Last night after group, an idea sparked for Sidney, and it soon morphed into a notion. “A notion,” Sidney said to himself, the shower steam fogging the mirror, “is just one step away from a reality.”

He got his breakfast, did his dishes, brushed his teeth, pet the cat, and locked the door behind him. His bald neighbor was in the carport. Sidney avoided eye contact. He pictured himself raising his hand in a wave but never had. In his car, he struggled to swallow. Today, he'd make some progress, darn it. Yes…Today.

The group leader listed strategies to engage with people. The one that struck Sidney as a possibility was to be around people, listen to what they say, and try to say something related. “Try and work in a memorable experience from your life,” the group leader said, “Think of something interesting or amusing that happened to you, and share that with people.”

Sidney pulled into the parking lot of the gray building where he worked, armed with an experience and ready to share. “I will do it,” he said, nodding as he crossed the parking lot.

The cute girl from the front desk smoked near the door as he walked up. “Good morning!” she said, flipping her red hair.

“Hi.” His mouth took that shape and action for the word, but no sound came. He'd prepared for joining an established conversation, but he wasn't ready for this ambush. Sidney quickened his pace to the door and wished he'd stayed in bed.

Wiping the sweat from his brow, he watched his computer boot up. The plant he kept near the entrance of his cubicle needed water. He liked watering it early so no one would see him walking the halls with a cup of water and think him “weird.”

At lunch, he ate his sandwich at a table in the break room instead of wearing headphones at his desk.

“The wife and I are taking the kids to Disneyland in a couple weeks. It's the first time for my youngest,” said the guy with the plastic looking hair, who worked near the restrooms.

“How great! It's not so crowded this time of year. You guys'll have a great time,” said the older woman that sat near the copy room.

“How do these people do it?” thought Sidney. “How could he just assume that anyone would care about his family vacation? Yet, that woman did—or pretended to anyway.” Is this the one to join? He looked both ways and hoped his heart would slow.

Talk filled the room, but Sidney's prepared experience didn't fit. Defeated, he snailed his way back to his cube and pushed numbers around an Excel spreadsheet for an hour.

“Hi Sidney.”

The female voice startled him. He turned his head, feeling his cheeks burst with heat. His lips quivered when he tried to smile. Looking just above her head, a trick he'd used for years to make people think he was looking them in the eye he said, “Hi.”

“Just checking to see how the November numbers were coming along.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

Sidney nodded. Face flushing enough to boil his eyes, he grabbed a tissue from the box near his monitor. He remembered what the group leader said about pausing and saying what needed to be said. “They're almost done.”

“Pardon me?” She took a step toward him and leaned closer.

“Almost…finished…”

“Okay, well could you do me a favor and just e-mail it over to Robert Bacall after you're finished?”

He nodded.

“When can I tell him to expect it?”

He worked his lips against his teeth. “Couple hours?”

“Okay, great. Thanks.” She walked away, and Sidney watched his shaking hands slow and stop.

“She blindsided me,” he thought, “If she had called first, I could have prepared.”

Later in the afternoon, Sidney headed to the break room again, thinking over the story he had ready. He knew every nuance he would use when he told it. At the door of the break room, his nerves got him. “Damn bladder,” he thought and headed for the restroom.

Back at the break room door, Sidney reached for the knob but pulled his hand away. He walked the halls of the building in a circle until he came to the door again. This time, a couple people walked out as he reached it. He looked from one of them to the other, saw them nod, took the door, and walked into the room.

The woman, who decorated her cubicle with cat pictures and statues, stood with her hands on her hips in front of the candy machine. She cocked her head to help her decision. She pressed a number button and a letter button, watched the candy's suicide dive, and grabbed it from the tray before leaving the break room.

Sidney, watching her from a table, pictured her bringing her candy and sitting across from him. There were many empty tables, but his imagination had her seeing him and asking if it would be all right to share his table. Then she'd say something that would be related to his story, and he could share it. It wasn't to be, and the only other people in the break room were the balding guy and the pug-nosed guy, both software engineers.

“The problem seems to be the interaction between the…” Sidney stopped listening. He stared at the tabletop until it blurred.

“Well, I don't know,” Pug-nose said, “We've been testing that in QA, and the results show…”

They talked, one leaning on the sink and the other pacing a little, until their voices sounded like traffic noise to Sidney. His ears pricked up again when he heard Balding Man say, “You know…Sometimes it's just one character that can mess up your whole day.”

Sidney swallowed hard and wiped his palms on his Dockers as he stood. He'd heard his cue. The rehearsed words flooded his mind and on his way across the floor, the dam broke and the story he'd been holding burst free. “I know just what you mean,” he said.

The two programmers looked at him as if he'd just materialized through the overhead heating vent. The group leader said to expect surprise from co-workers, so Sidney didn't allow their startled looks to dissuade him.

“Just the other day,” Sidney said, being sure he established equal eye contact with each of them, “I was out driving. After I get home, sometimes I don't feel like cooking, and this was one of those nights. So I felt like having a Subway sandwich, and there's a Subway not too far from my house, so I thought, ‘Why not?'”

The words clicked off his tongue like well lined up dominoes. The men watched him talk. Pug-nose had his mouth half open and Balding looked attentive.

“So I pull out of my driveway like normal, and I'm driving through the residential area. I'm going about 30, so it's not like I'm totally granny driving.” Sidney laughed here, the way he had rehearsed.

Balding looked at the floor, and then back at Sidney. Pug-nose checked his watch.

“Anyway, so I come to this three-way stop. And if you think of the three-way stop as the letter T, then I'd be coming in on one side of the top line.” Sidney made a T shape with his hands to illustrate, and it came off just the way he envisioned. “So I'm at that stop, and I stop like normal. I mean, I'm at this intersection twice a day, at least. I think by now, I know how to stop at it.”

Balding nodded a little. Pug nose sighed. The break room door opened, and Sidney heard the sounds of the candy machine and then the door opening and closing again.

“So like, if you can picture it, from the bottom of the T comes this little red car. I don't even know what kind it was. Long story short, I started going again after my stop and off I went thinking of turkey on wheat with extra mustard.”

Pug-nose leaned one fist on the counter and toed the floor with his right foot.

“But I haven't even gone ten feet when I hear this car blasting its horn behind me. I mean really blasting it, like HONK, HONK, HONK.” Sidney accompanied this with the motion of pressing his hand against the center of an imaginary steering wheel in front of him. “So I look in the rearview mirror, and here's this scrawny little chick in that red car, blowing her horn, flipping me off. She's driving right on my bumper. Screaming, from the look on her face.”

Sidney paused for a reaction. Balding looked off to a corner of the room, and Pug-nose rubbed his face from forehead to chin. He had them—just like the group leader said he would as soon as he opened up.

“This goes on, which surprised me, cause normally, eventually people stop it right?”

“Yeah…Uhm…” Balding said.

“So even around a couple turns, it's a residential street remember, even around a couple turns, she's still keeping it up. I mean, she kept it up longer than most normal people would. Let me back that up. Most normal people wouldn't have been upset about it in the first place.” Sidney laughed alone. “At the stop light, she rolls down her window and flips me off again, or still I guess, with both hands this time. And she's yelling something at me with her head hanging out the window.”

Sidney tightened one side of his face in confusion, “I've never been one to let things like that get to me, and the thing is, I didn't even think I had cut her off or whatever she thought. I'm still not real clear on what the problem was.”

Pug-nose cleared his throat.

“So I had to do something. I didn't know what at first, but then it came to me as we waited for the light to turn green. ‘Kill ‘em with kindness,' my Aunt Mary used to say, so that's what I did. I put my fingers to my lips and blew that crazy chick a kiss. When the light changed, I turned left, and figured that would be it.”

For a moment, Sidney thought maybe he was bothering Balding and Pug-nose, but then he remembered how the group leader said that people like to share and hear stories. “The human experience has always included story telling. Any insecurity is your own,” she had said, “Own it and don't let it own you. Recognize it as a thought and realize that you control your thoughts, not vice versa.” Sure of himself again, Sidney continued.

“I'd be lying if I didn't tell you my heart was beating a mile a minute. I'm not really one for confrontation. But like I said, I figured it was over, so I pulled into the Save Mart shopping center on Standiford where they have the Subway next to the Jamba Juice. Do you know that one?” Checking to make sure the people you were talking to were with you in the conversation was another of the group leader's recommendation.

After a pause, Balding nodded.

“So, I'm still feeling a little jittery when I get out of the car and walk to the Subway shop. A couple deep breaths, I figure, and I'll be okay. But I couldn't have been more wrong.” Sidney shook his head and folded his arms across his chest. “I swear if someone were telling me this story, I'd think they were lying, but this is how it happened. I'm standing in line there, looking up at the menu and trying to decide if I want to bother with a bag of chips or not.”

Sidney held his hands in front of him. “Man, even thinking about it now kinda gives me the shakes. The door to the Subway flies open and in walks that crazy chick from the red car. In she comes, right, and she gets within 10 steps of me, backs up a couple, then steps one forward again.”

“Eleven,” Pug-nose said.

“Huh?”

“If the point of this is how many steps she ended up from you, the answer is eleven.”

Balding chuckled.

“Oh, I get it,” Sidney said, following the group leader's suggestion that they validate what other people say. “Nice one. Anyway, so there she is, and she's still looking mad. Her breath is quick, and she's shaking. She's patting her chest with one of her hands.”

“‘You mother-effer,' she says, only she says the real word. Then she tells me that I need to learn how to effing drive and calls me a mother-effer one more time.” Sidney watched their faces for the shocked look he knew he had when it happened. Balding had a touch of it. “Can you believe that? Right there in the middle of Subway. She's screaming at me, and she doesn't even know who I am or anything. I mean I could be anyone or anything. Lucky for her, I'm me.”

Pug-nose nodded and stared away.

“But it's not like I just stood there and took it.”

Pug-nose sighed and moved back against the sink's black counter. Balding shifted his weight from leg to leg.

“I mean, I've been a bit of a doormat in the past, and I'm trying to change that. Instead of seeing this as an attack, I saw it as a chance to be assertive. I stepped toward her and said, ‘I don't care how many times you follow me into places. I told you it was over and I meant it. You need to let it go and move on. Find someone new.'”

Balding pressed his eyebrows together and up. Pug-nose scratched the side of his neck.

“Now remember, I don't even know this girl. And she's like, ‘Eff-your mother and Eff-you.' So I tell her ‘just cause no one else can ever give it to you like I did is no reason to feed the fantasy that we're still together.' She says, ‘Learn to Effing drive. You can't Effing-drive.' And I tell her that's not what she told me in bed, but whatever.” Sidney doubled over in laughter.

Pug-nose and Balding exchanged a quick glance.

“The chick gives me the finger a few more times on the way to the door, and then she's gone. But not really gone cause I ended up thinking about her the rest of the night and well into the next day. So like you guys were saying, one character can really mess up your whole day.”

Pug-nose huffed. “We were talking about a character as in computer code.”

Balding and Pug-nose walked from the break room, continuing their talk as if Sidney had never been born.

Sidney rummaged his pockets for candy-machine money. He bought a caramel Twix bar and opened it on the way back to his cubicle. He had the notion now that things would be different if only in a subtle way. And for Sidney, a notion was only one step away from a reality.