I Thought I Wanted a Work Wife, Until I Got One

I thought I wanted a best friend at work. And then I met Rhonda.

This is a personal essay/story from my “book” on Substack, Will There Be Free Food? You don’t need to read the other stories to understand it, but I do recommend checking them out at the link below, which will include all of those stories, plus other personal essays and true stories from other eras of my life.

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Photo by Maria Fernanda Pissioli on Unsplash

When I started sixth grade, the students from four neighboring elementary schools combined to attend the local public middle school. Knowing this meant an opportunity to reinvent myself, I made up a few rules to curb my social ineptitude that got me bullied in elementary school: gently smile to say hi (no maniacal waving), don’t tell babyish stories about my family, stop trying to be funny, and most importantly: only wear clothes adorned with butterfly motifs, because then I’d be known as the “butterfly girl” instead of something embarrassing.

Despite the failure of this manifesto, I took a similar approach at the age of twenty-six, when I started working for an advertising firm called Zapify. Although Zapify was a startup, it was the biggest company in my career history--about two hundred people, with multiple offices--so I knew that this workplace might also be an important social hub for me. I was part of a friend group at the time, but I felt more on the outskirts than an actual member, much younger than everyone else, and rarely taken seriously. My rules for Zapify were simple: don’t do anything weird, don’t get drunk at company events, ask other people about themselves a lot, and attend all the happy hours even when you’re tired. The mission: have a great group of girlfriends who liked me as much as I liked them, and who could open the door to fun gatherings and parties.

On my first day, the recruiter, Charlie, introduced me to my team, which consisted of my boss, Ji-hoon, and the other two salespeople, Derek and Jim. I didn’t typically go out of my way to make friends with men, mostly because I didn’t want my husband, Nick, to think it was okay for him to start making friends with whatever sinister “work wife” was waiting for him. I’ve since become a lot less jealous as I’ve gotten older—opposite sex friends can be perfectly harmless. But having had some bad experiences with Nick’s female friends (all of whom turned out to have had crushes on him at some point- one of whom wrote us a literal hate letter when we got married) I did not want to go there.

At lunch, I spotted my new friend group. Just like in middle school, I could easily tell they were the “cool kids” of the office. The ringleader was a woman around my age named Taryn who looked surprisingly midwestern for San Francisco--chunky highlighted bob, heavy eye makeup, weird purposefully-wrinkled mid-calf boots that made her look a bit like Peter Pan meets Home Depot Karen--but I could tell she thought she was cool, as did everyone else, and as a result, so did I. Her sidekicks included a few of the other office-hot young women and one gay guy. I would manifest this into existence, I decided.

The culture of Zapify was unsurprisingly male and geeky (one of the reasons I didn’t think I’d fit in with anyone else, given previous experiences with male geeky cultures), so I assumed Taryn’s clique would identify me as one of their kind immediately--I wore skirts, I liked taking pictures at parties, and I liked cherry lime vodka. What more proof did they need?

For the next week, I had one major goal: get in with Taryn’s crew. Unfortunately for me, Taryn and her friends didn’t seem to get the memo that I was obviously one of them.

I said something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m new! Good to meet you, how long have you all been working here?”

“Oh hi,” Taryn said, and then immediately went back to her conversation. 

I wanted to cry. I literally had to become friends with these people or my social life would be screwed forever, or at least until I joined a new company. It was impossible to meet other women in San Francisco who weren’t trying to pitch you their woman-owned “Tinder for jewelry” startup. Work friends would be perfect for me because they’d provide company and make me seem like a normal person, plus I could maintain the friendships purely during work hours, negating the need for girls’ nights outs (something I absolutely dreaded–as my OCD was keen to remind me, how would I know Nick, left to his own devices at home, wouldn’t choke on a piece of chicken or something and die, causing me to blame myself forever?)

Around the time I started at Zapify, Andrea, the CEO, started holding anonymous Town Hall Q&As where the employees could submit questions. I had never been at a company big enough to need something like this before, so I wasn’t sure what the right questions would be. I thought long and hard about what my question would be. I wanted to ask, “Why does everyone here hate me?” but I stopped myself. No, that was too unhinged. I settled on something else: “Why is it always so cold in here and is there any way we can turn up the heat?”

Later that day, we all settled in the company common area, sitting on what I can only describe as foam bleachers and various cube-shaped cushions, to listen to the Q&A. Andrea began the meeting with a somber announcement. “Hi everyone. This will be our first anonymous Q&A. I want you to know that we hear you. We understand where you’re coming from when you say something is broken and it needs to be fixed. We’re here to fix it. We want to hear from you.”

Damn right something was broken. Taryn wasn’t friends with me!

I turned to Ji-hoon. “What is she talking about?”

“She made her sister the CFO,” he said. “We liked the old CFO. Also my old boss Carolyn quit, and it just created this toxic vacuum and about five people quit when she quit.”

I couldn’t for the life of me understand why someone would quit their job because someone they liked quit. Maybe this was because I had never worked with anyone I liked that much, but also, didn’t they need the money? Nick and I were barely breaking even with our rent, and that was with coveted rent control. They could have hired a body pillow to be my boss and I wouldn’t quit.

Andrea read the first question aloud. “Ahem..let’s see...okay. When will you admit something is deeply wrong with Zapify’s culture? Okay, see, I love this question. That’s exactly why we do this. We want to hear from you. And let me tell you, I am so excited about Zapify’s culture. We’re doing so many great things. There’s been a lot of change but change is part of the excitement and we are so excited to have you grow with us.” She clicked around to get to the next question. “Next question is...With the departure of Carolyn, what are we doing to ensure we hire from within instead of restricting our own employees’ growth opportunities? Well, this one is interesting because I actually disagree that we restrict growth opportunities. There’s a lot of talent here but also a lot of talent that we can bring into the fold and I think we’re doing a great job on talent. Okay, next one. Why is it always so cold in here? She paused. And is there any way we can turn up the heat?”

Everyone laughed. 

“Um..I don’t think it is that cold,” Andrea finally said, after composing herself. “But this is the kind of thing, um, maybe you could speak with the office manager about this but I think the temperature in here is actually really comfortable.”

I was teetering on the edge, dangerously close to falling into my old ways that I knew had made me so disliked at every institution I’d been a part of over the course of my life. I knew I had the bad habit of constantly saying something when I shouldn’t, holding myself to an extremely low bar of “I don’t blurt out slurs or anything, so nothing I’m saying is really that wrong.” Just stop trying to always SAY SOMETHING. Just be normal, be boring. Say nothing. Behave the way people you find boring behave. Ask questions about the company’s “series funding” or whatever, don’t ask about fucking AC.

Although I didn’t have a lot of friends, I took comfort in the fact that Nick was my best friend, and I could hang out with him. I also liked Nick’s friends, a group of down-to-earth guys who actually included me in their activities and laughed at my jokes. This wasn’t a “I’m just one of the guys, girls are so catty” situation. I would have loved to make more female friends, and every time one of Nick’s friends started dating someone I would try to befriend her immediately. But it was likely that Nick’s friends were only loyal to me because of Nick, and transient girlfriends didn’t have the same requirement to be nice to me. Hanging out with Nick’s friends meant good drinks at fun bars, rounds of Seinfeld trivia, and going back to our place for an afterparty and watching our favorite throwback music videos.

This all flew out the window when Nick traveled for work, which thankfully didn’t happen often, but when it did, I barely functioned, obsessed with intrusive visions of Nick getting into car accidents or getting stabbed walking back to his hotel. I would white-knuckle the whole time. I could hold it together to the point where I wasn’t crying in public, but I always felt like crying in public unless I had just heard from Nick and knew he was safe. 

Because I didn’t have a lot of friends, I couldn’t just “make my own plans,” as people so annoyingly advised me, including people who knew very well that I had no solid friends. To get through these hellish spells of time, I had to buy three fancy cheeses and eat myself into a stupor, then drug myself with Benadryl to fall asleep, my phone on the highest volume setting next to me, a pathetic Nick stand-in. My hope was that making friends with people like Taryn could pull me out of this spiral because next time Nick went out of town I could just call up Taryn and say “Margarita night, girlies?” and then we could all go out and post pictures like we were having a good time. I would just have to make sure they didn’t expect margarita night when Nick was around, because then I’d want to bring him with me just in case a serial killer who specifically targeted young men named Nick was on the loose in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Nick went out of town my second week at Zapify. I felt crushed under the weight of my anxiety, unable to conceive of a world in which I enjoyed my time alone and Nick came back safely. From the point I found out about the trip–which was going to consist of just one night away, by the way--I spent every moment around him telling him all the things I wish I had told him earlier, apologizing for arguments that happened years ago, and crying in his lap.

I figured that I would need to “make my own plans” as futile as that idea probably was. Predictably, all my current “friends” told me they were already busy and couldn’t hang out with me the night that Nick would be away. I would have to figure out something else. Luckily, Zapify was having a happy hour that night. I went and of course attempted to sneak into a conversation Taryn was having. Much to my chagrin, Taryn and her friends acted like I didn’t exist. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me--I mean, realistically, lots of things, but it’s not like they knew. 

  I felt myself spiral out of control and I poured myself my first alcoholic drink of the night, something I promised myself I’d never do at a work event after a few previous social mishaps at alcohol-related work events. I realized I was the only person at the happy hour not in a conversation. Literally, I was the most hated person at the company.

Finally, I saw a woman approach me with a friendly smile on her face. She had poofy dark brown hair and one of those faces that always looks a little bit drunk, even when sober. Her lipstick was spilling over her lips a little, bright red and shiny, a style I hadn’t seen on anyone in their twenties since the early 2000s. This matched her ever-so-slightly dated clothing--slightly translucent paisley top and low-rise pencil skirt. Curious. But none of that mattered, because she seemed nice and she was saying hi to me. Besides, if she looked a bit unstylish, at least I would be the fashionable one of the duo, in my high-waisted flares, ‘70s inspired felt hat, dark brown Kylie lip kit, and boho chic faux suede vest from Lulu’s that I was absolutely positive would never go out of style.

“I don’t think I’ve met you before!” she said. “I’m Rhonda.” 

“It’s so nice to meet you! I don’t think I’ve seen you before either.”

“I’m on the QA team. We sit upstairs. You must be new. Are you in sales or design or something?”

“Sales. Ji-hoon’s my boss.” 

She gave me a mischievous smile. “Do you think he’s hot?”

“Um...not...really?” I was looking around to see if Ji-hoon was there. Not that it would change my answer, because I didn’t have much of an answer at all. He was good looking, but I didn’t really like to go around calling other guys “hot” when I was so devoted to Nick. Just felt wrong. After all, I’d probably take about six Benadryl if I realized he was telling his coworkers he found other girls hot. It was only fair that I abided by the golden rule.

“I’m married,” I said. “Actually, he’s out of town tonight so I’m here just trying to distract myself.”

“Aw, you don’t like it when he travels?”

“No, it makes me super anxious. But I have OCD, I don’t expect anyone to understand.” I refilled my drink. Rhonda did the same.

“It’s totally fine,” Rhonda said, before taking a long sip of an extremely whiskey-heavy whiskey cola. “Everyone has some kind of anxiety. That’s just life!”

“I know, right?” We were clicking. This was what friendship felt like. Man, this was nice! I wasn’t even worried about asking the right questions, we had settled into that satisfying rhythm of a friendly conversation, the two of us on the Friendship Raft, barreling down the white waters of conversation without even trying. 

“Aw, what the hell, let’s get drunk tonight,” I found myself saying, pouring both of us a shot.

“How old are you by the way?” she asked.

“Twenty-six.”

“Oh my God, me too!”

“None of my friends are my age,” I said. “It’s cool sometimes but also sometimes I just wanna be immature, you know? I’m tired of talking about how busy everyone is at work.”

“Seriously! I want to talk about cute boys and stuff!” Rhonda laughed. We held our shots up to toast each other.

“Hashtag, this is twenty-six,” I found myself saying. Why the hell did I say that?

We took the shots. Within minutes, we were cackling, telling each other old stories, like the time I didn’t get invited to a party in elementary school and then in a Biblical turn of events, everyone at that party got lice. I opened up to her about the trauma I experienced when Taryn refused to like me, and she told me that apparently “everyone here knows Taryn is a bitch.”

We realized that we were some of the only people left at the happy hour. This was when I’d typically choose to go home, but because Nick was out of town I wanted nothing more than to avoid the apartment and stay out with Rhonda. I asked her if she liked Korean food. She said she did. We decided to get spicy wings at a local Korean restaurant that also doubled as a bar. Hours later, our fingers were red and sticky with sauce, and we’d ordered four girly drinks between the two of us, snapping photos of each other and posting to Facebook as if we had known each other for years.

Wings and bubbly with my girl! I typed into Facebook, before posting the picture.

“You are so crazy, I love it,” she said. “It’s so hard to meet people.”

“I know, right!” I took a deep sip of my drink, which at that point was mostly warm melted ice with a bittersweet aftertaste of blue raspberry syrup.

“I feel like I meet girls that I want to be friends with and then we’re both just too busy or something,” Rhonda said. I totally related, but I was also self-aware enough to know that people aren’t actually too busy, and if they say that they are, they just don’t like you very much. But I didn’t see why people wouldn’t like Rhonda. 

“You know who’s hot?” Rhonda asked me out of nowhere.

“Who?”

“Derek.”

“Derek from my team? Oh, I don’t think so.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re married! He looks exactly like Channing Tatum.”

I laughed. “Well, he’s about five foot four, but I guess he looks like Channing Tatum in the face a little.”

“There are honestly so many hot guys at Zapify. Like, everyone is so hot.”

“How long have you been working here?” I asked her. “You know dating isn’t against the rules.” I figured she was new, like me, and that was why she was still so excited about how hot everyone was.

“Ten months,” she said. “And yeah, I guess I could date, but...I don’t know, I’m not sure if they’re into me.”

Suddenly I felt uneasy. We clicked, of course, and we were still clicking through our many drinks, but if she had been working at Zapify for ten months and nobody was friends with her, was there something...wrong with her? 

I immediately wanted to kick myself. There were a million things wrong with me, so how could I even pose this question secretly in my own head?! What a hypocrite I was! But anyone who was this excited to be my friend probably had issues of their own… it just depended on what those issues were. Her lack of diagnosed mental illnesses was a red flag, because that was the kind of thing I could handle as an acceptable issue. The trouble was with people who were simply “off” without any explanation. Those people terrified me, occasionally leading me to worry that if I stopped hanging out with them they would murder me.

Despite my nauseous wave of discomfort cresting, I pushed the thoughts aside, because I really wanted a friend, and I was still scared to be alone.

“Do you want to come back to my place for tea?” I asked. “Full disclosure, I have such a hard time being home alone when Nick is out of town and I figured we could watch a fun girly movie or something.” I had attempted this before with other girls, and they usually thought I was trying to hook up with them and scampered off into the night, never to be heard from again. Because I wasn’t extremely invested in this friendship with Rhonda, I figured if this plan caused the entire five-hour-old friendship to implode in my face, it would not be a great loss.

Much to my surprise, Rhonda was down. “That’d be awesome! How about Mean Girls?”

I felt relief and anxiety at the same time, a feeling almost worse than just regular anxiety because it required me to weigh my own choices and decisions instead of merely agonizing over a fear.

When we got back to my apartment, I smelled the intoxicating, unbearably sad smell of Nick, even though he wasn’t there. It was a warm, distinct smell of black truffle salt, crayons and rye bread. When Nick was out of town, I almost wanted to forget he existed, just so I wouldn’t have to think about missing him and worrying that he was pinned under a train somewhere. I quickly texted him, “Got home safe. Had fun with a coworker, you’d like her!” even though I knew Nick would absolutely hate Rhonda. He responded, “I love you sweetie.” Okay, good, he was alive. 

“I love your place!” Rhonda said, making herself comfortable on the sofa. Our apartment, in hindsight, was absolutely hideous, because we decorated it like the living room of a 1980’s movie villain, in shades of red, black and brown, full of glass surfaces and asymmetrical, shiny black side tables. Our maroon and beige art deco carpet, an unsettling mix of spirals and curves, looked like something out of a therapist’s office, but we found it online for $32 so we pounced. 

Rhonda and I watched the movie. Throughout, she continued to tell me how hot all the men in our office were and told me about a guy she used to hook up with who would go down on her for hours. Rhonda was, for lack of a better word, an extremely horny person. 

I looked at the clock and realized it was past eleven. Shockingly, I was getting tired without Benadryl, although the copious amounts of alcohol probably had something to do with that. Now I just had to convince Rhonda to leave.

Rhonda checked her phone. “I don’t want to be super weird, but I live with my parents out in the suburbs and the last train leaves in like, fifteen minutes. I’m not gonna make it. Unless I try to catch the one at 2 AM, but…”

“Oh! I’m so sorry, do you need to stay here?”

“Yeah, that would be ideal, if it’s not too weird.”

Okay, now I was literally sleeping with Rhonda. I was starting to sober up, and I realized that Rhonda and I were now best friends, whether I liked it or not. 

Thankfully, I fell asleep easily and so did Rhonda. I woke up the next morning alone in bed, with a note on the pillow from Rhonda. It said “I tried to wake you when I had to leave to say bye, but you wouldn’t wake up. Thanks so much for having me last night! Can’t wait to see you in the office tomorrow!”

The entire bed smelled of Rhonda now, instead of Nick, and Rhonda’s smell was both girly and oppressive--a strong, powdery perfume that you might smell on a secretary in the 1980s wearing a giant turquoise pussyblow blouse. Immediately I regretted everything. 

When I got to work, I saw Rhonda, and I wanted to flee. I couldn’t tell if I was being dramatic or not--she didn’t do anything wrong! But something about her was starting to freak me out and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I also recognized her suffocating smell again, which I didn’t even notice when we met. Why did she think that perfume smelled good, and why did she feel the need to wear so much of it? Rhonda wasn’t mean, she wasn’t even boring, why didn’t I like her anymore? I knew if I called my mom about this she’d tell me I was pushing her away because of my own fear of being rejected, but honestly I would have liked nothing more than for Rhonda to say, “Hey, we were both drunk last night, let’s forget it and just be regular coworkers, not friends.”

Unfortunately, she put her elbows down on my desk, heaved over my shoulder and began talking to me loudly about how hot some guy named Phil from accounting was. Derek and Jim looked over. 

“Hey, sorry,” I said. “I’m kinda busy right now with some prospects I need to email. Let’s talk at lunch.” I’m actually not eating lunch today, specifically to avoid you!

“Oh, no problem,” she said, with that over-the-top nonchalant tone that people only use when they’re afraid of looking like they care too much. Ugh, I felt so bad for her. Not bad enough to actually change my behavior or anything, but bad enough to sit with it and stew.

For the next few weeks, I received multiple Slack messages from Rhonda a day, usually lamenting her inability to sit closer to the likes of Derek or Phil. At one point she declared that Ji-hoon was no longer hot. Occasionally, she would regale me with a story about how all the men in her department were sexist assholes who didn’t take her seriously. She told me she was repeatedly in and out with HR to try to hold members of her team accountable for their sexism.  On the one hand, I wanted to believe all women, but on the other hand, I really didn’t believe Rhonda.

I knew I couldn’t end the friendship with a breakup conversation. Despite the fact that people on Internet advice forums think this is a socially appropriate thing to do, I knew that friendships had different rules from romantic relationships, and you didn’t just end them with a conversation. Why? Because in a relationship, unless you’re in some kind of Redditor polycule, you can’t have more than one partner. So a breakup always carries an undertone of “I like you a little, just not enough to date you instead of someone else. Let’s be friends instead.” One can, however, have multiple friendships, so the “let’s be friends” part doesn’t work when you’re breaking up with friends. A friendship breakup is much harsher. It essentially is: “I know I can have as many friends as I want, but I dislike you so much that I do not want to associate with you.” I was not going to say that to Rhonda. I decided I would just slowly fade away until she got bored of me. Enough people had done it to me, and I survived.

I also gave up on befriending anyone else at work. Clearly this work friend stuff wasn’t for me. I tried to just focus on my job, as ludicrous as that sounds. At one point, Ji-hoon told me that “numerous people” had told him I was on Reddit during work hours, something he apparently didn’t want to reprimand me for because he didn’t care, but his boss had nagged him to do it. I didn’t get why this was such a problem because our office had arcade games which people would play all day, as well as (and I promise I’m not making this up) an adult ball pit where Kyle, the “office perv” would hang out. But Reddit apparently crossed a line. Perhaps it was because I was on the men’s rights subreddit pretending to be a man (asking everyone if it was cucked if your girlfriend’s father was a chad with a big dick) in order to spark drama and mess with everyone. This was a habit of mine when I was bored. 

“Who told you about that?” I asked, not even attempting to hide it.

“Oh, I probably shouldn’t tell you but what the hell. It was Derek.”

Derek!? Fake Channing Tatum Derek? 

I didn’t confront Derek about this, because that wasn’t really my style, but next time I knew he was standing behind me, no doubt spying on my screen like the rat he was, I made the point to Google “How to get rid of snitch coworker.”

Nick knew about Rhonda and routinely teased me for being so lonely that I felt the need to sleep with her while he was away, but he also understood why I didn’t want to be her best friend. At the company holiday party, I brought Nick, we ran into Rhonda, and after the routine “Oh, so you’re the woman who slept with my wife?” joke, and the obvious response of “Haha, watch out Nick, I might steal your wife!” we were free to go separately to “mingle.” Surprisingly, Rhonda didn’t bother me much that night. She had finally ventured out of her eighth-grade-level secret crushes and was drunkenly humping Phil on the dance floor, occasionally making her way over to Derek to rub her butt into his crotch. 

After we got back from the holiday break, Ji-hoon told me that Rhonda was fired because several men came forward about her sexually harassing them.

One of the great things about work friends is that you have an immediate opt-out whenever they get fired or quit—validated by how many times I had been fired and subsequently dropped by work friends. I knew that without the ability to run into me regularly, Rhonda wouldn’t be able to keep our empty husk of a friendship going. I still felt sad for her that she was fired, but I was happy to be able to enjoy my Reddit at my desk (with my monitor at a better angle to avoid Derek’s snitch-ass glances) unencumbered by her Slack messages. 

Zapify hemorrhaged employees over the next year. Ji-hoon, Jim and Derek all quit. Even Taryn’s group quit--the entire group, albeit not all on the same day or anything. Although I still felt like the new girl, I realized at one point that I was officially one of the most tenured employees at Zapify and I had barely been there for a year. I still wasn’t sure what everyone hated so much about Zapify--I had worked in more toxic environments, so perhaps my standards for acceptable workplaces were a lot lower than others’. Or perhaps it had something to do with Zapify’s product being dated, and never hitting our revenue goals. This was something I cared about less, as long as it didn’t result in me being fired. 

Occasionally, I still wondered if there were opportunities to make friends there, especially given the revolving door of employees. People who knew me a year ago no longer worked there. I essentially had the option to reinvent myself every six months, which was kind of perfect for me. But I had to remind myself that I couldn’t let an irrational desire to simply have a friend drive my pursuit of another woman. If I made another friend at work, it would have to be someone I’d actually want to be friends with in real life, not someone who met the standard of “is willing to be in a photo with me.” If this meant I would suffer through Nick’s next work trip with the cheese and Benadryl trick, that was fine, as long as I wasn’t bringing a new person into that mess.

That was when Sara appeared. Sara was our new office manager, and at first I didn’t think we had much in common. She was clearly my age or older, but wore childish comic book T-shirts and painted her nails blue. She also dyed her hair a bizarre shade of lilac-silver and wore ironic glasses. I hated judging people by their appearance (I mean, I didn’t hate it, I did it all the time, but I felt bad about it). Appearance, however--at least the stuff within our control--had so far been a decent way to gauge if I’d have anything in common with someone and I didn’t think I’d have a lot in common with Sara. No doubt she probably looked at me and thought I was too “basic.” But one day when I was working a little late, we started talking and she mentioned being a fan of the show Rick & Morty.

“No way, I love that show,” I said. Okay, so maybe I was geekier than I thought. I did have about two hundred Reddit usernames after all. Or maybe Rick & Morty wasn’t that geeky. I knew it wasn’t exactly obscure to like the show, but I had never met another woman in real life who did, so I was intrigued.

“Me too,” she said. “But the fanbase is so annoying, I always feel awkward telling people I like it.”

“Wow, me too! Like, I’m not some kind of asshole neckbeard, you know?” Friendship raft incoming. Room for two? “My husband and I have watched it several times over now. What’s your favorite episode?”

“Definitely the Mr. Meseeks one,” she said. “You?”

“Oh, easy! The one with the alien parasites that take over memories.”

“Ah, that one is great too. Mr. Poopy Butthole!”

“Seriously, I thought he was one of the alien parasites the whole time! And then he just never came back!”

Other people began filing out of the office but Sara and I remained, joking back and forth about Rick & Morty, a show with a bottomless pit of dorky references. Regrettably, I’m sure a Mr. Poopy Butthole impression was performed at some point. Because Sara was new in town, she didn’t have any friends in San Francisco and I related to that, even years after moving there.

“I don’t want to be weird,” I said. “But if you’re open to hanging out outside of work, we could trade numbers.”

“Yeah, let’s do it!”

We traded numbers. So this was how a friendship was supposed to start--it was supposed to drop into your lap, without you pushing it or feeling like you had to have a friend.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked.

“A year,” I said. “I can’t believe it. It’s changed so much since I started. You started like, last week, right?”

“Yeah!” she said. “Everyone seems really nice.”

“They are! It hasn’t been easy to make friends, though. Not a lot of other women.”

“Girlfriends are so important,” she said.

“Are you doing anything for Halloween?” I asked.

“I barely know anyone in town, so no.”

“Zapify usually hosts a fun party. After some of us go to a bar or something after, you should come! They get really into costumes too so you should definitely go as something. Oh! You should go as something from Rick & Morty!”

“Love it.”

“Or we could do like, a matching costume! Haha!” Was this too soon? Was a forty-minute-old friendship too new for matching costumes? No, of course not.

“Yeah! Nice.” She turned around and shouted to a coworker. “I found someone to do matching costumes with me! Yeah, Rick & Morty.”

Okay, so we were telling people!

“Who do you want to be?” I asked, eagerly planning out my sexy Morty costume--tiny yellow crop top, high-waisted jeans, natural-looking makeup. Obviously, everyone would immediately know who I was trying to represent.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, either Rick or Morty, right?”

“Would you want to like, genderswap the characters or go as just straight up Rick and Morty?”

She laughed. “I don’t know, it’s only September, I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Okay, well let me know. I love this stuff. I usually do a Halloween costume with my husband but I always have to force him into it and it would be so cool if someone was actually as into it as I am, you know? Maybe I could make him go as Mr. Poopy Butthole! Haha!”

“For sure. For sure.”

Sara and I never hung out outside of work, but we’d exchange pleasantries in the office. The Rick and Morty costumes never happened, but that was okay, I told myself. It didn’t need to happen. It was a big task anyway and might have been a pain in the ass to figure it out with another person. I always made sure to message Sara on Slack to ask her how she was doing and not talk about myself too much. I understood we weren’t very close friends, but I considered her a casual work friend.

At one point, there was some construction going on at the front of the building and all our mail was rerouted to the back. Because I regularly got my packages delivered to the office, I asked Sara if anything had come for me that day. Specifically, a Topshop bomber jacket that I had been really excited to wear. 

“I haven’t checked yet,” Sara said.

Okay, no problem. I’d ask at the end of the day when she’d probably checked, since as the office manager and the only person in charge of mail she wasn’t going to go the whole day without checking. Sometime around five, I messaged her again: “Hey Sara! I hope you had a great day. Did you manage to check the mail to see if my package came?”

“I’m really busy today and I don’t have time for this,” she responded. With a PERIOD at the end. It was confirmed: she did not want to hear from me anymore.

I found my head spinning as Fight Club-esque flashbacks popped into my mind, Rhonda’s perfume still stuck in the back of my nose-brain. Did Sara ever like me? Did we abandon the costume idea because we were actually too busy, or did she hate the idea from the beginning and think it was creepy that I suggested it? Was...was I Rhonda this whole time? 

Realizing that Sara most likely felt just as uncomfortable as I had felt under Rhonda’s siege of inappropriate Slack messages, I decided never to bother her again. I had done many things wrong during my time at Zapify, but I decided I couldn’t subject anyone to the awkward choice of whether or not to formally break up with a work friend, or more realistically, tell a work would-be friend that a friendship wasn’t in the cards. I figured if Sara was just having one bad day, I’d hear from her later, but I never did. Scrolling through our past conversations, I was always the one to initiate contact. I felt like such a fool.

It was easy to pity myself, because after all, I had been so excited about befriending Sara. But now that I knew what it was like to be in Sara’s shoes, I knew Sara felt just as shitty as I did, if not shittier. If I was going to do one right thing in my quest for work friends, it would be giving someone the gift of not having to be my work wife.