THE WEST VILLAGE block where Andrew Shepard lived—brownstones, black streetlamps, trees turning vibrant shades of yellow and red and orange—was straight out of a New York tourism-board ad, Katya thought as she checked the numbers on the elegantly imposing buildings. When you grew up where she had grown up, it was hard to believe that people in the same city lived this way. It was also somewhat hard for her to believe, still, that she, Katya Pasternack—who hadn’t really learned English until she was seven, whose father had been an engineer in Russia but drove a cab in New York City, who had grown up surrounded by other Russian immigrants in a huge, anonymous apartment building in a section of Brooklyn that most of her colleagues at TechScene wouldn’t have been able to find on a map—had been admitted into this exclusive world.
His email had said that the party started at eight, but she had stayed late at the office and now it was approaching nine. Not that she particularly minded being late—if she missed the cocktail hour, so be it. She had bought a Snickers bar at the newsstand by the office and eaten it on the subway down to the West Village, and that, plus the cigarette she’d lit as she stepped off the subway at West Fourth, would keep her sated for a while.
The streetlamps gave the block a warm glow; Katya detected the pleasant scent of burning firewood in the air as she hurried to Andrew’s house. In some corner of her brain, Katya acknowledged that living like this would be nice, but it also felt like it would be too easy. Katya’s memories of the one-bedroom apartment she, her brother, her parents, and her grandmother had been crammed into for the first few years they lived in New York were still too vivid for her to romanticize poverty, but wasn’t the struggle part of the point? What did you have to strive for if everything was easy? Katya certainly didn’t think she wouldn’t enjoy living in a huge West Village brownstone with heated bathroom floors, decorated tastefully with midcentury modern furniture, but that didn’t mean this version of herself was one that her present self would loathe.
Katya knew Andrew as well as she knew most of the successful twentysomething founders in the startup scene, which was to say, both not very well and rather intimately, all at once. She didn’t really know Andrew Shepard, person. But she knew him, just like she knew practically all of these guys. They were runners and foodies and cyclists; they all wore fitness trackers and competed with one another about who had run the most miles or slept the optimal 7.5 hours. They donated money to charities started by their friends that taught underprivileged kids how to code but voted against raising taxes to make those kids’ schools better. They participated in hackathons and marathons; they climbed mountains; they loved South by Southwest. They thought everyone, including themselves, were where they were entirely because of hard work and innate creativity, and if you weren’t successful, that was because you hadn’t tried hard enough. They didn’t understand people who weren’t just like them.
Katya rang the bell, and she wasn’t surprised when Teddy Rosen, a young venture capitalist who periodically texted her tips—like this is so off the record but one of our companies that rhymes with shmy mecorate is about to sell and i want you to be ready—opened the door. His firm had been an early investor in Andrew’s company. “Heyyy, you made it,” he said, wrapping her in a hug, a level of familiarity that she wasn’t quite prepared for.
“Hi, Teddy,” she said, carefully extracting herself. Teddy wasn’t much taller than she was, and stocky, and she felt he was trying to hug her a little too long. “Victor’s here already, right?”
Teddy’s smile seemed a bit forced. “He is,” he said. “Come on in. Oh, you can leave your coat here.” There was a rack set up outside the door, already stuffed with jackets and a long, belted camel-hair coat. Teddy helped Katya out of her black wool coat. She was suddenly self-conscious that it was slightly threadbare.