ESFPPersonality Type: The Mood Lifter

Bianca recorded her fourth voice note of the morning while brushing her teeth, which did not help anyone understand it. The cafe staff chat was called "Team Espresso," and today's subject was Saturday's farewell for Luisa, the pastry cook, who was moving abroad. So far Bianca had contributed a photo of a banner, a clip of a dancing cat, the idea of everyone wearing one of Luisa's terrible bandanas, and a forty-second recording that was mostly her laughing at her own bandana idea.

The chat loved it. She scrolled back up to enjoy the whole thing and that was when she saw the gap. Noor, the new dishwasher, had read every message and written none. Bianca pictured her at the sink on Tuesday, smiling at jokes half a second late, still learning who was who.

Further up, almost buried, sat a message from the manager, Henrik: "Separate topic. I need two people for the stock count on the 30th. Also who is taking over the ordering sheet from Luisa?" Bianca's eyes slid across it the way they slid across bank letters. The 30th was a long way off. The ordering sheet was columns. She'd answer later, when later came.

Noor, though, was now. Bianca opened a private chat and typed: "Hey! You're coming Saturday, yes? We need you. Also important question, can you bake?" Then: "I can make baklava. My mother's recipe. Is that okay?" Bianca actually clapped. "That is SO okay. Tell the group, they'll scream." A minute later Noor's first message appeared in Team Espresso, and Bianca was the first of nine people to answer it.

At work that afternoon Henrik stopped her by the grinder. "Stock count. Ordering sheet. You read it?" Her face went warm. "I did. I was going to." He waited. She thought about the columns, and about Luisa leaving, and that someone had to. "Put me down for the count," she said. "And show me the sheet tomorrow. Slowly."

The couch was the reason. At six that evening Bianca's upstairs neighbor had knocked to ask if she could hold a door for a minute, and the minute had turned into two hours of steering a three-seater down a stairwell. It had been a great evening. It was now 9:50, and her presentation for the event management course, ten slides on "planning a festival for two thousand visitors," was due to be delivered at nine the next morning. She had a title slide. It said "Festival!!"

She sat down at the desk and the silence of the room pressed on her at once. Forty minutes produced a bullet list and a headache. She was not stupid about this material; she had worked two real festivals, she knew where queues formed and why you never put the toilets beside the food. But alone with a blank slide all of it went flat.

So she called Jelena from the course. "Are you done?" "Hours ago." "Good. Stay on video and let me talk at you. You don't have to listen. Just be a face." Jelena, eating cereal, agreed. And once there was a face, it came. Bianca walked around the room describing the gate, the lost-child tent, the year a generator died and she'd kept a crowd happy with a singalong, typing each part as she said it. "Your budget slide is empty," she pointed out around midnight. Bianca groaned, found last year's handout, and filled in the numbers.

Jelena went to bed at 12:30. Bianca kept going and at 1:15 ran the whole talk out loud for the cat, who sat on the printer and blinked. Nine minutes, forty seconds. Too long by forty. She cut the singalong story, missed it, and put half of it back.

Setting two alarms, she told the cat, "Next time I start on the weekend." The cat had heard this before. Bianca texted Jelena a row of hearts and "I owe you breakfast," and meant the breakfast.

"Excuse me, is breakfast still on?" The woman at the desk had a toddler on her hip and a stroller wedged in the revolving door behind her. Bianca had been an employee of the hotel for fifty minutes. She did not know when breakfast ended. A stuck stroller she understood, so she came around the desk, freed the wheel, and called across the lobby to the waiter. "Samuel! Breakfast, how long?" Twenty more minutes.

Her supervisor, Mr. Lindqvist, watched this from the office doorway. He had given her a binder that morning, sixty pages, and suggested she read the first three sections before touching anything. The binder was open on the counter at page two. Bianca had tried. But the lobby kept happening: a man who couldn't find the elevator, a courier, a couple arguing softly over a map. Each one pulled her up from the page like a hand on her sleeve.

By noon she knew the names of both housekeepers on the second floor, and that the couple with the map were on their anniversary. That last fact she passed to the kitchen, which sent up a plate of almond cake. Then a guest in a hurry asked for a second key card, and she cheerfully made him one, and Mr. Lindqvist appeared at her elbow.

"Did you check his identification against the booking?" She had not. It was on page nine. He explained, without raising his voice, why a hotel never hands out a key because someone asked nicely, and the flatness of his tone went through her harder than shouting would have. Her eyes stung. For a moment she wanted to be anywhere else, funny somewhere else.

She nodded instead. On her break she took the binder to the staff room and read pages three through fifteen with a sandwich. When she came back she copied the key card steps onto a sticky note, stuck it below the counter's edge, and looked up smiling as the revolving door turned.

Bianca arrived at Ingrid's door with a box of cardamom buns, and a speech she planned not to need. She had canceled on Ingrid three times in a month. The last time was Thursday, an hour before the film, because a coworker's birthday had run long. Ingrid's reply had been one word: "Okay."

"Peace offering!" she sang as the door opened. "And I found the funniest video, wait till you see, there's a goose." Ingrid took the box, set it on the hall shelf without opening it, and said, "Can we actually talk about it?" "Totally. Yes. After the goose?" "Bianca."

The room tightened. Bianca felt it in her stomach, the specific dread of someone she loved being unhappy with her and intending to say so in full sentences. Every instinct said to make Ingrid laugh, because a laughing Ingrid was an Ingrid who wasn't angry, and then it would be over. "I'm a disaster, I know, you should trade me in." Ingrid did not laugh. "I don't want a joke. I sat in that lobby with two tickets. It's the third time, and each time somebody else was more fun than me."

That landed badly, because it was wrong and she could see exactly how it looked right. "That's not it," she said, and her voice wobbled. "I say yes to whoever's in front of me. Then it's seven o'clock and I'm in two places." She sat down on the hallway floor, coat still on. "I hate that you sat there. I've been sick about it since Thursday and I brought buns so I wouldn't have to say so."

Ingrid slid down the opposite wall until they were facing each other. For a while nobody was funny. Then Ingrid said, "Next time, tell the birthday you have plans." "I'll put you in my phone with an alarm." "Two alarms." Bianca wiped her eyes with her sleeve and reached up for the box. "They're cardamom," she said. "Don't let them get cold."

The planning dinner was Bianca's idea, and so was the pot of mussels in the middle of the table and the sheet of paper taped to the wall headed "LAKE WEEKEND" in three colors of marker. Six of them were renting a cabin in two weeks. By the time the bread was gone she had covered the essentials. A playlist, four hours long. A swimming race with a ridiculous trophy she had already bought. Sleeping arrangements, worked out around the known fact that Gustav snored and Mei woke at five.

"Saturday night we cook outside, everyone makes one thing, and whoever makes the worst thing washes up," she said, writing it on the wall. People were laughing, adding ideas, arguing about the trophy. She could feel the weekend already, the cold shock of the water.

She noticed Amara because Amara wasn't arguing. Twice the cost of the cabin had come up and twice Amara had looked at her plate. Between jobs since March. Bianca waited until they were both carrying bowls to the kitchen and said, low, "I messed up the split, I counted five instead of six, so I've covered a share already. Don't send me anything." It was not true, and Amara may have known it. She squeezed Bianca's wrist and went back in with the salad.

It was Mei who asked. "How are we getting there?" Bianca's marker stopped. "There's a bus. I saw it." "At what time? Because the cabin is eleven kilometers from the stop." "Last bus Friday is 4:10 in the afternoon. Three of us work until six." Bianca looked at her beautiful wall, on which the word "transport" did not appear, and felt the heat climb her neck.

"Right," she said. "Okay. I planned the fun and forgot the getting there." She uncapped the green marker and held it out across the mussels. "Mei, you're in charge of roads. I'll bribe whoever has a car. Gustav, your cousin has that van, doesn't he?"

Nothing until Monday. Bianca said it out loud on Friday night, to the plant. Her week had been all double shifts and other people's requests, and a weekend without a single entry in it looked like a clean tablecloth.

She enjoyed it for about ninety minutes on Saturday morning. Coffee on the balcony, a magazine. Then the flat got loud with quiet. She heard the fridge. A page turning sounded like an event. At 10:15 she was in the stairwell in her slippers, knocking on the door across the landing to ask old Mr. Baptiste whether he had eggs, though she had eggs. He had eggs and also opinions on pancakes. By eleven her kitchen held Mr. Baptiste, the two students from the third floor, and a boy of about seven from downstairs who had followed the smell, and Bianca was at the stove taking orders. One with cheese, for the boy, who would not be argued out of it.

That carried her through the afternoon. Someone suggested the park, somebody else brought a frisbee, and she came home at dusk happily worn out.

Sunday was harder, because everyone had gone back to their own lives. Rain. On the hallway table lay an envelope from her landlord that had been there since Wednesday, and each time she passed it she found a reason to be in a different room. It was probably nothing. A meter reading. But she could feel her mood sliding toward a grey place she didn't like, where the envelope meant bad news and the bad news meant something about her whole life. She put music on, loud. It only half worked.

At four she picked up the phone and called her sister. "Stay on the line while I open a letter," she said. "Don't ask." Paper tearing. It was the meter reading. She laughed harder than it deserved, and said, "What are you doing tonight? I'll come to you. I'm bringing leftover batter."