We were three drinks past a reasonable decision-making window considering I don’t ever drink, sitting close enough to the fire that one of us was likely going to end up with a scorched ass, when she finally said the thing she’d been circling for an hour.

“Maybe I’m the problem.”

I set my bottle down slower than I needed to, which is my tell for oh, we’re doing this now. “Say that again with your actual chest.”

“I’m serious. Maybe if I just — went along with it. Kept my head down. Made it easier.”

“Made what easier. Their bureaucratic fire truckery? You want to make that easier for them?”

“I want it to stop.”

“It’s not going to stop because you get smaller. That’s not how any of this works, and you know it’s not, because you’ve watched it not work before.” “You have watched someone shrink herself down to nothing trying to keep a room calm. Did it work?”

She didn’t answer, which was the answer.

“There are two moves people make when a room gets scared,” I said, because apparently I was giving a lecture now, at eleven at night, half in the bag, to my best friend, in front of a fire neither of us had tended in twenty minutes. “You go small, or you go loud. That’s it. Those are the options on the menu. The small ones think if they take up less space, nobody will come for them. And the loud ones — the ones drowning everybody in memos and rubrics and documentation — they’re not powerful. They’re just louder about the exact same fear. Same terror, different volume.”

“That’s very tidy of you.”

“I’m a tidy drunk. Shut up and let me finish.” Damnit lost my point, nope there it is. “The point is — the ones who need it all written down, who need the paper trail, who can’t just talk to you like a person — that’s not strength. That’s someone who cannot survive being wrong out loud and can’t stand not being liked, which really means feared. So they build a filing cabinet instead of having a conversation. It’s genuinely pathetic when you look at it straight on.”

“It doesn’t feel pathetic from where I’m sitting.”

“No. It feels exhausting. Those are different things.” I let that sit, because it was, annoyingly, the actually important sentence in the whole rant. “You’re not tired because you’re bad at your job. You’re tired because you’re the one cleaning up their mess and the only one in the room who won’t play either game, and that makes you a bloody inconvenience to everyone who is.”

She laughed, but it had a crack in it. “An inconvenience. Great. Put it on my headstone.”

“I mean it as a compliment, you absolute disaster.” I reached over and took her drink out of her hand before she could hide behind it. “Look. We both know what happens to the woman who won’t shrink and won’t play tyrant. Every story about it. She doesn’t get the tidy ending. She gets burned, one way or another, by people who cannot stand a competent ‘no.’ That’s the actual cost. I’m not going to sit here and pretend it isn’t.”

“Comforting.”

“I’m not finished. God, have some patience.” I handed her back her drink, badly, some of it hissing into the coals, and did not care even slightly. “Here’s the thing they leave off the motivational posters. A woman who refuses to go small — even if the room chews her up for it — cracks something open for everybody watching. Somebody else in that room learns it’s possible to stand up straight and not immediately die. That matters. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole bloody point.”

“So what, I’m supposed to martyr myself for group morale?”

“No, you giant idiot. I’m saying stop shrinking because you think it protects you. It doesn’t. It never has. It just means you pay the cost later, quietly in the dark when you can’t sleep, in installments, instead of paying it now where at least you get to keep your spine.” I clinked my bottle against hers hard enough that it was a threat as much as a toast. “You are fantastic at what you do. Actually fantastic, not ‘fantastic considering the circumstances.’ None of this — the memos, the meetings, the people who need a rubric to feel like they exist — none of it touches that. It isn’t even in the same category as that.”

She was quiet, turning the glass in her hand, firelight goi.
“I don’t want to be a martyr,” she said finally. “I just want to stop feeling insane for noticing what’s obviously happening.”

“You’re not insane. You’re standing near people who need you to be, so they don’t have to look at themselves.” I shrugged. “That’s not a you problem. That’s a them problem wearing a very expensive lanyard.”
That got the real laugh out of her, the one that isn’t performing anything.
We sat there a while. The fire did its thing. Somewhere in the middle distance, the whole disaster kept right on being a disaster, and would still be one in the morning, and might come for either of us before the week was out.

“They could take all of it,” she said. Not dramatic. Just true.

“They could.”

“Tomorrow, even.”

“Tomorrow, even.” I pushed a log with my boot, badly, sending up sparks. “And they’d still have to do it to a woman who never once got smaller to make it convenient for them. Let them write that down.”

She raised her glass. “Fire truck it.”

“Fire truck it,” I said, and we drank like queens the night before the sacking — not because we thought it would fix anything, but because we’d decided, somewhere between the second and third drink, that we were going out standing at full height or not at all.