It was normal.
The way she’d felt exhausted all the time for the past few years, as if she’d just pulled an all-nighter. The way her heart pounded violently and tears spilled over when she closed her eyes late at night, and how she couldn’t get them to stop, even though she was desperately sleepy. The way she felt as if the tracks were drawing her down to them when she stood on the platform at the train station.
The fact that she’d applied to over a hundred companies, but the only one that had given her an unofficial offer had been the one with no one manning its booth at the job fair. The fact that ten other people had been hired at the same time she was, but before she knew it, only two of them were left. The way she kept catching herself gazing at Hello Work’s help wanted site and free job placement magazines.
All of that was normal.
When she went online, she saw scores of stories about companies that were worse. Even if hers didn’t have paid leave or overtime pay and didn’t give raises, she always found plenty of reasons to tough it out a little longer.
And so she’d done her best, like any normal person.
She’d been earnest and well-behaved, and she’d avoided making enemies.
She didn’t help anyone or compliment them, but she wasn’t malicious to anyone, either; she didn’t hurt or trample on them.
She’d lived her life as a good person, a normal person.
But her social media feed was brimming with the “normal” lives of friends she’d fallen out of touch with. Girls-only get-togethers at hotels, house parties, couples’ anniversaries, “I got married,” “We’ve had a baby”… She’d always silently clicked Like when she saw that sort of “normal,” but lately, her finger wouldn’t move.
It was right around then when…
“You know, I don’t think Ms. _____ is quite normal.”
She overheard a woman talking about her with their supervisor.
The woman had come to the office as a temp worker. “I’m satisfied with just a little work,” she always said. She passed out souvenirs from the overseas trips she took every year, and she complained that her parents—who lived a thirty-minute drive away—spoiled her child too much. On her days off, she and her husband went shopping together. Once a week, she took a flower-arranging class for fun.
That was her “normal.”
“People like her live in a different world, don’t they? I can tell she isn’t a bad person, but frankly, I’m not comfortable around her. She scares me a little… I mean, clearly, she can’t help but be jealous of me. I know it’s not nice to say this, but I really don’t know what she’s living for. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, she isn’t succeeding, she has no time off or qualifications, no guarantees for the future—she really has nothing. That can’t be normal.”
And so…
At their New Year’s Eve party, when the woman said, “I feel sick. I think I’m going to throw up,” and went to lie down and fell asleep, she’d quietly slipped the folded-up coat out from under her head and put it down by her feet instead.
And when the woman had thrown up in her sleep, choked on it, and suffocated before anyone noticed…
…the fact that she’d thought, It serves her right was probably normal.