In Joe Meno’s new novel, set in the last year of the 20th century, art school dropout Odile Neff and amateur sound artist Jack Blevins work deadening office jobs; gush about indie rock, French film, and obscure comic book artists; and gradually start a relationship that doubles as an art movement. They are, in other words, the 20-something doyens of pop culture and their tale of promiscuous roommates, on-again/off-again exes, and awkward sex is punctuated on the page by cute little doodles, black and white photographs (of, say, a topless woman in a Stormtrooper mask), and monologues that could easily pass for Belle & Sebastian lyrics (“It doesn’t pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone”). If the reader doesn’t recognize the territory being mined by the time Jack and Odile begin covering their neighborhood in cryptic graffiti credited “ALPHONSE F.” Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned) equips the book with two alternate titles—Bohemians and Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things—that ought to straighten things out. High on quirk and hipster cred, the novel is light as air, surprisingly unpretentious, and extremely kind to its larky, irony-addled protagonists. Meno is really the heir to Douglas Coupland, who introduced this crowd in 1991’s Generation X. However, Meno’s sympathy for his heroes’ frustrations makes his novel more than merely endearing. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (July)
Office Girl
Narrated by Julia Whelan
Joe MenoUnabridged — 6 hours, 26 minutes
Office Girl
Narrated by Julia Whelan
Joe MenoUnabridged — 6 hours, 26 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
"Office Girl shelves neatly into the anti-establishment, punk-rock canon Meno created with books like his breakthrough, Hairstyles of the Damned."
"Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple. Plot notes: It’s 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it was . . . well, you know. Meno’s alternative titles help give the gist: Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things. Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky element."
"It might be a standard boy-meets-girl tale, if not for the fact that the boy likes to record the sounds of gloves abandoned in snowdrifts, while the girl has a penchant for filling elevators with silver balloons. It’s 1999. Odile has left grad school while Jack’s wife has recently left him; after both stumble into jobs at the same telemarketing firm, they meet, and it isn’t long before he is supporting her attempt to create a whimsical, anti-establishment art movement."
"Wonderful storytelling panache . . . Odile is a brash, moody, likable young woman navigating the obstacles of caddish boyfriends and lousy jobs, embarking on the sort of sentimental journey that literary heroines have been making since Fanny Burney’s Evelina in the 1770s. Tenderhearted Jack is the awkward, quiet sort that the women in Jane Austen’s novels overlook until book’s end. He is obsessed with tape-recording Chicago’s ambient noises so that he can simulate the city in the safety of his bedroom, ‘a single town he has invented made of nothing but sound.’ Mr. Meno excels at capturing the way that budding love can make two people feel brave and freshly alive to their surroundings . . . the story of the relationship has a sweet simplicity."
"Odile and Jack are . . . two characters in search of authentic emotion . . . their pas de deux is . . . dynamic. Meno’s plain style seems appropriate for these characters and their occasions, and the low-key drawings and amateur photographs that punctuate the narrative lend a home-video feel to this story of slacker bohemia, the temp jobs, odd jobs and hand jobs."
"The talented Chicago-based Meno has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999...When things Get Weird as things do when we're young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple. Plot notes: It's 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it was...well, you know. Meno's alternative titles help give the gist: Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things. Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky element."
—Marie Claire
"Odile and Jack are...two characters in search of authentic emotion...their pas de deux is...dynamic. Meno's plain style seems appropriate for these characters and their occasions, and the low-key drawings and amateur photographs that punctuate the narrative lend a home-video feel to this story of slacker bohemia, the temp jobs, odd jobs and hand jobs."
—Chicago Tribune
"Meno's book is an honest look at the isolation of being a creative person in your twenties living in a city...Cody Hudson's hand-drawn illustrations, which relate to the text only laterally, add a charm akin to the small doodles that break up long New Yorker articles. The photos by Todd Baxter add a third level to the package, helping to make Meno's book feel more like an artwork."
—The Daily Beast, "3 Must-Read Offbeat Novels"
"A beguiling and slyly disquieting storyteller, Meno forges surprising connections between deep emotion and edgy absurdity, self-conscious hipness and timeless metaphysics. In this geeky-elegant novel, Meno transforms wintery Chicago into a wondrous crystallization of countless dreams and tragedies, while telling the stories of two derailed young artists, two wounded souls, in cinematic vignettes that range from lushly atmospheric visions to crack-shot volleys of poignant and funny dialogue. With bicycles in the snow emblematic of both precariousness and determination, Meno's charming, melancholy, frank and droll love story wrapped around an art manifesto both celebrates those who question and protest the established order and contemplates the dilemmas that make family, creativity, ambition and love perpetually confounding and essential."
—Kansas City Star
"A wispy, bittersweet (emphasis on the bitter, not the sweet) romance, Office Girl is the story of Odile and Jack, a pair of alienated twentysomething bohemians whose artistic ambitions are being worn away by one soul-killing call-center job after another in Chicago."
—Chicago Sun-Times
"Office Girl is a bittersweet little love story framed by Bill Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial and the turn of the millennium...By letting his characters be emotionally vulnerable, even shallow or trite—which is to say...real—Meno supplies an off-kilter, slightly inappropriate answer to the Hollywood rom-com. Meno is a deft writer. The dialogue in Office Girl is often funny, the pacing quirky, and some of its quick, affecting similes remind me of Lorrie Moore."
—Chicago Reader
"Meno's books have become increasingly liminal and idiosyncratic. In this latest, it feels as if Meno has written the book he's been wanting to write for years, combining all of those classic elements of his previous work: the stop-and-start of youthful inertia, the painful purity of romance, the way childhood informs (i.e. wrecks) us as adults and a direct prose cut into vignettes and montage. He also works with longtime collaborators photographer Todd Baxter and painter Cody Hudson...Gorgeously packaged, it's like a Meno box set 15 years in the making."
—Time Out Chicago
"It might be a standard boy-meets-girl tale, if not for the fact that the boy likes to record the sounds of gloves abandoned in snowdrifts, while the girl has a penchant for filling elevators with silver balloons. It's 1999. Odile has left grad school while Jack's wife has recently left him; after both stumble into jobs at the same telemarketing firm, they meet, and it isn't long before he is supporting her attempt to create a whimsical, anti-establishment art movement."
—Time Out New York
"Office Girl might be Joe Meno's breakthrough novel. Set in 1999, Office Girl tells the story of a pair of young, intelligent drifters who decide to start their own art movement. It's a stripped-down experience of a novel which means Meno's crystalline prose has a chance to shine."
—The Stranger
"Office Girl is a relatively simple love story: You know most of the beats and understand from the beginning how the story needs to end; the pleasure comes from the way Meno hits those beats, how he manages his characters and moments. And some of those moments are really excellent: Jack and Odile's drift toward a first kiss, for instance, or their lovers' conspiracy, mirrored in Cody Hudson's naive drawings. And the heavier ideas that Meno stuffs into the corners around his self-consciously slight characters—like an ongoing struggle with sound and music that's part of the last-act climax—give the book more weight."
—Philadelphia City Paper
"A lithe, winking take on the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl cliche, Meno's newest novel is like Perks of Being a Wallflower for the 20-something set—and just like that iconic novel of creatives-in-crisis, this one is quirky, clever, and full of bitten tongues and youthful dreaming. Add bicycles, fingerless gloves, and one of the most twee art projects we could have ever imagined, and you've got a charming and unpretentious hipster love story destined to be the next cult classic."
—Flavorwire
"Office Girl shelves neatly into the anti-establishment, punk-rock canon Meno created with books like his breakthrough, Hairstyles of the Damned."
—Onion A.V. Club
"Mr. Meno approaches his title character's potentially depressing combination of disadvantageous circumstances and poor choices with sufficient aesthetic distance to find levity amid the angst. And while Office Girl is a quick and easy read, it is not insubstantial."
—New York Journal of Books
"While Office Girl features illustrations by artist Cody Hudson and photographs by Todd Baxter, its real substance lies in the story itself. Set in Chicago right before the new millennium, Meno, a Chicagoan, explores the start of an art movement through the eyes of two twenty-something dreamers in this novel."
—Michigan Avenue Magazine
"Joe Meno's newest novel Office Girl, isn't some end-of-the-Millennium gloomy read. Rather it's an unconventional call to action encapsulating the lives of two 'creative souls' set adrift in urban Chicago at the end of the twentieth century...Don't be fooled by its lack of chapters and intermittent doodles, there are sections that you will likely have to reread before you can truly grasp Jack and Odile's motivations. At times it can even be a bit disheartening, but that is actually what makes Office Girl brilliant. Whether you are 13 or 30, it's the perfect book to pick up when that nagging feeling of unrest captures you over your current condition."
—Revel Rouse Magazine
"I was completely charmed by its boy-meets-quirky girl romance. Office Girl is unabashedly earnest. It's so sweet and sincere...The most important detail is the year: 1999, a moment of uncertainty in the world and the lives of the novel's couple...Today, when it seems that most media is hellbent on constantly reflecting on and reinventing our childhood and adolescence, it's refreshing to read a novel that can be nostalgic without being ironic."
—Grantland
"Office Girl is packed with whimsy and soft terror. It's emotionally affective and its scenes are sometimes too familiar, as if you have once been here yourself, in this same office, in that same bedroom, on that same street. It's the tale of a weeklong romance that cuts to the heart. At times you remember it like it was your own. Both Jack and Odile suffer from their own inability to translate their thoughts into words, and they possess a certain innocent, curious sexuality. There's nothing graphic here, but the feelings are laid bare. And, as if in a dream, you can watch those feelings winding themselves through Jack and Odile's increasingly complex layers of consciousness...It's a specific book about general rite of passage; an investigation of that strange, dream-like transition between youth and adulthood, where everything seems possible and terrifying and wonderful all at once. Meno does good here."
—Anobium
"Joe Meno's Office Girl draws the awkward love story of two twenty-somethings with grace and empathy in this exceptional novel."
—Largehearted Boy
"Wistful, heartbreaking, and melancholy, a sneakily tight manuscript that gets better and better the farther you read."
—Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
"With a format reminiscent of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Office Girl lets the reader develop his own ideas about each of the two characters...There is a spark. There is momentum."
—The Wichita Eagle
"The book is a love story but one with a different twist on your typical boy-meets-girl, then boy-loses-girl story...Office Girl by Joe Meno has an indie feel...Meno captures perfectly the fleeting thoughts of fancy of young people...Set in the whimsical, uncertain time of young adult life when you don't know what you are doing yet...What happens next is just like love...unpredictable. Joe Meno has done a remarkable job of capturing an age old story, in a brand new way. This is a bright read."
—California Literary Review
"The writing in this novel is crisp and clever. It's art that's at times beautiful without getting in the way of the story. Chicago becomes a character in the novel the way it does in the works of Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow, but it's Chicago that is between Algren's gritty streets and Bellow's upscale avenues...It's the kind of book that makes you blow off what you're supposed to be doing so you can keep reading."
—Razorcake
"Young love. Bicycles. Art school. Joe Meno's hipster romance about a couple going against the grain bubbles with funny dialogue and the charm of a French new wave movie (chalk it up to the whole defiant-youth-run-wild thing). Black-and-white illustrations by artist Cody Hudson and photos by up-and-comer Todd Baxter set the mood."
—DailyCandy
"Fresh and sharply observed, Office Girl is a love story on bicycles, capturing the beauty of individual moments and the magic hidden in everyday objects and people. Joe Meno will make you stop and notice the world. And he will make you wonder."
—Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
"I'm terrible, I bail on most books. Recent ones that delighted me the whole way through were...Office Girl by Joe Meno."
—Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, in the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" feature
Meno's 2004 novel, Hairstyles of the Damned, retains a loyal cult following, but that won't happen with this Y2K-set book. If this is a send-up of romantic comedies, then Meno isn't doing enough subverting. He still intimately knows his milieu: young, disaffected white couples wrestling with work, love, and the uncaring urban landscape. The protagonists here are art school dropout Odile, who huffs Wite-Out at her many office jobs, and mopey graphic designer Jack, whose wife has just left him for Berlin. They begin an affair and a micro-art movement. Sort of. "Jack puts his hands on her breasts from behind, and she does not say anything or move his hands away, and almost by accident he murmurs, I love you,' and she says, 'What?' and he says, 'Nothing. I just had to sneeze.'" Photographs by Todd Baxter and drawings by Cody Hudson are interspersed with mixed success. VERDICT Meno's descriptions of snow and Chicago's landscape can be lovely, even moving, but there's a problem when these passages are more compelling than the human characters and the plot.—Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL
A brief clacking of typewriter keys introduces narrator Julia Whelan’s dynamic performance of OFFICE GIRL. Wielding a wide array of perky, monotone, sluggish, and animated voices, Whelan brings out the multifaceted personalities of quirky 20-something Odile and Jack as they struggle through meaningless jobs and relationships. Odile manages life’s mundane moments by defacing signage on busses; Jack records audio snippets of life on an old-fashioned tape recorder. Whelan’s impeccable timing, pacing, and command of the different characters make for a beguiling listening experience. Whelan emphasizes the ordinary and unique qualities of the characters and accentuates the freshness of this quixotic and unconventional story. M.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Sometimes things just don't work out, no matter how hard we wish they would. But there's irony, so we have that going for us. Right? The talented Chicago-based Meno (The Great Perhaps, 2009, etc.) has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999. The titular protagonist is Odile, the arty, brazen and fearless 23-year-old who loves graffiti, the Velvet Underground's "After Hours," riding her bicycle around the city, and the married guy she can't have. She's also chronically unemployable, generous to a fault and susceptible to dumb mistakes like offering a sexual favor to a co-worker who can't keep his mouth shut, forcing Odile to quit and go take a crap job in customer service. Jack is a few years older and a spiraling tragedy of his own making. An art school graduate with no creative traction, he's devastated by his abrupt divorce from Elise, to whom he was married less than a year. To fill his soul, Jack records things, and Meno turns these fleeting sounds into mini-portraits. "Everything is white and soft and dazzling," he writes. "And Jack, in front of his apartment building, can't help but stop and record as much of it as he can. Because it's a marvel, an explosion, a cyclone of white and silver flakes." The encounter between these two creative iconoclasts is less courting and more epiphany, as they discover the amazing and transformative effects of love with a joy as naïve as that of children. Their story can be artificially cute, with secret messages scrawled on city walls and dirty magazines awash with surrealistic Polaroid snapshots. But when things Get Weird as things do when we're young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying the lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940175731799 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ODILE
ANYWAY IT'S SNOWING.
But then there is the absolute bullshit of it! The amazing gall of some people! Who does he even think he is? Odile Neff, art-school dropout, age twenty-three, rides her green bicycle along the snowy streets of the city that evening at five p.m., arguing with herself. She is wearing one gray sock and one black sock and her faint-pink underwear, hidden beneath her long gray skirt, is dirty. It is January 1999, one year before the world as everyone knows it is about to end. Communism, like God, is already dead.
Having just finished an eight-hour shift conducting telephone surveys for an international research company — How many members in your family? What sort of hair spray do you use? How often do you use your hair spray? Have you noticed any dermatological irritations, including but not limited to eczema, carbuncles, warts, or various skin cancers, in connection with the frequent use of your hair spray? Has your hair spray ever interfered with the quality of your life? — she is now riding home and swearing to herself about something she is having a difficult time understanding, and about the person who has become the cause of all her grief. Her green hood is up, completely covering her small white ears, green scarf bound around her chin, the hem of her gray skirt blowing as she pedals along. It's only the second week of January but the winter has already become a verifiable pain in the neck. She wears her pink mittens which have become unknotted, the pale pink penumbras of her fingernails peeking out. And with these mittens she holds the cold plastic of the bicycle's handles, cursing to herself again and again.
"Asshole!" she shouts out loud. "Why won't you talk to me? Why not just talk to me and be honest about everything?"
She never thought she would be so stupid, and yet, here she is. Her fancy pearlescent shoes, bought for twelve bucks at the thrift store, keep slipping off the pedals, making her even more frustrated. The gray sky, the waxy unending weather, the caliginous buildings rising up in humorless planes of speckled silver glass, all of it makes her feel so small, so tiny. The snow continues its liberated march in considerable flakes, falling all around in achromatic sheets of bleary chalk. Also, there is his gray sock, Paul's gray sock, sitting in the left pocket of her parka, which she has been carrying around for the last few days.
Why am I so stupid? she asks herself again. Why do I keep wanting to be with him?
Her face is an abject expression of disgust, mouth twisted to the side in a frown, narrow eyebrows raised.
Is it just because I'm not supposed to? Is it just because he's married? Is it just because I thought I had the world by the balls and I always end up making a mess of everything?
Her green bicycle, unable to answer, only vibrates with rage.
AT A STOPLIGHT.
Odile pauses a block later at a stoplight which has become obscured by ice. She looks over and sees a bus idling beside the curb. On the side of the bus is an advertisement for some men's hair dye that promises to be SO FEROCIOUS! Odile grabs the silver paint marker from the pocket of her green coat and uncaps the pen and leans over and draws a pair of enormous silver breasts on the male model in the advertisement and then adds a pair of hairy, dangling, unkempt testicles between his legs. Beneath this pictogram she writes, You are an idiot, Paul. She then caps the pen, shoves it back into her pocket, and rides off through the uninterrupted snow.
A NOSE UNLIKE HER MOTHER'S.
Odile, pronounced O-deel, has dark hair, which runs just past her shoulders, a wide forehead, which is framed by uneven bangs she cut herself, and a pair of gray-blue eyes that are set several inches apart in a soft, heart- shaped face. The size of her eyes, larger than most girls', lends a quality of constant amazement to all of her facial expressions. Her ears are attached to her head at a spot lower than average, and are also a little wider, suggesting an elfish affectation, though this is hardly noticeable, as it's her large, gleaming eyes that draw you in. Her nose is neither long nor snub and is rounded in appearance, as it often is on the faces of girls of European descent. Her nose is unlike her mother's, who at first glance may appear to be the greater beauty, as there is a small bump along the left side of the bridge of Odile's nose, imperceptible to anyone who has not spent an afternoon lying in bed beside her, listening to the song she loves the most, "After Hours" by the Velvet Underground, or admiring her profile in the dark of a theater, ignoring the black-and-white film by John Cassavetes. This very small bump is the consequence of an ice-skating accident that occurred when Odile was six, and, on deeper inspection, only adds to her attractiveness. It allows the viewer to wonder what other worlds, what other small pleasures, there are to discover. Like the small beehive tattoo on her left wrist, which is so faint it's almost invisible: What does it mean? How old was she when she got it? Will she tell about it you if you sleep together? You look at it and then up at her open mouth, at the sensitive lips, the lips rounder and somehow more adventurous than you noticed at first glance, the mouth already smiling, already laughing at something you said or did.
At the moment, atop her bicycle, her mouth is partially occluded by a green scarf, though it's moving as she continues arguing with herself out loud. She curses at a cab driver and swerves past a woman with an incredibly wrinkly face, dressed in a gray fur coat. The woman's arms are piled high with packages, each of them tied nicely with a white string bow. Your face looks just like an elephant's, she wants to say but means it in the nicest possible way. And look out: there's another drift.
BUT TEN YEARS BEFORE.
At the age of twelve, two weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Odile was molested by a group of boys who were several years older. It was after ice-skating practice one afternoon: Odile was waiting outside the rec center for her mother to come pick her up in the plain beige station wagon when five young men, boys from the nearby public school, found her sitting on the snowcovered merry-go-round and then began to taunt her. One of them had a ski mask on, another a red scarf around his face. She ignored them at first but when the boy with the mask leaned over and said something dirty, like, "Do you want to take a bite of my dick?" she stood, trying to run back inside the rec center. After a few steps through the snow they chased her over to the bottom of the cold metal slide, and then they took turns holding her down while each of them put their hands all over her, one of them, a boy with a dark peach-fuzz mustache, going so far as to get her black tights down to her knees. Another boy, who had a face like a mussel, all droopy and white and silvered- over with sweat, was the one peering over her when Odile realized it was she who was screaming. And then, somehow, she got her left hand free and grabbed ahold of his right ear and pulled as hard as she could. The boy shouted and rolled off and then one of the other boys hit Odile in the side of the head with a clod of snow and then she just laid there like she had died. The fact that she hadn't died was, in fact, an awful kind of disappointment. She watched through a swollen eye as the boys all walked off. And then she got up a few minutes later and stumbled over to where her bag was lying, unfamiliar as an amputated limb, and then, holding her sore ear, her sore cheek, she limped to find her mother parked out in front, humming along to Sonny and Cher on the radio. Odile told no one about the incident and instead decided that if such a situation should happen ever again, she would force her attackers to kill her first. Having survived such a particularly violent and thoughtless assault, Odile found she was no longer afraid of anything.
AT THE CORNER OF DAMEN AND AUGUSTA.
On her bicycle, Odile stops at another red light and adds a pair of boobs to a poster advertising some moronic new hip-hop release. The rapper, DJ RAW, with his sunglasses and grill of gold teeth, now has a gratuitous pair of silver saddlebag tits hanging from his chest. And then she adds a diamond over his face. And then sketches a silver dunce cap on his head. This is all she's been doing lately, drawing on street posters or other advertisements, because she hasn't made anything good, anything really interesting of her own, in weeks. Lately all she's been making are these weird, lewd doodles which she can't even call art. She places the cap over the paint marker and then glances over at a blue newspaper dispenser which features a headline having to do with the president getting impeached. The idea of being impeached for getting a bj makes Odile crazy. Maybe in the next millennium people won't be so worked up about screwing. Maybe after the comet that is coming to wipe out the world on New Year's Eve has already annihilated everything, and people have become wax-faced mutants, maybe then everyone won't be so uptight about sex. Maybe. And thinking of this, she adds a hairy vagina to the poster DJ's lap. Yikes, it looks like a black insect. And she does all of this before the light turns green.
BUT THEN THERE IS HER YOUNGER BROTHER.
And she rides up to the shadow of her apartment building and locks her bicycle to the iron gate out front. She climbs the wet carpeted stairs and hopes her kid brother will be gone, but when she unlocks the door, she sees him still lying there on the couch, still wrapped up in his green sleeping bag, his dark brown bangs hanging in his too-skinny face. He doesn't look right anymore. He looks a little disturbed, a little too serious for a boy who's only seventeen.
"What are you still doing here, dipshit?" she asks. "You said you were leaving this morning."
"I know, but then an episode of CHiPs came on, and I couldn't make myself go."
"You need to leave, Ike. You can't stay here. Mom and Dad are already going absolutely nuts. They called last night. They're really super-pissed. At both of us. But mostly me. You said you were going to the bus station this morning before I left."
"I know," he says, nodding his head. "But I don't want to go back alone."
"You only have one year left. When you're done, then you can come live here."
"But I hate it. I hate Minneapolis. I hate my friends. I hate having to live with Mom and Dad all by myself."
"Why? They don't ever fight. They're the greatest parents in the world."
"That's what I mean. They're always trying to get me to watch TV with them. They asked if I wanted to go to a movie with them a few weeks ago. It's too much. They just won't leave me alone. They're way too supportive. It practically borders on abuse."
"Okay, come on," she says, standing before him. "Pack your bags. We're going to the bus station right now."
"Really?"
"Really."
And he nods and sits up and begins to fold his green sleeping bag.
And then they are walking back into the snow, Odile unlocking her bicycle, pushing it beside them, advancing step by step through the ever- increasing drifts, her brother, six years younger, though already taller than her by several inches, shuffling alongside her, their frames, the shape of their shoulders identical, their hair color exactly the same, their mannerisms mostly different, though in their expressions there is a similar aloof candor, the same sense of amusement at most things. And it's snowing around them and all of a sudden Odile remembers what it was like to be a kid, and to have played in the snow with her little brother, and for no other reason she turns and shoves Ike into a pile of it. And then she hops onto her bike and tries to pedal off. And so begins the now-famous chase sequence that ends only at the turnstiles of the Blue Line station on Damen Avenue.
AT THE GREYHOUND BUS STATION.
And on together riding the Blue Line subway to the Greyhound station downtown, and then afterward, Odile sits beside her younger brother in the hard vinyl chairs, ruffling his shaggy, dark hair. She looks at him and is surprised again at how skinny his face is. She kicks her legs back and forth, glancing up at the institutional-looking clock every so often.
"How long is the bus ride again?" she asks.
"About ten hours."
"That's a long time."
"I don't care. I have a book," he says.
"What's the book?"
"It's some fantasy series I'm rereading."
"So have you thought about what you're going to tell Mom and Dad?"
"No, I'll just say what you said."
"What was that?"
"That I had a freak-out. And that high school isn't the way they remember it. And I didn't want to take that Spanish test."
"That's good," she says, smiling. "You know, if you ever get into any real kind of trouble, you can always count on me."
"I know. That's why I came."
"But you're not in any real trouble."
"I know," he says. "But I missed you."
And then Odile smiles, the dimple appearing on her left cheek.
"I was hoping maybe you'd come back with me," he continues. "It's not as fun there anymore. I don't have anyone but Mom and Dad."
"I have a life here, kiddo," she says. "This is where I live."
"I know, but what's so great about this place? It's pretty dingy- looking."
"I don't know."
"Is it the buildings?" he asks.
"No."
"Is it the people?"
"No."
"Are you in love with someone here?"
And she shakes her head and knows her cheeks are glowing red. "How about this?" she asks. "You can come visit any time you like. As long as you call me beforehand."
"Okay. Okay. Sorry about getting you in trouble with Mom and Dad. I'll call next time and tell you I'm coming."
"Great," she says, and then the static-filled announcement blares over the wires and Odile stands, helping her brother with his backpack and sleeping bag. And he hugs her and begins walking away, his gait slow but more confident than you might guess.
"You're gonna be all right!" she shouts, folding her hands together like a megaphone. "Better than all right. I see big things for you, kid. Big things!" and he shakes his head and gets a little red too, and he waves to her and walks away. And then she begins to think maybe he is right. What's so great about this city? What's so great about Chicago? On the ride home, her bicycle rattling beneath her, she thinks, Nothing. And if she had climbed on that bus with her brother, would anyone have noticed? Probably not. Because Jeannie called from New York only yesterday and told her she had a place where Odile could crash, at least for a few months. And because Odile's lease is up at the end of February, she's thinking maybe she should go. Because if not now, when? And as she rides she hums a song from the band Half Japanese, considering all these different possibilities. And so.
MEN WHO HAVE ACUMULATED AROUND HER.
1. Reginald, her former English teacher, who chaperoned the Literature Club when Odile was in high school, and who was responsible for her Franny and Zooey phase. Even five years later, few days pass that Reginald doesn't stare at the blossomfaced female students in his English class, wishing they were more like Odile, punishing them with surprise quiz after surprise quiz because they are not.
2. A boy who she held hands with at the mall just outside Minneapolis when she was seventeen. This young man, Max, still walks by the video arcade every few weeks, and sighs, thinking of the afternoon they spent playing game after game of Miss Pac-Man.
3. Brandon, the first adult relationship she ever had, during her freshman year in art school, and who was the first boy she ever cheated on. A red flame of sadness still crosses his face whenever he thinks of her.
4. Will, an art student pursuing photography, who once talked Odile into doing some racy Polaroids. There are seven of them. These seven Polaroids are still kept at the top of Will's sock drawer. He will sometimes flip through them to masturbate, but also, sometimes, simply to see the daring look of abandon, the recklessness glowing pink there on her face.
5. Paul, who is not an ex or even a boyfriend, but who is someone she is afraid she has fallen in love with.
BACK AT HER APARTMENT.
And so she lugs her bicycle up the stairs and begins to frown even wider as soon as she sees a pair of men's tennis shoes lying at the front door. Because there are her roommate Isobel's orange high heels left in an awkward pattern beside them. And there is some bad music coming from inside. And Odile opens the apartment door and finds Isobel and her boyfriend Edward making another stupid art movie. Edward is in film school. And Isobel just so happens to be an exhibitionist, and she has hung dozens of near-nude black-and-white photos of herself all around the apartment. At the moment, Edward is dressed like Darth Vader, wearing a black plastic mask, and also a pair of white underpants. That is all. Isobel is in her underwear too, which is an alluring shade of pale green. She is topless and is wearing a Storm Trooper helmet. Together they sit on the couch, tickling each other and laughing. Edward is trying to hold the video camera up while wearing the awkward-looking black mask. "I'm going to fuck you using the Force. I am. I'm going to do it." This is their idea of art, of becoming famous. Odile coughs once, closing the front door behind her. The couple turns and regards her in absolute silence. Odile nods at them and then carries her bicycle inside, feeling embarrassed for everyone present. As soon as she closes her bedroom door, Isobel and Edward immediately begin laughing. Darth Vader begins breathing heavily once again.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Office Girl"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Joe Meno.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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