by Leigh Stein
“Say that again?”
Serious question @ 28 weeks, one forum headline read. I was 100 pounds when I got pregnant and I’m 113 now. Dr. says this is normal, but do I look huge in this pic? Be honest!
I took a screenshot for Maren. Richual was missing out on this market segment.
Adam was on his hands and knees, fixing a wobbly leg on my desk with the Swiss army knife he carried in his pocket. The marketing girls and I watched from above.
“What else can he do?” one of the girls—Marisa—asked.
“He builds tiny houses,” I told her, just to watch her jaw fall. She took out her phone.
“Is it okay if I take a picture of this for our main channel?”
Adam said sure. But then Marisa’s face darkened.
“Oh no,” she said. “Look.” She opened a new tab on my computer and showed me the headline: “Women’s Empowerment Summit Interrupted by Protestors Who Demand Justice for Victims of Richual Founder.”
“That’s not even right,” I said. “Evan’s an investor, not a founder.”
We all watched a nine-second video of Devin’s face crumpling like a paper bag. I felt mortified on her behalf. I nudged Marisa out of the way so I could sit at the steering wheel of my own vehicle. Who were the protestors? “A crowd of women in coordinated outfits and masks,” it said. Adam was still underneath the desk, looking up at me, confused. In another window, I looked at the live tracking of our user stats. They were dropping precipitously. We were getting dozens of account deactivations a minute.
“Find Katelyn,” I told Marisa. “She has to demand a correction.”
“She’s not here.”
“That’s why I said find her,” I snapped.
I clicked through the slideshow attached to the article. There was Arianna Tran making Devin laugh in a wingback chair. There was a white woman seated in the front row smiling with tears in her eyes, her hands clasped over her heart. Then I saw the masked activists. I kept clicking as their masks melted off their faces. I recognized two of them right away from their profile photos on Slack. NicoletteLee and Aja_dontgothere. Shit. There was our intern Diana. There was a woman who looked just like Gili nursing a baby.
Well that was an absolute nightmare , Maren texted. I’m sure you saw.
I signed into the Stay Woke, Y’all Slack channel. I hadn’t checked it since the news broke about Evan—it didn’t seem like a very high priority, but what I’d missed was all their planning. As I scrolled, I pieced it together. Once the Richual press release went out in Evan’s defense, all the New York–based users decided how they would take us down. Diana rose to the challenge of matching their outrage word for word. I will not have my labor further exploited by a company funded by a sexual predator and led by his sycophant, she wrote. First they would disrupt the conference and confront the sycophant directly. The_s_is_silent couldn’t be there in person, but she came up with the idea of wearing sheet masks. Diana would bring the towels she knew were in Devin’s office. Then, using all the viral media footage of the disruption, they would call for a massive wave of user cancelations.
I had to make sure Maren never found out about the Slack channel.
I saw , I texted her. Holy shit.
Now what? Should I express my condolences, ask if there was anything I could do? I couldn’t post anything publicly in defense of Devin or Richual or Evan, not until I found out what our official line was. I did what Devin would have done: to the internet, I pretended nothing was wrong.
“You okay?” Adam asked. “Can I get you a snack?”
“Stay there,” I told him, and snapped a picture of him holding the screwdriver. Work work work work work, I wrote in the caption.
Could you do me a favor, Maren said, and ask Diana to go to the summit and get Devin’s bag? It’s in the green room it has her phone.
But Diana was no longer with us. She’d emailed her letter of resignation. I screenshotted it for Maren.
Hey y’all,
I will not have my labor further exploited by a company funded by a sexual predator and led by his sycophant. I acknowledge my privilege in that my parents have been paying my rent and living expenses during my internship so that if I quit, I will not be homeless. (Also, FYI my dad is a lawyer, just in case you were thinking of pressing charges for borrowing the towels. Think again!) For the sake of my future in the job market, I cannot have my personal brand associated with Richual. I want to give a shout-out to Khadijah, who has been a really great boss who literally supported my growth. Now I’m deleting my account. If you want to stay in touch, find me on Insta.
Oh FFS. Can you ask Chloe?
Chloe has Lyme disease.
Right now?
That’s what she said. She’s not here. I’ll go.
What would I do without you!!!!
In the Uber, I rolled down my window. The freezing air was like a caffeine injection, a buzz that gave me the illusion I could do this. “I think I should tell her that I’m pregnant now. Today. With you there,” I told Adam. I had to deflect attention from what had happened at the conference and how much I knew about the behind-the-scenes plotting. If Maren was going to yell at me, I preferred she do it over my pregnancy rather than my negligence. Had she seen what was happening to our user numbers? I didn’t want to know.
Adam smiled nervously. He was staring out the other window, tapping a rhythm on his thigh to a song I didn’t recognize, possibly by Phish.
“You’re freaking out,” I said. “I need you to keep it together.”
“I’m just worried about whether this level of stress is healthy for you and the baby.”
“What are my options here?”
“What if you got a different job?”
I posed in my seat, one hand on my belly and the other behind my head like a mermaid. “Maternity model?”
I waited for Adam to say he would get a different job, but that wasn’t the plan. Next month, we were getting an apartment together. After the baby came, he would be the primary caregiver, the Brooklyn dad in the BabyBjörn, and I would go back to work. I couldn’t leave Richual. I had to stick it out for at least another three years, until my shares fully vested.
When Maren opened the door, she was barefoot, backlit by the sun flooding Devin’s palatial open-plan apartment, which was more like a photography studio than a place where anyone actually lived. At her side, she held an open bottle of wine.
“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to ground zero. Please come in.”
“This is my boyfriend, Adam.”
“Nice to finally meet you,” he said, reaching out a hand and then retracting it when he saw her beige wrist braces. “I came down last night to go to Khadijah’s doctor appointment.”
“Came down from where?”
“Dutchess County.”
“How lovely that you have a home up there,” Maren said, in a weird British accent. “It must be so nice to be able to escape the city, get away.”
“It’s not really my home. I’m actually helping a friend who—”
“Do you have the bag?” Maren whispered. “Devin’s napping, but I’m going to hold her thumb up to the phone and unlock it. Do you think that will work?”
“Actually, there’s something we wanted to tell you,” Adam said, gripping my hand. Thank you, I thought, and squeezed back.
Maren looked at Adam’s face, as if registering his features for the first time, and then at mine, putting them together.
“You’re getting married! I’m so happy.” She didn’t look happy at all. “I have my license from the Universal Life Church if you need an officiant. It would be my honor. Let’s put a pin in this and pick it up later. Cheers.” She held the bottle out to us and then brought it to her lips, but it was empty.
“No,” I said. She never listened. What made me think she would lis
ten now? After all the mornings I came in early, all the nights I worked late, all the texts and emails I responded to on weekends because Adam was away so what else did I have to fill my time with but work, all the editorial content I put together for Cervical Health Awareness Month and National Endometriosis Awareness Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month, all the staff photo shoots, where I sat front and center, smiling, the token black girl (everyone called each other babe: Thanks, babe; no problem, babe; really sorry, babe, but I was only ever Khadijah)—Maren used me when she needed me and I was supposed to be grateful for the opportunity. I wasn’t negligent. I was overworked.
I held Devin’s purse hostage.
“Maren, I’m pregnant,” I said. I stood up as tall as I could. “This is good news for you. It gives the company the chance to institute a progressive paid parental leave policy. It’s good PR. It’s also the perfect time to create a self-care content vertical specifically for prenatal and postpartum millennials, which has so far been an untapped audience segment for us.”
She held one hand to her forehead, massaging her temples. I couldn’t tell if she was looking down at the floor or if she was looking for the bump underneath my coat, so I took it off. “My due date is in July. I’m asking for six weeks of maternity leave and another six weeks part-time after that.”
“You’re pregnant,” she repeated.
“She’s pregnant,” Adam said.
“Khadijah, I’m surprised you think it’s okay to just leave me like this.”
I was seized by a cold chill.
“I’m not leaving,” I said. “Not until July. And then I’ll be back. Adam is going to be the primary caregiver. I believe in Richual. I believe in the work we’re doing.” Stop talking, I thought. You’re making it worse.
“You’re telling me this now? The day I learn that Devin is one of Evan’s victims?” Her voice dropped to a hiss.
“To be fair,” Adam said, looking at me, “she wanted to tell you sooner, but it never seemed like the right time.”
“I would appreciate if you didn’t mansplain to me in this situation.”
“Wait,” I said. “Devin is one of Evan’s victims?”
“Yes and I think it’s time for her to break her silence.”
Before I could respond, Adam set Devin’s bag down gently on the kitchen counter. “Great meeting you,” he said, steering me out the door before Maren could suck me back into her vortex.
Devin
Arianna’s lip is bleeding. I can see the blood on her front teeth. I should tell her. I should tell her that there is blood on her teeth. I don’t want her to be embarrassed. I would want someone to tell me. Why didn’t she moisturize her lips? I take one finger and put it in my own mouth, rub it along my top teeth, the way my mom used to, but Arianna isn’t looking at me—she’s giving a tinkly finger wave and scrunching her nose at someone she recognizes in the audience.
Then she grabs a phone from one of the masked women and starts recording a video. “It’s so hard to say this,” she says. “But I’m not going to hide it any longer. I won’t be complicit. Devin was abused. Devin is a victim. I’m going to ask the Richual community to come together to support her during this difficult time.”
When Arianna turns to look at me, her face has melted into my mom’s face. Two streams of blood are running from her nostrils into her mouth.
“Evan touched me, too,” she says to me. “He touched me when I was dead.” She takes my hands and puts them on her breasts.
I woke up in bed in the dark, groggy from my nap, a sour taste in my mouth. “Maren?” I yelled.
The sound of her voice, speaking to someone in the living room.
“Who’s here?”
“Just me,” she called back. The daylight was gone. I turned on the lamp on the nightstand, which was covered in dust and Starburst wrappers, a bottle of Kiehl’s self-tanner that had leaked onto my copy of The Clarity Cleanse, and my Fitbit charger.
She brought me my phone in bed. “Khadijah picked it up. I didn’t try to unlock your password or anything.”
I had thirty-eight missed text messages, mostly from Katelyn. I scrolled for Evan’s name. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not even a You ok? No Call me if you need me. I’d defended him, hadn’t I? I was sure he would text me later that night. He would offer to come over and this time we could talk. Really talk. I wanted to hear him say, I’m worried about you. It was my turn for sympathy. With my camera on selfie mode, I assessed the damage: my face was sleep-creased, my eyes bloodshot, my hair ratty and tangled, my eyeliner surprisingly intact. In low light, I looked like I’d just been fucked.
“Should I offer to bring you a sheet mask in bed?”
“Very funny,” I said. I remembered why my mouth tasted like puke.
“Have you ever seen Evan’s mask?”
“Evan’s ‘mask’?”
“It’s something I found at his house.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. I didn’t want to know what Maren knew that I didn’t.
“On one side it says—”
“Don’t tell me, I said.”
“—‘fuck’ and on the other it says ‘sleep.’”
Yes, I’d seen the mask. I had the same one in my nightstand. It was from Kiki de Montparnasse and cost $195. “So what?” I said, getting out of bed. My blouse was glued to my torso with sweat. At some point I’d taken off my pants.
“It just seems like he has a hard time distinguishing the difference between those two . . . states of being,” Maren said.
“That’s his thing,” I said. “His Sleeping Beauty thing. I don’t ask you about your sex life.”
“I don’t have a sex life. I have Zoloft.”
I went to scrape my tongue in the bathroom and then drank a glass of room-temperature filtered water. If Evan would just text me, I could ask her to leave. I started tapping the energy meridian points on my face using the Emotional Freedom Technique. “Even though I have to appear perfect to survive,” I whispered, “I deeply and completely accept myself. Even though I have to appear perfect to survive, I deeply—”
My phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number with a 212 area code.
“Hello? Evan?”
“Devin? Hey! It’s Clem from Dragg and Dropp. I was at the summit this morning?” Her voice was rushed, breathless.
“Thank you so much for your concern, but I really can’t talk right now.”
“My crew got some incredible footage of your fireside chat that we can use for the pilot episode of Stay Woke, Y’all. In-cred-i-ble. It was such a visceral moment. I’m sure you felt that as well. We got a few interviews on-camera with Richual users who were at the event about the beach towel reveal and what it meant to them.”
“What it meant to them?”
“What it means to live in a world where even women don’t believe other women. This isn’t even about Evan anymore, you have to understand that; it’s about the culture. You don’t know how to get in touch with Khadijah, do you? She hasn’t responded to my last two emails. I need access to the Slack channel.”
Maren was standing across from me at the kitchen island, mouthing, Who is it?
“No,” I told Clementine. “I don’t.” And then I hung up.
My cofounder, my work wife, my business bestie was staring at me with total pity. Maren would always be stronger than me. It had something to do with where she came from, and what she’d overcome, growing up on the kind of food they sold at Walmart. She was solid as a punching bag. She wasn’t desperately checking her phone for messages that said she mattered to someone, someone who would notice if she dropped dead. She could exist without validation. It was true what she said: I had a wine fridge, a monthly unlimited subscription to Pheel, an apartment that she would never be able to afford, not even to rent. So why was I so alone? Why didn’t anyone want to share it with me?
> “I quit,” I told Maren. “You can have Richual. You can be CEO. I can’t do it anymore.”
“You can’t quit,” she sighed.
“Yes, I can. I’ll go on a silent vipassana meditation retreat.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll . . . adopt a shelter dog.” I knew I should just ask Maren to untangle the knot of Stay Woke, Y’all and get us out of it. But then I would have to admit how stupid I was for greenlighting a web series where women debated the stupidity of other women like me. The title was stupid, wasn’t it? Had the title been my idea? Why hadn’t Khadijah stopped me when she was in the room? Wasn’t she supposed to be in charge of our content strategy?
“I just don’t think I’m strong enough,” I told Maren. “To be CEO.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“You’re a strong person, so you don’t understand what it’s like.”
Maren leaned over the kitchen island until her face was nearly touching mine. Her teeth were ringed with purple stains. “That’s why Evan chose you.”
“Because I’m not strong?”
“No, because you are. This guy has a type. I’m sorry, but he does. He picks a powerful, successful woman, and then he assaults her while she’s asleep. Do you have anything to eat that has cheese in it?” She was looking inside the fridge.
“Evan never assaulted me,” I said.
I wanted to say, How can it be assault if I like it? I wanted to make Maren understand somehow what turned me on—to lie there in the dark, waiting, having nothing to do but pretend to be dreaming, taking pleasure from the absence of having to try so hard at anything. I had told Maren that Evan was my boyfriend as if this were the kind of fairy tale where saying the words out loud would make it so. But of course he wasn’t my boyfriend. He was a drug without a reliable connection.
“Hot Pockets?”
They were left over from a binge.
“I’m not sure how old they are,” I said, “but you can have them.”