The mansion belonged to their founder, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. He had traveled the world as a young man and become aware of the lack of medical care available in developing countries and set up a not-for-profit to teach local organizations how to build sustainable health systems. They operated mostly on grants from places like the Gates Foundation and the World Bank, and also had some wealthy private donors. Georgiana was in the communications department, so her job was to suck up to the aforementioned donors, and to cull photos of their work abroad for their website, edit articles about their projects for the newsletter, and manage their social media accounts. It wasn’t because she was especially interested in social media, but because she was under thirty everyone assumed she would be, and it helped her land the job to casually mention that she had eighteen hundred followers on Instagram. （Who didn’t? All you needed to do was remove your privacy settings and post the occasional picture of your cute friends at a party.）
But this was the main difference between Georgiana and Brady: she was lowly support staff, fangirling the organization’s successes in the field and writing it up in the newsletter, and Brady was at the center of the action. He had been to Afghanistan and Uganda, he was featured in the photos Georgiana pored over, speaking to a group of doctors in a makeshift hospital, kicking a soccer ball with adorable kids in front of a banner with information on vaccines, looking deeply into the eyes of a doctor in India as they reviewed their contraceptive distribution plans. He was the star of the play, and she was painting the sets, simultaneously desperately wishing he would notice her and dreading the moment when he might, sure her cheeks would go aflame.
* * *
—
It was a Friday, and Georgiana was standing at the mailboxes under the stairs sorting envelopes by destination, domestic into one bin and international into another. As she sorted, she double-checked each address to make sure it looked right—she had updated their contacts so that they could do giant mailings without having to enter the addresses individually, but it was still a slightly imperfect system. She was puzzling over an envelope, lost in thought, when a voice startled her.
“You okay?” It was Brady. He leaned past her to retrieve his mail from a box with his name below it.
“Yeah, just trying to figure out if this one is addressed correctly.” Georgiana held the letter out so that he might see it. They were standing so close she could have kissed him if she lurched fast enough. Oh my God, why would I lurch-kiss this person? She briefly hated her own brain.
“It looks fine. What’s the problem?” Brady asked.
“But is it domestic or international? It doesn’t have a country on it,” Georgiana replied, perplexed.
“United Arab Emirates,” Brady read slowly, pointing to the bottom line of the address. Was the envelope shaking? Georgia felt like it was shaking.
“Right, but shouldn’t there be a country under that?” she asked.
“United Arab Emirates is a country.”
“Oh, I just—” Georgiana stopped talking.
“It’s on the Arabian Peninsula by Saudi Arabia and Oman?”
“Yeah.” Georgiana had literally never heard of it in her life.
“Dubai is one of the cities there.”
“Right, with those Palm Tree islands you can see from outer space.” Georgiana nodded her head vigorously. She knew Dubai. “And the shopping malls and sports cars.”
“Yeah. But that’s not the part where we’re trying to provide health care.”
“Right, right, no, no,” Georgiana agreed. Was it possible she had ever sounded like a bigger idiot? She wasn’t sure.
“Anyway, the envelope is good to go.” Brady smiled—or maybe he was laughing?—and gave her a quick nod before he walked off with his mail.
Georgiana tossed the envelope into the international bin and felt her cheek. Blazing.
* * *
—
That night Georgiana went to a birthday party in Williamsburg and woke up Saturday morning with a hangover so intense she could feel it in her teeth. She texted Lena a series of skull emojis and Lena wrote back and told her to come over. Kristin was already there, and they opened up the pullout couch in Lena’s living room so that they could convalesce together horizontally. They ordered grilled cheese and French fries and a side of onion rings from Westville, because though they all claimed to not really like onion rings, they might as well have a few since they were on their deathbeds. They watched rich ladies fight on Bravo, and at three, when Lena’s boyfriend came home from the gym, he laughed at them, lying there like three vodka-soaked degenerates.
Georgiana loved going out, but hangover days with Lena and Kristin were kind of the best. Sometimes they went to movies and fell asleep and missed the whole show, sometimes they decided to sweat it out and went to a barre class and spent the entire hour bitching and moaning and getting dirty looks from the instructors, and sometimes they gave up and went to the diner on Clark and ordered Bloody Marys, saying “hair of the dog, hair of the dog” until they were drunk again and had to go home and nap.
Georgiana, Lena, and Kristin had gone to high school together and had promised to all live in a big apartment when they were grown up. They hadn’t ended up as roommates, but they lived in the same neighborhood, and having three different apartments to hang out in actually made it even better. Lena was an executive assistant for a rich hedge fund guy who loved her so much that he was willing to overpay her in exchange for her promise never to quit. It wasn’t the career Lena had dreamed of when she graduated with a degree in art history, booking flights and making dinner reservations, but she was earning three times what she had been offered at Christie’s, so she stayed. He regularly transferred his mileage points to her account, and at this rate she’d never have to fly coach again, which seemed like a fair price to pay for one’s dreams. Kristin worked for a tech startup and mostly hated it, but she never had to go to the grocery store, eating breakfast and lunch in the work cafeteria and filling a lunchbox with salad and grilled salmon to bring home after work. Since they went out five nights a week, Kristin was always carting her Tupperware bar to bar, and they teased her pitilessly for looking like some weirdo who was going to break out a five-course meal in the middle of Sharlene’s on Flatbush.
As they lay on the pullout with their onion rings, Georgiana told them about the mailbox debacle with Brady. They had spent more time than Georgiana would like to admit talking about her crush, so even though this was the least cool story she had told in a while, she felt it was her obligation to give her friends the update now that something real had happened.
“George, how the fuck did you not know that the UAE is a country?” Lena asked, sitting up and giving her a despairing look.
“Well, I’m not like, a scholar of international boundaries! I majored in Russian literature!” Georgiana defended herself.
“It’s really bad, dude,” Kristin agreed. “But at least he talked to you? I mean, he offered to help you, so that’s a positive.” She was trying to be supportive, but Georgiana hadn’t given them much to work with, she understood. They spent the rest of the afternoon discussing how she might recover her standing with Brady, coming up with conversational gambits that ranged from the boring to the absurd: “Did you know that the poverty line in the UAE is about twenty-two dollars a day?” “I’ve heard falconry is really big in the Emirates.” “Is it true Emirates Airline has the best free pajamas in first class?” Her friends really were useless at this sort of thing, but she liked that they all got to say Brady’s name a lot as they conspired.