“Fine,” I say. “So you were just messing with me. Game, set, match: Cassandra. I’ve spent the last few days terrified about this entire ordeal, and I’ve been reconsidering my job at Chick Habit. Do you really have to humiliate me further?”
“Why not? What have you ever done for me?” Cassandra asks.
Nothing. I’ve never done a thing for her. She’s right. I try offering the one thing she wanted in the first place: my platform.
“How about this. I’ll link to the piece about the Ugandan women, and I’ll post to every subsequent issue of your journal, too. I’ll even let you guest-post once in a while.” I sincerely doubt Moira would ever let this happen—but I’m desperate.
“It’s too late for that now. Like I even want some capitalist pawns sending my journal traffic anyway.” Cassandra can obviously smell the desperation and has no desire to settle.
I try one final salvo. “Can I at least see whatever these materials are before you release them to the World Wide Web?”
I realize something else as I’m speaking—I’ve been focused on the idea that the incriminating material is my sex tape, but I still don’t know how Adam could have gotten Internet access to send it—he never responded to my e-mail so I assume he’s still off the grid. And self-centered as Caleb is, and bad as that breakup was, I’m starting to believe he wouldn’t have made some creepy inappropriate “piece” about me—his computer seemed clean, and weirdly, I trust him.
But Cassandra went to college with me. She could have anything: a photo of me from Wesleyan’s notorious naked party, snapped surreptitiously; an audio clip of me saying something racist-sounding that I meant in jest; a video from some freshman-year party when I was too drunk to remember what happened.
Cassandra looks at me for a minute and I guess decides to give me a break. “I’ll get the video. It’s in my laptop in the bedroom,” she says.
I’m shocked by her acquiescence but relieved. I guess she’s already gotten everything she wanted—her entire scheme went just as she planned—so why push it further? “Okay,” I say gratefully.
I watch her as she scuffles off to the back of the apartment, hunched like a miniature Quasimodo. To busy myself while I wait I wander over to those beautiful bay windows, move aside the curtains, and check out Cassandra’s view. Her apartment looks out on a perfectly kept courtyard with a mosaic fountain in the center. A slender woman in her early thirties is sitting on a bench near the fountain. Her blond hair whips gently in the wind and she’s wearing a chic black maxi dress. A cherubic baby with a floppy pink sun hat is perched on her lap. The woman stares into the infant’s face with a look of unyielding pleasure while she bounces the baby up and down on her knee.
I am absorbed in the innocence of this scene, its purity and clarity of purpose. There are no ulterior motives here, no complications or upsets. Just a clean, human interaction between a mother and a daughter. I’m feeling a pang of jealousy for something so uncomplicated. I must have been standing there for at least five minutes when I hear a loud crash against those gorgeous hardwood floors. The sound is coming from Cassandra’s bedroom, and so I rush there to see what the ruckus is.
The bedroom is pitch-black when I get there, except for a bright shard of light against the floor. I look up to see where the sun is coming from and see Cassandra’s skinny leg sticking out of the window, her foot almost on the fire escape. She’s trying to flee the scene? But why? She’s won the elaborate game she constructed. Why would she run away just at the moment of ultimate triumph?
I don’t understand it, but I need to prevent her from getting away. I sprint over and yank her back into the room with one swift motion.
“Where the fuck are you going?” I scream at her.
“Um, I just wanted some air?” She seems scared of me now, and she’s breathing quick little rabbit breaths. Probably because I just forced her back into the room with one comparatively brawny arm.
“That’s not why. Tell me the truth.” I say this so strongly that Cassandra starts to cry.
“I don’t have anything on you,” she blurts out.
“What?”
“I don’t have anything on you. No sex tape, no dirty photographs, nothing. And believe me, I tried to find something.”
“So you really were just fucking with me for the past four days?” I have to stifle the hysterical laughter that’s welling up in me. After all this fear and self-loathing, there was nothing at the center of it.
Cassandra sighs and sits down on the bed, the tears still coming. “I guess so. Yes. I remembered the smiley-face tattoo from college, and I assumed that everyone has some naughty business lurking somewhere in their past. I assumed right in your case, obviously.”
I stare down at her. How does she still sound smug, even through tears? I look around at her bedroom while I’m trying to figure out my next move. The vaulted ceilings and crown moldings really are lovely. This place must have cost at least $1.5 million. Then it occurs to me—if I’m going to get Cassandra to do what I want, I need to hit her where it’s going to hurt the most.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I tell her, pulling the recorder out of my pocket and waving it in front of her face. “I’ve been recording this entire conversation. I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. Crandall back in Palm Beach would be really eager to hear about how their daughter is spending her trust fund. If you agree to remove Breaking the Chick Habit from the Internet, I won’t send your mom and pops this file.”
Cassandra looks truly horrified at the prospect of having her financial security cut off, and so she says quietly, “Okay, okay, I’ll delete it.”
“Good. I’m going to stand over your shoulder while you do it so there won’t be any funny business.” I gesture toward her computer.
“Okay.” Cassandra stands and trudges slowly toward her glass-topped desk.
“Let’s speed it up a little, shall we?” I keep my hand firmly on her left shoulder as she moves her fingers deftly across the keyboard. I watch as she deletes the blog and then I make her transfer the Breaking the Chick Habit domain name to my Go Daddy account. Just to be extra careful, I make note of the password she types into her WordPress blog: weathergrrrl, of course.
Once I’m satisfied that BTCH won’t be updating ever again I remove my hand from her shoulder and allow Cassandra to swivel toward me in her chair. She scowls at me and crosses her arms, but we both know I’ve got her. “I’m going to ask you one more question,” I say.
“What?”
“Was it worth it? Causing all this chaos?”
A creepy, shit-eating grin spreads across her withered-apple face. “Viva la revolución!” she cries.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I tell her. I turn promptly on my heel and head for the door. Just before I’m about to close it behind me, I hear her shout one more thing.
“Bet you’ll remember my name now!”
I stand, dazed, outside the Phthalo for what could be five minutes or could be twenty, running back over all the events of this week. In a sick way, I respect Cassandra. She may be a nutcase, but she also really believes in her twisted causes. Besides empathy, that’s the other thing that’s been missing from my work: being able to stand by it.
What privacy means now is an ever-shifting line—the old universal standards have yet to be replaced by a new code of conduct, and we’re all just muddling through. So all I have to go on are my own moral standards. If I had listened to my instincts about Becky West, I never would have run that video. I would have deleted the e-mail and moved on with my day. If I had listened to my instincts about Peter, I never would have read that stupid report. All this moral equivocating has been exhausting.
As I’m realizing these things, I come to the revelation that I’ve been circling all day. It’s not the job that’s the problem. It’s me in the job that’s the problem.
I text Molly:
Alex Lyons (12:43 PM): You should post on Rebecca West’s reality show later today, if yo
u want to. You deserve the page views for this one. It’s your scoop, after all.
Molly Hawkins (12:44 PM): OMG YAY! That is awesome. I can’t wait!
I hope this gives Molly a leg up with Tyson Collins and that if the sale goes through, she keeps her job. She deserves it more than I do. She does the real work, instead of just hiding behind a clever sentence or two. Moira may still fire me, since I’ve been AWOL for about twenty-four hours, but I no longer care.
All of a sudden I miss Peter something awful, like a shot through the chest. I want to tell him about my crazy day—he’s the only one I ever want to share my highs and lows with. I think about calling him but remember how angry he was last night and decide that I should probably give him a little more space. He has a lot to focus on at work right now. He can deal with me later.
I decide to walk all the way home, even though it will take me nearly two hours and I will have missed another half day of work. After the week I’ve just had, I deserve some fresh air.
MONDAY MORNING,
NINE MONTHS LATER
Chapter Fifteen
My alarm clock goes off at seven thirty. I’m alone in bed, and I reach over and turn it off. I’m wearing a proper nightgown, a white, floaty affair that makes me feel like an extra in Valley of the Dolls, in a good way. The sun is already streaming through the gauzy curtains I installed. I hop out of bed, stretch my arms, and walk into the kitchen.
Peter’s already made coffee, and he’s sitting at our long white table, reading a hard copy of the Wall Street Journal. A copy of the Times lays across the place mat opposite him. When he sees me enter the room, he gets up to pour me a cup. “Good morning!”
“Hello, honey.” I smile and give him a hug and a kiss, and we sit down at the table to drink our coffee and read the paper together.
That’s right—Peter and I are still together. He didn’t speak to me for two weeks after the Becky West debacle, and even though it was torturous, I gave him his space. I spent a lot of nights at Jane and Ali’s place, watching bad reality television and crying over many different kinds of smoked meats. Jane was the most wonderful best friend a girl could ever ask for—full of real talk, as ever. She told me that she was glad Peter had left, because it forced me to take a hard look at myself. In the moment, of course, I wanted to smother her with a pillow. But I knew she was right.
Those fourteen days made me realize just how deeply I had taken Peter for granted, how I had betrayed his trust by reading that report, and how my job had brought out the worst parts of my personality.
On that fourteenth day, Peter came home after work. We cooked dinner together and opened a bottle of wine. By the time the oven timer went off on the roast chicken, we had demolished the wine and were back in bed together. As we ate the chicken afterward, both of us clad in Peter’s soft old T-shirts, I apologized for my behavior. Peter did, too, for not telling me earlier about how he felt my job at Chick Habit was affecting me, and affecting us. That’s what he had been trying to talk to me about for the whole crazy week. “I was trying to be supportive, but sometimes that means being brutally honest,” Peter said.
About that job: I went home after my blowout double confrontation with Rebecca West and Cassandra Crandall and did a full day of work. Moira could have fired me after those few days of insubordination, but she didn’t; the Rebecca West post brought the site so much attention it would have been bad press. Not that Moira was pleased: She screamed at me for so long that afternoon that I ended up putting my iPhone on speakerphone and playing solitaire while she ranted without interruption.
Furthermore, after all that drama about the Omnitown deal, it fell apart at the last minute. Peter never told me any of this—it’s still against the law—and I never brought it up with him, but I read a short article about it in the business section of the Times.
Molly did publish a meaty post that day about Becky West’s new reality show. She even got Shira Allen to cough up the proposed title: West Knows Best. That scoop got her two hundred thousand page views, a promotion to associate editor, and a side gig commentating about celebrities on VH1 shows.
As for me, I tried to create some boundaries for myself at Chick Habit. No more histrionics; no more Googling myself and being upset about the results; no more squabbles with Rel or Tina or Molly. I did the best I could, and whenever I was on the verge of taking myself too seriously, I would remind myself that Chick Habit was just a job.
It was still a job I cared about, though; despite everything, from Becky West to my mother’s non-expectations, I realized that blogging was where I really did want to be—and I tried to do work that I was proud of. That doesn’t mean I started exclusively following Cassandra’s agenda, writing straight-faced posts about sad foreign ladies and their worthy plights. I did some of that. But I also continued to do slide shows highlighting Ke$ha’s fugly fashion sense and wrote searing indictments of women-hating politicians. What I wrote could sometimes be construed as mean—but I always tried to be fair. “Nice” is different from “good,” as Stephen Sondheim says. My new rule turned out to be: Don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to a person’s face. Sober.
I made some other changes, too: I asked Moira if Molly could take the first post of the day, so that I could be slightly less crazed—and to my surprise, she agreed. I also started showering before noon every day and even putting on a bra at least three days a week. I retired the ol’ muumuu: It now hangs in the back of my closet. Whenever I see it, I remember that work isn’t my entire world and that there are lots of different outfits that would like to see the light of day. I even started leaving the house for lunch occasionally, eating many different sorts of non-salad-based things while seated at tables with other live humans for company.
Sometimes those humans are even Rel and Tina. In the weeks after our respective tiffs, I invited them out to drinks and explained the whole Becky West/BTCH saga. They both impressed me with their easygoing forgiveness. I had been especially scared that acid-tongued Rel would hate me forever, but she understood why I had tweaked out so hard. She and Tina work on the Internet, too, after all—they both saw how I could lose perspective, and fast.
I never told anyone about my altercation with Cassandra. Rel and Tina noticed that the hate blog had disappeared, but they never asked me about it. They just assumed whoever was writing it got bored and moved on to hating bigger and better things.
For several months after that July day, I was anxious that Cassandra would find some new and inventive way to harass me. For a while, every time I’d open my inbox I’d dread a threatening e-mail from her. But I haven’t had a whiff of her since. She defriended me on Facebook and deleted her profile. The website for that magazine she founded, Logos, has disappeared as well. I heard through the Wesleyan grapevine that she sold her apartment and moved to Kinshasa, where she now goes by the name Ayana. Who knows if it’s true. Perhaps her revolutionary fervor goes over better in the Congo, but somehow I doubt it.
And what of Becky West? Molly’s post about her reality show didn’t sour the deal with MTV or with People. Just the opposite: It made the American appetite for all things Becky even more insatiable. The People issue with Becky’s sad-looking face on the cover was one of the most popular newsstand buys of the summer (just behind the cover with the woman whose face got eaten by a chimp). Becky became America’s favorite tabloid daughter and took an indefinite leave from MIT and her beloved robots. Her three sisters took leaves from their respective august institutions of learning and the whole lot of them moved home with Darleen so that MTV could film West Knows Best, a Father Knows Best update for the “End of Men” era. The show premieres next month; I’ve seen ads for it plastered all over the subway, the West sisters’ angelic faces beaming down at me on the F train.
Becky and I didn’t speak after that morning in the Pierre. I’d like to think that if we did see each other again she wouldn’t hold a grudge. It worked out well for her in the end. But who knows how she really feels. I don
’t think even she knows, deep down.
Though I never heard directly from Becky, I heard from Darleen’s lawyers. Again. And again. And again. For the first time in Chick Habit history, Moira and our lawyer agreed to take my post down four months after it had been published, just to make Darleen go away. By then, it was only a token take-down—any curious Internet surfer would be able to find the video on a torrent somewhere, and the post had received ten million page views and put Chick Habit on the map in a way that it hadn’t been before.
As much as I had mixed feelings about publishing that video, it turned out to be a boon for my career. Suddenly the editors of those $2-a-word glossies knew my name and started assigning me short celebrity profiles and reported cultural essays. They wanted some of that trademark Alex Lyons sass, but the pieces of mine that ended up in the magazines were edited down to be both bland and utterly unrecognizable as the work I had handed in. No matter: I really enjoyed getting more than an hour to work on an article (sometimes I’d even get weeks!) and the checks didn’t bounce.
And then, a month ago, I was offered a job managing the website of one of those glossies, at nearly twice my salary plus health insurance. I would go into a real office every day, and ride the subway and interact with people and speak aloud regularly. More important, I would get to pick and choose what web originals to run. Though it is celebrity oriented, the magazine is also known for its profiles of politicians, musings on Wall Street, and dispatches from the Middle East. I could offer the same mix of stories I was trying to achieve at Chick Habit, but with a much bigger budget. It was an opportunity that was too good to pass up.
When I got the job offer, I couldn’t wait to tell my mom the exciting news. Things between us had been strained since that crazy week: She felt responsible for pushing me into a career that was making me miserable, and I felt guilty for making her feel responsible. Despite the fact that we both work with words for a living, neither of us could muster the right ones to say to each other.
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