The stakes were just higher for her. She couldn’t afford to lose this story. She couldn’t afford to lose this job. People like Teddy, people like Mack—they could afford to make mistakes. They were forgiven. Young women with immigrant parents who went to college on scholarship and were one paycheck away from not being able to pay rent—they couldn’t.
“Okay,” Teddy said finally. “So you have to tell me first, because I can’t really come up with a quote about something that I don’t know about.”
“Fine,” Katya said. “Okay. So the other night at Casper’s drinks, Mack was giving a toast to Casper and Isabel interrupted him and was like, ‘You’re full of shit, why don’t you tell everyone how you fucked me over and sent me sexts and you suck.’”
“Whoa,” Teddy said. “Is that, uh, a direct quote?”
“Not exactly, but that was the gist,” Katya said.
“I see,” Teddy said. “What happened after that?”
“Apparently Isabel ran out of the bar—they were at Flatiron Social—and everyone continued on like nothing had happened?”
“Whew,” Teddy said. “That’s…that’s intense. I mean, she’s crazy, right?”
“Who? Isabel?”
“Yeah.”
“I dunno,” Katya said. “Is she? She doesn’t seem crazy to me.”
“Well, you have to be a little crazy to do something like that, don’t you?”
Do you? Katya thought. There was a time when maybe, maybe she would have conceded this point. But not now. Now it seemed like these guys had all gone to the same school of “call women crazy whenever they do something that makes you uncomfortable.” But she didn’t want to get into a fight with Teddy over this. The idea was to get him to say more, not hang up on her. So she just said, “Hm, maybe.”
“Does Andrew know that she did this?”
“I have no idea,” Katya said. “Does Andrew really have anything to do with this?” Andrew. If fucking Andrew hadn’t confronted Victor, then Victor would still be speaking to her!
“I guess not,” Teddy said. He sighed. “Okay. Here’s my quote. ‘They’re figuring out what to do—they had been prepared to make a substantial investment, and now they’re getting cold feet. It’s not off the table, but they’re reexamining everything.’ How’s that?”
“Perfect,” Katya said.
“Wait,” Teddy said. “Change it to ‘They had been prepared to make a substantial investment, but now they’re reexamining everything.’ Okay? Take out the cold feet and the off the table.”
“Fine,” Katya said. “Anything else?”
“No,” Teddy said. “Nothing else.”
She had one more person to talk to. As she dialed Isabel’s number she thought about everything that had led up to this phone call. What if she had skipped Andrew’s party and just gone home? What if she hadn’t started talking to Isabel and Sabrina at the party, or what if Isabel hadn’t left her phone on the table? What would have ended up happening between Isabel and Mack? she wondered. Maybe things would have just petered out between them. By pursuing the story, had she actually influenced its outcome? She shivered involuntarily. She couldn’t deny that it gave her a rush to know that she possibly had.
She didn’t have time to contemplate this anymore, because Isabel picked up. “I’ve been waiting for your call,” she said.
“You have?” Katya was genuinely surprised about this.
“Mm-hmm,” Isabel said. She sounded almost giddy.
“Why is that?”
“Why don’t you tell me why you’re calling, and then I can tell you why I thought you were going to call me.”
Katya felt thrown off. Her whole modus operandi was to take people by surprise. Maybe she had underestimated Isabel. “Well…” At this point, she might as well tell her everything. “I’m going to write that story about you and Mack that I’ve been working on for a while. Even though Andrew tried to get me not to write it.”
“I know,” Isabel said. “Wasn’t that weird? I guess he thinks I can’t take care of myself.”
“Well, I think Victor and I broke up because of that.”
“You did? No way. Wait. Seriously? Andrew didn’t really mean anything by that.”
“Yeah,” Katya said, realizing that she was confiding in Isabel when she was supposed to be interviewing her. “Um. Anyway. I was just saying that I’m going to write that story. And…I need to confirm something with you, and this might be a little awkward.”
“I’m ready,” Isabel said.
“Did you interrupt Mack’s speech the other night at Casper’s going-away party?”
“I did!” Isabel said. She sounded triumphant, almost smug. “I sure did.”
“You seem…enthusiastic about this,” Katya said. This conversation was not going badly, but it also wasn’t going the way Katya had thought it would. “Can I ask why? You seemed so reluctant to talk before, let alone make a dramatic gesture like you did at Casper’s.”
“I know,” Isabel said. “It does seem like I’ve done a total one-eighty, doesn’t it.”
“Um, yeah, it does,” she said. Maybe this was some kind of trap or trick, and Isabel was just saying this to fuck with her?
“Let’s just say I had a conversation with someone I work with who made me see why I was being dumb about this,” she said. “And that Mack deserves whatever is coming to him.”
“Whoa,” Katya said. “You mean that?”
“I mean that,” Isabel said. “This person said to me, ‘Think about it this way, if you don’t speak up he will continue to get away with this stuff forever, and you owe it to, like, womanity to expose him.’”
“Wow. I mean…I think that’s true,” Katya said. “And just so you know—I will absolutely treat your story with respect.”
“Oh, I know,” Isabel said. “I’m not worried about that. So was there anything else you wanted to know?”
Katya took a deep breath. “Actually, there is,” she said. “You might have wondered why I wanted to write about this in the first place.”