by Andrea Bartz
* * *
—
My own phone buzzed as I reached my front door, and I pulled it out to see a text from Katie: “Left my laptop at your apt. Can you bring it to herd tomorrow?”
Katie was always forgetting her things. Not losing them, per se, because she always got them back—luck followed her like a scent. She texted again: “Sorry I took off so suddenly. xo”
I noticed all at once how cold my nose and fingertips had grown, and I fished for my keys in my purse.
“Hi, Hana!” the doorman called as I passed. “Slow down, you have a package!”
“Great, thanks!” I skidded to a stop at his desk. He’d mumbled when he introduced himself months ago, and I’d said pardon? twice but still couldn’t catch it, and now I can never ask. He has an unfair advantage; every time I pick up a delivery, he gets a glimpse of my name on the address label, the woman in 4C.
I checked Instagram as he fumbled in the package room and saw that Katie had posted a photo from Mocktails: her, Mikki, and Eleanor, holding up drinks topped with flowers and cherries and tiny paper umbrellas. The old insecurity blared on: how perfect they all looked together, how strangers sometimes asked if they were sisters. Katie had grown close with them the very moment I left for the West Coast in 2010, and though that was my call, though I’d encouraged them all to hang out without me, though earlier today Eleanor was considering not letting Katie into the Herd—I felt a pinprick of fear that they would replace me now that she was back.
My phone pulsed in my palm as I rode the elevator. A FaceTime—no video, just audio—from Eleanor. What?
“Hello?” I asked, but the elevator was like a tomb, reducing her voice to staticky clicks. I pawed at the Call Back button as I plodded down the hall.
“Hana?” she said, and I paused in front of my door. Her voice sounded strange—pinched, almost.
“I’m here. What’s up?”
“Can you come to my apartment?”
I froze, my key in midair. “Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Is everything okay?”
The phone line sizzled for two seconds, three. “Just get here.”
Two beeps, and she was gone.
CHAPTER 3
Katie
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 9:36 P.M.
There were three keys on the fob Samantha, my new roommate, had given me—one for the deadbolt, one for the door, and one I kept meaning to ask her about—and this evening, none of them fit. I futzed and fumbled, jabbing at the keyhole like an awkward teen during his first sexual encounter, until finally the door clicked open. Then I froze, the text replaying in my mind, before pushing it open.
I’m at your apartment. I’m not leaving until we talk.
I stepped inside, holding my breath, and then exhaled when I spotted Samantha washing dishes in the sink. Maybe she’d left.
“Hi!” a voice called from the living room. I swung my head and spotted my literary agent on the couch, her fingers wrapped around her phone.
“Hey, Erin,” I said as casually as possible.
I dropped my keys on the counter and fucking Samantha finally looked up from the rushing faucet and grinned. “Katie, your friend’s here!”
“I see that!” I forced a smile and Samantha went back to scrubbing.
Erin started to rise and I crossed to the sofa to hug her. The black muck had settled all over my brain and chest again, this time with a splash of panic. “It’s good to see you, lady,” I said.
“Likewise. I was starting to think you were still in Michigan.”
Something shot through me, an unpleasant geyser. “Erin, I’m really, really sorry I’ve been MIA. I’ve been so crazed with the move—”
“You’re probably wondering how I found you,” she cut in. I opened my mouth, closed it. “Josh mentioned you were subletting from someone in his sister’s year. I asked for the address.” She rubbed at her wrist. “I hope that’s not creepy. I’ve been sitting here for a while thinking about it, and I decided my text was actually pretty creepy.”
“No, it’s—I understand. Should we…?” I looked over my shoulder, where Samantha was washing silverware with the furious concentration of a frat guy playing flip cup. “Let’s maybe talk in my room.” Erin nodded and followed me in; I offered her the small chair in the corner, bordered with boxes, and sat on my crumpled duvet.
She took a deep breath. “Katie, I know this isn’t super professional of me. I’m sorry if I’m overstepping, but…I’m worried about you. I don’t know what the fuck happened in Michigan or why you’re not answering my calls, but we need to talk.”
Hot tears filled my eyes. Since I got back, everyone had been so curious, so interested, so jealous of my fancy book deal and research sabbatical, I’d barely admitted even to myself how broken I felt.
“Katie, talk to me. Nothing good is gonna come from avoiding me. I’ll just keep clinging. Like a…flea.”
I laughed and wiped my eyes.
“No, a leech, because girl, I don’t get paid until you do,” she continued. “Agents are real bloodsuckers, you know?”
I laughed again and allowed her to hug me. We’d been friends since junior year, when we’d randomly chosen seats next to each other in a massive Russian Lit seminar. When she was finally promoted from an assistant to a true literary agent two years ago, I was one of her very first clients. And when my article on Northern Sky Labs had blown up, she’d helped me pull together a proposal, and she’d convinced a bright young editor at a prestigious publisher to offer me a book contract. I owed her so much, and I hated fucking her over.
“You’re gonna kill me,” I announced, hunching like a pill bug.
“I’m not.” She patted my knee. “Let me guess: You don’t think you can write the book.”
I nodded, tears trailing down my cheeks.
“Everyone feels that way when all they have is a pile of reporting and a deadline and a scary blank page. We can figure this out. What do you need, transcription services? A research assistant?”
“That’s not it,” I said. “I know it sounds like writer’s block or whatever, but it’s not. I can’t write this book.”
Her eyes flashed, but she squeezed them closed and said soothingly, “Tell me what you need, Katie. We’re in this together.”
“I need to cancel this book.”
“But why?”
Strobing lights: red, blue, red, blue. “I just need you to trust me. I can’t do it. I’ll pay back the advance.” I stole a glance at her. “I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Between the proposal and research, you’ve sunk a year into this. And now you just want to throw it away? Why? Did something happen there?”
I saw myself pulling over on the fifty-minute drive from Kalamazoo to Iron River, resting my head against the steering wheel and sobbing. “I just can’t.” I shook my head, sniffling. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
“You’re being childish, frankly.” I watched her morph into the bad cop, trying a new tack. “You signed a contract, Katie. This could be very, very bad for your career. What publisher wants to work with someone who gets a book deal, cashes the check, and then pulls out?”
“I know,” I said, my voice bloating up into a wail. “I just…please.”
“Is there a different angle I can go back to them with? Something more general…weird start-ups in the Midwest? The Rust Belt meets Silicon Valley? ‘Rust Valley’—ooh, that’s kind of a good title.”
I considered it, then felt another blast of nausea. “No.”
“Katie, what the hell? You’re making this huge decision and you won’t even tell me why.”
It flashed before me: the flickering lights, darting through the woods. Then the wail of a siren, rumbling between the trees. I shook my head again, and she lifted her ch
in and closed her eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening. You know I’m still trying to establish myself as an agent too.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“You were my first sale. I really advocated for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
I peeked up and saw she was blinking back tears too.
“What do we do now?” I said.
She threw her hands out. “Unless you have another brilliant fucking book to write instead, we go back and tell them you’re pulling out. And we pay back the advance.” Her palms settled on her stomach. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
My mind hurtled after it like a drowning person spotting a hole in the ice: another brilliant fucking book to write instead. I bit my lip, sifting through the articles I’d written over the last few years. Tired-eyed Trump supporters who’d voted for Obama eight years earlier, hooking their hopes on the promise of change. Weary poll workers who’d tottered out of retirement to check in registered voters, less interested in the democratic process than the $9.50-per-hour paycheck. Ruddy-nosed men at local rallies, wearing misogynist T-shirts and spitting as they spoke: “You’re too pretty to be a part of the fake media. You’re actually fuckable.”
UGLY CUNTS on the beautiful pinstripe paper, my reporter spider sense tingling at the sight.
There are a lot of angry men in the world.
Hana had said it, just an hour ago. And just before that—
I said it without thinking, the idea booming out of me like a cannonball.
“Eleanor Walsh.”
Erin raised an eyebrow. “The Herd founder?”
“And beauty magnate. She’s fascinating, right? And incredibly private.”
She’s a huge deal. People are kind of obsessed with her. Hana had said that too.
Erin propped her elbows on her knees. “What about her?”
“I know her well. Since high school. I’m joining the Herd—I signed the paperwork today.” An exaggeration, but only a small, convenient one.
She cocked her head. “What are you saying?” Her eyes grew wide. “An authorized biography of Eleanor Walsh? Would she let you do that?”
“Maybe more of, like, an oral history of the Herd?” I tilted forward, buoyed by her interest. “I could talk to Eleanor and everyone else involved in its creation. People are enchanted by her. And it. There are forums online that strategize about getting in and make guesses about her personal life based on her Instagrams and stuff. And some people hate Eleanor and the Herd.” I balled my hands into fists. “There’s an online community called the Antiherd. And apparently angry dudes send her death threats and stuff. Oh, and today there was graffiti on the wall in one of the rooms that said ‘ugly cunts.’ No one knows who broke in to do it, or how. I could do a part memoir, part investigation, part unauthorized oral history starting with this weird hateful tagging on my very first day—I can try to figure out who did it and trace the Herd’s history back to its creation. It could be super of-the-minute.”
Erin was nodding, slowly at first, then with fervor. “I could sell that, Katie,” she announced. “I could sell the shit out of that. But are you sure you want it to be unauthorized? I mean, I’ll take juicy over sanitized and PR-friendly any day, but we also don’t want you to suddenly get, like, a cease-and-desist.”
“Good point. We should slow down.” Guilt plunged through me. The last thing I wanted was to piss off Eleanor…or Hana, or Mikki, or anyone, really. But the way Erin was looking at me, the excitement in her eyes—this was my shot, the escape route out of the mess I’d made. And I couldn’t ask Eleanor now, on my first damn day as a Herder. Er, applicant.
“Let me do some poking around,” I said. “I’ve only been there one day—I’ll do some observing and background reporting and I’ll start thinking about how to organize it.”
“I like the idea of looking into these threats against her,” Erin said. “Like, what happens when you’re so beloved by women that men hate you, maybe even want to kill you?”
I nodded, remembering with a harpoon of shame how Hana had described Eleanor’s calculated dismissal of her haters. She’d said the worst thing you can give an attention-seeker is attention, and here I was, about to throw a floodlight on the haters. Hana and Eleanor would come to understand, wouldn’t they? I was desperate. “She’s very buttoned-up, so I want to approach this carefully.” Teleanor—that’s the only side she showed the media. For this to work, I’d have to bust beneath the shiny veneer.
“Would it help to say there’s interest from a major publisher? Because I can call Faith tomorrow. Off the record, of course.”
“Maybe. As long as it’s totally, totally off the record.” Faith, the editor who’d offered on my book proposal, scared me. The idea of Erin enthusiastically steering her away from the reality-manipulation book (working title: Infopocalypse) eased my panic, even as this new guilt rushed in. “I’ll do some research and, when I have a better sense of what I want to do, I’ll talk to my sister. She does their PR and she’s best friends with Eleanor, so she’ll know how to handle it.” She’d know how to sell this to Eleanor as an opportunity, not an affront. She had to. Eleanor was kind and good and understanding.
This has to work.
“Perfect,” Erin said, sitting up. “Well, good thing I stalked you. I left you, like, three voicemails today, Katie.”
“Four,” I replied, rising to see her out.
* * *
—
Once she’d left I rummaged around for a notebook, determined to act before the obnoxious angel over my shoulder could whisper it aloud: This is a terrible idea.
Unmasking the Herd, we could call it. Or just Inside the Herd—that was better. Or Unmasking Eleanor? I found a pen and pressed a half-used notebook open, rifling for an empty page.
But it was a notebook from Michigan, interview notes and jotted-down details, and my mind swung to the subtleties I’d been cataloging in secret: Chris’s thick, unruly eyebrows, the spatter of freckles, fingertips skimming over my neck, my waist, the back of my knee. Then a scene change: the bright cymbal crash of humiliation when the EMTs had burst into the room. I felt a wail rise up through me and fought it, my knuckles pressed against my lips. No. I had to get to work.
I Googled Eleanor and began printing out profiles that’d been written about her—a big one in The New Yorker, breathtakingly sexist, and frothier ones on Goop, Time, Cosmopolitan, The Cut. Mikki and Hana occasionally appeared in the photos with her, which was a little odd, since neither was a full-time employee. To their benefit: Hana had no interest in dropping her other clients, and free-spirited Mikki couldn’t be tied down—she was an artist, dammit, not a forty-hour-a-week packaging designer. Yet Eleanor always made it clear they were her work wives and closest confidantes, three corners of a power triangle. The living embodiment of what she’d said in our interview this morning: “Wonderful things happen when passionate women and marginalized genders come together.”
With any luck, those wonderful things would extend to the nosy journalist, the oral historian eager to get it right. I gathered my printouts in a manila folder, and hope billowed in me for the first time in months.
CHAPTER 4
Hana
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 9:41 P.M.
Just get here. Eleanor’s voice, tinny over the phone, echoed in my ears as I headed to her apartment. She was commanding, bombastic, larger-than-life—but never a drama queen. She was calm and controlled, knowing the power in composure. So whatever had her summoning me to her place well after business hours must have her thoroughly rattled.
I hadn’t been over to her apartment in a few weeks, and as I climbed the steps of the orange-brick West Village townhouse, I was struck anew with how beautiful it was. Steep-roofed and skinny with a tasteful wreath on the door, eucalyptus branches and bright bursts of berries. She slid open the door and ushered
me in. She looked cross.
The inside was even more perfect than usual, thanks to a fat pine bough in the vestibule, the slash of green bouncing back and forth between the mirrored closet doors and floor mirror there. Eleanor was good at everything—a casually excellent interior designer, personal stylist, makeup artist, businesswoman…
She collapsed onto a sofa; on the coffee table, her laptop gleamed.
“So what’s going on?” I pulled my coat off.
Eleanor sighed. “Someone stole my phone.”
“I’m sorry.” I waited for more, then frowned. “Did—did you call the police?”
“It disappeared—I don’t even know exactly when. Sometime during the day. I took the subway to the Fort Greene site this afternoon, so it could have been then.”
So that’s why she’d FaceTimed me, presumably from her MacBook. But…why had I just taken an $11 Lyft here?
I nodded patiently. “That sucks, I’m sorry. I assume you tried Find My iPhone?”
“Of course. It was turned off right away.”
“So that’s why you think it was stolen?”
“No. This is why I think it was stolen.” She pushed her laptop in my direction and I squinted at the screen: There it was again, UGLY CUNTS. I scrolled through four photos of the defacement she’d found this morning, then—
“What is this?” The same two words sprayed in similar bubble letters, this time orange, across a sheet of nailed-down drywall. Then another picture of the words scrawled across graphic wallpaper, a pattern of illustrated hand mirrors and combs.
“It’s the other two locations,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “The first few photos, I took them this morning to show the police. But I hadn’t sent them to anyone yet—they were just on my phone. And the other two are in Fort Greene and San Francisco. Someone hit our other sites last night. Coordinated attacks.”