I'm Not That Importantnt
by Sarah Prescott

Chapter One — Joey Was a Dreamer

Joey was a dreamer in the least cinematic sense—excel sheets and earnings calls, polite nods in glass rooms, a man who could explain a balance sheet. Kind, more than fair. Unlucky, more than tragic. People looked at him and saw a statistic. His friends knew better. They knew he had a way of seeing order where other people only saw noise.

On Tuesday at 09:41 he noticed it: the intraday line had grown a shoulder. By 10:03 it had a second. At 10:16, after a downgrade that he had argued against but signed anyway, the price line drew a cold, clean triangle in his mind. Not a triangle, a mountain. Not a mountain, the mountain. The Matterhorn flickered there on his screen like it had a right to be in an equity note. Elevation: ~4478 m.

He leaned back, surprised by the small joy of the recognition. Imagine my surprise, he thought, that a graph could be a postcard. That a day in the market could look like a day above the tree line. Little did you know, he told the line with a private smile, that you were a summit the entire time.

He remembered the first time a picture hid inside numbers. The cheap newsprint of a connect‑the‑dots book at a dentist office. He had cheated—of course he had. You can see the whale even before you connect 41 to 42. ‘You win some, you lose some,’ his mother had said when he ran out of time and the hygienist called him in. He had traced the invisible anyway, drawing the curve in his head, finishing the picture that was already there.

Someone asked if he was going to the meeting. He was. He wasn’t. He hovered in that place where decisions pretend to be urgent. The line on his screen kept climbing the Hörnli ridge of his imagination.

The room’s air felt recycled, the kind that makes thinking feel like chewing dry bread. Joey closed the laptop. He took the graph with him anyway—the way you take a tune after the song ends. In the hallway mirror he looked exceptionally boring and he liked that about himself: the cover that keeps the story safe.

As the elevator descended, a memory rose: a child’s hand pressing too hard with a dull pencil, the page tearing at dot forty‑two, the impatience to see the whale completed. He smiled. ‘It made sense at the time,’ he said to no one, which was true of almost everything he had ever done.

Ridge, he thought. Ratings ridge. The word handed itself over like a baton. Ridge to ridge.  Somewhere else, at the exact moment Joey’s line had morphed, Julie was walking along a ridge that didn’t care about earnings or guidance.