* * *
—
Home: lights on, podcast loud. I check each room, making sure I’m alone. It’s not that I’m worried someone broke in and is hiding behind a door, waiting to murder me, it’s just—well, there’s no harm in knowing for sure.
This is normal. Everyone who lives alone must do this.
Once I’ve determined my home is murderer-free, I settle into the rest of my evening: pajamas, laptop, couch. I have a home office, but I prefer the living room. The TV makes the room feel a bit less lonely, even when it’s not on. I’ll probably spend some time with my newest vibrator later, if only because the conversation with Ameena made me realize it’s been nearly a year since I’ve had sex. Going solo isn’t quite the same, but I have a routine. Lord knows I’ve had enough time to perfect one.
It’s when I unzip my laptop from my work bag that it hits me—by the end of next week, I may not have a job to overwork myself with.
Instead of opening my work email, I log on to my bank account. I have enough in savings to last me a few months, and I imagine I’d collect unemployment. However that works—I’m not entirely sure. It feels like something I should know, but I’ve only ever had this one job. Does the government just . . . give you money? God, I am a disaster millennial. I pull up the Puget Sounds archives, convinced we did a show about this at some point, but our search function is painfully outdated, and I grow frustrated with it before finding the information I’m looking for.
My next stop is the public media jobs board some of my PPR colleagues have talked about. There’s a producer job in Alaska. A reporter job in Colorado. A managing editor job in St. Louis.
Nothing in the entire state of Washington.
I knew jobs in public radio were hard to come by, but I didn’t realize it was quite this bad. I press a hand to my chest, trying to calm my increasingly panicky breaths. If I’m not in public radio, I have no idea what I’d be doing. This is all I know, all I’ve ever known. And sure, some of those skills are transferable, but I’m not ready to leave this field. I love radio too much to let it go.
I have to convince Dominic to do this show with me. And in order to convince him, I’d have to know him, which I do not. Luckily, being a producer has made me great at social media stalking research.
His Facebook profile is public. Bless this generation and our lack of boundaries. Only—shit, am I in a different generation from Dominic? There’s no birth year on his profile, but he went directly from undergrad to grad school. That puts him at twenty-three or twenty-four. I’m solidly a millennial, but he falls in two generations: mine and Gen Z.
Strangely, we don’t have any mutual friends, which means he must not have added anyone at the station yet. I click through his photos. Here he is, my potential ex-boyfriend, with unfortunate haircuts and teenage acne and posing for awkward family photos. His face looks softer here, though there’s that sharp cut of his jaw. I’ve been so focused on being annoyed by him that I haven’t really registered that he is cute. Especially once he passed the unfortunate-haircut stage. Somewhere, a barber should be fired.
I could have dated a guy like this, I muse, lingering on a photo of him giving a presentation in front of a class, his arms stretched out in some kind of emphatic gesture. The photo was uploaded by someone else, with the caption Typical Dominic Yun presentation: please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle. I smile at that. Must be an inside joke.
I’ve never dated a younger guy; all my boyfriends have been my age or slightly older. And even though we wouldn’t actually be dating, I can’t deny there’s a bit of a thrill there, buried beneath the generational angst.
I keep scrolling, landing on a series of photos—a lot of photos—of Dominic with a redheaded girl, some of them as recent as this past June, at his Northwestern graduation. Mia Dabrowski says the photo tag. She’s extremely cute, a spray of freckles across her nose, a penchant for bright colors. I watch them age backward. There’s the two of them at a party, at the beach, on someone’s boat. Most of the time, they’re surrounded by a group of friends, but sometimes they’re on their own, pressing their cheeks together and mugging for the camera. Then they’re at their undergrad graduation in matching gowns. They’re adorable together. I click on her, but her profile is private.
His relationship status is single, so it must have been a somewhat recent breakup, I deduce. I wonder if it has anything to do with Dominic’s reluctance to do the show or with his move to Seattle. I really do know next to nothing about this guy, and I’m overcome with an unfamiliar pang: I want to know him. I want to know this guy who had a full life back in Illinois, who not just smiled but beamed in all his photos, and yet hasn’t Facebook-friended any of his coworkers.
Does he have friends at PPR? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him grab drinks with anyone after work. Jason had lunch with him once in his first couple weeks, but then he was put on afternoons. I’ve only ever seen Dominic leave the station in one way: alone.
I’m scrolling back to the beginning of his photos when tragedy strikes.
My hand slips on my laptop, and I accidentally hit the like button. On a really old photo of him and his ex-girlfriend.
The only rational solution is to set myself and my laptop on fire.
“Shit,” I say out loud, tossing the laptop onto the couch cushion. “Shit, shit, shit!”
I leap to my feet and shake out my traitorous hands. He’s going to know that I was stalking him. And it might bring up weird feelings about this ex, and then he’ll never want to cohost with me, and fuck, fuck, how could I have been so fucking stupid?
Deep breaths. I’ll just unlike it. He’ll never even get a notification. I pick up my laptop, realizing that in my panic, I closed out of the window. So I have to find his page again and scroll through his photos, only I can’t remember how far back this particular photo was, and—
A new notification pops up:
1 new friend request: Dominic Yun
6
Over the next week, desks empty out. Arts reporter Jess Jorgensen, who was hired right before Dominic, leaves on Thursday, followed by weekend announcer Bryan Finch. Kent breaks the news to Paloma, Ruthie, and Griffin on Monday, and I pretend I’m hearing it for the first time.
The newsroom is typically a chatty place, but the layoffs have turned us quiet. No one knows how many people are being let go, and we’re all on edge. I’ve never seen the station like this. I don’t like it.
Kent’s deadline looms closer. Whenever I try to catch Dominic, he’s on his way into a sound booth or out to meet a source, a recording gear bag slanted across his body. I’m even more aware now that he’s always, always alone when he leaves work. He doesn’t grab lunch with anyone. No after-work happy hours. Despite the praise his fellow reporters heaped on him, he is a lone wolf, and I’m not sure whether it’s by choice. The station is a slightly older crowd, and I was the youngest for so long that my only choice was to make friends with people who had kids close to my age. Then Ruthie started, and I couldn’t believe I was older than she was.