The Knockoff

by Lucy Sykes

  She had never been a true line editor, but she had also never seen more errors in her entire life.

  “Who is editing these?” she’d asked Eve that morning.

  Eve barely looked up from her laptop as she shrugged her bare shoulders. “No one. They go straight on the site. It’s the Internet. It can always be fixed.”

  “You don’t think it’s sloppy?”

  “I think more is better.”

  The conversation ended there.

  It was nonstop. The site was updated twenty-four hours a day, content determined by traffic. If a certain celebrity got engaged then the site could do as many as thirteen related fashion posts on that celebrity’s style, her fiancé’s style, their future child’s style and the obligatory wedding style. Right now they averaged more than one hundred pieces of content a day. All of it ended with the same juvenile tag line: “Make sure you never miss any of our LOL-worthy stuff! Sign up for the Glossy newsletter today!”

  Leaving at eight felt like a luxury when there was still an army of women inside the office clacking away at their keyboards, nibbling on the sushi platters Eve ordered in for dinner and chugging their cheerfully colored Organic Avenue juices and diet Red Bulls.

  Imogen felt guilty about staying and guilty about going home. She never turned the lights out in her office. She would leave a sweater behind on her chair, her computer screen on and the office fully aglow, hoping to create the impression that she could be somewhere else in the building at any given time. At the end of the day she knew she wasn’t fooling Eve. Something told her that Eve knew exactly where she was at any given moment. There was probably an app for that.

  The girl was already standing at the elevator bank when Imogen arrived. Her perfectly round head hung limp and her shoulders shook. She walked quietly into the elevator once it reached their floor and kept her face to the back wall instead of turning forward. It was only after the doors closed safely behind her that she let loose a wail like an animal being led to the slaughterhouse. She was just a speck of a thing, with hair the shade of honey. She looked vaguely familiar to Imogen, but there were so many new faces in the office these days. They all blended into one another.

  Moments like these made Imogen feel validated in still carrying a small embroidered white handkerchief in her purse. She had small bags of Kleenex as well, the kind you purchase in bulk a month after becoming a mother. Imogen tapped the girl quietly on the shoulder and offered up her proper handkerchief. The girl took it without glancing up and wiped mascara down her cheeks before blowing her nose and letting loose another wail straight from the bowels of hell.

  “It can’t be all that bad.” Imogen patted her uncertainly. Why did she say that? She knew exactly how bad it was in that office.

  “It is. She’s a witch.” The girl finally turned her exhausted eyes up at Imogen. “I did everything Eve asked me. I’ve been working for three days straight. Then I fell asleep at my desk. She told me that only losers need sleep. That was it. That was enough for her. She just fired me. Right in front of everyone. She told me to pack up my things and go home and not bother to come back tomorrow.”

  Now Imogen recognized the girl as one of the editorial assistants Eve hired to do the typical assistant duties, transcribing, answering phones, setting up market appointments, the things she had done herself just a few years before.

  “Why haven’t you been home in three days?”

  “Didn’t you get the memo? She told us we all had to stay to help meet the traffic goals she set for the investors by the end of the month. She set up air mattresses back in the supply closet. We take turns back there, but it was loud. I had a hard time falling asleep.”

  Now Imogen could see the dark circles beneath the young woman’s eyes, giving her the appearance of someone much older.

  “I’ve seen a lot of people besides me get fired,” the girl said. “It’s sort of like, ‘Let’s see who lasts the longest.’ ”

  There was nothing Imogen could say. She’d heard whispers of how Eve fired people, but she had never been around to witness it. She’d assumed she did it late at night. Eve was on such a hiring streak that Imogen could barely keep track of who was coming in, and she definitely couldn’t keep track of who was going out.

  “I’m sorry” was all she could think to say. “No one deserves to be let go like that.” Imogen didn’t even know if it was legal to let someone go like that. She had fired only three employees in her life and each time she’d had to create a monthlong paper trail of their offenses and had a member of the Human Resources staff present. For a second the girl looked at Imogen with pity in her eyes, as if she believed Imogen could be the next one bawling in an elevator.

  There were only a few floors to go. “I don’t have any savings. I won’t be able to pay my rent next month.” It wasn’t a plea. The young woman said it as a fact, as if she needed to say it out loud to make sure that the universe knew it was true.

  She didn’t have anything left to say to Imogen. The girl strode fast onto the street, not bothering to look back. Imogen stepped into the lobby and then pivoted into the elevator, pushed a button and watched it light up for the twenty-seventh floor.

  As Imogen stepped back into the office, she saw Eve standing tall in the middle of the room.

  “Go!” she yelled. Twelve young women were lined up on opposite sides of the room. Each of them held a silver spoon out in front of her and on top of that was balanced a white egg. When Eve shouted they ran across the room, eggs flying off half the spoons and splattering on the ground. The room was fraught with the anxiety of planned fun, the kind commonly experienced on holidays like New Year’s Eve and Halloween. You played, you partied, you danced, you drank, you balanced an egg on a spoon in a midtown office building. You did these things because everyone else was doing them and someone told you this was what you were meant to be doing to have a good time. But the women in the room just looked tired. Imogen knew they would rather be at their desks finishing whatever it was that was still on their to-do lists so they could go home to their own apartments and have fun with their real friends and real families.

  “Break time is over.” Eve clapped her hands and with that everyone scattered back to their desks, leaving the egg yolks coagulating on the floor.

  Eve had noticed Imogen when she walked into the room, but waited until her game was over to acknowledge her. “Hey, Imogen. I thought you had gone home for the night.”

  “I just popped downstairs for a macchiato.”

  “Where’s the coffee?” Eve countered, smiling knowingly.

  “I drank it on the walk back. Could we chat in my office?”

  Eve shrugged and trailed behind her. The lights had been turned out and the computer shut down. Imogen knew that wasn’t how she had left things just ten minutes earlier.

  “Did you turn off my computer?”

  “Of course not.” Eve rolled her eyes aggressively. “I never come into your office. One of the cleaning ladies must have done it or something.”

  “Who was that girl you just let go? She was bawling in the elevator.”

  Eve flicked her hand. “Just an assistant. I let all of them go today.”

  Imogen wanted to reply slowly to make sure the right words came out of her mouth. “We need assistants. Have you talked to HR about hiring new ones tomorrow?”

  “No need. I have a plan. It’s going to save us a ton of money so that we can hire new content producers in their place.”

  Imogen raised her eyebrows, indicating Eve should continue her explanation.

  “I’m outsourcing all of the assistant duties offshore. One of my friends from B-school just started the most amazing virtual assistant company. For just five dollars an hour you can farm out all the menial work we have those office assistants doing. We can have them transcribe interviews, make appointments, order office supplies. They’ll even order delivery food for you. It’s so disruptive. It’s genius.”

&nb
sp; Imogen shook her head. “You know the point of having assistants in the office is to eventually train them up to work on more and more things and then to promote them. I started out as an assistant. You started out as an assistant, remember.” Imogen took in a deep breath, catching a whiff of Eve’s Miss Dior perfume.

  Eve flicked her hand again. “Yes, but we don’t need them anymore. That’s how things used to get done. I’m creating a new system, Imogen.” Now Eve was scowling. “Why can’t you accept the changes I am making around here. I brought Glossy into the twenty-first century and I want to bring you with me, but you aren’t helping me.”

  “Some of the old systems actually work, Eve. We don’t need to throw everything out to start something new just for the hell of it.”

  Eve continued. “Come on. Let me do my job. I am letting you do yours. Go home and spend time with your kids. I know you weren’t getting a macchiato. You just came back up here to lecture me. Point taken. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The women were all back at their desks, their headphones on and their fingers flying furiously over their keyboards. Imogen felt stunned, but was reluctant to make a scene. She made her way to the elevator, careful not to put her heel in gooey egg along the way.

  <<< CHAPTER FIFTEEN >>>

  Imogen arrived home and drew herself a long bath, pouring a glass of wine and trickling a bit of lavender oil into their antique claw-foot tub. She liked her lavender better in her tub than in her coffee. She and Alex discovered the tub at a tiny antiques shop upstate in Phoenicia and spent hours negotiating for it, only to find out that it had a terrible leak once they got it home. They had to have the entire thing resealed and it cost them a small fortune, but Imogen loved it so much she believed it was completely worth all of the trouble. It was deep enough that she didn’t have to slouch to slide her entire body beneath the water. She was able to submerge herself up to the middle of her neck in water scalding almost to the point she couldn’t stand it.

  Annabel was asleep when she got home. Imogen kept thinking back to those comments she’d seen on her daughter’s Facebook page. What kind of monster would write that kind of thing to a little girl? She didn’t know how to bring it up without looking like she was spying on her daughter, a surefire way, she knew, to make any and all personal conversations end before they even had a chance to begin.

  Everything was a mess. Her daughter was being bullied online and she was being bullied at work. She woke each day with a pit in her stomach about the very thought of walking into that office and seeing Eve. Not a morning passed when Eve didn’t comment on something Imogen didn’t know or had done wrong. She didn’t send a document in the right format. Why didn’t she understand how to access the photographs they now stored in the cloud and not on the server? You know you don’t have to reply all to emails! You know you should reply all to emails more often! Could she tweet more?

  There was now a very clear line drawn through the story of her life, Before Eve and After Eve. It should be Before Cancer and After Cancer, but Imogen wasn’t certain that the cancer had more of an impact on her well-being than the reappearance of Eve in her life.

  We all have tropes that run rampant in our heads. Before Eve, Imogen thought endlessly about being the best editor in chief out there, about beating the competition, about selling more magazines. That little voice told her that Glossy could always be better if she just tried harder. Now that little voice changed its tune. Now she was no longer good enough. Now it told her to just give up because she couldn’t survive here.

  She stretched her leg out, which felt good, and wiggled her toes. Decades of six-inch heels did feet no favors.

  The hot water from the faucet falling created a pleasantly thumping crescendo and Imogen indulged in a new fantasy. What if they just left? What if they gave up the wildly expensive mortgage on their town house and the private school tuitions? What if they packed it all up and moved to New Orleans? Taking a large swallow of wine, she remembered how much she fucking loved New Orleans.

  What would it cost to live in New Orleans? Maybe a fifth of what it cost them to keep up appearances in New York? She picked up her phone from the little vintage bamboo table she kept by the tub and fumbled with her wet hands for the real estate app, the one Tilly downloaded for her. Careful to keep the device above the water, Imogen pecked in some parameters. New Orleans—Garden District—Bedrooms (4+).

  So many options. She shook bits of water off her thumbs so she could scroll down the smooth screen. Then she fell in love.

  It was a nineteenth-century historical manse in the Garden District. Peculiar and beautiful, with its all-white exterior and robin’s-egg-blue trim, a formidable wrought-iron fence wound lazily around the property. Enlarging the picture allowed a glimpse of a rickety porch swing. The price for this gem was less than 20 percent of what they’d paid for this town house.

  Down south, Alex could put up a shingle as a local attorney, fixing DUIs and divorces. The kids could go to public school. She’d find the space to figure out what she wanted to do next, what she could do next. Photography? Interior design? Both fields were different and digital now, but she had an eye. It was the only place in the world besides New York City where she felt like she could thrive as a creative person.

  Butterflies fluttered in her belly. She was excited. New Orleans would be new and fresh. A challenge, sure, but a new challenge. Goddamn it. Did everything always have to go in a straight line? Her career could move across a diagonal. What if Alex came home and she just said, “Leave your goddamned job”? She could have choices!

  Imogen finished her wine. Why didn’t she bring the bottle upstairs?

  The phone slipped from her hand onto the bath mat.

  You think New York is everything, until it isn’t anymore.

  She sighed. It really was just a dream. Sure, getting rid of the house and the private school would give them some breathing room, but both Imogen and Alex had aging parents, both with little in the way of retirement savings. Then there was her pile of medical bills, growing all the time, which needed the attention of her jaunty Robert Mannering Corp. insurance plan.

  The weight of an entire family cleaved to her shoulders. No matter how much hot water she put in the tub now a chill crept over her and goose pimples prickled the surface of her skin.

  <<< CHAPTER SIXTEEN >>>

  DECEMBER 2015

  An excerpt from “Recess Theory,” by Axelrod MacMurray:

  We need to be happy in order to be productive. We need to push the boundaries of the workplace and allow adults to tap into their inner child in order to maximize success and innovation. It is important for the adult employee to be given time to be social in an unstructured and creative way during the work day and it is incumbent upon managers to foster this. The focus of the play should not have a goal. Used properly in the workplace, an hour of playtime will ultimately increase your output exponentially.

  In 2013, a squat, balding Harvard Business School professor named Axelrod MacMurray (Stanford PhD, Harvard MBA) wrote a book proposing the “Recess Theory.” It was based on a proprietary study conducted over several years by Dr. MacMurray himself that proved even adults needed an hour of unstructured “play” to bolster their productivity in other parts of their lives.

  After Eve took MacMurray’s class in 2014, she very briefly became his most devoted student and sometime late-night companion.

  Their fleeting, but apparently playful and productive, time together could have been what inspired Eve to take the whole office on an outing to Spirit Cycle for a spin class. All of the mommies at school swore by Spirit Cycle, this kind of New Agey take on cardio spin that was supposed to unite body and soul. Imogen thought it sounded like bollocks. She’d been a runner in her twenties and through most of her thirties. Mainly she just ate right and did Pilates with her trainer. In the same way that she’d missed the Atkins craze in the early 2000s, spin somehow passed her by.

  It woul
d be nice to get out of the office early though. The Spirit Cycle studio was close to her town house and she planned to go home straight after, which significantly lifted her mood as she walked into the dark cycling studio with its bright yellow bikes and inspirational words written on the walls.

  Eve strutted into the studio, a vision in Spirit Cycle yellow pants and stringy top, her hair pulled up into a high ponytail on top of her head.

  “Yeah, Spirit!!! I love it here. We’re gonna get our spirit on.” She high-fived the instructor as the other girls from the office climbed onto their bikes. Imogen had taken the funny shoes with the metal clips on the bottom from the front desk and clomped the rest of the way back into the cycling room, but once she found herself on the bike she hadn’t a clue how the bloody things worked. She tried angling her foot flat against the pedal, hoping it would quickly clip in. Nothing happened. She made these odd clanging sounds as pedals and shoes around the room mated in satisfying click-clicks.

  The anxiety of not doing it properly just compounded each time her foot slid off the pedal without that requisite click.

  Ashley planted herself on one side of Imogen in the front row. Eve was on the other. Ashley quietly reached down to guide Imogen’s toe into place. Click.

  The instructor bounced up and down on a podium lit only by candles that smelled like grapefruit.

  “Heya, Spirit sisters!” she hollered into a headset mounted on top of her white-girl dreadlocks. Eve leaned in to Imogen to whisper, “The instructor is Angelina Starr. She’s, like, a spin goddess.”

  Angelina Starr? It is obviously a stage name, Imogen thought. When did spin instructors start warranting stage names? Angelina Starr was too tanned and too made-up to be breaking a sweat. She wore nothing but a teensy yellow bandeau top and teeny-weeny black Lycra panties.

  Eve and the girls in the room who were obviously Spirit regulars chanted back in unison, “Heya, Angelina!”

  “Everyone got everything?”

  “I would quite like a water.” Imogen raised her hand politely, which made Angelina sneer.