Chapter 6 — Seeing Them at Work

As Molly got older, she started seeing them everywhere and in everyone. It wasn’t quite like people were being controlled, but there was this almost obvious way you start noticing a smell once someone points it out. After that, you can’t pretend it is not there.

“I probably should be doing something more practical,” Jade, the girl from accounting, said.

She laughed like it was a joke, but Molly already knew that Max was in the room. It took some time to pinpoint him, but Alaric never played hard to get like that. He could be seen most clearly. She saw it in her boss.

“Let’s just wrap the content pipeline now,” she had said. “The client will get back to us if need be. We really must move on now. Time’s wasting away.”

No one argued and Molly felt her shoulders tighten up like they had done in every group project and every group discussion. She knew that the client would, in fact, be getting back to them because there was something missing from the scope, but there was zero point in trying to bring it up. Glynnis always knew better.

“You’ve got real potential,” Molly remembered Glynnis saying to her once. “You just need to be more disciplined with getting to work on time. I’d hate to see you go.”

Molly felt Atticus walk into the room long before she had said anything. She had only been late that one time and here this archetype was, bringing rules and future consequences into a conversation that could have stayed simple. She literally could have just asked Molly why she was late that day and it was only five minutes, for goodness’ sake.

At home, Gabriel was the easiest to spot. He came with disappointment and expectations about being good and grateful and sensible. She hadn’t planned to live with her parents this long, but with the housing market the way it was, it wasn’t as if she had much of a choice. She hated that her mother oscillated between thinking that some of her choices were respectable and others were selfish.

“I just want what’s best for you, Molls,” she would say. “I had you by the time I was your age.”

Her dad, on the other hand, brought Max and Alaric together without meaning to. He talked about work like it was unavoidable and spoke about money as if it explained everything. Money was the answer to all her questions. It was the be-all and end-all.

“That’s just how the world is,” he said often. “You can hate capitalism all you like, but you can’t change a system that old and widespread.”

Molly started to hear the sameness in that sentence no matter who said it. Even she was beginning to bring them into conversations without meaning to, but the difference now that she was older was that she could stop mid tumble and feel one of them enter a room. She could choose not to immediately rearrange herself around it. It wasn’t automatic and always, but it was enough to show her that she was capable of doing it.

That was new.