The Circle

was one of twelve to go to a four-year college, and the only one to go east of Colorado.
     That she went so far, and went into such debt, only to come back and work at the local
     utility, shredded her, and her parents, though outwardly they said she was doing the
     right thing, taking a solid opportunity and getting started in paying down her loans.
    The utility building, 3B-East, was a tragic block of cement with narrow vertical slits
     for windows. Inside, most of the offices were walled with cinderblock, everything
     painted a sickly green. It was like working in a locker room. She’d been the youngest
     person in the building by a decade or so, and even those in their thirties were of
     a different century. They marveled at her computer skills, which were basic and common
     to anyone she knew. But her coworkers at the utility were astounded. They called her
     the
Black Lightning
, some wilted reference to her hair, and told her she had
quite a bright future
at the utility if she played her cards right. In four or five years, they told her,
     she could be head of IT for the whole sub-station! Her exasperation was unbounded.
     She had not gone to college, $234,000 worth of elite liberal arts education, for a
     job like that. But it was work, and she needed the money. Her student loans were voracious
     and demanded monthly feedings, so she took the job and the paycheck and kept her eyes
     open for greener pastures.
    Her immediate supervisor was a man named Kevin, who served as the ostensible technology
     officer at the utility, but who, in a strange twist, happened to know nothing about
     technology. He knewcables, splitters; he should have been operating a ham radio in his basement—not supervising
     Mae. Every day, every month, he wore the same short-sleeved button-down, the same
     rust-colored ties. He was an awful assault on the senses, his breath smelling of ham
     and his mustache furry and wayward, like two small paws emerging, southwest and southeast,
     from his ever-flared nostrils.
    All this would have been fine, his many offenses, but for the fact that he actually
     believed that Mae cared. He believed that Mae, graduate of Carleton, dreamer of rare
     and golden dreams, cared about this job at the gas and electric utility. That she
     would be worried if Kevin considered her performance on any given day subpar. It drove
     her mad.
    The times he would ask her to come in, when he would close his door and sit at the
     corner of his desk—they were excruciating.
Do you know why you’re here?
he would ask, like a highway cop who’d pulled her over. Other times, when he was
     satisfied with whatever work she’d done that day, he did something worse: he
praised
her. He called her his
protégée
. He loved the word. He introduced her to visitors this way, saying, “This is my protégée,
     Mae. She’s pretty sharp, most days”—and here he’d wink at her as if he were a captain
     and she his first mate, the two of them veterans of many raucous adventures and forever
     devoted to each other. “If she doesn’t get in her own way, she has a bright future
     ahead of her here.”
    She couldn’t stand it. Every day of that job, the eighteen months she worked there,
     she wondered if she could really ask Annie for a favor. She’d never been one to ask
     for something like that, to be rescued, to be lifted. It was a kind of neediness,
     pushiness
—nudginess
, her dad called it, something not bred into her. Her parents were quietpeople who did not like to be in anyone’s way, quiet and proud people who took nothing
     from anyone.
    And Mae was the same, but that job bent her into something else, into someone who
     would do anything to leave. It was sickening, all of it. The green cinderblocks. An
     actual water cooler. Actual punch cards. The actual
certificates of merit
when someone had done something deemed special. And the hours! Actually nine to five!
     All of it felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time, and
     made Mae feel that she was not only wasting her life but that this entire company
     was wasting life, wasting human potential and holding back the turning of the globe.
     The cubicle at that place,
her
cubicle, was the distillation of it all. The low walls around her, meant to facilitate
     her complete concentration on the work at hand, were lined with burlap, as if any
     other material might distract her, might allude to more exotic ways of spending her
     days. And so