The Knockoff

by Lucy Sykes

  But of course Eve wouldn’t let a little sex scandal or the whir of robotic photographers steal her wedding thunder. Today was all about her. This was being live-streamed to the world, and damn it, she was the star.

  Someone flipped a switch and the room plunged into darkness. Confused, the drones stayed in place as a spotlight hit the mahogany doors at the start of the aisle. Except it wasn’t an aisle, not in the traditional sense. No, Eve would walk down a bright red carpet. Pachelbel’s Canon played as Eve appeared, basking in the lamp’s glow and the attention of an entire room. For a moment, even Imogen sucked in her breath at how beautiful Eve looked there in the spotlight, her shoulders and décolletage shimmering, her hair pulled into the perfect side chignon and the dress sweeping down over her narrow hips, the train trailing ever so slightly out the door.

  As the lights came back up and Eve confidently took her first step down the aisle, the room erupted in chaos. Drones buzzed busily overhead. Phones replaced faces, held aloft to capture the moment to be posted on Twitter, Facebook, Keek and Instagram, all hashtagged, as decreed in the program, #GlossyWedding. Through it all, Eve remained laser-focused on the front of the room with a smile that appeared painted across her face with a bold red lipstick.

  Sweat poured visibly down the sides of Andrew’s neck as Eve advanced. He looked more like he had when he and Imogen dated. His face, puffy and shiny, no doubt from the liquid courage it took for him to face the next few hours, was frozen in a look of terror. Imogen imagined the riot act Eve had read him that morning. She was surprised actually that he hadn’t fled, but the pull of his public life and the embarrassment he would face leaving town was too much for his fragile ego. What a plonker, she thought. His face twitched as he stood there; Imogen recognized it as a sure giveaway that Andrew had indulged in another of his old vices, cocaine, probably just before the ceremony. He shuddered as Eve approached.

  Eve was halfway down the aisle when the music stopped, midnote. This is it, Imogen thought. This is where she leaves him. This is where she walks out. And for a moment, she had a new respect for Eve, even if she had choreographed a very public exit.

  But no.

  Pop music began blaring from hidden speakers. What was this song? It was familiar, but Imogen couldn’t quite place it. From seats lining the aisle, Glossy staffers, all in bright pink dresses (and frightfully skinny), rose and formed a circle around Eve. There they stood, feet hip-width apart, swinging their hips left and then right and crossing their arms in front of their chests just as the chorus swelled: “Looking so crazy in love’s/Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love.”

  Of course, Beyoncé. It was the choreographed dance the girls had learned at Eve’s apartment during the snow day. Like they were part of the act, the drones swirled over their heads to the beat. The Internet would not miss a second of this artfully plotted spontaneous moment. Eve feigned shock, as though she couldn’t believe her staffers would bequeath her with such a performance on her wedding day. She even rolled her eyes slightly to the ceiling as she smirked to enhance the idea that she thought this might be a little bit silly, but Imogen knew, without having to ask Ashley, who wiggled her bottom in the aisle with a look of horror on her face, that this show had been directed by Eve, down to the very last tasteful twerk.

  The girls took Eve all the way to Andrew. His mother desperately fanned herself with a bright pink wedding program. Fainting was not entirely out of the question.

  The ceremony itself was brief and nondenominational. Imogen caught Eve pinch Andrew under his rib cage to compel him to remain standing. Just as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge presiding over the wedding prepared to announce the couple to the audience, Eve shot her hand toward him, her palm appearing flat in front of his face. Not again, Imogen thought.

  “Just a second,” Eve said, pulling an iPhone out from somewhere within the taffeta folds of her gown. “I need to update my Facebook status.” She punched in a few buttons and raised the phone over her head like a trophy. “It’s not official until it’s Facebook official,” she shouted to the room. “And while I’m at it,” she added, “let me find something to wear to the after-party.”

  Oh no. Even in this moment Eve was going to perform a publicity stunt.

  She pretended to murmur to herself, but Eve had a microphone on so her words were broadcast loud and clear to the entire room.

  “I want something short, something white, something Tadashi. What should I do? I think I will BUY IT NOW!” And as she hit the button, a twentysomething man in a pristine tuxedo, a man who looked like a much more suitable mate for Eve than the rheumy-eyed addict standing next to her, walked through the grand double doors to deliver a white box tied beautifully with a satin bow the size of a Volkswagen.

  “Looks like I have my after-party dress.” Eve giggled to the crowd, who applauded the moment, if not the woman.

  Afterward, there was no formal receiving line. Andrew slunk off to the bar, while Eve insisted on taking selfies with the starlets she had paid a total of more than $100,000 to show up. Waiters circulated with champagne, white wine and light-colored appetizers. Eve mandated all of the food served at the wedding be anemic so that nothing colorful could spill on her dress.

  Eve had invited several of her ex-boyfriends, some much older and others her age, fratty-looking banker types partial to pocket squares and whimsical ties from Vineyard Vines. They huddled in packs around the room, eyeing Andrew’s friends from Dalton, similar save for twenty years, twenty extra pounds and a couple of divorces.

  Dinner tables were artfully arranged around a dance floor in the adjacent formal dining room. A band, one that was fairly well known among hipster yuppies in gentrifying Brooklyn, was setting up on the stage.

  Before they needed to sit for the five-course dinner, Imogen wove her way through the crowd to join the small queue for the restroom. The women in front of her surely knew Eve from back home in Wisconsin. They were dressed in black tie, but not as polished as the rest of the crowd. Their hair was just a touch bigger, their nails too garish, the dresses about five years out of date. All three of them wore gold bands on their left ring fingers. From their conversation it was clear that these three women hadn’t kept in close touch with Eve.

  “Erin…are you glad that we came?”

  “I’m glad that Eve sent us free airplane tickets to come see New York City for the weekend!” The women chuckled and high-fived one another.

  “She sure looks different.” The girl nodded over to Eve, who had her arm slung around the waist of the redheaded star of a teenage vampire television series. The photographer was ordered to take one more picture.

  “I’ll bet she doesn’t act any different. I’ll bet she’s still mean as a cat with his tail stuck in a door.”

  The smaller and chubbier of the three piped up to defend Eve. “Come now, girls. She isn’t all that bad. Remember how much fun we had on the prom committee?”

  “Remember how Eve rigged the ballot to make herself prom queen?” said the larger of the women. “Now look at all of this. Looks like she rigged herself a marriage.” She spread her arms wide to encompass the enormity of the room before lowering her voice. “Even if it sounds like she’s marrying kind of a scumbag, Candy Cool strikes again.”

  Imogen was jerked out of her reverie.

  Candy Cool. It rolled off that girl’s tongue like a proper name. Like an old friend. Like someone that she knew. Imogen felt a chill just hearing the name spoken out loud, this name of someone who had been torturing her daughter. She thought she must have misheard, because what would three married women from the middle of the country know about a teenage bully?

  The small one slapped her thigh, emitting a snort.

  “Oh, I had forgotten all about Candy Cool.”

  Imogen needed to know if she was hearing these women correctly. It was a possibility that she didn’t understand their thick Midwestern accents.

  Imogen tapped the
bigger woman on the shoulder. “Pardon me? But I couldn’t help but hear you talking about someone named Candy Cool. How do you know her? Who is she?”

  “Who is Candy Cool?” The two women to her right looked at Imogen with skepticism, but the one she tapped enjoyed an audience.

  “You already know her. You’re at her wedding.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Eve used to use the name Candy Cool for all of her screen names in high school, like instant messenger and chat and stuff. She was stupid though. She hacked into the school’s voting system to try to make herself prom queen, but she didn’t do it right. She got caught because all of the ballots cast for her were from a person named Candy Cool instead of other students.” This group of women, all of whom looked so much older than Eve, perhaps because they had already been married and grown up in their small town, collapsed into laughter, tears running down their cheeks at the memory of Eve getting in trouble. In a burst of clarity, Imogen’s insides turned to ice.

  Eve was Candy Cool. Eve was the one harassing her daughter, her daughter who was nothing but an innocent little girl. She remembered some of the terrible things that had been written on Annabel’s Facebook page: “You’ll never be as pretty as your mom.” “You’re an ugly little pig and everyone thinks so.” “I don’t know how you can stand looking in the mirror every day.”

  She tried to keep calm, but for an instant everything in the room stopped moving. Everything made horrible sense. Thoughts sliced manically through her mind. A few months ago Imogen never would have thought such a thing was possible, a grown woman bullying and verbally abusing a child. Knowing what she knew about Eve now, she knew without a doubt that it was true.

  “What a story, girls. I bet you have so many more of them to tell about Eve, but I need to track down my husband before this party gets started.” Imogen managed to extricate herself from the small scrum.

  As she walked off, Imogen pulled out her phone to send her daughter a text.

  >>>>I just want you to know I love you very much.<<<<

  A reply came through instantly. She swore the phone was actually glued to Annabel’s hand.

  >>>>Awww…I know mom <<<<

  —

  Eve couldn’t figure out how to get out of her wedding dress. The girls from the office had helped fasten the more than one hundred teensy tiny buttons up the back, but now she had to pee and she couldn’t get the thing undone. She’d thought she could do it herself, but now here she was in the gilded bathroom off the Grand Ballroom, stuck inside her dress with a very full bladder.

  “I can’t believe she married him.” “What a gold digger.” “How could she walk down that aisle?”

  Eve heard each and every thing people were saying about her. Could hear the soft cluck of their tongues hitting the roofs of their mouths to stop their gossip as soon as Eve drew near. As she approached, they morphed into gushing sycophants, congratulating her and telling her what a beautiful bride she made.

  Bitches.

  Reaching her hand behind her, she nearly grasped the top button. If only she could start there, the other buttons might come undone quite easily. She nearly had it, but the satin slid through her fingers.

  They all wanted to know why she walked down the aisle. Why didn’t she walk away when she saw the New York Post this morning? They wanted to know if she knew. They all wondered how much she knew. Of course she knew. She knew what she was getting into with Andrew from the very beginning. Christ, he asked her to dress up like a schoolgirl on their third date and spank him with his Sigma Chi fraternity paddle. She had heard it all and the truth was, she didn’t give a shit. Eve didn’t see any point in calling off the wedding. To the contrary, getting married in this city was the same as getting a job promotion. You busted your ass to get it done and then you used it to help you get to the next step, whether that next step was having a baby, getting a better apartment, increasing your social status or putting yourself in a better position for marriage number two. This marriage was an alliance. Look at Hillary. Look at Huma. Look at Silda. Eve could handle a lot. Besides, the wedding was the perfect exposure for Glossy.com. They were under a microscope right now. The sharks were circling. Something big was about to happen. Aerin Chang had come to the wedding. That had to mean something.

  Andrew was just her starter husband, the one who would catapult her to another level in New York society and business (the same thing, really). Name recognition mattered with investors and she knew she would be courting a lot of those. They’d get a divorce eventually (no kids for sure…she had already made sure of that). She could remarry again in her early thirties, probably someone else in tech. When that wedding was written up in The New York Times they would describe it as the adorable coupling of “two tech darlings.”

  Maybe she could pull the dress up from the bottom. The material was very snug around her thighs, but maybe if she crossed her legs in just the right way.

  The sound of expensive fabric tearing echoed through the marble bathroom. Sonofabitch.

  —

  Half blind with rage, Imogen sliced her way through the crowd. All around her guests continued their lighthearted gossip. Imogen watched the crowd move her as if she were in a dream. Her husband and best friend finally came into focus across the room.

  “I heard some scoop,” Bridgett said, pulling Imogen in between them and handing her a glass of pink champagne. Imogen took a sip but it tasted sour.

  Bridgett continued. “I heard from one of Eve’s Harvard B-school friends that she didn’t even flinch when she saw the story in the Post. She took it in stride, said the show must go on and ordered Andrew to deny, deny, deny to the media so she could have her picture-perfect wedding. How sick is that?”

  “I can do you one sicker.” Imogen’s face must have been drained completely of color.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?” Alex reached out a hand to steady her.

  “She’s the devil. The actual devil. She’s so much worse than I ever thought.”

  Everything in Imogen’s body, everything that made her a mother, wanted to find Eve and rip her limb from limb for what she had done to her daughter.

  “We need to get the hell out of here right now.”

  —

  When Imogen told them what Eve had done Alex wanted to call the authorities and Bridgett wanted to call Page Six. Imogen vacillated between never wanting to see Eve’s face again and wanting to smash it with something heavy. She volleyed between the options throughout the next several hours.

  Alex went to the office and his mom, “Mama Marretti,” packed up both of her grandchildren for a weekend in Queens and so Imogen found herself alone in the house on Sunday morning, stewing, plotting, pissed off. Her computer crashed just as she was about to compose a scathing email to TechBlab, exposing Eve for everything she had done.

  “Crap!” she cursed to the empty house, jabbing her index finger at the power button to coax it to reboot. A million windows popped up to let her know things hadn’t been properly shut down. Word document after Word document that had been hanging out in the background of her computer popped up. Recovered. Recovered. Recovered!!!

  What was this? ShoppitMag.doc [Recovered].

  Imogen hadn’t thought about that at all over the holidays—the ideas she had for a Shoppit magazine after her meeting with Aerin. She must not have saved the document properly. These were good. She probably should have spent more time fleshing them out, but there were nuggets of something in here. Imogen heaved a sigh and carried the laptop over to the kitchen table. She could now balance a laptop on her palm as expertly as the women in her office. What would be the harm in adding a little gloss to this proposal?

  For the next six hours, that’s what she did. It took her mind off Eve and vengeance and Glossy and a buyout. Before she knew it, Imogen had a twenty-page manifesto. This is what a digital magazine should look like. It was interactive. It was user-friendly. It inspired the reader
with words, pictures, videos and social media. It didn’t bash them over the head with BUY IT NOW captions, it merely intrigued them, encouraging them to mindfully consider making a purchase.

  She featured real women in the clothes, women of all shapes and sizes and colors. They’d do behind-the-scenes videos of all of their shoots. She could do stop-frame videos of designers actually making the clothes. She’d let the designers take over Shoppit’s Instagram and Twitter. She’d let regular readers take over too. They really could make fashion democratic. She pored over old magazines. By midnight the kitchen table was covered with tear sheets, photographs and pages of scribbled ideas—some of them lousy, but some of them quite good. Really good. Imogen hadn’t felt this kind of jittery thrill of creativity in years. She drew out pictures of the pages in pencil and then snapped them with her iPhone before copying them into a document on the computer—a Google Doc!

  But what now? Screw it. Imogen was just going to bite the bullet and send it to Aerin Chang. Time to put herself out there. Before she could talk herself out of it, she attached her memo in an email to Aerin and hit send.

  Her fingers wobbled over her phone as she debated whether to call Bridgett or Massimo to tell them what she had done when an email popped up in her in-box.

  From: Robert Mannering (RMannering@ManneringCorp.com)

  To: Imogen Tate (ITate@Glossy.com)

  Dear Imogen,

  Please attend an all-hands meeting tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

  Sincerely,

  Robert Mannering Jr.

  No one had seen the absentee chief executive of the company in the flesh for at least three years, not since he’d married an airline heiress and taken up amateur surfing on her private heart-shaped island off the coast of the Seychelles.

  Had he been around when Worthington took the buyout? Imogen hadn’t seen him.

  Was this when she got offered the buyout? Tomorrow at ten a.m.? Was this how her career in magazines would end?

  Imogen fell asleep wondering if she cared.