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  For Nicki-Pee

  on the m-i-c

  Part One

  * * *

  1.

  * * *

  January

  I’m having a bad nipple day. This morning a new bra smoothed my little rosebuds into nonexistence. But now, midafternoon, they are clearly visible through my top, as perky as a pair of sitcom stars. I realize this ten minutes into our weekly all-hands meeting, when it’s too late to throw a scarf around my neck or change clothes. Instead, I slowly and surreptitiously start to hunch forward, trying to get the material of my top to stop clinging so obviously to my chest. But my nipples refuse to be silenced.

  Of course, I am aware the nipple can and should be freed. We all have them; why deny it? An argument of distraction is clearly victim blaming, while propriety feels revoltingly Victorian. But, I am not a ding-dong. I was alerted as to what was happening with my boobs via a brief but devastating frown from one of the company’s most influential fashion editors, Eloise Cunningham-Bell. Her look of distaste was all the information I needed: nipples are not welcome at Hoffman House. Everyone knows I’ve been coveting a job on Eloise’s team since I was an intern. And so everyone could guess who is in charge of my nipples. Not I, my friends. Not I.

  As a member of senior staff, Eloise has joined those sitting around a table the size of a beach. The company’s quite literal inner circle. I’ve joined the ones lining the walls. To an untrained eye, we wall liners appear impeccably styled and socially relevant. But the truth is, we are junior sales. Bottom-feeders.

  Collectively the inner-circle editors look like a casting call for “diverse Brooklyn fun person.” Their expertise ranges from youth culture to city and lifestyle to menswear to interiors. They’re always jetting off to or coming back from London or Milan, Tokyo or Berlin. I’ve just gotten back from the café downstairs, where a rather sad kale salad and I had a brief and underwhelming winter fling.

  Senior staff talk. Junior staff listen. I continue to hunch.

  The meeting lasts about an hour. When it comes to an end and we all rise to exit, I find myself unexpectedly in step with Eloise herself. Even now, I’m still intimidated. But I force myself to speak. “Hey.” I smile, friendly as I can. “I was just wondering if you got the reports I emailed you last week?”

  She glances at me, with the chilly impenetrable beauty of a Nordic queen. “I did.”

  I have no response planned. “Great! I’d love any tips. Or feedback. Feel free to use them—”

  “I’m late,” she says, striding ahead.

  Feel free to use them. What a dumb thing to say. I collapse into my chair at my cubicle, resisting the urge to groan. Eloise doesn’t need to use my reports. Her work is perfect. Her taste is perfect. She’s probably on her way somewhere unspeakably glamorous: a private showing of a new collection, perhaps, to be viewed with a glass of champagne and inside jokes. Why do I even bother? Oh, that’s right: So I can stop scraping by on commission. So I can do something creatively fulfilling, so I can travel. So I can occupy a workspace big enough to merit a door. A door of one’s own: this is my Holy Grail.

  I duck my head below my cubicle wall to answer my bleating phone. “This is Lacey.”

  “Lacey Whitman?” The man’s voice has a cut of authority.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Dr. Fitzpatrick at Midtown Medical. I’m calling because you missed your last appointment.”

  My four o’clock pushes open our heavy glass door, brushing snow from her coat collar. She smiles at our receptionist, making a joke I can’t hear. “I’m sorry, Doctor”—his name escapes me, so I idiotically repeat—“Doctor; it’s been bananas in here. ‘Here’ being work; I’m at work.”

  “When can you come in to discuss the samples we took during your Pap smear?” Doctor Doctor is insistent.

  “Discuss?” Apprehension, just the suggestion of it, sniffs at my feet. I kick it away. “Can’t we speak over the phone?”

  “We don’t give out test results over the phone, Ms. Whitman. You’ll need to make an appointment. When can you come in?”

  My four o’clock catches my eye and does an awkward one-finger wave. I point to the phone and mouth, One second. “I’m sorry, I really don’t have time this week.”

  Later, I’ll remember this afternoon as the Last Day. It wasn’t the Last Day where I was free and happy and had the perfect life: show me a contented twenty-five-year-old in New York City and I’ll show you a secretly unhappy liar or a deluded happy fool. No, this was the Last Day of feeling like I was in control of my future. It was the Last Day of believing that you only get a set amount of trouble. It was the Last Day of my small life.

  Doctor Doctor draws a long breath. “Ms. Whitman, you tested positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation.”

  The words land with the concise clarity of custard hurled against a wall. I can’t stop blinking. “What?”

  “I’ve made an appointment for you with a genetic counselor tomorrow to discuss your options.”

  “My options? I thought we were talking about my Pap smear.”

  Papers shuffling. His voice is curt. “You asked about the best time frame to start mammograms. We discussed a test that could help determine that time frame. Do you remember that?”

  Blood bubbling into a vial. I made a joke about vampires. “Yes.”

  “Do you know what this means? Do you understand the ramifications?”

  I’m having trouble focusing. “But I came in for a Pap smear . . . Just a routine—a regular . . .” I run out of steam. I stare straight ahead, breathing through my nose.

  “Ms. Whitman? Are you still there?”

  * * * *

  I take my four o’clock: the creative director for Target. There I am, in one of the small, bright conference rooms, presenting next year’s fall with lunatic talk-show sincerity. “The trend for the tweed is continuing as an organic-looking base, and the demand for trouser suits isn’t going anywhere.” My voice sounds unnaturally loud. “Is it loungewear? Is it sportswear? Personally, I’m excited about shearling. I think we could see the caplet get reinvented.”

  I laugh too hard at my client’s jokes. Leap too excitedly on her insights. I feel drunk. Drugged, dreaming, split in half. One version of me is saying my lines—or a bizarre, dadaistic performance of my lines—while another version is running around in the wings, unable to find the stage.

  When the show’s over, I have a missed call from Vivian. Her quick, sardonic voice plays back: “Hey babe, my flight was diverted to Newark because of the weather, so I’ll be a little late. New Jersey, yay. Brush up on the latest download numbers, hopefully we can bust them out tonight.”

  I’d forgotten about the party. I could tell you exactly what I wore to my middle school dance, down to the color of my socks (leopard print, and you better believe they had a lacy frill), but I’d forgotten about Hoffman House’s holiday party. Which is, of course, tonight.

  I don’t think about . . . it. It’s not a conscious denial, it just feels like something I can outrun, and so I do. I familiarize myself with the fashion editors’ new reports, skim Women’s Wear Daily, and attempt to get on the list for a few Fashion Week parties by sending flirty emails to various publicists. Just before seven, I fish out my day-to-night mak
eup bag from my bottom drawer.

  The gray-tiled bathroom is cool and empty. I lay out my products on the marble counter, a ritual I’ve always found soothing. Curling mascara, dark pink lip liner, blush . . . my hands are shaking. A wave of nausea sweeps over me. I hold my hair back over the toilet bowl, ready for my sad kale salad to make a surprise comeback. But my body refuses to be sick, settling instead for a slight tremble and overall queasiness.

  Ghastly is the word my reflection inspires. My hair, which I’ve been carefully bleaching a silvery white-blond ever since I moved to New York three years ago, makes me look as sallow as the zombie light of a midnight subway train.

  A calendar notification pops up on my phone: 7:00 p.m.: STOP WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING, get ready for party now. Not in five more minutes. NOW.

  I keep a few dresses in the coat closet for events. Tonight, I need bright armor to protect me. Romance Was Born, the electric, extroverted Australian label known for high-flash high fashion. My client at Saks gifted me the dress for Christmas (a sample, not complaining). Chiffon, floor-length, keyhole neck, quarter-length sleeves. The edge of the skirt is red and yellow fire, melting into a print of exotic bird feathers. Iridescent greens and cerulean blues give way to an almost all-white bodice. Paired with my trusty black fedora and a face full of makeup, I’ll look like everyone else at a Hoffman House party.

  Immortal.

  2.

  * * *

  Patricia Hoffman has been throwing Hoffman House’s holiday party in mid-January for forty-eight years. The date ensures the guest list isn’t distracted by New York’s holiday-party circuit in crowded December. As the invite has always read, No excuses. Anything else goes. For the company’s fortieth anniversary, photographs from four decades of the annual event were compiled in a heavy coffee-table book, something I found in a museum gift shop on a day trip to Chicago when I was a junior in high school. In the 1970s, gap-toothed models the size of pencils ignored fat shrimp cocktails while being hit on by long-haired musicians, dreams of utopia wafting from their unwashed, open-necked shirts. In the eighties, everything got shiny or sharp: safety pins, disco balls, shoulder pads you could cut a finger on. The nineties was bleached teeth, denim everything, big hair, bodysuits. The aughts were flat-out bizarre: high-heeled Timberlands; tight, plush sweat suits, overplucked eyebrows. (The aughts were deeply embarrassing.) Apart from the fact that eyebrows are back to being bushy, this decade feels harder to pinpoint. We’re still in it, after all.

  It took me weeks to save up for the Hoffman House book, and it was those pictures that made me want—need—to land at New York’s oldest and most respected trend forecaster. Hoffman House was dead center: of SoHo, of fashion, of everything Buntley, Illinois, wasn’t.

  As a member of the junior sales staff, I sell two things. The first is an online subscription service to reports created by the various Hoffman House editors, like my best friend Eloise. Most people working in fashion, or any industry that includes style, need to be up-to-date on current trends on a global scale, but they’re usually chained to their desks and unable to keep up on their own. The online service is a daily newsletter of inspiration, analysis, and opinion: “the essentials you need to stay on the pulse of your industry.” The second thing I sell are trend books. Individual publishers around the world put together seasonal books, two a year—spring/summer and fall/winter.

  Big, beautiful books brought me to New York. In their pages, as in most of the city, there is no room for uncertainty.

  Trend is retail’s dirty little secret. You might think that Victoria’s Secret or Apple or L’Oréal are coming up with their new looks and colors and trends on their own. They’re not. Every big name in retail buys trend books, and thousands more subscribe to the online service. Each book costs between two and six thousand dollars, while the online service can run you up to $15K a year. I get a 15 percent commission on each book and 5 percent on the online service.

  So when I splurge on a cab to take me to the party at the famous Pembly Hotel, it’s because I should feel triumphant. I’m on the guest list for the event that means the most to me. But as I slam the cab door shut, I’m fighting the powerful sensation that I’m trapped and water is rushing in, and rising.

  We hit gridlock. My driver swears and blasts the horn, again and again and again. We’re not moving. Dr. Fitzpatrick’s words echo in my head: I’ve made an appointment for you with a genetic counselor tomorrow to discuss your options. A windowless waiting room with bad landscape art and a collective feeling of dread.

  Water gurgles up my calves, over the seats, almost to the meter. I’m running out of air.

  A hospital bed. Machines that don’t stop beeping. The sound of a man crying.

  Another horn blast. Another.

  “Can you stop that?” I can’t help it. “We’re not moving.”

  He mutters something under his breath. When we arrive at the hotel, the ride fifteen minutes longer than it should have taken, I almost forget to pay. I bolt out of the cab in a rush of relief, gasping for air, water spilling like a wave.

  “Lacey!” The interns squeal. “You look amazing.”

  “Hi, dolls!” I air-kiss the girls manning the door, all three bursting with celeb-encounter glow. “Love everything about this,” I add, circling their outfits with my fingertip: slinky slip dresses, feather crowns, oversize chunky cardigans, and even though I’m keeping a simmering panic at bay, I file away, Kate Moss. Nineties. Making a comeback? They giggle and gush as they take my coat, and it’s hard to believe that was me, over four years ago, holding the list, intent on being on it, and here I am, and New York Cancer Care Center—

  “Bar!” I half gasp, half shout to no one in particular. Swimming through the plucked and polished bodies, I smell weed and spicy perfume and wet fur and I’m at the bar, rapping the underlit glass, ordering a white wine in a voice that’s too tight, too loud, not mine, when someone taps me on the shoulder and I whirl around. Vivian’s sharp eyes are narrowed. “Hey.”

  The sight of Vivian Lei Chang is instantly calming. Not only because she is, as always, immaculately dressed: silk tunic, leather pants, gold geometric necklace, heeled ankle boots. And not because she is, as always, exuding the eyebrow-arched calm of I can handle this. It’s because Vivian is part of my regular life—older, wiser, as beautiful and tough as a ninja on the bow of a ship.

  “Hey.” I hug her in a way that’s more like a tackle, getting strands of her black hair in my mouth. “Hi.”

  She extracts herself from me. “What happened?”

  The wine appears at my elbow. “Nothing.” I start drinking and find myself unable to finish until I’ve drained the entire glass, all without losing eye contact. Even in my frazzled state, I’m aware this is super creepy. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Oh-kay.” Vivian’s eyes move from the glass to me, to the four square feet around me, searching for clues. “You’re acting very strange.”

  “Am I?” My laughter is maniacal. My hands flap like a loose tarp. “I saw a squirrel . . . eating a piece of pizza . . . in the snow. Snow pizza? I mean, what’ll they think of next?” I’m a runaway train, out of control. I laugh some more, then abruptly stop. “How was the West Coast?”

  Work is Vivian’s catnip. As she recaps the meetings she was taking on our behalf (check-in with our preternaturally talented engineer, Brock, in Silicon Valley; two investor lunches—one borderline promising, one definitely sleazy), I steer us to a darkened corner, mouthing, You look amazing and I’ll come back to the clients and colleagues we pass. I focus on controlling my breathing and trying to comprehend what Vivian is telling me. “We’re on track,” she concludes. “I’m confident.” She scans the room. I stare into the middle distance with the unfocused eyes of someone receiving a message from the other side.

  Is it possible to know and unknow something at the same time? Because when I took the multigene panel test—an all-you-can-test genetic buffet—there was a ladybug-size part of me that knew this
outcome was a possibility. Just not a probability. Definitely not a probability. I took the test the way I take an HIV test: to confirm a clean bill of health. Not have it blasted apart. I was more than confident. I was blasé.

  “Vivian.” I turn to her at the same time she says, “Tom Bacon.” A man in a light blue suit who looks like a 1960s astronaut, talking to a handful of similarly bespoke dudes. “He’s a partner at River Wolf.”

  “The venture capital fund?”

  “But he’s also an angel investor. He’s the richest guy in this room.” Vivian’s gaze all but draws a bull’s-eye on Tom’s blond head. “He could write us a check for a quarter million right now.”

  “As in dollars, American dollars?”

  Vivian doesn’t even smile; she’s so focused. “He comes on board as lead investor in the seed, River Wolf leads the Series A funding. That’s a good story. That’s a great story.”

  This is my story: I’m in this room because I’m both ambitious and careful. I’m the kind of person who gets yearly Pap smears because I thought, like money and respect, good health could be earned.

  “Lace?” Viv snaps her fingers in my face. “I said, are you sure it’s okay to pitch Tom here?”

  I nod, trying to concentrate. “Patricia’s supportive. Besides, her flight’s been delayed because of the snowstorm.”

  The company’s eponymous Patricia Hoffman—my boss—had traveled to Paris for the Coco Chanel retrospective at the Musée des Arts décoratifs that isn’t traveling to the States. It’s the first year she’ll miss her own party.

  Vivian straightens her shoulders. “Excellent.”

  It’s only then that it hits me. We’re ten feet away from the app we’ve been working on for eight months becoming real. I’ve been hedging my bets: an editor position at Hoffman House or the app. Deep down, I always thought I’d land an editor position first. I’m wrong. This is the moment that Clean Clothes, the app Vivian is certain will buy us both a mansion in the Hamptons, could become a real company.