Factory Settings

Mary pushes open the restroom door. She feels the cold air hit her face. Her nose prickles from the smell of chlorine coming toward her. She expects emptiness. But Theresa is standing in front of the mirror. She stands there, motionless and perfectly straight. Mary stops in the doorway. Looks. Blinks and clears her throat.

Theresa does not react the way Mary would expect. Her expression slowly changes. Nothing extreme, no theater. Subtle things. A minuscule fraction of a frown. The shadow of a smile. Then back to neutral. As if she is resetting her face to factory settings. “What are you doing?”

Theresa still does not respond.

Her gaze remains fixed on her reflection. Then she calmly turns to the faucet and presses the soap dispenser twice. Not one pump, not three. Two. A little water. Twenty seconds of lathering. No rushing. Like a medical routine. As if she is cleansing her own hands of noise.

“I’m checking my baseline,” she says. Her voice is dry, as if it is perfectly logical for someone to do that. “Your… what?” “Facial setting. Resting posture. What you look like when you’re not thinking anything. When you’re not talking. That’s your baseline. GRACE measures everything you do after that against it.”

Mary walks farther into the room. Her eyes move over Theresa’s posture, the clothes coordinated as perfectly as always. Not conspicuous. Never provocative. Always a skirt these days. A pencil cut falling just past the knee, tights underneath, pumps, blouse tucked in as if she starts her day in an instruction manual. Too correct to be accidental. A kind of precision you only develop when you’re always looking at yourself through someone else’s eyes.

Mary thinks, not for the first time: Why not wear pants for once? Why no jeans, no sneakers, no crooked laces or rolled-up sleeves? What is wrong with nonchalance? As if the system—quietly, without imposing anything—has decided that femininity is only allowed to exist as long as she keeps her knees together.

Theresa rinses her hands and dries them with one sheet of paper. Another calibrated detail. She folds it in half before throwing it into the trash, as if she wants to use it again later. Then she stands in front of the mirror again and adjusts her face.

Mary remains standing beside her. Without a word, she looks into the mirror. And there she sees Theresa, with her perfectly calibrated face. The embodiment of external control. But her own reflection beside it, with the tight, functional ponytail and the wrinkle-free clothes, looked just as clinical. As if she had copied the CMO.

Mary looked at Theresa’s exterior and saw the inner fear she herself had felt. Theresa working on her appearance was Mary working on her own inner transformation, on the purification of her soul. She looked like her, but was she?

She saw the doubt in herself. The messiness of unprocessed emotions. The exhaustion of constantly filtering. But something else too. Pleasure. Very small. Just there in her eyes. Something that glints.

Maybe the memory of a joke or sunlight at the wrong moment. She does not know. She looks at Theresa beside her. Who is still practicing her gaze, as if an assessment that will determine everything is about to follow. Mary makes a silly face at herself in the mirror—eyes wide, tongue halfway out.

She grins.

It loosens something in her chest. Theresa glances sideways, her irritation barely visible. “Seriously?” Mary shrugs. “Sorry. I was curious how I score when I just exist for a moment.” Theresa sighs—not loudly, but audibly. “You’re not playing the game, Mary. You’re not supposed to guess.”

She turns around and leaves the room. The door closes silently behind her.

Mary remains standing. In front of the mirror.