I laughed because that is what people do in moments like that.
“Charles is better company than you,” I said, then went back to eating my sandwich.
But it did not end there.
It became a running joke.
People would glance over at our table and smirk.
Once, someone placed a fake “reserved” sign on Charles’s chair as a joke.
Someone else asked me, pretending to be concerned, whether I worried about my “career trajectory” when I sat with the janitor every day, as if being near him might somehow rub off and get me transferred to mop duty.
I brushed off every one of those remarks with a laugh.
But laughing something away is not the same as not feeling it, and most evenings I drove home replaying their words, wondering whether I had truly become the office joke.
Charles never appeared to notice, or if he did, he never allowed it to touch him.
