscotch filled her nose, and she took in a greedy mouthful. She sighed.

With the take-out and bourbon in hand, she made herself comfortable on the couch, staring out at her view of the Hudson and the city that did, in fact, sleep. Fifty-two floors up, and she had a pretty good view into the lives of other people. The smattering of office workers who didn’t get paid enough to be hunched over their computers and imprisoned in their cubicles until 2 AM—investment bankers, she guessed. The lone night owls in their equally luxurious apartments and condos, watching reruns of The Bachelor or talking on the phone. Who could they be talking to at this hour? Harper wouldn’t know.

Ripping into her take-out, she started on a container of orange chicken. Take-out wouldn’t have been her first choice for celebrating finally becoming a partner at her firm, but it wasn’t like anyone threw her a party, and she still had work to do. Someone with finer taste would’ve been appalled by her pairing for the evening, but truthfully, she only started drinking bourbon because it impressed her male co-workers. She liked it fine enough, but even after sixteen years, she could hardly tell the difference between the middle and top shelf.

Once she was done with the first container, she tore off her blazer, grabbed the container of fried rice, and began scrolling through her phone. As a habit, she checked her email first. There were marketing emails from seemingly every store she’d ever purchased from, with the same old wave of subject lines: Limited Time: Get 10% Off, A Special Gift Just For You, The Spring Collection has Arrived, and so on. Most people unsubscribed from the deluge of marketing sludge, but Harper liked to see all the notifications pop up on her phone.

There was a handful of messages from sales associates—Dior, Tory Burch, Hermes, Goyard—trying to entice her to come in with the promise of rare bags and hand-picked outfits. There were the regular notices from her bank that let her know her bills had been autopaid, purchase confirmations, and emails from streaming services advertising their new shows.

When she got bored with it, she switched over to her messages. No contact photos, no emojis, just the short, brief texts exchanged when her co-workers couldn’t reach her on her work phone or from her neighbor, Ms. Miles, who would text Harper for legal advice whenever one of the other tenants did something she believed was against HOA guidelines, which was often.

Shoveling a spoonful of rice into her mouth, she switched over to Instagram and stalked the accounts of high school ex-boyfriends, college frenemies, and basically anyone else she had met in life.

She hovered over a selfie of Rebecca and Junie smiling widely at the camera—some swanky restaurant in the background. They captioned it: Jebecca back together again! With an absurd number of emojis that was likely some accumulation of inside jokes. At Yale, the three of them dormed together, and they were practically inseparable throughout freshman year. But Harper didn’t have the same interest in going to parties or joining societies. Even then, Rebecca and Junie were closer.

When Harper started her various internships and LSAT prep, she saw very little of her friends. And then they graduated. Harper went to law school. Rebecca and Junie moved to the city to start their careers. Harper only saw them a handful of times after that—awkward happy hours that Harper squeezed in when her internships had her travel to the city. They naturally grew apart. Or…she grew apart from them, at least.

Harper accidentally liked the post.

“Shit,” she murmured, unliking it as quickly as possible.

Harper resumed her scrolling, mindlessly taking in the assortment of wedding pictures, family vacations, and gender reveals.

When she reached the natural end, she clicked on her own profile. Her profile picture was the same one on the firm’s website—professional, clean, boilerplate. Her last post was from three years ago, a photo of the sunset she’d taken on a solo vacation to Tulum. She remembered toiling over what to put as the caption; she wanted it to be funny and light, to maybe even say something about how she was enjoying her time away, but nothing had rung true. She hadn’t enjoyed her time and ended up working from her personal computer after getting a small sunburn and deciding to spend the rest of her weekend inside her hotel room.

So, she had posted it without a caption.

Harper considered posting something now, something to commemorate becoming a partner at one of the top firms in the country—to prove to everyone that she was more successful than they were, that all her hard work had finally paid off, that her success meant more than any of their useless accomplishments and stupid smiling faces.

See? She would write, Do you see what I’ve been able to accomplish? I became something. You’re nothing to me.

She tossed her phone to the other side of the couch, finished off the bourbon, and rubbed her temples.

In her mind, the mean girls from high school and the friends she used to have were always thinking about her, waiting for her downfall. So everything that she was doing was to prove to them that she was better, more successful, more intelligent.

Last week, Harper had actually run into one of her high school tormentors, Gracie, at a Starbucks. Gracie was as pretty as she’d always been, annoyingly, and seemingly on her way to a pilates class in the middle of the day.

“Gracie?” Harper had asked, eager to get a chance to brag about her accomplishments.

Gracie looked at her, confused. “Sorry, do I know you?”

“Harper. Harper Reen from high school.” She almost added: ‘The person you mocked in the school talent show, the person you and your friends would throw carrots at during lunchtime, the person you’d constantly be snickering at when the teachers showed preferential treatment.’

She shrugged. “I’m so sorry, I don’t remember that name. Were we in the same year?”

Harper had shaken her head, grabbed her coffee, and walked out without another word—hot tears of embarrassment stinging her eyes. That was the worst thing Gracie could’ve said. Harper had never even considered that she could be forgotten by the very people she had spent countless nights cursing in her dreams.

Standing up, she pattered over to the kitchen to refill her glass, walking over to the window and peering down. She should’ve been elated; she thought this was what it would finally take to feel whole, but why was it all she wanted in the world right then was to have someone to tell? To have someone to celebrate with. To have someone be happy for her.

Harper thought of her mom then, whom she hadn’t spoken to in close to a decade. They had gotten into a fight in Harper’s last year of college—she couldn’t even remember the specifics, just that it was two decades of pent-up anger at her mother that had come out all at once. And then Harper simply stopped talking to them. It was easy to do when she was so busy, she wasn’t even sure if it was a conscious effort to avoid all their calls—she just did. And once she started, it became harder to pick up their calls, to reach out, to show up out of nowhere. And eventually, they just stopped calling.

If she called her mom now, what would she even say? How could she even face her parents after all this time?

So, she wouldn’t.

Harper sank to the floor. Hugging her knees to her chest, she finished off her bourbon and stared down at the world below. In a city of eight million people, she was utterly alone. In a world of eight billion, she didn’t have a single person she could call a friend.

Tears streaked down her face, one by one—and then all together.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?”