After studying peace and world security at Hampshire College, she’d once intended to join the State Department, but her first job out of school—a paid internship at the teen magazine Filly, another Cooper title—set her on a different path. Bess had worked her way up to senior editor at Filly before taking a title cut two years earlier to work at the far more prestigious RAGE Fashion Book, where, like everyone else, she was more than overqualified for the general responsibilities of her position.
But Bess didn’t mind, for RAGE was so much more than just a magazine: it was the most successful women’s title in the history of print publishing. Distributed in thirty-four countries worldwide through seventeen international editions, with four million domestic subscribers, it was the gold standard for women’s lifestyle publications, print or digital, and held a moral high ground that few others could claim: all the apparel featured in RAGE was manufactured by living-wage workers. Yet it was as high-fashion as any quixotic editorial in W or Harper’s Bazaar had ever been—before their parent companies had gone bankrupt, anyway.
Bess came to the office every day with a serious commitment to the work they did there, no matter how trivial, but she didn’t expect everyone else to have the same energy; certainly not an unpaid intern like Molly, so she let the girl’s lateness slide, just as she would the next day, and the day after that.
Besides, after what happened with Hillary, everyone in this office could use a little slack.
Catherine Ono opened her eyes. Fuck, she thought. Fuck you, morning. She fumbled around in her sheets until she found her phone and held down a button.
“SIRI, WHAT TIME IS IT?” Cat asked, unable to read the clock until she had her contacts in.
“It’s 10:25 a.m.,” Siri replied.
Cat bolted out of bed. She looked around her apartment—an unrenovated loft off the Morgan Avenue stop in Bushwick—and scanned the room for a pack of cigarettes. A yellow box came into focus nearby. She grabbed the pack off the nightstand, popped one in her mouth, and pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail in a lame attempt to keep the smoke out of her hair. An old book of matches from the long-defunct Mars Bar was tangled in her sheets and she lit the cigarette, then strode quickly across the cold, dirty floor to the bathroom. She set the cigarette in an ashtray, spritzed her face and arms with a large spray bottle marked “CARIBBEAN SEA WATER DO NOT DRINK” in permanent marker, squirted more in her hair, grabbed the cigarette again, took a deep drag, then rooted around in a jar on the sink for a black liquid eyeliner to distract from the bags under her eyes. Two quick swipes later, she grabbed a pair of thin, gold-framed vintage Oliver Peoples eyeglasses from a selection of spectacles on a shelf she’d installed next to her bathroom vanity. She peed, brushed her teeth, and applied deodorant before springing out of the bathroom and diving into her closet.
Cat’s closet was the only part of her apartment that was actually a built-out room with walls. She grabbed two black silk tank tops, a pair of perforated black lambskin pre-Galliano Margiela leggings, her black leather cowboy boots, and a set of large, ultra-oxidized heavy bronze bracelets from Nigeria that always left her with little bruises. She pulled a large leather tray off the closet’s top shelf and fished a white grosgrain ribbon out of it, which she wove into her hair in a plait. After snaking into her clothes, she stubbed out her cigarette and sprayed herself down with an industrial-strength bottle of Febreze stolen from the maid’s cart at The Standard Hotel. Cat had tried electronic cigarettes for a few years, just like everyone else, but after people everywhere had gone bald overnight in an epidemic of vape-related hair loss, she’d decided it was safer to stick with regular old carcinogens and gone right back to American Spirits. So had millions of other ex-smokers, and now, in a regulatory mea culpa, cigarette prices were almost reasonable again.
Finally, she grabbed the paperback copy of Welcome to the Desert of the Real that she was halfway through and shoved it, along with her cigarettes, into a black leather Alexander Wang shopper with pointed rose-gold feet on each corner.
“Cigarettes, phone, wallet, metro card, keys,” she said out loud as she reached the door, a recitation she made every time she left the house. Check check check check check: all still in her handbag from the night before. She shut the door, locked the heavy dead bolt, and booked it for the subway.
At 12:45, Cat finally stood on the four-story showboat main escalator. Huge, nearly prehistoric ferns salvaged from a Cooper scion’s overgrown Great Neck mansion surrounded her in a humid wall, and she tried not to sweat as she rode up to the elevator bank. Although the $112 million lobby was meant to inspire the legions of employees tasked with channeling the zeitgeist each month, it just reminded Cat of the infinite escalators in London tube stations, where the urge to slide down the center railing was almost overwhelming. Someday, she thought, letting her fingers drag off the edge of the rubber banister. When I quit this place in a blaze of glory.
But today, the very thought of sliding made Cat dizzy. Late. Sweaty. Tired. Today is going to be r-u-f-f ruff, she thought. She looked down and took a long, thirsty gulp of her iced Trenta Red Eye from the Starbucks around the corner, then fished an Adderall out of her purse’s side pocket, broke off half into a sugary orange chunk, and crunched it between her teeth. Please kick in soon, she thought.
“Kit-Oh!” yelled out a Sloaney voice behind her. Boots clomped up the escalator steps ten yards below, and a tousled head of expertly colored and blown-out caramel-blonde hair ascended in double time. Cat hoped it looked like she was coming back from coffee and not showing up two and a half hours late to work, for the immaculate hair and boots belonged to Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas, an oft-photographed socialite, clotheshorse, and twice-divorced mother of two, known simply as Lou, who was a temporary fill-in for Cat’s now-dead boss and close friend, Hillary. Among other affectations, like dropping most vowels and willfully mispronouncing even her own surname, Lou thought calling Catherine Ono “Kit-Oh” was hilarious. Cat disagreed.
It was their second month working together, and while Cat was doing her best to be friendly, she was still trying to figure out what she and Lou had in common. So far, it was just tequila—but in some cultures that was plenty to forge a lasting work relationship. When Lou got within a foot, Cat smelled faint traces of jasmine and honeysuckle, a subtle smell that dozens of women in the RAGE office had adopted over the past few years. Lou is trying to fit in every way she can, Cat realized, and she suddenly felt appreciative of the gesture, however small.
“Hi, Lou. Love your color,” Cat complimented her, pointing to Lou’s hair.
“Oh thaaaaank you!” Lou smiled. “Jane has been in the sun all summer and she has such amazing color, we just chopped off a lock of it and brought it in to Tricomi.”