“Hey. You ready to make that toast? I think it’s time.” Jason barely looked at Isabel as he said this.
“Oh—yeah, sure.” They headed to the center of the room, where someone had helpfully put a chair for Mack to stand on. He hoisted himself up and handed Jason his drink. “Ahem, ahem! Could I quickly have everyone’s attention?” It took a moment or two for the room to quiet down, but soon everyone’s eyes were on him. “And could I get Casper Kim to step up to the, er, podium. Or whatever this is. The chair. Step up to the chair, Casper!” Everyone cheered and hollered as Casper made his way through the crowd.
“Casper, you were the Woz to my Jobs,” he said. Everyone laughed. Fine, this was a little hyperbolic, but the analogy, Mack felt, was a good one; he was the outward-facing visionary, like Steve Jobs, and Casper had been the genius who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to figure out the product. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.” This, at least, was true. He hadn’t even begun to think about replacing Casper. “You’ve made TakeOff what it is today, and we wouldn’t be the innovative, forward-thinking company we are today if you hadn’t come along.”
Before he could say anything else, a voice—a female voice—piped up from the back of the room. “Could you be any more full of shit?” It was Isabel. Fuck, it was Isabel. Was she drunk? She had gulped that drink in front of him—who knew how many she’d already managed to down before he saw her. “Seriously, Mack. Why don’t you tell everyone here how you’ve been treating me?”
The only sound was the bartender shaking a drink, and as soon as he realized how quiet everything was, he stopped. Now the room was more silent than Mack would have thought possible.
“Nothing to say, huh?” Isabel’s voice was getting louder. “Why don’t you tell everyone how you won’t leave me alone? Or about the texts? Or the sexts.”
“That’s enough, Isabel.” It came out sharper than he intended. He was still standing on the chair. This is ridiculous, he thought. He wasn’t going to let her hijack this. Everyone was still silent; no one was looking directly at him, or at Isabel.
“Oh, fuck you,” she said. She was crying. “Fuck you.” And with that, she shoved her way through the crowd and ran out of the bar.
No one moved. What do I do, Mack thought. What the fuck do I do now. Before he could say or do anything, Casper came to the rescue. “I don’t know what that was,” he said, “but Mack, I just want to say thank you. You’re a true friend and a real leader. Hey, everyone, let’s give Mack a round of applause.” For a moment, no one made a sound, and Mack thought, Fuck-fuck-fuck, but then Casper started clapping, and then a few more people did, and soon enough, the whole room had erupted in cheers and applause. Mack hopped down off the chair and Casper slapped him on the back and leaned in to whisper to him, “Yo, that bitch is crazy.”
20
Battle Loyal
SABRINA HADN’T EVEN been planning on going to Casper’s thing, but then she’d gotten a message on Slack from Mack that said, See you at drinks? Important for all senior staff to be there! She was senior staff now. Despite everything she felt about Mack, this still gave her a satisfied little thrill. Dan would just have to deal. She texted him: Gotta go to a work thing tonight—can you be home early? Sorry last minute. She was shocked—pleasantly shocked—when he responded right away: Sure, no problem!
Thanks. Won’t be too late, she wrote back, trying not to think too much about how quickly and enthusiastically he’d responded. But that was how she found herself sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc in the back room at Flatiron Social at six thirty as the bar filled up with her coworkers. She’d walked over with Isabel, who seemed distracted—maybe it was their conversation in the park that morning? Or maybe it was something else; she wouldn’t say—and who immediately headed to the bar and ordered a whiskey on the rocks, drank it, and ordered a double. “Take it easy, champ,” Sabrina said, trying to keep her voice light, but Isabel just rolled her eyes and said, “Whatever,” and then she’d lost her in the crowd.
Sabrina just wanted to stay long enough for Mack to see her there and then head home. She got pulled into a conversation with Oliver Brandt and a couple other sales people, during which she stayed mostly silent, periodically craning her neck to see if Mack had shown up yet. She somehow missed his entrance, though, and didn’t see him until he was standing on a chair in the middle of the room.
She tuned out when Mack started talking, something about how Casper had been the Woz to his Jobs, which Sabrina took to be some kind of Steve Jobs reference that she didn’t quite understand the significance of, besides the fact that it seemed awfully presumptuous of Mack to be comparing himself to Steve Jobs, and she had started inching toward the door when she heard Isabel’s voice, a little high-pitched, slightly frantic, interrupt him. “Could you be any more full of shit?” she said. Oh no, Sabrina thought. She must be drunk already. What else could have possessed her to make this kind of scene? It was precisely the opposite of what Isabel had said she wanted to happen. She’d said she wanted everything to be quiet, not to make a fuss. She didn’t want Katya writing about what was going on, but she was willing to bring it up here? It made no sense.
As soon as Isabel ran out of the room, and Casper made his ridiculous speech that seemed to distract everyone from the fact that Isabel had accused Mack of sexual harassment in front of the entire company, she slipped out of the bar to see if she could catch Isabel. Mostly to ask, What the fuck were you thinking? But Isabel was already gone; there was no sign of her in front of the bar. Sabrina texted her: Where the hell are you? and waited a moment to see if Isabel would respond, but she didn’t. And so there was nothing left to do but go home.
She hadn’t thought that Isabel had something like that in her. This was probably the crux of the matter: that Isabel had done something more risky and brave than Sabrina would have thought possible, and there was a tiny, tiny part of her that was actually jealous. As she emerged from the subway back in Park Slope, her phone vibrated; Isabel had responded to her text. It was just an audio file. She fished around in her bag for her headphones and plugged them into her phone and pressed play. First she just heard a lot of background noise. Then she heard, “Could I get everyone’s attention?” and she realized, with a creeping sense of horror, that this was Mack’s voice, and that Isabel had recorded what had happened. She hit pause on her phone—she didn’t want to hear any more. She texted back, I can’t listen to this. Isabel responded immediately, please. I want this to get out there. But it can’t come from me.
What the hell, Sabrina thought. You’re kind of sending me mixed messages, she typed back. First you said you didn’t want this to be public. Actually i think you said you wanted me to talk to Dan and ask him to kill the story. So which is it?
I know, Isabel texted back immediately. Listen…think about it. I’m obviously not gonna be at work tomorrow.
Sabrina was in front of her building now. Ok. I’m home…i gotta run. Isabel didn’t respond. Sabrina climbed the two flights of stairs to her apartment and opened the front door. Dan was sitting on the couch, working on his laptop. The apartment was quiet. Was it possible he had put the kids to bed all by himself? “Hey,” she said. “Everything okay?”
“Yup!” he said. “Everything’s great. Gave them a bath and put them to bed. How was your work thing?” Why was he being so…cheery? Something felt off.
She sat down on the couch next to him. “It was fine.” Dan nodded and turned back to his computer. “What are you up to?”
“Not much, just finishing up some work stuff.” He quickly closed his laptop. “So…something a little weird happened last night.”
“Oh?” Sabrina felt immediately on guard. “When you went out?” They’d barely seen each other since then, Sabrina realized. When he’d gotten home, she’d been asleep, and then this morning he’d left as she was getting Owen and Amelia ready for school, giving them a quick wave good-bye as she was trying to get Owen to sit in his chair
and not roll around on the floor with no pants on, which Owen thought was hilarious.
“Yeah. I forgot my wallet, which I didn’t realize right away because I had Ubered, but for some reason I had a credit card in my jacket pocket—I was wearing that brown corduroy blazer that I don’t wear that much?” She nodded. She thought she knew where this was going and she knew she couldn’t stop it, and she was getting that terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach again, the one that she usually felt anytime she looked at a credit card bill. Which was why she had stopped looking at her credit card bills. “So I was getting drinks—”
“You got drinks? I thought you had a work thing.”
“Yeah, they were, like, drinks with some work people.”
“Okay.” She briefly considered challenging him on this—he sounded like he was lying about something, although she wasn’t sure exactly what.
“Anyway, so I forgot my wallet, but I realized I had that Delta SkyMiles card in my pocket, so I tried to use it, and it got declined.” He paused as though waiting for her to say something. She was silent, because she was trying to figure out how she was supposed to play this. She hadn’t paid the SkyMiles card in months—when the cash started coming into her PayPal account from selling her underwear, it had first gone to the Barneys and J. Crew cards, and she had been planning on getting to the SkyMiles card and the other AmEx and the Citibank Visa soon, but between everything that had been going on at work and her side job—because that’s what selling her underwear was, a second job that she had to pay attention to—she just hadn’t had the time. “Which I thought was weird, because we hardly ever use that card. I’m actually not totally sure why we even have it—it’s not like we fly that much.”
“We got it so we could get all those bonus miles, remember? So we could go visit your brother in San Francisco.”
“Oh yeah, right,” Dan said. “That was, like, three years ago, though.” Sabrina nodded. She was going to try to placate him, she decided. Play a little dumb and slightly confused, not really argue, and hope that it would all go away. “Anyway, the card was declined. So I called that number on the back?”
Okay. Maybe playing confused wasn’t going to work. She closed her eyes. “Just get it over with,” she murmured.
“Huh?” Dan said. He shook her shoulder. “Are you okay? What did you just say?”
She opened her eyes. “Whatever you’re about to say, just say it. Get it over with.”
He squinted at her. “What am I about to say?”
“Don’t do this, Dan.”
“No, seriously, I want to know. What am I about to say? Please enlighten me.”
Was she going to cry? She might cry. But maybe…maybe there was something that would feel liberating about coming clean. The burden of this secret was wearing her down. When she got married, she had been convinced that there was nothing she would keep secret from her husband; they were a team. But somewhere along the line it had started feeling more like they were like a bad physics problem: She was a train going ninety-five miles per hour and he was a train going a hundred and fifty miles per hour, and they were heading toward each other and now they were going to crash. But exactly when or where or how they were going to crash…that was what she had to solve for, and she had gotten a C+ in physics in high school.
“I don’t know,” Sabrina said. “Maybe…maybe something about how the card hadn’t been…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Hadn’t been paid. Is that what you were going to say? Because that’s what they told me when I finally pressed the right combination of numbers to get to a representative. They said that the card had reached its limit three months ago and it hadn’t been paid. Not even the minimum. And do you know what the limit is on that card?”
Sabrina shook her head. She actually truly didn’t know. She’d made it a point not to know.
“It’s twenty grand,” Dan said. “Twenty thousand dollars. Of which I personally have spent zero, to my knowledge. So, Sabrina, tell me. Where the hell did you spend twenty thousand dollars?”
“It’s…it’s complicated,” she whispered.
“Complicated how, exactly.” He wasn’t raising his voice, but his tone had gotten sharper. Meaner.
“It…it didn’t happen all at once, I mean.” She paused. “And I’m trying to pay it off. Really. I was trying to take care of it myself. I didn’t want to stress you out.”
“I’m just confused. And I feel a little stupid, to be perfectly honest. Like, where was I when you were spending twenty thousand dollars on…what? What did you spend it on?”
“Stuff,” she said. She knew she sounded defensive, but she couldn’t help it. “Just stuff. Stuff for the kids, stuff for the apartment, stuff for me…I don’t know. It was nothing crazy, I swear. It just adds up quicker than you’d think.” He looked around the room as though trying to ascertain what objects she’d bought with the card. “Seriously! It wasn’t like one day I just went out and spent thousands of dollars. It’s like, a sweater here, a vase there, a pair of rain boots for Amelia…it just adds up.”
“But twenty thousand dollars,” Dan said. “I just don’t get it.”
“I don’t know what else there is to get. I spent a lot of money and now I’m trying to pay it off.” She wasn’t going to mention the other cards. Not now. Maybe not ever. “And, like, we’re fine. You have a job, I have a job, we’re still paying our mortgage on time, there’s food on the table. And it’s over! I’m not spending money like that anymore.” She believed this to be true, but she also knew, even as she said it, how delusional it sounded, especially since there was a pair of Céline sunglasses in her purse that she’d just bought last week on FlairMatch, and a Vince cashmere sweater from Saks still in its package in her closet—she didn’t have to open it to know how soft it was—and a couple of things, she had forgotten exactly what, from J. Crew that were on back order and should be arriving sometime in December.
“I can’t even talk to you right now,” Dan said. “I’m going for a walk.” She had no response to this. She watched silently as he got up from the couch, put on his coat, and walked out the door without saying anything else to her. It looked like he wanted to slam it but he closed it quietly.
“Goddamn it.” Her phone buzzed again—it was Isabel. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said. The text read, sorry to keep bugging u but srsly i could use some help.
21
Secret Service
BEFORE SHE’D EVEN gotten home from Old Town the other night, there was already a text from Dan that said, good seeing you tonight. ;) She didn’t respond. When she got home, Janelle was still up, watching something on her laptop on the couch in her leggings and Taylor Swift concert T-shirt. “Hey,” Katya said as she sat down next to her. At least she wasn’t shooting a video. She and Janelle had the kind of roommate relationship that Katya preferred; respectful, but they kept their distance. Janelle had her friends and her job and her beauty videos, Katya had her job and…well, now not much else. She had never been good at keeping friends—there were always the girls who targeted her for friendship because they thought she was cool and edgy or whatever, but they quickly realized that she wasn’t interested in going to brunch or having picnics in the park or learning how to crochet and chronicling all of it on Instagram or in a Snapchat story or participating in any of the other activities of bourgeois New York twentysomething existence. Janelle tried in the beginning, inviting her out to drinks and concerts, saying with purpose that she was going to draw Katya out of her shell, whatever that meant. My shell is me, Katya thought every time this happened.
“What’s up,” Janelle said without taking her eyes off the computer. “Oh, by the way, thanks for getting your boyfriend out of here. Though…could I have his number? He had really good weed.”
“Um…yeah, sure. But can I ask your advice on something?” Before she’d even finished talking, Janelle had closed her computer and turned theatrically toward her.
“Me?” Janelle bro
ught her hand to her chest. “Advice? Are you okay? Let me get this straight. You, Katya Pasternack, are asking me, Janelle Lewis, for advice. Can I take your temperature? I think you might be deathly ill. Or wait. Are you an impostor?”
“Ha-ha-ha,” Katya said. “I’m serious. I…” She was having trouble getting the words out. Did she want to ask Janelle for advice? Not really, but she was all Katya had at the moment. Then the words just came tumbling out of her mouth: “My boss kissed me at a bar just now and he just texted me and I’m just like…I don’t know what to do.”
Janelle’s eyes widened. Fuck, Katya thought. I shouldn’t have said anything. “Hoo boy. Wait. What about Victor? Wait. Was he mad he had to leave?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. It was good he left. We got in a fight—it’s a long story. And I ended up at a bar with Dan. My boss. And then we like…kind of made out for a minute and I feel really strange about it.” She paused. “This is a new feeling for me.”
Janelle laughed. “I see that. Well, what do you want from the situation? Do you like him?”
Katya shook her head. “No. It’s not about that.”
“What’s it about?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well…how did you leave things?” Janelle said.
“I was just like, I’ll see you tomorrow, and I got in an Uber and came home. And he already texted me, like, ‘Glad we didn’t do anything else,’ or something like that.” She rolled her eyes. “As if that was on the table.”
“It’s always on the table, silly,” Janelle said.
“No,” Katya said. “It was a random fluke; it wasn’t like we had arranged some secret rendezvous at a hotel or something. I was the one who texted him! Dan would never actually want to, like…” She trailed off.
Startup Page 20