My first day at Halvorsen & Pike started with a turkey sandwich I was too nervous to eat.
I’d gotten there forty minutes early. I parked in the far corner of the lot so I wouldn’t take anybody’s spot. I sat in my car and practiced saying my own name out loud. “Hi, I’m Charlotte. Charlotte Reyes. I’m the new claims analyst.” Like I might forget it.
I found my desk on the fourth floor. A gray cubicle with a dying spider plant somebody had left behind. I met my manager, a brisk woman named Diane who shook my hand once and said, “We move fast here.” I smiled through about thirty introductions until my face actually ached.
By noon, my stomach was tied in a knot so tight I could feel it in my throat.
And when I pushed open the doors to the break room on the third floor, I walked straight into a wall of noise.
Every group had already formed. People were laughing at inside jokes I didn’t understand. Leaning across tables like they’d known each other for twenty years. Somebody was microwaving fish. Somebody else was yelling about the Bengals.
I stood just inside the doorway holding my brown paper lunch bag like a kid on her first day of middle school. Scanning the room for anywhere I could sit that wouldn’t feel like an intrusion.
Every table was full.
Every group had a rhythm, and I wasn’t part of any of them.
I was twenty-eight years old. I’d just moved to Columbus, Ohio, from a small town in Kentucky where I knew everybody. I had a new apartment with no furniture and a new job I wasn’t sure I could do. And I was standing in a break room, about to cry over a turkey sandwich.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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