by Lucy Sykes
—
The next morning, all the way to the office, Imogen replayed over and over in her head what she would say to Eve. She would confront her with everything she knew and then she would submit her resignation to Robert Mannering Jr., or he would fire her. Either way, with Eve she would get the last word.
Imogen rushed toward the elevator right as the doors were closing. A delicate ivory hand reached out to hold the doors open for her. Aerin Chang looked up, startled to see that it was Imogen walking into the elevator. The Shoppit CEO tucked both sides of her dark hair behind her tiny ears.
“What are you doing here?” Imogen said. “Did you get the email I sent last night?”
Aerin paused. “I did. I was about to email you back, but things got so rushed this morning.” Imogen realized that the girl didn’t answer her first question.
“Why are you here?” Imogen repeated it.
It was obvious that Aerin was trying to choose her words carefully.
“I have a meeting here with Rob Mannering.” Aerin’s face was blank.
With a startling clarity, Imogen realized the reason Aerin was there.
“Is this about the Glossy sale?”
The elevator doors opened onto a nondescript floor beneath the Glossy offices, a floor that housed Sales, Accounting and Human Resources. Aerin began to step out of the elevator.
“Imogen. I can’t talk about it right this second. I want to talk about it with you. I want to talk to you about your email last night. I want to talk to you about everything.”
The doors closed on her words and Imogen continued up another three floors.
Imogen had never doubted her own judgment of character, at least not until Eve came back. Eve made her question her ability to read people and their motivations. She’d had such a good feeling about Aerin Chang from the moment she started following her on Instagram, and it was only solidified when they met in person. She seemed so genuine. In hindsight, Eve had never been genuine, just eager, and her eagerness masked the naked ambition that was revealed once she was in a position with a modicum of power.
Mannering had sold Glossy to Shoppit. Imogen knew it. That was the meeting.
Maybe they weren’t going to fire her. She knew Aerin Chang wanted to work with her. But still, could she stomach working with Eve for a single day more? She would endure the same torture from that horrible girl no matter who owned the company. The sale was a good thing for Glossy. Of that, Imogen was sure. Aerin was a solid executive with a great head on her shoulders and an incredible eye. But Ron had been right. She needed to make a choice. She wanted Eve out of her life. She would congratulate Aerin on the sale and take the buyout.
Imogen scanned the office, looking for Eve, wanting to confront her before the big meeting. She needed to get it over with.
Her anger surfaced as, across the room, she saw the girl applying a fresh coat of bright red lipstick and pouting at herself into her iPhone camera. Around her neck, the very same shade as her lips, was the red Hermès scarf Imogen gave her two years earlier when she left for business school.
Breathe. She had to remember to breathe.
Ashley cut her off before she could reach Eve.
“I need your help.” She was more frantic than usual.
“Ashley, can we talk about it in a little bit?”
“No. I need you now.” She pulled Imogen into her office. “The commenters on the site got nasty after Eve’s wedding. I don’t want to talk to her about it. Because you know. It was her wedding, but I need you to help me shut it down.”
“I have no idea how to even start doing that.”
“Me neither. It’s sooooo bad.”
Imogen didn’t bother to ask Ashley what “sooooo bad” meant. She took a look for herself.
That is the saddest white girl dance to Beyoncé I have ever seen. Those girls look like they’d rather be in prison!
Could the entire wedding party be any thinner? Gross!
I see a toddler in the corner. Did the groom bring a date?
DESPERATE!
I don’t want to BUY ANY of this NOW. I want to forget I saw it.
The bride scares me…STEPFORD!
Imogen glanced down at her watch. She had ten minutes. “Let me make a quick phone call and see what I can do.” As she sank into her chair, she thought about doing nothing at all. Let them skewer Eve for the witch she was. She deserved it. Let the Glossy site be covered in hate mail. She’d be gone in a couple of hours anyway.
But she couldn’t. This was her magazine, until someone told her it wasn’t. She had pride.
Rashid answered on the first ring.
“Hello, beautiful.”
“Can you help me with something a bit technical?”
“Of course.”
“I need to shut off the comments on all blog posts about Eve’s wedding.”
He considered for a second. “What CMS are you using?”
Imogen surprised herself that she knew the answer to that question right off the bat.
“It’s based on WordPress.”
“Oh, easy then. Go into the back end of the system and click on the posts that are getting the comments.” Imogen did as she was told. “There should be a drop-down box that will let you see all of the options. You can just hide comments.”
It was so simple. Yet this was something Imogen never could have done three months earlier. She breathed a sigh of relief that it was something she could do now. She switched off the comments and pushed her chair back from her desk.
“Rashid…one more thing? How hard is it to hack into someone’s Twitter account?”
“For a regular person?”
“For you?”
“Easy. Unethical, but easy. You want into Eve’s account?”
“I might.”
“Anything for you, Imogen.” The plan wasn’t fully formed yet. She had to go to this meeting. Then she would deal with Eve and Candy Cool.
Eve had already vacated her corner. Deliberately, Imogen walked over to Ashley.
“Thank you,” she whispered in her ear.
“For what?” Ashley’s wide eyes were confused.
“For everything since I’ve been back. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
The girl blushed. “That’s my job. I’m here to help.”
“I know you are, darling. But you’re here to do more than that too. Make sure that people appreciate that.” Tears threatened to smear Ashley’s perfectly smudged smoky eye.
Imogen leaned in to hug her.
“Mr. Worthington was right,” Ashley said into Imogen’s shoulder. “About what?”
“When he was leaving he told me to try to spend as much time with you as I could. He said I should try to be more like you when I grow up.”
Imogen smiled at her old boss’s compliment.
“I think you are quite grown-up already.”
Imogen’s phone pinged with an incoming email.
From: Eve Morton ([email protected])
To: [email protected]
Please join me in the conference room in an hour to celebrate my big promotion with me. We also have a HUGE announcement about the magazine!!!! We’re about to be BIG-TIME LADIES!
It’s a Good, Great, Gorgeous, GLOSSY! Day!!!
Eve
—
The ecru walls of the hallway leading to the large executive conference room were lined with enlarged magazine covers throughout the history of Robert Mannering Corp. There was Sporting, Chic, Business Watch, Beautiful Homes, Yacht Enthusiast and, finally, Glossy. Early issues of the fashion magazine had beautifully illustrated covers of prettily coifed twentysomething housewives in tea-length dresses and hats. Then came the photographs, growing edgier and sexier as the years went on. So much more skin. Just steps before the doors to the conference room the covers stopped. They were out of room. It made Imogen laugh. How do you put a website on a wall?
/> Inside the bright and airy meeting room, Robert Mannering’s eleven gray-haired board members congregated around the mahogany table, furiously typing away on BlackBerrys. Bridgett liked to joke that it was executives in their sixties who were keeping BlackBerry in business. Imogen glanced longingly at their easy-to-type-on keyboards. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls and on a clear day the view stretched out to Coney Island and the Atlantic Ocean beyond it.
Aerin Chang sat at one end of the table. Robert Mannering Jr. at the other. Unfortunately, the only empty seat at the table was right next to Eve, who wore a smug smile on her wide face. She had no doubt this was her moment to shine.
Imogen kept a proud expression on her own face as she walked toward the empty executive-style high-backed leather chair. Lowering herself into it, she felt something prick her derriere. She glanced down, trying not to betray anything to the room, to see Eve’s plastic dinosaur on her chair.
“Rarrrr,” Eve mouthed, her lips red and swollen with collagen. Raising her lacquered blue nails like claws, she was more reptilian than the toy.
Did anyone else see that?
Two could play at that game. Imogen put the plastic animal on the table in front of her. She was older than Eve. So what? She owned it. Eve’s immaturity was comical at this point. Imogen placed her hand on her knee to keep her leg from bouncing up and down.
As she sat, Aerin stood, appearing cool and in control in a skinny Thom Browne pantsuit with just the faintest pinstripes. She tucked her hair behind her ears and sucked in a deep breath before smiling directly at Imogen.
“Imogen, I’m so happy you made it. I wasn’t going to start until you got here.”
Mannering Jr. stood too then. His face was sunburned, as though they’d pulled him, reluctantly, into the boardroom from the beach. He looked lazily over at Imogen. “Heya, Imogen. Good to see you.” One by one, the board members turned their eyes away from their phones when Robert began talking.
“First, I know that I don’t need to say this, but I will anyway,” the chief executive said, tugging at his tie uncomfortably like it was a collar someone fastened too tightly. “What I’m about to tell you must remain in this room and completely confidential until we make a statement to the press.” Everyone made a big show of turning off their devices.
Eve stared only at Imogen, who could see her stroking the red scarf out of the corner of her eye.
“I want to thank everyone in this room for being so discreet as we worked on what I’m so happy to announce is the biggest sale Robert Mannering has ever completed. I don’t need to mince words here. We have sold the brand-new Glossy platform to emerging Internet giant Shoppit for the price of two hundred ninety million dollars.”
Mannering smiled and nodded like a pageant queen while his audience made a show of polite golf claps.
With that, he sank back into his chair. His work was finished and the check was probably already in the bank.
A lithe young man with jet-black hair, Mannering’s assistant perhaps, in a fine black suit and glasses that covered too much of his face, glided into the room with a silver tray of fresh doughnuts.
“They’re still warm,” he told the assembled crowd, as if they were the kind of people who regularly consumed these kinds of snacks in meetings. Their warm doughy scent kissed Imogen’s nostrils, reminding her of Café Du Monde. New Orleans could still be an option. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
Aerin smiled expertly and took control of the meeting. “Thank you for having me here. I know that this might not seem like a traditional media acquisition to you. I’ve had my eye on this for a while now. I’d been thinking about it even before Eve Morton changed the format of Glossy.” She left her seat and strolled around the room, forcing the board to swivel their heads to face her as she walked along the wall of windows, the wide expanse of Manhattan at her feet.
“I’m a fan of magazines.” Aerin threw up her hands. “Love ’em. Most of you know that. I love print magazines. I love digital magazines too.”
She walked toward a shelf in the corner that displayed copies of all the Mannering publications and pulled the very last copy of Glossy they’d printed. Aerin ran her hand over the shiny cover.
“They can live together. My vision is to integrate Glossy’s incredible voice across all of Shoppit’s platforms. I want our editorial to come to life online the way it does in a magazine.” She paused and took another step, now directly across the table from Imogen.
“Additionally, I want to bring Glossy back to print. We probably won’t do twelve times a year right off the bat, but we will produce a beautifully edited print magazine four months out of the year as a companion to the editorial on Shoppit’s site. For women, the print experience is very unique. We shouldn’t do the same thing in digital we do in print. Keeping it separate but equal will keep things fresh.”
It hadn’t been what Imogen was expecting to hear by a long shot. Glossy back in print? She knew that Aerin had chosen to stand in that exact spot so that she could see Imogen’s expression when she revealed her plan. Imogen tilted her head to the side and made a small curtsy with her hand to tell Aerin it was all right to continue. Eve cleared her throat, her mouth twitching, and she made a noise as if she wanted to interrupt, but Aerin plowed forward.
“And now I want to introduce the team that I’ve painstakingly chosen to lead this huge endeavor for my company. We’re taking a very large and very expensive gamble on this and I need to have the very best people working with me.”
Eve grew taller in her chair next to Imogen, looking sideways at her, smirking. Shoppit was a tech company. Of course Eve would have a major role, perhaps even one above Imogen. That was the reason Imogen knew she couldn’t possibly stay on. It would be hard to tell Aerin that they wouldn’t be working together.
Aerin gestured to the middle of the table, where there was a plain manila envelope. “Imogen, we have an offer for you in there. I would love if you would look it over before I keep talking?” What was this? As Imogen reached across the tabletop to pick up the envelope, Eve’s eyes darted around, looking for a second envelope.
Imogen slid a nail beneath the metal prongs and pulled out a stack of contracts with an offer letter on the top. She could see Aerin Chang’s signature, bold and curvy on the bottom of the page.
This couldn’t be right.
“Imogen Tate, we would be thrilled to offer you the position of artistic director of Shoppit. When the board asked for my opinion on this I told them that there is no other person in the industry with your eye and the respect of your peers. If you accept, you’ll be leading the charge on a new generation of Glossy and overseeing the launch of all our other editorial properties and our portfolio of platforms.”
Eve’s and Imogen’s jaws dropped in unison. If they were in a cartoon, steam would have blown out of Eve’s ears.
Nothing but professional, Aerin didn’t let the temperature of the room faze her.
“Eve Morton will be working directly underneath Imogen Tate. She will be given the title of deputy editor.” Aerin looked over at Eve. Did she expect her to be pleased by the news? Deputy editor was still a big job. It was a huge job for someone who’d been an assistant less than three years earlier. But no one knew better than Imogen that it wasn’t big enough for Eve. A vein throbbed at Eve’s temple as Aerin clicked a button in her hand so that a slide appeared on a screen behind her.
It was one of the pages Imogen sent through the night before.
“The new Glossy is about fashion and the real woman. Designers no longer live in their ivory towers, and fashion magazines can’t either,” Aerin asserted. “The new Glossy will be completely interactive. The reader can enjoy it anywhere. In print, on their phone, on their tablet or on their computer. Imogen Tate is the woman who will help us make the magazine of the future.”
Making a noise between a grunt and a snort, Eve pushed her seat back from the table. She paused for just a momen
t and stared down at Imogen, then, without a word, stalked out of the room.
Aerin continued on to name a team of new business development folks from Shoppit who would be working to bring native advertising to the digital version of Glossy. She then turned to Imogen.
“Imogen, I trust you can build a staff of top-notch editorial folks to get us back up and running. I’m sure you have some people already in mind.” She smiled warmly at her. Imogen tried to smile back. She hadn’t expected any of this.
She nodded. “I do.”
“Great.” Aerin looked over at another woman dressed all in black.
“Sara will prepare a press release to go out this afternoon.”
Aerin sat, signaling that the meeting was through, but rose again as Imogen got out of her seat. The two women drifted into the corner of the room and out of earshot, as the other executives filed out, patting themselves on the back to celebrate what the sale would do for the company’s plummeting stock price.
Imogen wanted to hug Aerin but extended her hand instead.
“I underestimated you. When I heard that Shoppit was going to buy this magazine, I thought that I was done for. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I wish I could have been up front with you about this sale from the very beginning.”
Imogen shook her head. “I understand. I really do. What was our meeting all about?”
Aerin smiled. “I wanted to know if you were really the Imogen Tate I imagined. I wanted to know if you were up for a challenge and for this kind of job.”
Imogen nodded. “I have a lot to learn, but I am.”
“It’s fine. We’ll teach you. And you will teach us how to run a magazine. I should let you know about one of the perks of working for a technology company.”
“The macarons?” Imogen said, raising an eyebrow.
“Nope. The technology. We make it easy for you to work from almost anywhere. We have people who do their jobs pretty much all over the world.”
She wanted the job. But she needed to be very up front with Aerin. “I won’t work with Eve.”
For a minute, Imogen thought she saw Aerin turn a slight shade of red.