Ava-Claire, whose blond hair spiraled in pins on her head like crop circles, and whose gentle shining presence delighted the entire team sans myself, suggested we view the brief for what it was: a fun one-off that could actually spark real change. “Can we mention abortion?” I asked. “Et cetera?”

“It’s supposed to be issue neutral,” she said. “Just a positive social-forward campaign saying, Young people, make your voices heard, get out and vote.” She’d learned this from the PAC that had hired us, because she was not just a creative strategist, she was the accounts manager. I was a creative strategist and the HR department. And a copywriter. That’s just life.

“The iconic sticker,” said Ben, our designer, and a creative strategist. “Something with the iconic sticker . . . We could make the i voted sticker a collectible series.”

“Well, you can only vote once,” I said, “so you can only collect one.”

“Joan, keeping us honest,” Ben said, pointing to me like I would smile and point at him back. I had a UTI, a yeast infection, BV, nobody liked me, I was the dog of the earth, and furthermore my ex had just gone viral for teaching a bird to talk. His openness, humility, and playful nature had caused a miracle and were thus revealed to the world, whose bounty now rushed to him unfettered. My sense of play had atrophied from brands acting playful. I met stunts and gimmicks with a teeming distrust. So how could I delight the public with the truth of my heart? I was a downer and a snob. Something was really wrong with me. But ultimately, I was normal.

“Scratch-and-sniff stickers,” Ava-Claire said. “If the question is what can we do with stickers, smell is a major element.”

Then Mark Uptick spoke, from behind my head, the place I had purposefully turned my chair opposite. “The axis of smell,” he said, “is sensory.”

Everyone else was looking at him, so I turned my head to look at him too, which made me look more interested than everyone else given the angle of my chair. I didn’t want to look interested, so I moved my chair to face him, which made a high-pitched scraping sound, so to counteract the sound I adopted the expression of a peaceful monk, a peaceful, monk-like smile. When I was a child my dad had an expression he called “dumb face,” and the face I adopted now was similar.

“I loved the video of you teaching the bird to talk,” said Ava-Claire. “I didn’t know you were on social like that.”

“I’m not,” Mark Uptick said, rubbing his eyes. He was always rubbing his eyes, like he’d just woken up to the happy reality of his life. “I just shared it for fun, and I guess it resonated with people.”

I moved my chair away again.

“Which is like the scratch-and-sniff sticker,” Mark Uptick said. “Even if we don’t do scratch-and-sniff, there’s something to be said for the sensory experience of voting itself, and maybe we can harness that as the value prop.”

“There’s an Indigenous tribe,” said Ava-Claire, “who only breathe through their noses rather than mouths, and they’re all insanely healthy, six feet tall, blue-eyed, and gorgeous.”

The four of us sat, awaiting Jace’s comment. But Jace was on vacation.

“Put it in the upfront,” said Ben. “It’s a great detail.”

---

When Jace had announced he was going on vacation, he’d made jokes about “the inmates running the asylum,” which were funny but revealed true fear, for in the five years I had worked for Jace, he had never gone on vacation. Jace was the founder of the agency and the agency ran on Jace’s charm. Jace had lively black hair and sunglasses hanging on a golden chain and had grown up in the ’80s in a rural area with no running water. For years Jace had cluelessly stuffed sheets of fabric softener into the armpits of the single suit he owned while he was wearing it, a story he told as a joke when we had clients in either fashion or cleaning products, who were uniformly, cleanly delighted. Jace knew taste was something fed to you and knew even silence was a competitor. And the last feature of Jace was that I owed him my life, for he had lifted me from the trough of technical writing and taught me all I knew.

Jace’s agency created campaigns to make people buy product. We pitched campaigns to brands by finding a cultural insight that led to an idea enacted through an execution. An execution was a stunt, billboard, video, event. An insight could be a statistic, pain point, piece of social proof, anecdote turned fable, energy we sensed in the culture, or feeling we had, which meant others had it too. We chose facts to bolster our campaigns and sometimes we worked backward from campaigns to facts. But working backward felt like working forward: like work, where I sat stone-faced in my seat, resenting being watched.

When an idea felt a little stupid, that meant it contained a powerful truth, one so true it didn’t need to be said.

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Then Jace had hired Mark Uptick. Mark Uptick was a creative director and creative strategist. His hair curled by his ears and his lack of earring sparkled with restraint. From his backpack he took a tiny plaque that read mark uptick and set it on his desk. I handed him his new laptop: I was also the IT department. He took out a sticker, which was a photograph of the name plaque, looked at me, and stuck it on.

My life became beautifully directional, shimmering, thumping, hearts streaming from my face, until eight months later he was dumping out a rucksack of running clothing he’d misidentified as mine and delivering a fearful, teary speech about how celebrating his 30th with his parents and cousins had made him realize he needed to start his real life, start a family, find someone he could start a family with, so he was ending our relationship to preserve what this was, because this had been a beautiful and healing experience, and though he could never feel romantic love for me, because he could never imagine a future with me, as I’d said I didn’t want children, he felt a different kind of love for me, a love that rivaled even his love for Ruth, his tiny, peaceful dog. He was a people pleaser, he knew that, so thanks so much for making the space for his feelings. And so, forevermore, he would remember how nice I was to him, because it reminded him of the human capacity to be nice.

Now, cropping pop stars’ pictures for my deck, I felt embarrassed: You thought you were like these people, you thought you were as sexy as these people. I felt disgusted by my small breast, which could be palmed even by my own small hand, my hand that was small when placed over his face, when inserted into his mouth so he could suck my dick. He was the one who had called it that, had said I’m sucking your dick. Hearing that a waterfall opened in my head and covered everything. But later, right after he told me we couldn’t have sex anymore, when we were having sex I said, hoping to prompt a font of conversation, I don’t know why I like doing this to you so much, and he said, Well, it’s because it’s like I’m sucking your dick and you like that, right? He thought how he’d made me was just how I was. But it wasn’t like that that time. It was nothing that time. And nothing was wet with language. And now I was actually angry, thinking about how small my hands were, that if I put both of them together, they could not cover his face.

The past made gibberish, every memory unjackoffable, I sat in the oppressive present, where Mark Uptick smiled wholesomely, like we’d been friendly colleagues all along. I was the creep for remembering different: movies we’d cried at, compliments he’d given, a flower I’d brought him, was I insane? I knew his fixations, hang-ups with his family and the church, his maudlin childhood traumas, and I was the creep for knowing. You started this, I thought at him, you’re the maniac. You started beers and shots in the backyard of the bar by our office after work, talking for hours every day, before we even kissed. You messaged me riffs on the worst office small talk. When Jace asked after Ava-Claire’s Denmark-based boyfriend, you’d wink across the room. Now he humored their humor and I got nothing. And the treatments for a UTI, BV, and a yeast infection each create the conditions for the other, so you have to keep doing each step in a precise, unforeseen order, like Dance Dance Revolution.

I would not let what I knew of him color my behavior. I would not sit in the puddle of my knowledge, I would withhold it even from myself. I would not look at him at work: I vowed to be unimpeachably, impersonally wise; to deliver a deck that stood rigid against him; to remove myself from the equation entirely. I would get the young people out to vote.

---

My slides were pulled up,but the image I had placed on the title page had already sparked a brainstorm. When I had joined the agency, Jace had said, “Welcome to the brain trust.” The problem with a brain trust was anything could cause a brainstorm.

“Sleepaway camp is the key to adult culture,” said Mark Uptick, pointing to the title image: the cast of a just-released movie about young adults at summer camp, lounging in the grass with sodas. “Everyone’s just trying to get back to camp.”

“Totally, the unity of color war, the teamwork of color war, it was so fun,” said Ava-Claire.

“Best experience of my life,” said Mark Uptick. “I still remember my bunk’s song.”

The two fools were smiling at each other like cartoon sunflowers. “Be real, camp’s really the best part of your life?” I said joking-style. “Camp, the place you can’t leave?”

“Well, all of life is a place you can’t leave,” said Ava-Claire.

“Scope too wide, Ava-Claire,” I said. “Listen. People like camp because it’s their first taste of being adults — you’re separated from your parents and kissing your peers. But when you’re actually an adult, isn’t that one million times better?”

“No,” said Mark Uptick.

“But have you considered harm,” I said.

“I know about harm,” he said.

“I know you know about harm,” I said.

“Huh?” he said.

“OK guys, let’s put a pin in harm,” said Ava-Claire, writing something in her notebook, I assume “harm.”

“If camp weren’t special,” Mark Uptick said, gesturing again to the movie image, “why would we have so many movies about camp?”

I vowed to never again place an image in my deck that could be used against me. “People make a lot of movies about everything,” I said. “You’re just doing nostalgia. Like, we romanticize the ice cream cones we had as kids at the fair or whatever, but we don’t think of all the great ice cream cones we have now as adults,” I said, trying to cram the analogy through, “because we still have them.”

“Right, right,” said Mark Uptick.

“Yes!” I said.

“But,” said Mark Uptick.

“No . . .” I said.

“Isn’t it actually kind of sad to eat an ice cream as an adult? That this indulgence — this freedom — is what you dreamed of as a child, and now to you it’s nothing? Eating an ice cream will never mean that much again.”

“I think we’re aligned,” I said. This was a trick I’d learned from Jace: saying “I think we’re aligned” to confuse my enemies. “When I eat ice cream, I feel grateful that I’m eating ice cream now. That my life has improved to the point where ice cream is nothing to me.”

“The iconic cone,” said Ben. “We could use the triangle as a visual container, as a V, for ‘Vote’ . . . Sorry, I’m really sick.” And he left.

“No way, Joan,” said Mark Uptick. “The perfect way to experience eating ice cream as an adult is to watch a child eat ice cream. Because it means so much to them. Then, life matters.”

“Wait, I lost the thread,” said Ava-Claire. “The perfect way to vote as an adult is to watch a child vote?”

“This actually is related to my idea,” I lied, clicking to the next slide.

Insight: Young people crave the present more and more as material conditions grow worse. They’re not in control of their future. (Photo of a Democratic and a far-right senator sharing popcorn at a baseball game; an airline CEO and the president shaking hands; graph of disability cases skyrocketing; spike bisecting a subway bench; smiling headshot of health-care chatbot; global sleep market estimated to reach $108 billion in eight years, indicating burnout.)

So they’re leaning into that lack of control (chart showing surge in Gen Z sports betting; blurry photo of woman bound and gagged in dungeon, bottom text, “Now I can finally chill”; headline, “Why Young People Aren’t Saving for Retirement”; viral GIF of woman falling down hole), caring less about living their values (YouTube thumbnail: “I TOPPED A COP?!?!”; post, “some of you mfs acting like Messrs Homo and Gayguy”; condom use down among 18–24yos; “TheeSoberGirl Relapses: ‘I Got Bored’”; pop star publicly apologizes for publicly apologizing: “I’m sorry . . . to myself!!”; stand-up clip, “Imagine a pedophile with executive dysfunction. Just no kids at all”; video of pundit fatally shot on college campus, caption, “bro let out a yelp”; supercut of teens repeating phrenological misinformation), and turning to nihilism and hedonism. (Report on Gen Z “doom spending”; fake ad for 2-in-1 Gun Hat, “It’s Right by Your Mouth!”; low health bar added to photo of dead biker; event page, “When Global Warming Reaches 1.5°C We’re Smoking Crack”; podcast clip, two girls: “Why are we talking about history when we’re reborn every day? We need to be feeling the angels . . .”; podcast clip, two guys: “You’re not me. I’m not you. So what are we doing here?”; glitchcore lyrics, “take the stripes out my drink imma die tonight / put MORE stripes in my drink imma die tonight”; credit card debt reaches all-time high; trend report on “moneycore”; Prada-branded noodles sell out in an hour; Cheetos-branded hojicha sells out in an hour; Cheetos-branded hojicha-flavored vape sells out in an hour; cocaine-flavored weed; weed-flavored cocaine; “finally saw her pussy and it was square” (quote post: “This didn’t happen.”); #TrepanningSummer, “i’m putting matcha in there”; plane goes missing, “it must feel so good to be gone”; viral GIF of woman falling down hole but altered so she’s smiling, “in 30 years i’ll have enough money to purchase this hole”; woman falling down hole but she’s blue; woman falling down hole but she’s 12; “LifeProTip: Do something wrong? Pretend you didn’t. You could have not”; hole falling down a woman; snake with a lump in it, the lump is X-rayed, the lump is a photo of the snake; benzo use up; marriage rates down; loneliness deadly; loneliness everywhere; deadliness everywhere; streamer screaming at a self-service kiosk, “Scan my face. I’m not using it. No one wants to make this face famous. No one wants to fuck on this face.”)

Young people are desperate for real-life events and in-the-moment connection, which is rarer than ever. That’s why they love your bird video, Mark; it’s the fantasy of someone coming to your window, a joyful event that you don’t have to work for, that just is. So to get young people excited about voting, we need voting to be the event itself. Idea: turn the act of voting into a party. By telling them this message: Vote Drunk.

When an idea felt a little stupid, that meant it contained a powerful truth, one so true it didn’t need to be said. When an idea originated from intuition — hunches strung together, unproven common knowledge — that was a good sign of its deeper truth, for if a truth could be intuited, that meant it was loose in the world. And when an idea was annoying, or a little inappropriate, that too had an upside, for that meant it had wormed its way into your heart.

“That is actually fun as fuck,” quoth Mark Uptick.

Then we were all smiling, laughing, refining, dancing, prancing, et cetera.

“We get so much done when it’s just us,” Ava-Claire said as we were clearing up.

“Well, it’s a sensory idea, like you said before,” I said, turning away from Ava-Claire and toward Mark Uptick. “So you helped. And obviously, rules around alcohol ads, but we can skirt them if we word it right. And obviously we’d be talking to 21-plus, but 18 to 20s will see it, it’ll trickle down to them, so no worries there.”

This was a trick I’d learned from Jace: saying “I think we’re aligned” to confuse my enemies.

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“Right, right,” he said. “I’ll voice that over when I present.”

“Do you want to grab a drink next door?” Ava-Claire said. “Mark and I are going.” And Mark Uptick gave a thumbs-up.

Mark Uptick would be there, true. But Ava-Claire would be there, so Mark Uptick wouldn’t really be there. If I could suspend my misery, I’d drink a striped drink, feel a surge of optimism, hold forth on culture’s ills, name-drop people I half knew and share half ideas I didn’t have, then return home, heart suddenly pumping embarrassment, feet digging into the leather slides I’d advertised then bought myself, convinced by my own pitch, dumb as bones, what must Mark think of me. Which I could just skip to, by not going.

“I’m actually meeting up with my little sister and her boyfriend,” I said. “They’re only in town for a few days.”

“Well, I’d love to grab some time with you tomorrow, Joan,” said Ava-Claire.

“I really want to grab a drink!” I said, shaking my fist. “I would totally grab a drink if it weren’t for my darn sister and her darn boyfriend.”

“OK, see you later, Joan,” Mark Uptick said.

And I texted my sister, saying actually work had freed up, and I was able to see her and her boyfriend after all.

---

“It has been so long!”my sister said. She talked like she texted, with the punctuation of a much older person. In a recent fit of paranoia I had thought someone else was authoring her texts asking to meet up, but it seemed these were really her thoughts. Though maybe her thoughts were being ghostwritten, I thought. Well whatever.

The two spoke of their classwork. Their electives differed, but they shared a gut. My sister interrupted to fill in details; I felt fear for the quiet boyfriend, an urge to make sure his side was heard, then thought, What a perverse impulse, to side with anyone but my sister.

Their faces gleamed with purpose: It was the beginning of break and the beginning of the road trip through which they’d make their way back home. They’d see some friends on the route, then spend a little time relaxing at the house, thank goodness, “’cause we’re about ready to drop,” said my sister, sighing the sigh of a businessman. “And Dad wants to do peyote with us,” she added.

“What the fuck,” I said. “I am begging you, do not do peyote with him.”

“He said if we don’t do peyote with him, he’ll just do it with Chasen,” she said. Chasen was my childhood friend who had recently been arrested for transporting acid across state lines. “He’s found some shaman who helps you do it legally as a traditional religious ceremony.”

“He’s not your peer,” I said. “It’s fucked up.”

“OK, we won’t do it,” the boyfriend said, looking at my sister.

I knew they were going to do it. “It’s your decision,” I said.

The boyfriend was so polite and friendly, but I remembered that my sister was polite and friendly. When she was 7 and I was 15, we moved to a new house, and all summer long we sat around looking at each other, and the house had thin gray walls, a style I would come to recognize as connoting both new-money luxury and the cheapness of the future. A person who had success in an office could now live inside one. My sister to amuse us both told me there were people living in the walls. This idea didn’t interest her as much as her elaborate maps of fantasy worlds, which rumpled under the weight of umlauts and other diacritical markings; still she drew a picture of the wall people for me. The big horror movie that year was No-Eyes, which I wasn’t allowed to see but nonetheless looked up in private browsers, and the wall people looked similar: creepy but mostly pitiful, with a single tuft of hair.

Come to think of it, there should be a disruptive ad agency called Opposite Day.

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But one day, a terrifying thought came to me, and I wanted to scare my sister too. I said, electrified: If the people in the walls are alive, they must be eating something. They themselves are preying on something. So what else is in the walls?

“Bugs,” she said.

My sweet sister saw my face, she tried to save it. “Beautiful, huge, curly bugs,” she added.

Scary stories let you fill in the blanks. Every kid knows that. But my story’s blank was of something smaller, prey, not something bigger hiding. My story wasn’t scary, it was detail work.

“What’s fun around here?” asked my sister.

“Well, there are more coffee shops around here,” I said. “And the park is really fun too.” They looked around. “There’s a nice library on the other side of the park,” I said, but it was obvious: I had failed to know what was fun around here. I didn’t want to take them to my place — in fact, I had chosen to meet by a park far from my place, to throw my sister off the scent of my address, for though she had no ill intent and perhaps didn’t even know she wasn’t meant to know my address, you never know what information she’d give up if pressed by someone mentally weird enough to just never stop.

And though I knew this fear was normal, since my mentally weird father had said many times that he would stop at nothing to find me, looking at my friendly and fun-loving sister I felt the deep truth of my rotten, secretive nature, and though over the years I had come to see my nature as a reaction to circumstance, sitting across from my sister I did feel it was possible my rotten, secretive nature had come first.

At the other table, six pierced teens smelled a perfume sample. Sister and boyfriend looked on with interest. “We’re thinking of going to the thrift store,” my sister said. They were college freshmen. All they wanted was to go to the thrift store. “Thanks for the coffee, Joan,” the boyfriend said. “That’s so nice.” I imagined drinking bleach and calling Mark and him soothing me as I died; my dying would turn his commitment issues moot, and he could feel free to love me. I gave them directions to the thrift store. I went home.

---

Where I wasn’t, Ava-Claire and Mark Uptick sat together. Mark Uptick had a beer and a shot and Ava-Claire had a striped drink with a pink straw stuck in it.

“I’m wiped,” said Ava-Claire. “I don’t want to snap into productivity mode when Jace gets back.”

“You’ll have some Monday downtime, ’cause Jace and I pitch the PAC. And the dog client stuff writes itself. Dog owners crave two things: moments and memories.”

“So we’re giving them more moments.”

“Yeah, and turning their moments into the ultimate memory. Anyway, Joan’s lead on that.”

“Have you ever talked to Joan?” said Ava-Claire.

“Huh?” said Mark Uptick, sweating.

“Like as HR.”

“Oh,” said Mark Uptick, wiping. “No.”

“Jace said we can go to Joan about that type of stuff, but I don’t know how real that is,” said Ava-Claire. “I don’t know how much power she really has.”

“Right, right,” said Mark Uptick. “Jace says so much that it’s hard to sort through it.”

“Right,” said Ava-Claire. “He’s a weird guy.”

“Right,” said Mark Uptick.

They drank their cool refreshing items.

“Has Jace ever been weird to you?” said Ava-Claire.

“Sure. I mean,” said Mark Uptick, faltering, “he is weird.”

“I guess I’m struggling,” said Ava-Claire, “because I don’t want to be hard on him, because I know so much about him.

His childhood, you know, it was really . . . rural?

And that makes him an outsider and that’s what makes him special.

He’s not afraid to be an outsider.

He’s not afraid to break the rules.

He’s so playful, he’s like a big kid.

And our agency’s built on that.

So how he treats . . . women . . . well, maybe not women in general . . . well . . . maybe it’s just an extension of that.

And then to ask him to walk it back, walk back something that’s in his nature . . .

That’s like telling a kid not to play . . .

That’s saying, Jace, don’t be Jace.

If I said that, he would feel bad.

But when he . . . acts a certain way, I feel bad.

I feel really bad.

But it’s not like I love rules.

I don’t want to be the voice of rules.

And I’m not saying it’s bad to have a rural childhood.

All his childhood stories, they’re actually really touching.

Sorry. Does that make sense?”

But Mark Uptick now wore the dumb face. At the mention of kids and touching, he wore the dumb face. Because for weeks, Mark Uptick had been wondering whether he might have been molested. At a sleepover when he was maybe 5, he’d told his playmate a scatological, sexual yarn. He had possibly pressed his young crotch on his brother’s leg, tried to touch his other brother’s dick in the bath when they were both babies, played doctor many times at camp, scratched out his family’s faces in a kindergarten drawing, though to be fair he was trying to create a flesh tone, and the scratching was by mistake. And he remembered he had refused to tell a story to his friend. The story was of him biking along the bike path he and his family rode often, and there was a light blue sky and green grass. And the vision was of a man laying him down in the green grass and touching under his thin underwear. This hadn’t happened, but he recalled saying, “It’s nothing,” to his friend, as if the vision were real. Where did he glean this vision? This was before he knew how to use the internet. The answer is kids are vulgar; kids are imaginative; the world is vulgar; the world is imaginative. But several weeks ago, he had seen a movie featuring two abused children bonding and begun to cry, startling his fellow watcher. And last week his boss had made some molestation joke, and his heart had leapt up, saying, Me. But most likely his heart was just leaping up saying, Me, I am Human. And that was actually good, that he had a human heart.

It would explain his wish for a kid, though it would also explain the opposite. It would explain his strategies of preventive appeasement, hyperpositivity, why in conflict he just tried to feed enough coins of agreement to the other person to make them stop. But those qualities were also explained by his Christian upbringing and the specifics of his family, specifics he wouldn’t get into, but which were basically by-products of older people doing their best. What about this: Was Mark Uptick the way he was because somewhere in the world, another child had been molested? No. He was just suggestible, porous, and people were constantly talking about people getting molested by priests. But ultimately, he knew he hadn’t. Been.

I couldn’t say I Love You; I was already saying it. I was a billboard saying it.

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Unless he listened to the sock puppet accounts I’d created to respond to his forum posts, posts I’d found by remotely accessing his work-issued laptop with my IT permissions, two days after he’d left my apartment, checking in on his emotional wellness with HR proactiveness, as he’d left in distress. The sock puppet accounts said, Actually, maybe you have been molested. Or if you haven’t, something else is wrong. Your body is telling you something is wrong, for we know more than we know we know, and what we say is just a symptom. So just take a second to see where you are. Pump the brakes on having a kid. Is there someone in your life who doesn’t judge? Maybe the person you watched the movie with. Maybe talk to them.

And these sock puppets said what anyone would. For new posts of his appeared each day, clogged with unhelpful details; it’s how I know everything, including his and Ava-Claire’s conversation. Verbose posts spilled fear all over, doubled back to towel off, begged someone to step in. He needed an interlocutor and I was one. For hadn’t we laughed incredulously at our good fortune, housing picklebacks in the bar’s backyard, as we vowed to be allies for life? I’d kept my promise; though he’d forgotten, I’d never stopped. He thought no one cared, but I cared; he thought his life was boring, but it was interesting; he thought he was alone, but I was right here. So he wanted a family; I know your job isn’t your family, but locking eyes across a stupid situation, don’t you think that’s family, that’s actually family’s real upside? I don’t have much to offer but my attention, but what is there but attention: I know everything about you, I can learn your needs like a mother, listen like a sister, roughhouse like a brother, sort through your stories, be useful, dependable, seamlessly slot in.

If he told me, I would get it. He was like me. But I wasn’t there.

“Wait, sorry, you’re asking if you should talk to Jace or not, about . . . what?” Mark Uptick said to Ava-Claire. “Or wait . . . Joan?”

Ava-Claire opened her hands helplessly: She had already said it. She was a smart person, accustomed to ideas guys cluttering her life; why had she, sitting at the boy-girl table, thought a guy could solve her problems? Well, one could. Her boyfriend. But he was in Denmark.

Mark Uptick recovered. “I think you should do what feels good to you,” he said.

“Totally,” said Ava-Claire. “Honestly, I was rambling.”

---

Jace came back from vacation weird: He was now peaceful. When he learned of Vote Drunk, he clapped me and Mark Uptick on the backs and rubbed Ava-Claire’s shoulders and said he’d left the agency in good hands. And he only added one build: After voters share their Vote Drunk stories online to receive a bedazzled flask, their stories can be folded into a commemorative, punk-looking zine.

He and Mark Uptick went away and pitched the PAC. Ava-Claire and I sat in our seats. I wrote lines for a brand that turns your dog’s cremains into a painting of the dog.

“Ava-Claire, what did you want to chat about?” I said.

“It’s OK,” Ava-Claire said. “I actually forget.”

Then Jace and Mark Uptick came back all smiles, said Vote Drunk was a go, and in a sweep of swashbuckling goodwill Jace invited us all to get drinks at the bar next to our office, and said we could all leave early and he’d meet us over there.

“I will go,” I said. “I will go,” Mark Uptick said. “Ava-Claire?” Jace said. “I actually have a family conflict but wish nothing more than that I could go,” Ava-Claire said.

Then Mark Uptick and I were alone.

“I got you the usual,” I said, gesturing to the two pairs of beers and shots.

“Oh, I’m actually not drinking right now,” he said.

“That’s OK,” I said, “I’ll drink it myself!” And I cheerfully downed both shots and slurped one of the beers and the two beers sat in front of me so close they were almost kissing.

To say anything I brought up the new No-Eyes. The tagline on every poster was, for some reason, “Now He Sees You.” The wrongness boggled; it should be “It Gets Darker,” that’s a no-brainer, another no-thing, ha ha. “Now He Sees You” is the exact opposite of what it should be, come to think of it, there should be a disruptive ad agency called Opposite Day, though the negative connotations might be too obvious, it’s so annoying it just might work.

“No, dude,” said Mark Uptick, “that’s the reboot’s premise. He gets eyes.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “Well, I guess that’s scary too.”

I asked him if he’d seen it yet. He said he hadn’t. My heart turned. He said he was going to see it with some college friends that weekend; they were going upstate. I drank more of my beer, extending my neck like a swan, I hoped. He said it was a fun tradition and they always sat around a bonfire and got really real, telling each other deep secrets about their lives.

“Like what,” I said.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. I had thought he rubbed his eyes when he was happy, but now I saw it as sad. Strangely I rubbed my eyes too. He stopped rubbing his eyes.

“So I guess we should level set,” he said. “About us.”

“OK, what level do you want to set,” I said, randomly excited. Maybe something good would happen!

“I like sending you funny links,” he said.

There was nothing I needed less than funny links. A funny link was dust in my fist. It was as if he had offered me an hourglass standing atop a sand dune: Not only is that superfluous, we have bigger problems. “I like funny links,” I said.

“Great,” he said. And he sneezed: allergies.

What could I say? Please unlock the padlock on your heart, sir, please let the ropes fly off. I only want to talk to you, I want it for hours, I want you to choke on me, I want you to eat my hair. “I really like you,” “I really miss you,” the really stroking double time to save the nothing sentiments. I couldn’t say I Love You; I was already saying it. I was a billboard saying it. I just couldn’t close.

“I don’t want kids,” I said. “I don’t like forcing people to do things.”

“Yeah,” he said.

I tried every sentence on earth, and none did what I wanted. Grief went in me and then it went out. And with that, we became coworkers again.

“Do you really like Vote Drunk or are you just being nice,” I said.

“I really like it,” he said.

“Do you think it’s offensive in some way, and we might get punished somehow,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I’m not worried about that.”

“Do you think she’ll win,” I said.

“She’ll definitely win,” he said. “I have a good feeling.”

“Hi Mark! Hi Joan!” Jace said. “Where’s Ava-Claire? Getting a breast reduction? God I hope not!”

“I’m actually feeling sick,” I said. “I think I have what Ben has.”

“You know I’m kidding, right Joan?” Jace said. “You’re like a guy to me, I’m joking around. So, Mark, I heard you taught a bird to talk. Tell me everything.”

Here’s what happened, Mark Uptick said. The bird arrived, and somehow I got the idea to try talking to it. But I didn’t hear the rest of Mark’s story, because I wasn’t listening. For I had gotten quite drunk. I was so drunk that I thought I might throw up, and indeed I did throw up a little in my mouth, but I swallowed it, and I wasn’t afraid. Sure, the poison was in me, but my body would handle it; I wasn’t in trouble, I wasn’t a kid; and soon I’d be headed home, to my own apartment, pulling out my own key, and opening the door onto all the objects I had freely chosen.