Chapter Text
Is Ms. Casey okay? It’s all Mark can think about as he walks back to MDR. When he gets there, he goes back to work with the others.
“So what did you think?” Petey asks him. “Better than the Break Room?”
Mark laughs. “Yeah, I guess.”
“She’s not too bad,” Petey says. Unspoken: as far as Management goes.
Mark imagines her leaving the office, stepping into the elevator and out into some wide-open afternoon: blue skies and green trees and good friends (he hopes she has friends, someone to cheer her), sliding off her shoes, washing the product out of her hair so it hangs in curls about her face—
He blinks at the numbers floating on his monitor, feeling vaguely guilty. Rolls the trackball under his fingers. You think she has friends out there? He doesn’t say it.
You think she’d want friends in here?
It’s nearing the end of the day when Milchick comes by to tell Mark to go to Cobel’s office. With a sigh, Mark powers down his monitor—he’s pretty sure he’s not going to get any more work done today—and follows him to the Management office. Ms. Cobel tells him to shut the door and Mark knows it’s going to be one of those days. He shuts the door, walks over to the chair across from her desk when she asks him to and sinks down onto it, giving her a bland look.
She’s quiet for a long time, observing him like she’s trying to figure out what makes him tick. After a minute or so, Mark decides she’s waiting for him to open, so he guesses, “is this about the Wellness thing?”
He’s not sure if this meeting is about the Wellness thing or if the Wellness thing was only an excuse for this meeting. But her reaction tells him it’s the former—indrawn breath, loud in the complete silence between them, eyes brightening, locking in place. No other tells—she sits with apparent ease, all unmoved. Mark’s spent too many mornings sitting across from her with a sampler, stabbing his fingers with needles, to be fooled.
“How would you describe Ms. Casey?” Ms. Cobel says, affecting a tone of unconcern. “Did you feel… anything… in your Tempers, when you encountered her?”
“I think she’s good at her job,” Mark says carefully.
He hasn’t—yet—seen a security camera in the Wellness Room, but he’s never found one in the Kier house either. The expression on Cobel’s face is too eager, too much like after his very first Waffle Party, when she’d asked him why he’d been so attentive to Woe.
“Anything else?” Cobel prompts.
“No, not really,” Mark says.
They run into each other in Distribution Supply—he and Petey and Ms. Casey. She’s browsing the shelves of identical green watering cans, and when they enter, she turns towards them, straight-backed.
“Hello.”
“Hey,” Petey says.
“Hi,” Mark says.
“I was just searching for watering cans,” Ms. Casey says. “To water the tree.”
“Oh, cool,” Mark says.
An outie is never going to be friends with an innie.
She stares at him while he tries to look anywhere other than her lips.
Cobel doesn’t ask him about Ms. Casey again, but she keeps bringing him into her office after each session—which, coincidentally, happens much more often with him than with the rest of MDR. Mark’s gotten very good at listening to facts about his outie without taking in any of them. (Your outie has brightened people’s days by merely smiling.)