by Lucy Sykes
“I agree with you. Mannering thought we had to offer her something but I knew she would never take the deputy job. If it comes down to having to choose between you or her, I choose you.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Do you want me to talk to her?”
“I’d prefer to handle it.”
Imogen could hear her phone buzzing on the table. “I hate to be rude, but could we pick up this discussion this afternoon? I need to take care of something downstairs.”
Even as she played out terrible things she wanted to do to Eve, a sense of calm crept over her. It was the calmest she had felt in a long time, the calmest she had felt since she learned about the cancer and definitely the calmest she had felt since coming back to work.
She had a text from Rashid.
>>>>Mission accomplished. I’m in Eve’s Twitter. Give me more instructions.<<<<
Things changed, but she could alter her original plan. She thought for a second and typed a few lines back to him, telling him exactly what she needed him to do.
When Imogen arrived downstairs, Eve was standing at her desk, her headset nested in her curls, furiously shouting to someone on the other end.
Standing in the door to her office, Imogen called out to her.
“Eve. Get in my office. Now.”
Her tone finally alerted the girl that it was time to listen to authority. Eve murmured into the mouthpiece of her headset before removing it from her head altogether. She walked slowly to Imogen’s office.
Imogen sat in her desk chair, the one Eve had twirled so capriciously in just months earlier.
Eve strode in, reeking of insolence. Imogen took a deep look at the girl. Her shoulders were thrown back, turning her body into a parenthesis. Her eyes narrowed into mean slits. One of her eyebrows arched slightly more than the other, giving her a perpetually sinister look.
“That’s bullshit what happened up there,” Eve spat, digging the heels of her hands into the edge of Imogen’s desk and leaning over it like a cobra ready to strike.
Eve unleashed her tirade. “What the hell do you know about running a website? Nothing. I should be the one in charge over at Shoppit. You didn’t even go to college. I went to fucking Harvard!”
Imogen stood tall and raised her hand to cut her off.
“Shut your mouth for once, Eve.” God, she would love to place her own hand over Eve’s mouth and shush her. “Sit down,” Imogen commanded, before she continued. Again, Eve did as she was told. Still glaring at Imogen, she perched on the edge of the couch.
“I am going to say this exactly once and after I say it, I never want to see you again. You’re nothing but a nasty, jealous bully. I know that you’re Candy Cool, Eve. I know that you have been harassing my daughter. You’re a sick and evil bitch, and I don’t know if you will ever recover from that. I think you sold your soul a long time ago. I think that’s the reason you walked down the aisle to marry a man you don’t love. I know you came back to Glossy to take my job, not to work with me. But you’re nothing but a cheap knockoff.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.” Eve bared her teeth at Imogen, crossing her arms in front of her chest. Fury raged in her eyes and again Imogen was reminded of Nutkin. This time, she wouldn’t allow Eve the opportunity to slaughter any more lambs.
“You don’t. But you will,” Imogen said.
Eve believed she was invincible, that she would never be caught. Imogen imagined she had felt the exact same way up until the moment that she was found out for tampering with those prom queen ballots so long ago.
“You are an evil genius, Eve. You’re smarter than me in so many ways. You understand tech in a way that I never will. But you forced me to learn. For that, I suppose I have to be grateful. No. I am grateful. I’ll have a second act now. And you will too…but not at Glossy and not in New York City. You will never work in the fashion industry again, Eve. I don’t want you as my deputy and I don’t want you in this business. Go to Silicon Valley. Go to Silicon Beach. Create a Silicon something of your own back in Wisconsin. I don’t care. Plenty of people would die to hire you on the other side of the country. I never want to see your face on this coast again. Stay away from me, stay away from my family and stay the hell away from my magazine.”
Eve’s jaw nearly touched the floor.
In an instant, her expression changed into that of a little girl being chastised by her mother. She slumped back into the couch and rounded her shoulders. Her voice was quieter. “I only did it to upset you. I didn’t mean to hurt Annabel. It was just a way to hurt you.” Imogen held up her hand again. She didn’t want to hear it. Any of it. Of course Eve would think of some excuse for torturing a ten-year-old girl.
Imogen remained silent.
Eve was defensive, almost frightened. “So what are you going to do now? Are you going to go out there and expose me? Tell everyone what I did?”
Eve’s phone pinged with an alert. “What the fuck?”
Imogen smiled. “What, Eve?”
“I didn’t tweet that!”
Imogen glanced at the Twitter feed on her own computer.
GlossyEve: A fond farewell to Glossy and #NYC. I’m about to embark on a new adventure. C’est la vie!
Rashid worked fast. Now that it was tweeted to the world, there was no going back.
Eve’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t tweet that,” she said again through gritted teeth.
Imogen feigned surprise. “Well, then. I wonder who did.”
She rose and walked over to her office door to pull it open, gesturing for Eve to stand and walk out.
Eve repeated herself as she inched out of the office. “Are you going to tell everyone what I did?”
“No, Eve. No, I’m not going to tell everyone what you did. It isn’t all about you, Eve.”
<<< EPILOGUE >>>
Who Said Magazines Were Dead?
Shoppit Shakes Up Fashion Industry with Unveiling of New Glossy Magazine (YES, A MAGAZINE!)
By Addison Cao
August 1, 2016
And they said it couldn’t be done! The e-commerce newbie Shoppit unveiled their first issue of Glossy magazine this week after acquiring the editorial brand for a hefty price tag in January.
The first cover featured the stunning supermodel Chanel Iman, wearing Google Glass and a Balenciaga gown. The new magazine is expected to publish four times a year while the website updates daily with editorial, photo and video content. Artistic Director Imogen Tate said she expects the margins on the new product to exceed expectations in the first quarter.
“We still have the traditional advertisers that have always been loyal to print, but we are able to do incredible things online with native advertising and by driving traffic to our retail partners at Shoppit,” Ms. Tate told us at the wedding of the baby-faced tech mogul Rashid Davis to super celebrity stylist Bridgett Hart, who is seven months pregnant. The extravagant affair took place on Richard Branson’s private Necker Island.
The magazine had a bumpy road over the past twelve months. While under the ownership of Robert Mannering Corp., Glossy was shuttered and turned into a website and an app, run mostly by Editorial Director Eve Morton, who was notoriously wicked to her staff. Ms. Morton left the company after its acquisition by Shoppit and is currently working underneath (ha!) Buzz CEO Reed Baxter as his director of external sales. Ms. Morton recently split from incarcerated Congressman Andrew “I’ve Been Naughty” Maxwell. A little birdie told us Eve may be the reason Baxter and Meadow Flowers called off their Game of Thrones–themed nuptials last month.
Ms. Tate’s former assistant and Glossy community manager Ashley Arnsdale (you know, the one whose outfits always end up on the street-style blogs looking GORGEOUS) is reportedly working on a top-secret project for Shoppit involving vintage clothing.
Following her toast at the reception for Ms. Hart and Mr. Davis, Imogen Tate told us she welcomes this new age of digital-print partnership.
“The world isn’t ready to abandon print,” she said, raising her champagne glass into the air. Adding, with a laugh, “Plus, the Internet allows me to work remotely half the time, which is a bonus.” Ms. Tate and her family are currently splitting their time between an apartment in TriBeCa and a home they are renovating in the Garden District of New Orleans.
Ms. Tate will be giving a TED Talk next month titled “Don’t Call Me a Dinosaur: Embracing a New Era.”
Sitting on her wraparound porch, a balmy summer breeze smelling of magnolias, Imogen Tate read the story with a satisfied smile and clicked her laptop shut.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From Lucy to Jo: Thank you, Jo Piazza, for showing me how to work my iPad and being a complete joy to work with and for being a great friend and Fit Bitch who inspires me constantly.
From Jo to Lucy: Thank you, dear Imogen…I mean Lucy, for all of your wonderful ideas, your limitless creativity, your contagious passion and your inspiring use of emoji.
We have an entire village of incredible people to thank for helping take this book from a nugget of an idea to the store shelves. Thank you, Luke “Gamechanger!” Janklow, for seeing the vision before anyone else did. Thank you, Alexandra Machinist, for being the best damn superagent a first-time author could have hoped for. We could not have done this without our incredibly talented editor, the constant optimist, Jennifer Jackson. Your liner notes are one of our favorite things to Instagram. Will Heyward deserves a halo and a cocktail for dealing with all of our handwritten edits. We are so lucky to have Maxine Hitchcock and the whole Penguin team in the United Kingdom on our side. You make us feel like rock stars even when we are having a bad hair day.
Thank you, Francesco Clark, for always making us want to be better.
Neither of us could have made this writing partnership happen without the constant support of Chloe, the greatest, most tech-savvy nanny on the planet (and the inspiration for the inimitable Tilly).
Plum Sykes, Tom Sykes, Alice Sykes, Valerie Sykes, Fred Sykes, Josh Sykes, Alastair and Annalisa Rellie, Jemima Rellie, Katie Dance, Lucasta and Kevin Cummings, we would not be writing these acknowledgments without you. Euan Rellie, you win two awards: best husband and best book promoter ever.
The support of The Li.st cannot be quantified. You helped us both believe that we have a future in this brave new world of technology.
Thank you to all of our supportive friends, mentors and inspirations (both online and in real life):
Maxi Sloss, Sandra Ellis, Charlotte Clark, Sara Costello, Claude Kaplan, Lenore and Sean Mahoney, Gin Boswick, Podo, Lucy Guinness, Kara Liotte, Ben Widdicombe, Colleen Curtis, Glynnis MacNicol, Allison Gandolfo, Leah Chernikoff, Tracy Taylor, Toby Young, Amanda Foreman, Mary Alice Stephenson, Amanda Ross, Ann Caruso, Lloyd Nathan, Betsy Rhodes, Donald Robertson, Jennifer Sharp, Mary Shanahan, Paul Cavaco, Paula Froelich, Jaclyn Boschetti, Pamela Fiori, Glenda Bailey, Rachel Sklar, Bob Morris, Hailey Lustig, Jane Friedman, Natalie Massenet, Tristan Skylar, Dee Poku, Patrick Demarchelier, Pamela Henson, Oberto Gili, Ted Gibson, Cynthia Rowley, Christian Louboutin, Vera Wang, Michael Davies, Thom Browne, Bart Baldwin, Zac Posen and Grace Chang.
Thank you to Flybarre and our trainer (yes, we share one) Emily Cook Harris for the exercise highs that kept us going on countless yummy brunches together at Café Cluny.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS
LUCY SYKES has worked in the fashion world as a stylist, fashion editor and fashion director. For six years she was the fashion director at Marie Claire, and was most recently fashion director for Rent the Runway. Her children’s clothing line, Lucy Sykes New York, was sold in more than one hundred department stores worldwide, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman and Nordstrom. Together with her twin sister Plum, she moved from London to New York City in 1997, where she now lives with her husband and two children.
JO PIAZZA is the managing editor of Yahoo Travel and a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York, Glamour, Gotham, the Daily Beast, and Slate. She is the author of Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money, If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission, and a novel, Love Rehab: A Novel in Twelve Steps. She lives in New York City with her giant dog.