Overnight, Wendi had apparently gone into full-on fixer mode (à la Olivia Pope from Scandal). Wendi was a gladiator when it came to manipulating the Internet. She’d somehow managed to turn a clear negative (me, fired) into a positive (me, class hero). Wendi posted photos of me being hauled out of the Titan building onto the “News” section of our website, beneath buzz-worthy headlines like: Tina Fontana Quits Titan Corp., Escorted Out. And: Fontana to Barlow: I Quit! The subtext here, if you hadn’t caught it, was that I left my job of my own accord.
Thankfully, no one had yet struck upon the terms embezzlement, forgery, or grand larceny.
For now, Wendi’s posts and the resulting online chatter only gained traction for the site. Our donations spiked. Such is the justice of the digital age.
Robert understood this sort of justice better than anyone—he’d been its master for years, using his vast media empire to control the layman’s chatter. How many times had I sat in the conference room, taking the editorial-meeting minutes, and jotted down a variation on the same statement: We don’t have to win this argument. We only have to muddy this argument enough so they don’t win. Robert may as well have had those words tattooed across his bare chest (which, to be clear, I had never seen). So it was surprising—and perhaps fitting?—that this was exactly what we accomplished in the hours following my firing. Wendi stirred up enough mud to make a clear winner impossible to decipher.
Only yesterday Emily had wanted to run away, and I was on the brink of setting Kevin free into the wilderness, the way John Lithgow and the Henderson family had to do back in the eighties with their beloved bigfoot, Harry. But as far as I was concerned, that plan was officially off the table. How could I run away from this? Google Tina Fontana now, and it was me who came up first, not those other Italians and Spaniards of lesser notoriety who shared my name. Such success came with responsibility, didn’t it? I couldn’t just bolt.
Besides, in the light of a new morning, with a fresh pot of coffee in front of me, I reevaluated my situation more favorably. If Robert had actually figured anything out, wouldn’t he have pressed charges immediately? He could have had me airlifted straight to Guantánamo if he wanted to. So maybe he really was just kicking me out of the nest. Because deep down he loved me like a daughter (maybe even more than he loved his one daughter who wrecked his Mercedes that one time). And maybe it finally occurred to him, like it had only recently occurred to me—and to these total strangers on the Internet—that I was capable of doing more with my life than just filing papers, keeping a calendar, and mixing drinks.
So I brought my coffee and my laptop into bed with me, to more comfortably explore all the new features Wendi had added to the site—and there were many. She’d created tabs where people could submit short essays, so they could tell us how they would pay it forward if we paid off their debt. And she’d added a place for users who’d just had their debt paid off to tell us how their lives had already changed for the better.
She’d added a few banners, too. One read: Did paying off your student-loan debt free you up to get married? Buy your first home? Start a family? We want to see photos!
There were links to my speech from the launch party. And, of course, user comments: The problem is that nobody talks about what they make. It’s shame disguised as humility. Screw that. I’m a thirty-two-year-old assistant and I make $30,000 a year.
I clicked around some more and discovered a place where users could upload videos.
Great, I thought. This was all we needed. DIY porno and homemade cat movies. But when I began scrolling through the thumbnails, I quickly got sucked in. First I chose a video posted by Lisa in Detroit (former debt: $78 K). Then one from Su-Yung in Philadelphia (former debt: $103 K). Then one from Joanna in New Orleans (former debt: $91 K). All the women looked to be somewhere around my age. Thank you, each of them said. This changes everything for me.
I let my head fall back onto my pillow and allowed my eyes to go soft on the ceiling rain bubble. Robert had tie clips that cost as much as those debts. One man’s private-jet ride to Key West was another woman’s second chance at life. I know, this isn’t news to anyone—and it sure as hell wasn’t news to me.
What can you do?
Gratitude is so much more dignified than ungratefulness, than speaking out about a subject as frowned-upon as an “unlevel playing field,” so these women simply said thank you. They promised to pay it forward. They went back to their jobs as office assistants and teachers and X-ray technicians and worked extra hard. I got it. That’s just the way it was. But if one wasn’t careful, it was enough to turn a girl like me into a girl like Wendi Chan, at least in the privacy of her own collapsing, overpriced bedroom.
That’s where I was, and what I was thinking, when I received Kevin’s text.