I’ve avoided thinking about that day for the past year, tried to block it out and ignore it. “It was… it was really challenging,” I say with my eyes still closed, her fingers still on my skin. “I’d always been at the top of my class, and I’d never really… struggled. Not like that.”

I inhale slowly through my nose and the cold stings my sinuses. In the distance, there is a peal of laughter, followed by a shout of mock anguish. I close my eyes. “I was working all the time, putting in extra hours to try to catch up. My anxiety was terrible—I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat, and I knew I was disappointing the people who’d hired me. Then, three months in… there was a budget issue.”

That was why my supervisor pulled me into his office. “I’m afraid our quarterly earnings fell short of our projections, so we can only keep on two of the three new animators we hired at the end of last year.”

The shame that gathered on my skin, rolling up and down my limbs in hot waves. Shame like terror, like a sound you hear in the night, half-asleep, when you wake up in a confused panic.

“I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.”

My supervisor kept talking after that, but I couldn’t hear the rest. There was a deep, pulsating thud in my ears, and all I could do was stare at the naked tree branches outside the window, unblinking. Because if I blinked, I would cry. I was sitting in a chair, hearing what I always suspected deep down.

I was just like my parents. Not good enough. A failure. A fuck-up.

“So, you weren’t fired at all,” Jack says after I’ve told her everything. “You were laid off.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “They’d hired three new animators, all fresh out of grad school, and I was the one who couldn’t keep up. I was the one they chose to let go.”

Jack doesn’t say anything, doesn’t argue with me about my interpretation of events. When I open my eyes, she’s sitting in the snow beside me, looking at me the way Jack looks, like she can see through everything, to all the holes I still keep hidden on the inside. “I’d had this whole ten-year plan—this goal I’d been working toward my whole life—and it just collapsed in an instant.”

I’d failed, and the worst part was, everyone would know. Those professors who’d praised me, and the peers who’d been impressed when I’d landed such a coveted position at Laika right out of grad school. My parents, who’d never believed in my dreams or noticed my talent. Guidance counselors who told me I would never be able to support myself as an artist. Meredith. Everyone.