Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  Amanda opened the door in a T-shirt the mottled-gray color of botched laundry, looking not just wide awake, but wired. Without a word, she waved me in, and I stepped past a narrow kitchen with a granite bar. The living room, half swallowed by the black night outside the curtainless floor-to-ceiling glass windows, was just large enough to hold an entertainment system and an L-shaped sectional sofa. Everything was in perfect order, from the coordinating throw pillows to the perfectly straight rows of Blu-rays on the shelf above the TV—mostly rom-coms and action movies, to my surprise. Outside, a wraparound balcony glowed with a ghostly concrete pallor, and the pale pink limestone of the capitol’s dome reared up in the distance.

  She shut the door behind me. “Amanda—” I said, but she was already talking.

  “Shall we celebrate?” she said. “I have some nice wine I’ve been saving. I wish I had champagne.”

  “But how—”

  “Neely’s gone for good.” Her back to me, she rummaged through the cabinets in the narrow kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I knew he’d go slithering back to L.A., but I wanted to wait until I was sure before I contacted you.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I have my ways.” She produced two wineglasses from the back of a cabinet, blew into them to clear the dust, and set them down on the bar in triumph. “Anyway, it was only a matter of time, once he saw what I had on him.” She closed the cabinet. “What we had.”

  “The video? How did you—” I was still standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, unwilling to take my seat until she came out of the kitchen.

  “Isn’t it perfect? Once I figured out that he likes to order up a massage whenever he’s in a hotel . . . I just knew he would try something. I knew his MO, you know?” She reached up to a wine rack on top of the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of red, checked the label, and put it back. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do. You just have to be in the right online forums, understand the coded language. Nobody wants to call him out in public because he’s so universally adored.” She rolled her eyes. “But this guy, trust me, he does this all the time. Like, every chance he gets. And service workers are less motivated to keep it quiet than comics are.” Having pulled out a few more bottles of wine, she finally located one that pleased her and set it on the countertop next to the glasses. Then she said, “Corkscrew, where are you?” and started opening and closing drawers with the same jittery energy.

  She eventually found one. “Give it to me,” I said to get her out of the kitchen faster. I opened the wine and poured it, then swiftly grabbed both glasses so she’d follow me to the sofa. “Now sit down and tell me everything. From the beginning.”

  “Okay.” She perched on the short side of the L as I took a seat on the long side. “But first—” She leaned forward, brandishing the wineglass. “To having each other’s backs.”

  “To having each other’s backs,” I said, trying not to betray my impatience as I clinked my glass to hers and drank. “So . . . entrapment. I’m more of a lead-pipe woman myself. In the study.” I laughed nervously at my own joke.

  “I should really be toasting my former employers at Runnr,” she said, ignoring me. “These Silicon Valley types pride themselves on large-scale vision, but they have poor day-to-day management skills. And shockingly short attention spans.” She giggled. “It took the admin ages to get around to changing my passwords and revoking my access.”

  “Access to what?”

  “Everything.” She raised her eyebrows. “User data, code—half of which I built from scratch, by the way. Eventually I had to turn over my laptop and sign mountains of nondisclosure and noncompete agreements—proprietary tech and IP theft is what they care about.” She took a big gulp of wine. “But by that time, I’d already gotten into the code and left a number of back doors open for myself—along with a few bugs. After I left, they were too busy putting out fires without the help of their best programmer to double-check the metadata. Particularly the user database. There is a lot of information in there, my friend.”

  “So Neely uses Runnr?” I said, finally catching up.

  “Everyone uses Runnr,” she said, then looked at me. “Well, everyone whose time is worth more than the Runnr fees. Which are dirt cheap, because it’s ridiculously easy to get signed up as any kind of runner, even the ones you supposedly need to have a license for.”

  “Like massage therapist.”

  “Right. You should see all the garbage they let slip through the cracks. You know they don’t even do background checks? They don’t advertise that, but it’s been in the news. People just don’t care enough to stop using it.” She laughed. “If they knew how few runners actually make a living at it, they’d care. I mean, how do you trust someone who just turns up at your door and says she’s a massage therapist when she’s only making, like, twenty bucks for a two-hour massage?”

  “Yeesh.” I made better money hawking hand-stamped stationery at Laurel’s.

  “Well, to be fair, I programmed an auto-bidder to make sure I got the run, which drove the price down. Usually female runners make more because there’s a higher demand for them. Imagine that.” She rolled her eyes, then shrugged. “Anyway, it was no big deal getting in with the camera. After that, Neely did the rest.”

  I replayed the ghastly intimacy of it, the greedy expression on his face, his hairy flesh looking somehow more naked for being half covered by the robe. “It’s perfect,” I agreed. “But what if you’d actually had to do the massage? And what if he’d—tried something else?” Now that I was talking about someone else’s safety rather than my own, I suddenly realized what it was that had paralyzed me in the back of the SUV that day. It was the inarticulable fear that if I made the wrong move, or any move at all, the situation would turn from mere humiliation into something else entirely.

  But Amanda was shaking her head. “He was too impatient to sit through a massage. You know the water he gave me? I’m ninety percent sure he put something in it. I didn’t taste it, of course, but it smelled funny. I think part of the game is some kind of sedative. Just to get you a little woozy, so you don’t move as fast. He’s a total coward.”

  I felt a surge of nausea, and bile rose in my throat. The smoothie with the chalky aftertaste. I had been so sure Jason and I had the same bug, but I never threw up, just got dizzy and slept for twelve hours afterward. Amanda didn’t say anything, but from the way she was looking at me, I could tell she’d already had the thought, probably when I first told her the story. I took a moment to catch my breath. So I’d been roofied in addition to being . . . whatever you called what he’d done to me.

  “So where are we going to post it?” I said finally.

  “Post what?”

  “The video. Or do we send it to a news site anonymously? Or what about those comedy forums you mentioned? Let him be the butt of the joke, for once.”

  “We’re not showing anyone this video, Dana.”

  I stared. “But—isn’t that the whole point? Show the world? Show everyone what he really is?”

  “It’s worth way more to us hanging over his head.”

  “Blackmail?” I stood up, and my voice rose, just as it had when Amanda had followed me out of the comedy club. I hated losing control, and talking about Neely, even thinking about him, brought me too close to the edge. “Are you doing this for money? Because I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything from him. All I care about is that it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

  “It won’t,” she said. “Trust me. Neely doesn’t know who we are, but he knows we have this video. We know everything about him, and we can get to him at any time. That’s why he turned tail and ran back to L.A. I’ve got ways of knowing what he’s up to, though—not limited to Runnr, by the way.” She looked pleased with herself. “Besides, I think I got my message across. After this, he’s going to be too paranoid to pull his signature move on anyone for a long time.”

  “But why not just release it?”

  S
he looked at me pityingly. “Out in the world, the video is falsifiable. His PR reps will make up stories, spin it for the press. And in the meantime, since we’ll have done all the damage we can do, he won’t be afraid of us anymore. He’ll hire investigators to find us. Trust me, you don’t want that. You don’t want to be the lone woman standing up against a celebrity with an accusation like that.”

  “But there’s proof,” I said, losing steam.

  “If it ever went to court, they’d find a way to get the video thrown out. That’s what rich people have expensive lawyers for.” She shrugged. “But nobody enjoys spending their money that way, and nobody wants the publicity. As long as we keep our fingers hovering over the button, he’s going to do everything in his power to keep us from going nuclear.”

  There was a moment of silence as I processed this. “Okay, so we don’t go nuclear,” I said. “Even though—I wouldn’t be in it alone, right? If something went wrong.”

  “No. You wouldn’t. If it came down to it, I’d be right there beside you, in court or anywhere else. I promise.”

  I sat back down on the sofa and took a long, warming swallow of wine.

  “So,” she said, tapping her fingers together with excitement. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “It’s your turn.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said, after a long pause.

  “I got your back,” she prompted, her voice level. “Now you get mine.”

  “Funny joke.” But I knew she wasn’t joking.

  “I’ve got a name for you.”

  I was starting to panic. “I never asked you to go after Neely, Amanda.”

  She gave me a long look, and the excitement slowly drained from her face. By the time she turned toward the window, her gray-green eyes had gone perfectly flat and opaque. For a moment I thought she might cry.

  Instead she got up from the sofa, opened a glass door, and stepped out onto the balcony.

  She didn’t ask me to follow, but after a few uncomfortable minutes passed, I did. I found her sipping her wine and staring out into the night sky, which had cleared of clouds and was now glittering with stars. To the right, far down, I could just see the Congress Avenue Bridge, a garland of streetlights over the dark river. I stepped toward her and looked up at her profile, lit from below by the balcony lights. No wonder she kept getting auditions. Her cheekbones could’ve won an Academy Award all by themselves.

  “Great wine,” I said. “Really, uh, jammy.” I took an overly enthusiastic sip and choked.

  “Look, you don’t have to do it,” she said wearily. “Obviously, you don’t have to do anything. When we were talking the other night, I just thought—” She stopped abruptly. I opened my mouth to reply, but she started again, more forcefully this time. “I thought we understood each other. But if you think I enjoyed watching Aaron Neely jerk off in that hotel room—if you think I got off on playing his victim, even for a minute—”

  I felt stricken. “Of course I don’t think that.”

  “He’s a huge guy. Like you said, he could have turned on me any time. It wasn’t exactly fun.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Not nearly enough,” she said, whirling on me. “But I didn’t do it just for you, Dana. You never see the big picture, do you? You don’t read the forums or listen to the stories, so you don’t get it. The problem is so much bigger than what happened to you. These guys do the same thing, over and over again, until somebody finally stands up to them. You have to find a way to hurt them more than they can hurt you.”

  I took it in silently. I’d said that what mattered to me was that it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. But what had brought me over to Amanda’s apartment tonight? What had filled me with joy on the bridge with Kim earlier today? Wasn’t it just that Neely wasn’t my problem anymore?

  “Anyway, you got what you wanted,” Amanda said, as if she could read my guilty thoughts. “Buy me a drink sometime, I guess.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I said, exasperated. “Go find your ex-boyfriend and get revenge? He’s kind of far away, isn’t he? Believe me, if I could be in Los Angeles right now, I already would be.”

  “If he lived in Austin, you’d do it?” she said, looking out over the city.

  “Probably,” I said. Then, struck by a sudden impulse to firm up the lie: “Yes. Yes, I would.”

  “Doug Branchik, my old boss from Runnr.” She took another sip. “He lives here now.”

  “In Austin?”

  Amanda uncurled her index finger from around the bowl of the glass of wine and slowly extended her arm. “There. He lives right there.”

  6

  “What?” I said, ducking instinctively. “Where?”

  “Across the street. The balcony with the orange deck chairs.”

  “Amanda—” The slender ledge of concrete we were standing on suddenly felt unbearably exposed.

  “If you’re going to ask did I know he lived here—of course I knew,” she said, ignoring my discomfort. “After I got fired, they transferred him to Austin to help start up the new office here. You know, the well was poisoned for him at the home office. Or maybe it was damage control from on high. Either way, I wouldn’t waste too many tears on Doug Branchik.” She said his name so loudly that I winced, looking across at his balcony. “I’m the one who’s blacklisted. He’s doing fine.”

  Unspoken: She knew how he was doing because she could watch him from her window. “Did you—”

  “Come here because of him? No. Just a happy accident.” I must have looked skeptical, because she laughed, lightly annoyed. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. Tons of people move from L.A. to Austin every year. The way people complain about it here, you’d think we were a plague of locusts.” She whirled and went back inside, and I followed her, relieved. “Anyway, he’s not going to be there much longer. That’s a Runnr-owned crash pad. They’re just putting him up there until his wife finishes decorating the six-bedroom mansion on Lake Travis.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the window. “Aren’t there some blinds you could draw or something?”

  “Come on, just listen. I’ve got it all worked out.” She cracked a grin. “And the beauty of it is, you’d never even have to see his face.”

  I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t say no either.

  The next day was the Funniest Person semifinals, but I couldn’t concentrate on prepping my set. Memories of the grainy, sordid video haunted me all day. When evening came, I walked through the door into Bat City with some trepidation, wondering if a guilty shadow would hang over my performance. In the waiting area, I kept my headphones on with the sound turned off, bopping my head to imaginary music while comics all around me gossiped about Neely’s absence. The replacement judge was rumored to be Cynthia Omari, one of my favorite comics and the host of a hugely popular podcast. As I stepped up onto the stage to start my set, I glanced toward the judges’ table, expecting—what?—dust motes where his shape had been? Ominous music?

  Instead, there was only the exhilaration of relief. The set did not feel particularly inspired. It did not feel uninspired. It happened almost without me.

  That was how light I felt, how free.

  I remained in this floaty state of oblivion for the rest of the night, right up until the emcee announced my name as one of three comics moving on to the last round of the competition. As the crowd roared, I looked at my fellow contestants, and the words I made it to the finals ran through my mind. I felt my real life turning on with a click.

  I stumbled through the bar, past the comics reaching out their hands to congratulate me, and into the women’s restroom, where I locked myself in a stall and pulled out my cell phone. The screen still showed Amanda’s last text from the night before.

  Trust me now?

  “Trust me, this is going to be epic.”

  Our senior year in high school, Jason tried to get me to help him steal Mattie’s truck.

 
Mattie still scared the shit out of me, though I did my best to hide it from Jason. Kenny the German shepherd had run away and gotten hit by a car the year before, so at least I no longer had to worry that the giant dog would come bounding through the dog flap in the garage apartment and put his massive paws on my shoulders and growl, which was the way he’d been taught to greet everyone but Mattie. But Mattie himself had only grown more menacing. I felt him looking at me all the time now.

  As practical jokes went, the truck caper seemed to me both incredibly juvenile and nowhere near what Mattie deserved. I never knew what exactly Mattie had done to inspire it, but whatever it was, Jason seemed to have snapped. Maybe he just couldn’t take Mattie’s ribbing about his manhood anymore, and with Kenny gone, he had no excuse not to try something. At any rate, Jason had decided that it would be hilarious to take the truck in the middle of the night while Matt was sleeping off a payday bender, drive it three counties over, and leave it in the middle of a field, roughed up, as if it had been stolen by a local kid for a joy ride.

  “It has to look like something some methed-up punk would do,” he’d explained when he saw my expression. “He’ll get it back. The tires’ll be slashed and it’ll need a new paint job, that’s all. And I’ll rig up the steering column to make it look like it was hot-wired. I found a book at the library with instructions and everything.”

  “Why don’t you just hot-wire it for real, then?” What I didn’t say out loud was that if he hot-wired the truck, he wouldn’t need me to get the keys. Mattie kept those keys on him at all times. As far as I could tell, the only two things he’d ever cared about were Kenny and the GMC. When Jason insisted I was the only one who could fit through the dog door in Mattie’s garage, I was flattered, but skeptical; Jason had filled out in the shoulders that year, but I’d been filling out more or less continuously since the third grade. Moreover, the idea of crawling through a dead dog’s door at night and stealing keys from the pocket of a drunk’s dirty jeans while he slept a few feet away nauseated me. I told myself that would be true even if that drunk were someone other than Mattie.