THERE WERE MANY PLACES in which Jenny Adler could envision meeting the man of her dreams. At a dinner party with mutual friends. Or she'd find him at the art museum, wandering through the galleries and thoughtfully admiring the paintings. At her friend Celie's coffee shop—maybe he sat next to her by chance and they struck up a conversation. Perhaps someday off in the future, if she could ever get a God-forsaken master's degree, she'd travel the world presenting her groundbreaking research and just so happen to stumble into a handsome man in the Italian Riviera. Or maybe she'd just meet him on the L. She wasn't picky.

Yes, there were many places in which Jenny Adler could envision meeting the man of her dreams.

But St. Catherine's Catholic School was not one of those places.

What it did happen to be was home to the new job that she was about to be late to if she didn't stop messing with her hair and get out the door. She grabbed her satchel from where it had been haphazardly flung onto the floor in the chaos of her fluttering around to get ready. It wasn't like her to carelessly throw her belongings around like that, but the bundle of nerves planted in her stomach made today an exception. Although she was a bit nervous about the work itself – there were a lot of moving parts that she was going to have to get adjusted to – the primary source of her anxiety was the inevitability of seeing her. But she was simply going to have to get used to this sensation. Her new boss wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

The bag was heavy when she picked it up, stuffed to the brim with an absurd number of objects that she either wouldn't need or wouldn't have time for – extra blue and black pens, scissors, a roll of tape, pads and tampons, a thin sweater, this month's issue of Technology News in case things got slow in the afternoon and she had a moment to spare – yet felt compelled to pack.

A vacuum of cold air ushered her outside the moment she opened the door. Yesterday's snow, muddied with footprints and various other substances that she didn't want to think about, crunched under her feet as her feet carried her swiftly down the sidewalk and scenes of quotidian life played out around her. The figures of the streets, unnamed faces that rhythmically performed their given roles, moved along through the confusing labyrinth of life on these roads so neatly organized that they could have been placed there by an algorithm.

All the usual cues made their appearances. The honking of a taxi, of two, of three, of many. The faded Bill Clinton for President posters plastered on a telephone pole. A group of boisterous men in long coats on the street corner, loudly conversing with one another while pretending to read the newspapers in their hands. The flick of a cigarette sent ash falling to the ground like a fresh layer of snow. One gentleman twirled his between his fingers, making circular smoke trails in the air while he shared a deeply philosophical thought with his comrades – something silly his girlfriend said the other day. The vapors of their exhalations were nearly opaque in the sub-freezing air, man playing the role of God by breathing white clouds into existence. The putrid smell of tobacco filled Jen's nostrils as she waited for the crosswalk signal to change. She wrinkled her nose and resisted the urge to cough conspicuously.

In many ways, today was no different than any other day. St. Catherine's was on the edge of the approximately ten-block radius in which she spent at least ninety percent of her time, this tiny microcosm that contained her entire existence. The only notable exceptions were when she went to visit her parents, but she preferred it this way. She enjoyed walking and biking and not having to deal with the questionable people a woman would inevitably encounter on public transit.

Fortunately, she didn't have to worry about getting lost this morning. In addition to the fact that the school was connected to the church and therefore rather hard to miss, she had already come by on Saturday to get oriented. Jude, the school librarian who also happened to be her friend Celie's older brother, showed her most of the ropes. They apparently didn't have the budget for two secretaries, so he oftentimes got dragged into administrative duties, too. The vice-principal, a man named Elliot Wood who was nice enough but had a personality even blander than the communion crackers, had also shown up to meet her and get her acquainted with whatever aspects of the role Jude wasn't familiar with.

The only one absent had been Nora, which Jen was perfectly content with. It was hardly like they needed to introduce themselves.

She was dreading their unavoidable encounter today but reminded herself that she did this voluntarily, that no one besides herself forced her to leave her last job or take this one. She made her own bed and now she had to lie in it, but surely she could put up with her for these few months.

The spire of the church towered over the rest of the block as Jen approached the opposite end of the building, the less grandiose attachment that was the high school. She'd been told that it was only added on about ten years ago, but it blended in with the old church rather seamlessly.

Despite the fact that she had been going to mass her whole life, it felt a bit odd to go into a Catholic school. It was so different from what she'd ever known—her parents could never afford for her to attend private school and one couldn't exactly come by many of those in the tiny town of Woods Crossing, Illinois regardless. Her school-age years had been spent in poorly-funded public schools where everyone knew everyone because they'd all grown up together.

She quickly kicked the snow off her boots by the front door before stepping inside and shutting the cold out. The students weren't here yet, but Jude was waiting at the front desk for her. The sight of a familiar, friendly face was enough to make her smile despite the fact that she'd been expecting him.

"I hope I didn't keep you waiting too long," she said as she took off her scarf and came over to shoo him out of her seat.

"You didn't." He grabbed a book off the desk and held it up with one hand despite it looking rather heavy. Bright, bold letters on the front cover read Wagner's Introduction to Art History. "I forgot to give this to you on Saturday, but Celie said you might want it?"

Jen brightened. The subject had been sitting in the back of her mind ever since college, but she'd never gotten a chance to explore it. "I did, thanks."

"Don't worry about it." He returned the book to its spot as she settled into her chair. "One of us will come check in with you during the day and Elliot left you a checklist, but you can call if you need anything."

She nodded as her eyes scanned down the list of tasks that had been scrawled onto a small slip of white paper. "Thank you. I really appreciate the help with getting me settled in."

Jude shrugged the comment off. Jen wasn't surprised—she knew him well enough to know that he didn't take compliments easily. His head of bright red hair immediately drew all eyes to him the moment he stepped into a room yet he ironically didn't like to be the focus of attention. He was humble, a little more soft-spoken than his sister. And he, like everyone else, was completely oblivious to the fact that Jen wanted to ask Nora for help as little as possible.

Her eyes returned to the checklist as he disappeared down the hallway. Everything seemed straightforward enough, though that might have had more to do with the fact that she inevitably achieved greater success at anything when it was presented to her in a logical structure than with the nature of the tasks themselves.

There was a certain degree of unpredictability to it that would hopefully prevent her duties from becoming too monotonous. A decent portion of her time would be dedicated to answering the phone and trying to fulfill whatever requests the parents had that particular day – looking at teacher's schedules to coordinate parent-teacher conferences, making note of which kids were being picked up early to go to doctor's appointments, things of that sort. The other main component, the unchanging piece of the puzzle, was looking at all the teachers' attendance logs as they were dropped off to her after every couple of classes to see if there were any tardies or absences that she hadn't been informed of in advance. At the end of the day, once the students were going home or off to their after-school extracurriculars, she'd still be there at the desk to make calls to all of the parents whose children had unexcused absences.

It wasn't exactly the job she expected to end up in with a computer science degree, but it was a job, and it would at least hopefully be an upgrade from the last one. Even Nora would be a better boss to deal with than a man who planted misogynistic ideologies in all of his employee's psyches.

The first half of the day went by without a hitch. A few teachers came by to personally hand her their attendance logs, but she quickly learned that the vast majority of them sent a student to do it for them. She didn't mind that—while the adults were keen to hang around for a minute to chat and introduce themselves, she also sensed that they were silently comparing her to her predecessor. It was an inevitable and not necessarily negative occurrence but made her feel under pressure regardless. The teenagers, on the other hand, were much more interested in simply dropping the papers off and scampering off to their next class before they were late. Only a couple of students had early dismissals and Jude was able to answer the one question she had, so no instances popped up in which she had to get Elliot or Nora involved.

Of course, the moment in which she got overly confident and started to believe that she already had this job down was when trouble came calling. After her lunch break, Jen grabbed a stack of papers off her desk and headed off to make copies only to realize that what she recalled being a copier room was actually a janitor's closet.

She tried to discreetly glance around the empty corridor, but there were only classrooms in sight. How had she already forgotten? Jude showed her around on Saturday. She let out a tiny, frustrated sigh. She should have been proactive and asked for some sort of map in case she lost her bearings, but the school didn't feel big enough to get lost in until she did just that.

There wasn't time to keep wandering around the halls aimlessly, but she knew for certain that Jude was with a class right now. That meant that the remaining option was to get directions from Elliot or Nora, but she hated the thought of making herself look ditzy by asking for help over such a trivial thing when everything had been going so smoothly thus far.

But for the first and probably last time in her life, luck came to her in the form of a man.

She spotted someone, a teacher who must have had his planning period right now, turn into the hallway and start walking in the opposite direction from her. She made the split-second decision that she'd rather look incompetent in front of her colleague than her superiors and sped up to catch up with him.

"Excuse me," Jen called to the dark-haired man.

He stopped to turn around and look at her. She awkwardly hurried over to him, her clunky shoes echoing off the hard floors, and came to a halt a few feet away from him.

They were opposite ends of the same magnet, him and her. He was slightly disheveled, with the sleeves of his button-down rolled up to his elbows and carrying a thick stack of papers in which none of the pages quite lined up with one another, but he clearly worked here and knew what he was doing. She, on the other hand, looked prim and proper on the outside with her neatly ironed clothes and her hair painstakingly smoothed back into its ponytail and yet was completely clueless.

"Hi, I'm sorry to bother you-" She faltered for only a second while her eyes darted to a name at the top of the papers "-Mr. Caruso, but I'm the new secretary filling in for Adelaide while she's on maternity leave and I seem to have...misplaced the copier room."

He struggled to keep a small smile off his lips. "You misplaced the copier room?" he repeated.

He had a pleasant voice, speaking with some sort of slight accent that she couldn't pick up on. It certainly wasn't Midwestern.

She felt herself start to blush. "...Yes."

"Well, fortunately for you-" He used the same strategy as she did, his eyes flickering to the small metal name tag she forgot she was wearing. "-Jennifer, I happen to be heading there right now."

Her heart unexpectedly tightened at the sound of her own name. "Oh, you can just call me Jen or Jenny," she said quietly as they started walking.

"Sorry," he apologized smoothly but decided to tread carefully on the tightrope of curiosity. "Do you not like Jennifer?"

She shrugged. "It's what my parents call me."

It used to be that she was always Jen or Jenny to them, but now she was only Jennifer.

She didn't let the silence make itself at home. "Would you happen to have a first name or is it just Mr?"

He softly laughed, revealing an endearing smile. "It's Robert."

"What do you teach?"

"History, Italian, and Latin."

"That...seems like a lot for one person," she observed, momentarily thrown off.

Jen knew that appearances could be deceiving, but Robert didn't look much older than she was. She wondered how someone could be educated enough in three different subjects to teach them at such a young age until it clicked with her that he must have been Italian himself. He had an Italian last name and that would explain the accent.

"It can be," he agreed, glancing over at her and still wearing a slightly crooked smile on his lips. Unlike her, he didn't have the stress of a new job to dampen his mood. Or perhaps he was just an optimist. "But at least I'm never bored."

A fair point. "I always wanted to learn Italian."

She wished that she could have studied abroad four years ago like she wanted to, that her whole vision of what her life was going to look like hadn't been catastrophically blown out of the water. She'd never had a particular interest in learning any Latin, but she figured it must have been a helpful subject to have in a Catholic school.

They had reached the copier room. As Robert opened the door, she made a mental note of where they were so that she wouldn't make the mistake of getting lost again. But meeting him didn't feel like a mistake—he seemed to be kind and have a good sense of humor and it would be nice to recognize one more face around here.

He grabbed some extra staples and paperclips off the shelf as she gravitated towards the copier. At least she did remember how to operate the thing.

"Thanks for the help," she piped up once he was already halfway out the door. "It was nice meeting you."

"You, too, Jen."

Everything else proceeded smoothly until the end of the day when school was already over and the winter sun, already starting to lower in the sky, cast golden shadows through the windows. Elliot came to the front desk as she was finishing up the last of her paperwork.

"Good work today, Jen. I think Nora wanted a word with you."

She knew it was coming – it wasn't like she was going to make it through her entire first day without her boss speaking a single word to her – but that it did nothing to stop the bundle of nerves that formed in her core as she got up from her desk. Nora wasn't much older than Jen yet the latter still felt like a small child being sent to the principal's office.

When she came to the door with a plaque that read Principal Ambrose, she briefly stopped to take a deep breath. The sooner you do this, the sooner it's over with, she reminded herself. She knocked.

"Come in," Nora's voice answered.

Jen braced herself and hesitantly opened the door. Nora was unsurprisingly alone, perusing one of the several bookshelves that lined the walls of the large office. As far as Jen could tell, they were stuffed with books on all sorts of topics – education, English, the sciences, law. She had to momentarily avert her gaze to the floor when her eyes landed on a framed picture of Nora with her family and her insides involuntarily convulsed.

She was still waiting for the day when this got any easier.

It did nothing to help the situation that she was immensely jealous of the woman in front of her.

Nora was everything that Jen wanted to be but wasn't – a successful woman in a leadership position whose authority wasn't questioned by her male peers, the beautiful blonde who showed up every day in her immaculate blouses, trousers, and heels with red lipstick to match. Jen wasn't that. She was the pale girl with the pale eyes and the dull hair and the long, chunky, loose-fitting coat that made her look like she was wearing a potato sack. The girl whose career wasn't going anywhere. The girl who was failing.

Perhaps resenting her would have been less painful if she were vain, but she wasn't. She was a nice, hard-working woman. She was everything good and she was a reminder of everything that Jen hated.

Nora slid a book back onto the shelf. "How was your first day?"

"Good," Jen replied simply.

Nora paused, waiting for her to elaborate further. She knew that her hesitance to comply with her boss – or even look her in the eye, for that matter – was making her a bad employee right off the bat. And she needed this job. She needed the money badly enough that she'd been willing to lunge at the first opportunity that presented itself to her even though it was with Nora. Resistance was counterproductive—she could get fired in an instant if it was decided that she wasn't cooperating. Yet it still wasn't enough to help her overcome this primal instinct inside of her to get out of there as fast as she could.

A small frown formed on the blonde's lips as she watched Jen silently standing there as stiff as a wooden board, but it wasn't an angry frown. She tried a different approach. An absolutely terrible one. "How is-"

That feeling like her insides were being twisted inside out returned to Jen's abdomen, only much stronger this time.

"Don't," she interrupted sharply.

There was a long pause. She wasn't even sure what she wanted from the other woman. Her tears had dried up a long time ago. But she still had anger. And suspicion.

Maybe that was what she wanted. To hear her say it.

She lifted her chin slightly to meet Nora's eyes. "Why did you hire me?"

She saw her jaw tighten almost imperceptibly. "I received your resume and you were highly qualified, so I hired you," she said calmly. "That's all."

"That's a high salary for an interim secretary," Jen noted.

They both knew exactly where that money was going.

Nora didn't bend or break under the accusation. She didn't retaliate, either. She considered her words carefully, well aware of the fact that talking to Jen was like trying to detonate an explosive.

"The compensation seemed appropriate considering your qualifications, but if it makes you uncomfortable I can arrange to have it lowered."

The ball was back on Jen's side of the court, but she didn't know what to do with it. She just stood there in silent frustration, humiliation, not speaking any of her thoughts aloud because both of them already knew the two truths running through her head like the flow of a stream: She was always going to be uncomfortable here. But she always needed the money.

Nora's expression was sympathetic, not the kind of look one would expect from their boss. Jen would never understand how she could be so authoritative and so human at the same time. She'd been taught that you had to be hardwired for one or the other, not both.

"It doesn't have to be like this, Jen," Nora said, her tone much softer than it was a moment before.

She quickly shook her head. "Please, just-" She forced herself to take a breath and then another one. "Nora, I appreciate this job so much. I really do. But I made myself clear about the fact that I'm merely working here for a few months and nothing more, so I need whatever idea you have in your head about us to stop."

Nora nodded lightly as if expecting this answer. "We could have been friends in another life, you know that?"

"In another life," Jen agreed. "But not this one. Now if that's all, I'll have the copies of today's paperwork on your desk first thing in the morning."

She turned around and left. 

____________________

A/N: 

For anyone who doesn't know, the "L" is Chicago's rail system. Parts of it are elevated while others are on the surface or underground.

Ahhh it's finally here! Thoughts? First impressions? How are we feeling about Jen?

This first chapter was meant to raise lots of questions, so I hope I've managed to make you curious for what's to come.