Jenga

I laid the final wooden rectangle atop my carefully-constructed pyre and stood back to admire my handiwork.

“Okay, it’s ready!” I called. I looked around expectantly.

Crickets.

John had gone to the bar to buy a round. Bobby and Len were standing nearby, busily quoting YouTube videos I’d never seen. I sipped the warming remains of my drink as a new round of laughter burst from their general direction. They hadn’t been any help, but what else was new?

Just yesterday our boss had assigned us a group project — something I’d been relieved to leave behind for good, I’d thought, when I graduated high school. No such luck. We, the college interns of State Senator Richard Pine’s local district office, had been told to work together to draft a phone script for the Senator’s new Medicare hotline. As soon as the beleaguered staffer who had evidently drawn the short straw on intern management had retreated from earshot, Bobby had piped up, full of ideas: “Hi, this is Dick’s office. Where we have an office for your dick!”

Len cracked up and threw his genius into the mix: “Just spit-balling…Emphasis on ballin.” Soon their spitballs were careening down a steep alley, one after another after another, mostly landing in the gutters. Some of them were pretty creative, I had to admit. But the boys never seemed to notice whether I appreciated their brilliance or not.

So I had turned impatiently back to my laptop, drafted a phone script and prepared to email it to them, “for review.” I winced as I typed the words. I could already hear their inbred mimicry picking up steam: “for review,” “for your review,” “for your kind review, good sir.” No, it wouldn’t work. I deleted “for review” and sent the email with a foolproof subject line: “Draft Script.” That should be clear enough. Not that I expected them to actually do anything with it. Not that I cared, I reminded myself firmly. I had already learned what I could only assume was life’s most valuable lesson: If you wanted something done right, just fucking do it yourself.

Now my Jenga tower, like my Draft Script, was done to perfection. I always liked to make the initial structure tidy and tight, to minimize unpredictable wiggles where there should be solidity. It made the game more interesting, I thought, because it allowed you to find the perfectly precarious piece and, with the right time and attention, tap it patiently from its wooden vice grip until you could slip it out smoothly, to the amazement of your opponents. Or at least to your own supreme satisfaction, I thought, glancing around again at my aloneness in the sea of after-work revelers.

Across the room, my eyes caught John, weaving his way back through the crowd, somehow miraculously managing four drinks between his two large, slender hands. John was the Senator’s newest full-time staff member. A recent college graduate, he was not quite two years our senior. He had an easy charm and deep, honey-colored eyes.

Returning to our corner, John winked at me and handed over another cranberry vodka. I felt my cheeks flush and took a big gulp in an effort to cover my face. I tried not to grimace. Unlike the others, I had just started drinking that summer. Cranberry vodka was my gateway drink — the only alcoholic taste I could begin to palate.

Bobby leapt forward toward John, holding out his phone.

“John! Check this out,” he cried.

John leaned toward the screen and let out a long laugh. “Oh I know this one!” he said. And then he quoted the stupid video without even watching it. Bobby and Len laughed, and they all talked over each other. I held my cold glass to one cheek, then the other, grateful to feel the color drain from my face.

“What about this one?” Len grabbed the phone to search for another video.

John turned to me, smiled, and gestured at the Jenga tower. “Scale model of the Burj Khalifa? Are you going to be a Senator or an Architect?” I heard a small giggle escape from between my lips. Gross.

He turned back to the boys. “Hey guys: Jenga. Bobby, you’re up.” Heeling to John’s command like an eager puppy, Bobby grabbed a piece from near the top and yanked it. The whole structure swayed.

“Dumbass!” Len punched Bobby’s arm. Bobby pushed him. John looked at me and rolled his eyes but laughed when Len fell into him.

Bobby turned over his Jenga piece and read the scrawled text of a bygone bar-fly: “Truth.”

The sarcasm leapt from my tongue before I had time to think: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Len guffawed immediately. “Oooh, shots fired!” he exclaimed, never breaking eye contact with Bobby. John snickered and gave me a high-five. Bobby blew past any credit I might have gotten and played it straight. He puffed himself up and put on his “official voice” — the voice he used in our Friday meetings to recap his middling accomplishments of the week. The voice he’d used the day before to tell the Intern Manager about the phone script he hadn’t written (but had suggested he revise, ultimately changing one word).

“I mean, as you know, I’d like to go into politics,” he began. “Start on the local level. Run for office. Make my way up. Look toward DC, run for Federal office. Eventually–” he paused and spread his arms for comedic effect –“POTUS, baby!” The three of them high-fived, and I felt my internal temperature rise as I was hit with another wave of laughter and the realization that Bobby’s entire answer to my question had been directed at Len.

I stepped straight into Bobby’s line of sight and looked him in the eyes. “Where will you stage your first local campaign?” I followed up.

“Eh,” he said, shifting his gaze to John now, “maybe right here. You know, City Council…”

His voice receded from my ears as it dawned on me that he didn’t even realize he was visually ignoring his interlocutor while answering the questions she had posed. I was literally irrelevant. Background noise. The wind in his full sail of unquestioned inheritance. My stomach turned over in disgust as I felt myself shrink into oblivion in plain sight, like a shadow that disappears when a dark cloud passes over the sun.

And then a pair of honey-colored eyes locked onto mine, arresting my disappearance. A soft smile appeared beneath them, and I thought of the night before, when that smile had been so close to mine, after the quick happy hour drink he’d proposed had turned into three, and my head had started swimming and the upward curve of his lips had taken on a new cast as those lips leaned toward mine — and the earth under foot had roared open, revealing a vast, dark, impenetrable … emptiness, as a single image floated to the surface of my mind: the pretty, laughing girl in the photo on his desk. The girl I’d seen him text: “I love you to the moon and back.”

And then the forward motion had stopped. And he had straightened his back in the knick of time, and I’d felt relief wash over me. He was a good person after all, I’d told myself all the way home.

But what did I know, really? I, a mere shadow in the marble globe he held so unthinkingly in his palm? As I looked back at him now through the narrowing slits of my own eyes, the honey color of his turned crimson. The upturned lips took on the shape of a smirk. And had I never noticed the crook in his nose before?

“Your turn,” he said amiably.

I charged forward, scanning my structure for the perfectly precarious piece, Bobby’s laughter now the wind at my back. I spied a single wooden rectangle near the bottom, bearing the weight of the entire tower. I reached for it, grabbed hold, and pulled as hard as I could.