“I brought you some snack bars.” Grant stood and held up a paper Whole Foods bag, which he handed to one of the officers. Cat and Bess were led back to a tiny cell, where they were given the bag after a cursory search.
Cat chewed on a bar as she sank to the floor, but she didn’t cry.
If she started crying, she was afraid she’d never stop.
Paula Booth had planned to spend this rare and peaceful Saturday morning doing absolutely nothing. She’d turned off her phone, slept late, had her coffee in bed with her cats, and was considering taking a long walk across the street in Central Park when her doorbell rang unexpectedly.
She threw on a cashmere robe over her cotton pajamas and walked to the door, peering through the spyhole as she twirled her long white hair up into its signature bun. Both her assistants stood in the hall. She cracked the door open warily.
“It’s Saturday, girls. My phone is off for a reason,” she hissed.
Izzy and Liesl pushed right by her, coming all the way into the apartment and closing the door. “Bess Bonner and Catherine Ono were arrested last night,” Izzy said, holding up a copy of the New York Post with Bess’s and Cat’s incredibly flattering mug shots on the front page.
Paula snatched the paper.
LIVING THE HIGH LIFE screamed the headline in hundred-point font, followed by RAGE BABES SNATCHED IN LUXURY DRUG RING.
Last night’s raid of a high-end drug ring on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg swept up two RAGE employees buying beauty creams loaded with prescriptions from a Brazilian Doctor Feelgood. The business, Bedford Organics, had been under surveillance by the NYPD, DEA, and FBI for weeks in relation to an as-yet-unspecified Manhattan overdose. It was shut down last night when the DEA seized over two thousand pounds of creams, lotions, and serums that were allegedly loaded with street drugs like opium, ecstasy, heroin, ketamine, amphetamine, and cocaine.
The article went on to wildly speculate about the backgrounds of the six women who were arrested. The little information they did have about Cat and Bess was peppered with so much hyperbole and sexism that they were rendered as little more than caricatures of two slutty rich girls trying to get high on their beauty supplies. Their Photogram post from earlier in the evening was reprinted in full color. A Cooper House rep had provided a succinct “No comment.”
Paula didn’t recognize the names of the two other women, who were reported to be freelance stylists from Los Angeles. She checked her email. There was nothing from Margot. Paula would have to deal with this herself—as usual. She’d hate to fire Cat and Bess considering the sheer volume of work they accomplished, but this kind of public embarrassment was well beyond her comfort zone. Her first instinct was that RAGE couldn’t support this kind of attention, not while they were in such a weak position. She started playing the voicemails that had racked up from Cooper’s senior publicists asking for clarification, deleting them one by one.
Paula had been putting out Margot’s fires since 1987. As she finished an MBA and intended to go work for IBM, her whole life was derailed, forever altered, by the speech that Margot gave at her commencement to the biggest graduating class of women that Harvard Business School had ever had. Margot had argued that without mandatory equal pay and a global economic floor for women, the leaders in front of her—these freshly minted uber-elite empowered feminists—would be nothing but a flash in the pan. You have an obligation, Margot had said, her voice resonating powerfully, to the women of the world, because there but for the grace of God go you. You must use your privilege for good and for nothing else, because you will always be fine. You will always have enough; you will always be able to provide for your families. So you must be responsible, powerful capitalists, though there is no incentive for you to be this way aside from your own moral compass; in fact, the greater incentive is to disregard the costs of our values. As such, you must be the economic change you wish to see in the world, or it will fall apart. There is something very rotten at the core of a society that increases in its wealth without diminishing its miseries. Do not lie to yourselves. We have too much, while everyone else has too little.
Paula had shown up at the magazine’s offices three days later, résumé in hand and statistics about domestic production rates for polyester, lamb’s wool, leather, cotton, and silk on the tip of her tongue. She’d argued that pushing an Idaho-based hosiery company to establish a minimum wage would ripple through the state’s economy, and that the sock company’s board members, who also had interests in a handbag manufacturer, could be tempted by a feature in RAGE. She’d advocated for a strategy of winning at all costs, for cajoling and bullying the world around them into meeting their requirements, and pitched the idea that would eventually become the system of auditors who doled out the RAGE seal of approval. Margot had hired her on the spot and fired her current assistant midsentence, forcing the young woman to clear out her desk and leave immediately so that Paula could have a place to stash her handbag while they continued that first exceptional conversation.
Her first two decades at RAGE had changed the world; the wage gaps between the cottage industries of Lake Como and the factories of Sri Lanka had been forced to narrow by Paula’s and Margot’s sheer forces of will, and their own employment policies, which included six-month paid maternity leave followed by paid child care for children ages six months to twelve years, had been aped by dozens of companies who were trying to recruit women of the same caliber as the RAGE staff.
But for the past twenty issues, RAGE had been in free fall, and now Paula faced a very specific choice: fire Cat and Bess, or figure out a way to use them to boost circulation. She read and reread the Post article before calling Maddie Plattstein, the author of the Skin Deep in Their Pockets beauty industry regulation piece they had scheduled for September. This plan was possible, Paula insisted to Maddie, rapidly calculating the hours to their production deadline for September. They could turn this around. She was certain. Maddie finally agreed, and they hung up.
“Izzy!” Paula barked. “Liesl! Make lunch. We have work to do.”
At 6:00 a.m. Monday, the buzzer finally sounded in the dank cell where Cat and Bess had spent the last thirty-six hours. “Back away from the door,” the intercom crackled. The door swung open.