Personal Days by Ed Park

afternoon and as he put his Coke in the cup holder he saw Lizzie walk in, wearing sweatpants and a baggy sweater. It was so startling he slumped in his seat till the previews began.
    Shooting the moon
    Every other month a film or TV crew shoots outside the office for a couple of days. Trailers hog the curb. Preening lackeys with headsets move purposefully along the sidewalk, coffee in hand, trained to address any trespass. Laars has taken to insulting them. Pru says she once flashed them, and the thought of it makes Jonah quiver like a jelly. One summer Jules would pitch water balloons from the sixth-floor window.
    Our building’s rugged façade, with its lone quizzical gargoyle, appears in advertisements for a luminous sports drink, three different cell phone plans, a financial management firm, a protein bar, and a pain reliever.
    Best of all is for a website that contained thousands of easy-to-use job listings for cities across the country. It’s called Jobmilla. The camera dives through an open window into a cavernous room, very Industrial Revolution, with the sinister sound of chains clanking and liquids dripping from bare rafters. A conveyor belt transports depressed-looking, obviously jobless people along a figure-eight route. At the end they get crammed into a computer monitor—representing the Jobmilla site—and are subjected to a brisk off-camera churning. Then they pop out of the building, onto the sparkling sidewalk, holding briefcases and looking thrilled to have a job and use of a comb.
    The motto is
What goes around comes around.
™
    The pit
    There was a parking lot that many of us used as a shortcut on our way in from the subway. On rainy days it was like one big puddle with tiny islands here and there, so far apart that disparate life-forms no doubt grew and developed independently.
    This spring, or was it last year, they put up boards around it and we learned to walk the long way round, using the sidewalk like good citizens. Now we can see, through holes in the boards, that a giant pit has totally erased our former route.
    The pit marks the future basement of an enormous glass-skinned building shaped like the symbol for infinity. Lizzie thinks it’s going to be turned into lofts for millionaires. Jack II hopes it’s a vertical mall, or at least that it has a few benches where he can sit down and de-stress with a coffee and a fresh cinnamon roll. He says there are surprisingly few spots in the city where you can find a proper cinnamon roll. A mom-and-pop operation in Yorkville is the only one that comes to mind. Something tells us he’s misremembering a Talk of the Town piece from an old
New Yorker.
    The Red Alcove
    In the office Lizzie, Pru, and Jenny sometimes eat together in the alcove by the window. They order clear plastic boxes of sprouts, sip at tinted water.
Alcove
is a nice real estate term for a disused storage closet with one of the walls knocked down. Even when Jill was on the fourth floor, she was usually too shy to join them. The alcove is directly under where Jill’s desk is on the sixth floor, so it’s sort of like she’s with them in spirit now.
    They look at fashion magazines, make fun of the ads, or maybe they’re not making fun.
    Do you like these velour hoodies?
    They never say anything but it’s clear that this refuge is for girls only.
    I hate the ones with the arrow thing on the back.
    Laars has started calling it the Red Alcove. Since his vow of chastity, he has joined a book club. His ex-roommate introduced him to it, then quit, making Laars the only man left. The club just read a book called
The Red Tent,
about a special tent in which women used to hang out whenever they were getting their periods.
    It was pretty interesting,
he says diplomatically.
    Four attempts
    Laars is about to go on vacation. He’s using two vacation days and two personal days. He asks everyone to remind him to change his outgoing message before he leaves, but how are we supposed to remember