Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn’t play our cards right.)

Sloane liked to tell people that if it weren’t for Sloane’s ripped pencil skirt and Ardie’s emergency sewing kit, they might never have become friends.

Sloane played by the rules of the game. And so she got to stay. She got to keep her seat at the table.

She read in a Post article that it was sleep deprivation not waterboarding that ultimately got Al Qaeda members to talk. The promise of a nap. She understood. She gave up. Her baby had broken her.

Other girls may have been able to handle that brand of twenty-first-century playground cruelty, but her sensitive Abigail? “Eggshell skull syndrome,” her torts professor had called it in law school. The idea that if you struck a person in the head and it broke their skull, it didn’t matter that the same blow wouldn’t have cracked most other people’s skulls. The injured person’s unexpected frailty wasn’t a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them. Abigail had the eggshell skull.

(Because we knew this logic: we were always supposed to be thankful when anyone thought we were pretty.)

It could all be very intimidating. Exhausting. Trying to stuff yourself into a group of friends and give off the appearance that you fit in, when really all you wanted to do was sit and eat chips so that all of your energy didn’t accidentally bleed out your ears.

There was this weird fad between men within the office to see who could complain more about their wife. Oh my effing god, she’s making me go to Disney World with the kids, kill me. I get home from work and she hands me the baby before I can even take my wallet out of my pants. I’ll have to work an extra twenty years to pay for her Birkin bag. That sort of thing. It was like they were pretending they were kidnapped from their native villages and forced to buy twenty-five-thousand-dollar cushion-cuts from Tiffany’s against their will.

Like, who did they think they were convincing and why did they believe the illusion that they’d made shitty life choices was such a badge of honor?

She wanted this. She did. But it wasn’t without discomfort.

Perhaps nosiness was a biological adaptation. Survival of the most informed.

How did we know when behavior was inappropriate? We just did. Any woman over the age of fourteen probably did. Believe it or not, we didn’t want to be offended. We weren’t sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to show up and offend us so that we would have something to do that day. In fact, we made dozens of excuses not to be. We gave the benefit of the doubt. We took a man’s comment about the way our high heels made our calves look as well intentioned.