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services, helping with casting, things like that. I didn’t know if that role had a real name, or if it even existed in Hollywood, but an NYU alum who also happened to be an Emmy-nom-9781525805981_TS_BG_txt.indd 57
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inated set designer got me a gig working as a super low-level
assistant to an assistant at a big studio in Hollywood. Cou-
ple the minimum wage pay with the cheap sublet I found on
Craigslist, and the twenty-two-year-old me was all-in on the
whole Los Angeles experience. I just needed to pack my bags
and officially switch my wardrobe over to something that
could be described as less “big city” and more “boho chic.” I
had no idea that a month after my move, I’d end up meeting
the man who would become my husband while on the job.
The studio I was working at was filming a reality show
about plastic surgery. I wasn’t as good at social media as I am now, but I found some guy on Instagram named Brian Jackson who was an intern at a surgeon’s office. He geotagged
the clinic in all of his posts and hashtagged every upload with
#ABoobJobIsTheBestJob. I DM’d Brian to ask if he’d want to
be part of the segment and a week later, Decker was the guy
who gave his good-looking boob-guy friend a ride to the
studio for the taping. That left Decker and me alone to talk
in the greenroom.
While chatting, I learned that Decker was a teacher, off
for the summer, and had plans to drive up to Tahoe with his
buddy right after the shoot. I don’t know what it was, but we
just clicked. Instantly. So we exchanged numbers and texted
his whole way up. When the flirting reached a critical mass,
he decided to come back solo a day early and take me out for
sushi. And the rest, as they say, was history.
Considering how worried my mom got at the thought of a
busy weekend, I decide now is not the time to slip into con-
versation the arrival of Decker’s urn. So I hurry to end the
conversation and cap it with a promise that I will call her after work one night this week.
“Sounds good. You know what? I’m going to ship you
matzo. You can make some matzo ball soup. I don’t want you
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getting sick. That’d really put a damper on your dating life,
wouldn’t it?”
She wants grandchildren. I get it.
An intern whizzes by me with an aromatic barbacoa burrito
bowl. She plops down at the desk across from mine—Moni-
ca’s. I guess while she’s out on her honeymoon, a girl named
Marigold is guarding her inbox. Marigold’s proximity to me
is, at best, a necessary annoyance considering I have zero in
common with the girl whose “fun fact” at our last team meet-
ing was that she’s distant cousins with Justin Bieber and gets
mistaken for a young Uma Thurman “at least once a week.”
Regardless, her fresh meal triggers a battle of scents. In one
corner, there’s the smell of heavily seasoned meat and cilan-
tro. My mouth wants to water. My stomach wants to growl.
I haven’t eaten yet today and a flavorful lunch, a free one at
that, should sound good. But in the other corner, all I can smell is the sterile odor of a hospital room clinging to my nostrils
as if my nose hairs were dipped in patina.
“You’re staring, Charlotte. Want some before I dump half
a bottle of hot sauce on it?” Marigold asks.
I’m staring because that’s the last meal I was supposed to eat with my husband, you dipshit.
“No thanks,” I say. “I’m good.”
“I read in Cosmo that Sriracha speeds up your metabolism.
So you can pretty much eat whatever you want, as long as you
drench it in this first,” she explains as she proceeds to douse her burrito bowl in the reddish-orange sauce.
I put my headphones on and scoot my chair closer to my
computer screen to mask the serious eye roll I’m directing to-
ward Marigold. Antisocial as it may seem to block her out of
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Emily Belden
ested in conversing with a girl who has little-to-no life ex-
perience and a pumpkin-spiced latte tattooed on her ankle.
As I look to my right, I notice that the rest of the intern pod resembles a United Airlines call center on the busiest travel
day of the year. I know there’s no shortage of Botox in LA,
so how everyone’s faces look so scrunched and frantic right
now is beyond me.
I peel my headphones off and get Marigold’s attention by
tapping the back of her computer monitor with a pen. As
much as I can’t stand engaging with her, I’d like to know—
“Why are the rest of the interns on the phone right now?”
She puts her hand over her mouth and holds up the “one
second” finger as she finishes chewing. There is a single shred of lettuce, half-covered in her purple lipstick, hanging from
her mouth.
“Voyager just emailed Zareen. Three of their top execs are
going to be in town this week and want to do an impromptu
dinner before they catch their red-eye out of LAX. She’s got
us trying to secure dinner resos at BOA. If we get in, it’s going to be a total schmooze-fest with these guys. Wining and dining at its finest.” Marigold stuffs another spoonful of saucy rice and beans in her mouth, pushing the lipstick-covered shred of
lettuce back in her mouth. I wonder how much makeup she
eats in a given year.
I don’t know enough about the difficulty of securing last-
minute reservations at hot new Los Angeles restaurants, but I
do know whoever scores this reservation is getting a job and a signing bonus. There hasn’t been a Zareen-issued, seemingly impossible task these interns haven’t been able to tick
off their lists so far this summer, and my money is on the girl who currently has the receiver up to one ear and a finger
plugging the other closed, as if she’s receiving very specific
hostage instructions.
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Voyager is the fastest-growing organic athletic shoe company
in North America. It makes sense they’d want to team up with
a firm in Southern California—the land of vegans and yogis—
to make their all-natural shoes much cooler than I’m managing
to describe them. And because Voyager initiated tomorrow’s
meeting, I’m assuming the likelihood they’ll hire us is set to
skyrocket. If I were to guess, they’re going to sign a contract in the twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the dinner. By my
count, the biggest deal of my tenure at TIF is totally happening and I should probably tell Zareen what my statistics are showing.
“No, no, no. 9:30 p.m. is way too late,” says Zareen. Keep trying for something earlier. Get creative if you have to. Pull out all the stops. Make something up. Where’s Marigold?
Can’t she tell them it’s for Justin Bieber? Do something, okay?”
Zareen, who’s hovering over an intern’s desk with her fire
-
engine-red readers resting on the bridge of her nose, normally
doesn’t talk to our trendy-named interns—Marigold, Scot-
land, Bentley, etc.—like this, nor does she encourage anyone
here to “make something up,” but I’ve worked with her long
enough to know she’s just edgy about Voyager.
“Can we chat?” I say softly, saving the intern from the wrath
of a stressed-out boss.
“Follow me to my office, please.” She swoops her short
salt-and-pepper hair to the side. She’s certainly rocking a The Devil Wears Prada look today.
She stomps the heels of her Christian Louboutin pumps into
the hardwood floor all the way back to her desk, and I ques-
tion whether our distressed wood floors came like this, or if
they were hammered over time by Zareen’s four-inch heels.
She sits down, takes off her glasses, and mumbles under her
breath as she checks her iPhone.
“Yoo-hoo,” I say, knocking my knuckle on her door to re-
mind her of my existence.
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“Charlotte, dear. Come in, come in,” she responds rather
warmly given the tense situation. I may not be the cutest,
spunkiest, most well-dressed employee, but as I take a seat in
the purple velvet chair across from her sprawling black wal-
nut desk, I’m reminded how satisfying it feels to be on this
woman’s good side—and that’s a quality very few people who
work here possess.
“So… Voyager?” I say with a hint of excitement in my
voice.
“Yes. Voyager. The execs are in town for a running confer-
ence and want to do an early working dinner before they get
on their flight home tomorrow,” she says. “So, we’re going
to pitch how great The Influencer Firm is one final time and
we’re going to do that over a few plates of tender filet mignon and expensive bottles of wine.”
“Are you sure these people even eat meat? None of their
shoes are made of real leather, you know. That’s their shtick.”
“I thought about that, but I had Scotland comb through
their personal Instagram accounts. All of them posted photos
of barbecuing beef burgers over Memorial Day. Go figure.
I think we’ll be good giving them a little reprieve from the
monotony of the vegan day-to-day.”
I give her a nod, she’s got a point.
“Anyhow, I predict that with full bellies, and with a little
wine buzz, the Voyager crew will go on to sign the contract
after the check drops. Which, by the way, we will pick up with
our American Express Black Card so they know our com-
pany has some serious capital behind it. What do you think?”
“I think it sounds like a grand slam,” I say, making a men-
tal note that my boss has referred to wine buzz as a legitimate business-closing tactic. “Who’s all going since Monica’s on
her honeymoon?”
“Funny you ask. I begged and pleaded with Monica to come
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back. She thankfully obliged when I mentioned the words
‘Christmas Bonus,’ so I’m paying for her to fly home ASAP
on a red-eye. When the meeting is over, she can go back to
Turks and Caicos and rejoin Danny for the rest of the week.
She and I will take the lead on the dinner,” Zareen confirms.
I can’t believe Monica has to interrupt her honeymoon for
this surprise dinner, but she is exactly who needs to be on
the guest list if Zareen really wants to clinch the business. I nod my head in approval and agreement. They’ll land this,
no problem.
“Oh, and you,” she says with a pointed delay.
“Excuse me?”
“There’s probably a 50 percent chance we’re going to get
this account,” she says.
“I think it’s closer to 90 percent, actually,” I quickly inter-
ject my calculation.
“Well then, 40 more percent of a reason you need to be
there. You see, a big part of if they sign with us is going to
come down to what we can show them insofar as reporting
and analytics. They’ve stressed that from the very beginning.
And that is all you, girlfriend. That’s your wheelhouse and
no one else’s.”
Her words reassure me my job is secure even with all the
minions proving their worth by Insta-Stalking our potential
clients’ holiday barbecues. But still, I don’t want to be at the dinner if I don’t have to. I’m not a schmooze-fest kind of girl and, even though work is a welcome distraction, it doesn’t
change the fact that there’s something in my apartment that
kind of needs some serious attention.
“Why don’t you just tell them whatever they want, I can
do?” I suggest it flippantly, but I mean it. I’ve yet to encounter a script I couldn’t run, a problem I couldn’t solve, a code I 9781525805981_TS_BG_txt.indd 63
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couldn’t crack. True, I may have come to Los Angeles to work
in show business, but I’m a Numbers Queen now.
Zareen gets up from behind her desk, walks over to me,
and puts her hands on my shoulders from behind. Her per-
fectly manicured fingernails tap me like she’s fanning piano
keys. A B C D, A B C D.
“Telling them that some faceless, nameless employee can
do ‘whatever they want’ is not enough. I need you to walk
them through how you do what you do. I need that Charlotte
Rosen razzle-dazzle.”
That’s a thing?
“You want me to explain my whole reporting strategy to
them? They aren’t going to understand if I get that granular,”
I say, trying to pass the buck.
She steamrolls on: “So show them; don’t tell them. This
isn’t about explaining the nuts and bolts, Charlotte. I just want them to see firsthand what the woman behind the data looks
like. I want them to know we don’t just use a third-party soft-
ware, we don’t just outsource it to a foreign country. No, we
have our very own Bethenny Frankel of the influencer space
sitting right here in our office!” She taps the top of her cus-
tom-built desk twice with her pointer finger and her dangly
jewelry clanks together like percussion.
The Bethenny Frankel of the influencer space? I’m not so
sure that’s the best way to describe what I do, but I’m happy
to take it as the compliment I think she means it to be.
Zareen resumes circling around me like a shark. Follow-
ing her with my eyes as she moves side to side makes my ver-
tigo flare up.
“I have no doubt that you’re going to help us bring home
this business,” she says, giving my shoulders another squeeze
to drive home the point. “And when they sign, you know
what that means.”
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She’s hinting at opening a New York City office, a second
headquarters located near
Voyager’s offices so we can slowly
but surely take over the East Coast inf luencer world. She
probably thinks I’m open to relocating since that’s where I’m
from; I could be closer to my family. But being closer to my
family means I couldn’t hack it in LA after all. It means that
room they’ve been preserving might actually be needed. Be-
sides, is there a professional way to tell your boss that if you didn’t choose to go home after your husband she never knew
existed died, then what other motivating factor—personal,
professional, or otherwise—could there be for a cross-coun-
try move at this point?
“Or I guess I could also have our Marigold come to the
dinner in your place if you can’t make it. This may be a good
opportunity for her to show me exactly what she has in mind
come the fall when I’m ready to staff up.”
“Marigold is interested in account management,” I an-
nounce as if I’ve ever talked to the girl longer than thirty
seconds.
“Is she? Because I heard she’s taken a liking to analyzing
your reports in her spare time. Even tried her hand at mak-
ing an influencer list for a small event last week. Wasn’t half-bad, actually.”
This is news to me. And whether there’s any truth to this
or Zareen is just trying to ruffle my feathers, the thought of
someone else encroaching on my safe place is enough to make me concede. Knowing how much our office resembles a Real
World house right now (“seven interns, picked to work in an office for the summer”), I can’t risk Zareen thinking I’m not
a team player. If something goes wrong at the dinner tomor-
row, Zareen will need me to step in and save it.
“Fine. Just know I’m ordering a side of ketchup with my
steak though.”
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* * *
In the ladies’ room, I hear a gaggle of high-pitched girls, the
interns, enter, and I quickly activate the sensor on the flusher so they know they are not alone.
I wait until I hear all of the other stalls lock shut before I va-cate mine. I even debate not washing my hands so I can scurry
out of the restroom and back to my desk to avoid any and all
possible contact with these plebes. But research suggests I’m
35 percent more likely to catch a common cold from a public
restroom if I don’t at least run my hands under hot water for