The Circle Read Free

were excruciating.
Do you know why you’re here?
he would ask, like a highway cop who’d pulled her over. Other times, when he was
     satisfied with whatever work she’d done that day, he did something worse: he
praised
her. He called her his
protégée
. He loved the word. He introduced her to visitors this way, saying, “This is my protégée,
     Mae. She’s pretty sharp, most days”—and here he’d wink at her as if he were a captain
     and she his first mate, the two of them veterans of many raucous adventures and forever
     devoted to each other. “If she doesn’t get in her own way, she has a bright future
     ahead of her here.”
    She couldn’t stand it. Every day of that job, the eighteen months she worked there,
     she wondered if she could really ask Annie for a favor. She’d never been one to ask
     for something like that, to be rescued, to be lifted. It was a kind of neediness,
     pushiness
—nudginess
, her dad called it, something not bred into her. Her parents were quietpeople who did not like to be in anyone’s way, quiet and proud people who took nothing
     from anyone.
    And Mae was the same, but that job bent her into something else, into someone who
     would do anything to leave. It was sickening, all of it. The green cinderblocks. An
     actual water cooler. Actual punch cards. The actual
certificates of merit
when someone had done something deemed special. And the hours! Actually nine to five!
     All of it felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time, and
     made Mae feel that she was not only wasting her life but that this entire company
     was wasting life, wasting human potential and holding back the turning of the globe.
     The cubicle at that place,
her
cubicle, was the distillation of it all. The low walls around her, meant to facilitate
     her complete concentration on the work at hand, were lined with burlap, as if any
     other material might distract her, might allude to more exotic ways of spending her
     days. And so she’d spent eighteen months in an office where they thought, of all the
     materials man and nature offered, the one their staff should see, all day and every
     day, was burlap. A dirty sort of burlap, a less refined form of burlap. A bulk burlap,
     a poor man’s burlap, a budget burlap. Oh god, she thought, when she left that place
     she vowed never to see or touch or acknowledge the existence of that material again.
    And she did not expect to see it again. How often, outside of the nineteenth century,
     outside a general store of the nineteenth century, does one encounter burlap? Mae
     assumed she never would, but then here it was, all around her in this new Circle workspace,
     and looking at it, smelling its musty smell, her eyes welled up. “Fucking burlap,”
     she mumbled to herself.
    Behind her, she heard a sigh, then a voice: “Now I’m thinking this wasn’t such a good
     idea.”
    Mae turned and found Annie, her hands in fists at her sides, posing like a pouting
     child. “Fucking burlap,” Annie said, imitating her pout, then burst out laughing.
     When she was done, she managed, “That was incredible. Thank you so much for that,
     Mae. I knew you’d hate it, but I wanted to see just how much. I’m sorry you almost
     cried. Jesus.”
    Now Mae looked to Renata, whose hands were raised high in surrender. “Not my idea!”
     she said. “Annie put me up to it! Don’t hate me!”
    Annie sighed with satisfaction. “I had to actually
buy
that cubicle from Walmart. And the computer! That took me ages to find online. I
     thought we could just bring that kind of stuff up from the basement or something,
     but we honestly had nothing on the entire campus ugly and old enough. Oh god, you
     should have seen your face.”
    Mae’s heart was pounding. “You’re such a sicko.”
    Annie feigned confusion. “Me? I’m not sick. I’m awesome.”
    “I can’t believe you went to that much trouble to upset me.”
    “Well, I did. That’s how I got to where