Katya went over to the desk across from Dan’s so she’d be directly in his line of vision and waved her hands until he finally looked up. She pantomimed bringing a cigarette to her lips, and he looked relieved. “Yes!” he said, too loudly. He still had his headphones on. No one around him looked up, though, because they all had them on too.
Katya enjoyed smoking so much that she could imagine quitting only if she essentially became a completely different person. She couldn’t imagine under what circumstances that might happen. She had made some small concessions to health in the last couple of years—going from a pack of Camels a day in high school and college to half a pack a day of Camel Lights—but now, smoking was as much a part of her as dyeing her hair platinum blond, wearing a nose ring, being rail thin, and speaking in a faint Russian accent that she could hear in herself only when she was transcribing interviews. And these days in New York City, smoking was an ongoing act of rebellion that she felt jibed so completely with her perceived and real persona that she never wanted to give it up. The smokers she knew—fewer and fewer these days—were, like her, stubbornly attached to this expensive, disgusting, delicious habit. Smokers had always set themselves apart, but now their numbers were so reduced and they were so beleaguered and resigned to their fate that she sometimes felt like they telegraphed secret, desperate messages to one another. She could immediately sense, if not smell, a real smoker nearby. The younger ones, like her, radiated a kind of jittery, nervous energy; she figured that at least half of the smokers she knew who were under twenty-five were probably also pill poppers of some kind. (She, of course, was not.) The older ones, like Dan, radiated a world-weariness she found comforting.
They weren’t supposed to smoke right in front of the building, so Katya and Dan moved exactly seven feet to the left and lit up. They smoked for a minute before Dan broke the silence. “You’re filing the Connectiv story this afternoon, right?” Katya was putting together a standard TechScene post called “Offices You Wish You Worked At,” about Connectiv’s new office, after getting an exclusive first look at the space. She was proud of the get; it signaled to the rest of the tech press that she, Katya Pasternack, was real journalist, as her father might say. TechScene was still in its relative infancy, launched a year ago by a now-twenty-seven-year-old media app entrepreneur named Rich Watson and a fired BizWorld editor, Deanna Stein, who immediately took what she’d learned at that site—a warp-speed aggregator and producer of business news of varying quality that got hundreds of millions of page views a month, thanks in large part to hundred-slide photo galleries—and applied it, hiring a gaggle of mostly inexperienced but hungry (often literally) reporters like Katya to produce content, and a couple of grown-ups like Dan to (loosely) supervise. As far as Katya knew, Dan was the oldest person in the newsroom.
Katya loved her job, which she demonstrated by working long hours and writing more than any other reporter. But she considered many of her coworkers to have a larger sense of entitlement than was healthy. The things they complained about! Food, mostly. When it came to food, TechScene was just like any other startup: There was way too much of it. Her coworkers grumbled that the snacks at TechScene weren’t healthy enough and everyone was gaining weight, or that they were too healthy and people felt like they were being shamed into eating baby carrots and plain Greek yogurt. Or the brand of coffee wasn’t the right one, or they were always running out of organic almonds, or they should be allowed to order their free dinner at six thirty so that it would arrive by the time they were hungry instead of having to wait till seven, which meant they might not eat until eight. She watched them eat snacks and she watched them eat pizza and she watched them eat huge orders of Thai food and she watched them drink beer after beer after beer, and then she heard them complain that they had gained the TechScene Fifteen. Katya’s weight had stayed exactly the same during the ten months she’d worked there. She really cared only that the office fridge was kept stocked with Diet Coke and that there was coffee—any kind of coffee. She had also put in a special request with the office manager for Sweet’N Low.
Katya took a long drag and exhaled. “Yeah. I’m still waiting for some numbers from their PR but if I don’t get them by tomorrow morning, I’m just gonna post. They’re being annoying.”