“Nah. There are cool, smart people in tech. They’ve just been overrun by the Mack McAllister types.”
Katya snorted. Dan’s antipathy for Mack was something that Katya both understood and, on some level, didn’t totally grasp. It had something to do with what Dan had explained was Mack’s status as the “ultimate startup bro,” a guy whose company did something that seemed wholly unnecessary and yet had gotten millions of dollars in funding, and the rest of the tech press had gone along, lemming-like, agreeing that Mack was the Next Big Thing. Mack was always speaking on some panel or other, earnestly representing New York tech, which just garnered him more adulation. Still, he and his company made it onto TechScene relatively rarely—Dan didn’t exactly have an edict against it, but as he put it, the bar was “especially fucking high” for someone like Mack McAllister, who in the manner of George W. Bush “was born on third base but thought he’d hit a triple,” and wouldn’t you know it, they were both white guys from Texas? Katya was pretty sure it also had to do with the fact that Mack was a known player when it came to women while Dan was married (to Sabrina! The woman who had just seen inappropriate texts her boss’s boss was sending to her boss!) and had two kids in a Park Slope one-and-a-half-bedroom (Dan had told her a thousand times about how they’d converted the dining room into the kids’ room), which he said they were staying in for the foreseeable future “because the neighborhood has gotten so fucking expensive that we’d probably end up in a smaller apartment and out of the decent school district,” and Katya made a mental note never to be trapped in a Park Slope one-and-a-half-bedroom with two kids just because of a decent school district.
She clicked on the button on Isabel’s phone to make her screen go dark and went into the kitchen. She tapped Isabel on the shoulder. “Hey, you left your phone.” Katya held it out to Isabel, who seemed to barely register that she had forgotten her phone and that Katya was here giving it back to her.
“Oh…thanks.” Isabel took the phone and turned away from her. Katya waited a moment—would Isabel look at her texts?—but Isabel just put her phone in her pocket and put her other arm around Andrew.
9
More Money, More Problems
IT WASN’T UNTIL Mack woke up the next morning and saw the text from Isabel time-stamped 12:03 a.m.—wtf is wrong w u—and his previous messages (starting with don’t tell me u don’t miss this with a picture of his dick, and then another picture of his dick, and, God, had he really sent a third picture of his dick?; then really, ur not even gonna respond, time-stamped seven minutes later than the third picture; and, finally, three minutes after that: bitch) that he started piecing together everything that had happened the night before. He had seen Isabel leave work with Sabrina around seven—she hadn’t bothered to say good-bye—and he’d been sitting at his desk thinking about the first hires he was going to make with the Gramercy money, but soon the office had emptied out completely and he started thinking about Isabel and then he was drinking from the bottle of Bulleit someone had sent to him that had been sitting, unopened, on his bookshelf for six months. He rarely drank, because he liked to keep himself sharp and present at all times, so it hadn’t taken long for things to go downhill from there. He didn’t remember sending any of those texts, but there they were. And he hadn’t responded to Isabel’s last message because by that point he was sound asleep, in his clothes, in his bed; he had apparently gotten in an Uber at 10:40, according to the receipt in his email, but he had no recollection of that either. But now Isabel probably thought—fuck, what did she think? And why had he sent her a picture of his dick in a text, not on Snapchat? He must have been wasted. This was not in character for him; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been drunk, let alone gotten drunk at work, alone, upset about a girl. What was happening to him?