Blood Is the New Black

by Valerie Stivers

At four P.M., my only breaks have been going downstairs twice for cigarettes, first for Lexa, second for the beauty editor, she of the fake freckles and tousled roller curls, who sits next door to Lexa. (Our intern closet is across from the beauty closet, from which wafts a smothering, fluffy pillow of conflicting scents.) On principle I don’t normally buy cigarettes. I’ve been known to ask, “Drop something?” when people throw their butts on the ground. But I was so bleary eyed from entering names, addresses, ages, and contact information into the computer that I was delighted to be given the errands.

  Nin and Rachel follow my lead logging entries, all the while discussing what’s new on their favorite media-gossip blogs. I learn that there are several devoted to Oldham’s magazine empire, including a popular one called StakeOut.com, which is trained solely on Tasty and prints the most outrageous rumors. Today StakeOut claims that Lillian turned the tables on PETA and left a dead animal on the organization’s doorstep. There’s also a site called www.RejectPile.com, where horror stories from people who’ve interviewed here are posted. At five-thirty the jaunty blonde I’d run into this morning while lurking outside stops by.

  “I’m Lauren, the managing editor.”

  Her ponytail is even messier than it was in the morning and the creases around her eyes seem deeper. She’s carrying an armload of eleven-by-seventeen photocopies.

  “How are you doing, Kate?”

  “I’m so sorry about this morning,” I say.

  She leans on my desk, pitching her voice low, which I appreciate because the last thing I need is for my humiliation to be exposed to Nin and Rachel.

  “Look,” she says, “this isn’t always an easy place to work, especially when you’re new. But if you hang in there, even for a couple of weeks, it will get better.”

  “Thanks. That’s nice to know.”

  “I have a good sense of people. And I think you’ll do well.”

  I don’t see why anyone would think that, but I’m grateful to her for saying it.

  “Can I do anything to help you out?” I try out the intern refrain.

  She sighs. “I only wish you could. But I’ll tell you what: I’ll keep you in mind. Maybe I can find a story or project for you. I know some of the editors aren’t focused on providing the interns a rewarding experience. Do you like to write? You want to take pictures? You want to style a model’s outfit for a photo shoot?”

  “I’d like to write,” I answer. I’ve liked writing from the time Eva and I used to go through fashion magazines and make up silly headlines together. And at school I squeezed in as many writing courses as was possible given my concentration.

  “Okay,” she says. “Why don’t you come up with some ideas for stories you’d like to see in the magazine. I can’t promise you that there will be an opportunity, but I’ll do my best.”

  “I’ll do my best, too,” I say, hoping it will be good enough.

  4

  A Fight to the Death

  HOW WAS YOUR first day?” Victoria asks.

  It’s Monday night and my aunt has, at my request, ordered Japanese delivery for us. She’s also wearing Japanese—Junya Watanabe—and looks clean-scrubbed and girlish, sitting cross-legged on her living-room sofa. A button on the wall has lifted a painting, disgorging a flat-screen TV. This, for her, is a “splurge night,” since Sterling hates takeout and televisions.

  She looks so happy I can’t tell her the truth, which is that I’m an outcast.

  “Busy!” I reply. “And I’m kind of the new girl. The other interns have both been working at Tasty since Lillian took over last year (and changed the name from Shop Girl). One of them is still in college, but she says she’ll drop out and take a staff job if they offer it.”

  “I told you what an incredible entrée you’ve been given, darling,” Victoria says. “Internships are the new first jobs. Some people intern for two or three years before becoming assistants. It’s common in the art world, too.”

  I struggle to dip my rainbow roll in soy sauce without losing control of the slippery fish. “I’m sure things will get easier,” I say.

  Victoria nibbles on a piece of pickled ginger. “I should think so, darling. How is the Larkin woman? She’s a tabloid sensation in England. Solidly D-list, but she thinks she’s B. Those are the worst kind—so insecure.”

  I don’t want to admit that Lexa hates me. But Victoria reads it on my face. She puts down her barely touched dinner and, in a rare moment of maternal warmth, pats me on the shoulder.

  “You really ought to have new shoes.”

  She abandons her dinner and comes back bearing a dusty-pink box with the words Miu Miu printed on the top. Inside is a pair of jewel-encrusted blue velvet wedge heels. “These are from last season but they’ll go with simply everything.”

  Words to live by.

  I SPEND longer than I’m really proud of on Tuesday morning, mixing, matching, and strategically snipping, but Vic is right. Our feet are the same size and, counterintuitive as it may seem, the jewel-encrusted blue velvet wedge heels go with most things in my wardrobe. I settle on wearing the heels with one of Eva’s early pieces over a newly short-short jean miniskirt. The talk in the meeting about the “blood-spattered” trend reminded me of this particular dress: a pearl silk nightie edged in white lace and splashed with red paint.

  I totter-clomp into Oldham right on the dot of nine-thirty and go through the rigmarole with security again. The lobby is much less crowded at this time of day, and on the Tasty floor it’s positively crypt-like. Felix the receptionist greets me like a long-lost sibling, hopes vociferously that I didn’t get in trouble for being late yesterday, and asks if I don’t just love my fellow interns. “They’re such sweeties, you must feel right at home.” He is a master of insincerity.

  I agree that Rachel and Nin are treacle-pops and receive a featureless gray plastic card that, in the future, will get me through the security barriers downstairs.

  No one else I know is in yet. Lexa’s door is shut. Annabel’s computer is on but she isn’t at her desk. Even Nin and Rachel are nowhere to be found. But there are plenty of Tasty Girl applications to sort, so I get started, working as fast as I can in the hopes of finishing sometime before I have to go to school in the fall.

  Nin arrives close to ten, also wearing wedge heels and a jean miniskirt. I consider bringing this up as a conversation starter. But I don’t. As the day wore on yesterday, I understood that we are to be mortal enemies. The life of an intern is a constant struggle for interesting work. When I say interesting, I mean test-driving crème blushes and untangling the belts in the accessories closet—two scorching-hot assignments my rivals gloated over yesterday afternoon while I stayed in the intern closet with the letter opener. The tasks sound silly, but they aren’t treated that way. And when you’re as ambitious as Nin and Rachel, it’s important that you spend the day making connections and doing favors for people. Between the two of them, they had worked out a method of sharing the spoils. Now that I’m here, it’s a fight to the death.

  Nonetheless, I greet Nin politely and observe, “The office starts pretty late.”

  She shrugs one bare, brown shoulder. “People get in at different times.”

  “My last job was working as an EMT. We had to get in at six-thirty.”

  “An EMT?” (pronounced “ay-em-tay”). She swivels in her chair to face me. “How did you get this job?”

  I should lie and impress her, but I can’t. “I met Lillian through my aunt, and she offered it to me. I don’t know why.”

  “And who might Auntie be?”

  “She’s an art broker. She arranges deals for private clientele.”

  Nin regards me skeptically. “She’s not involved in fashion? Does she have well-known designers as clients? Like, did she source the art for Elie Tahari’s new place in the Hamptons?”

  “Nothing like that.” I shake my head. “Her clients are mainly in Europe.”

  “Very mysterious.”

  Nin repeats the story to R
achel when she gets in at eleven. And then, at eleven-thirty, they—almost nicely—suggest that if I’m bored opening envelopes, I could go score some page-proof distribution off Annabel’s desk. “They’re in her out-basket,” Nin tells me. “We take them around every day.”

  Maybe they’ve decided to accept me.

  I happily comply, since I’m itching to get out of the closet.

  Annabel and Lexa still aren’t in, but Beauty and most of the other desks along our corridor have filled up. I pick up the stack of proofs and set out.

  The first inkling of trouble comes when I put my shoulder to a door that I believe will lead me toward the fashion department and it’s locked. I shove again, puzzled.

  “You realize that’s Art?” a passerby asks me. She’s a ruddy, middle-aged woman with unfortunate pigtails.

  I’ve gotten turned around and stumbled upon the forbidden lair of Shane Lincoln-Shane.

  “I didn’t, thanks.” I walk casually away from the door, shaken by my brush with disaster. “You don’t happen to know were I could find Kristen Drane, the fashion director, do you?” I ask the woman. The tiny Chihuahua in her arms bares his teeth and growls in my direction.

  “Marc Jacobs, stop that,” she says.

  “Isn’t he cute?” I say.

  “He’s a she,” she says, scolding. “That’s Kristen’s assistant, Reese, right over there.” Marc Jacobs bursts into frenzied barking.

  Now I remember. Kristen Drane’s office is on one of the long rows and is directly across from the kitchen, which strikes me as a strange location for the office of a fashion director.

  Her assistant has sunken dark eyes and a concave, art nouveau visage. She’s wearing a high-necked, black Victorian blouse, riding boots, and black shorts. She sighs when I walk up. Her chair-pillow is a twisted botanical chintz of artichokes, lizards, and thorns on a midnight-blue background.

  “Hi, Reese.” I find myself employing a hushed whisper, in tribute to her sullen beauty. “I’m Kate, the new intern. I have two stories for Kristen.”

  The stories are titled “Match Your Meds: A Designer for Every Designer Drug” and “Oh Myla! or Icky Vicky? What Your Panties Say About You.”

  Both stories are in quiz format. Nin told me this morning that it was Lillian’s genius to combine self-discovery multiple choice with fashion spreads. A page I’m delivering to a different editor asks, “Are you tickled pink, feeling blue, or going mellow yellow?” A quiz follows, and each “Results” section is accompanied by silhouetted crop-tops, wedge sandals, oversized sunglasses, vintage costume jewelry, and so on in pink, blue, or yellow. The brands are youthful, pricey, and trendy. The other galley I’m carrying is a beauty spread that determines if readers are ready for orange lipstick. Sample questions: Can you touch your toes? Do you like salt-and-vinegar potato chips? Were you terrorized in junior high by an elderly dancing mistress? Do you think your friends are honest with you?

  I notice that the byline on the “Oh Myla!” story is Reese Malapin’s.

  “Did you write this?” I ask her.

  “Yes, I wrote it. I went to Harvard. My senior thesis was a Marxist critique of the tiny bow on women’s panties.”

  Her charcoal eyes blaze at me with disturbing intensity. I get the feeling that Reese Malapin is a girl with an axe to grind. And I don’t want to be anywhere near her when she starts swinging. Tiny starbursts of broken blood vessels cluster on the knuckles of her right hand. A sign of bulimia. She sees me noticing and defensively tucks her hands away under her folded arms.

  “Okay! Well, I’ll just give this one to Kristen, then.” I push Kristen’s door open. Reese cries out a warning, but too late.

  There’s a person stretched out on the floor just in front of the desk.

  She’s waxen pale, with her arms folded over her chest in a pose that looks more eternal-rest than cat-nap. I jump and shriek. The thing about fear—which I wrote a term paper on for Neurobiology 101—is that your body reacts before you have time to process what you’re reacting to. Signals first pass through the amygdala, which gives the command for increased heart rate and breathing and muscle tension, and then travels on to the cortex, where you figure out if it makes sense to be afraid, or if it’s a false alarm.

  I know that there’s nothing scary about seeing an editor sleeping.

  I have plenty of time for my brain to process the signals and tell me “false alarm.” But seeing her there is panic-inducing. The reaction is so purely physical that I find myself frozen, waiting for it to pass. Reese snatches the page proof from my hands and drags me away from the doorway. We stare at each other, stricken.

  “Did you wake her?” she hisses.

  “I don’t think so!” I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but my flesh is one continual crawl.

  “You almost got us both in huge trouble. Don’t you know—”

  Lexa has appeared on the scene. Gently, she draws the door to Kristen’s office shut. Then she puts a limp, icy hand on my arm.

  “Kate, I’ve just had my morning routine disturbed by two phone calls about you. Complaints.”

  All the assistants within earshot are paying very close attention.

  “What kind of complaints?”

  “That’s in confidence, Kate.” She’s gently guiding me away from Kristen Drane’s office, back toward our end of the floor. “One of the reasons I’ve been so successful is that I always suss out the lay of the land when I arrive in a new job. I suggest you do the same. Get to know your surroundings before jumping right in with people. You should know who an editor is and what her section is about before you ever knock on her office door. Know what someone has written in the last issue before you start a conversation.”

  “I’ve read the last issue,” I protest. “I just…I guess I didn’t pay attention to the bylines or, um, the masthead.”

  She sighs. “Real magazine people read the masthead first.”

  My cheeks burn. She’s right. I wouldn’t have walked into a hospital job without first knowing who the staff is and what they specialize in.

  “It won’t happen again.”

  As Lexa silently escorts me back to my desk, I notice how many of the senior-staff offices are dark with a cracked-open door, just like Kristen’s was. And most of the assistants I pass are whispering on the telephone, as if they’re trying not to wake a sleeper.

  “Lexa, is there something I should know about people’s sleeping habits?”

  Her look says that putting up with my stupidity is a great trial to her.

  “How the senior editors spend their mornings isn’t your concern. But as a rule of thumb, don’t go knocking on doors before noon. People get started early on Mondays for the features meeting, but other than that we’re a late office.”

  We’re back at the intern closet. News must spread like wildfire because Rachel and Nin—who I’m assuming set me up for a result exactly like this—are both looking smug. In parting, Lexa decrees that I concentrate solely on sorting the applications for the Tasty Girl Contest. She promises to have another mail cart full of them delivered just for me.

  Mail carts around here are the size of pallet-loaders.

  WHEN THE screaming starts I lurch upright in my chair. The scream sounds again, rising hysterically until it’s suddenly cut off. Rachel and Nin are both away from their desks. Slowly and quietly, I get up and look down the corridor.

  Nothing.

  I wait for the sound of running feet, but all is silent save for the bleeping of phones and chatter of a distant fax machine.

  Grabbing the heaviest metal object I can find, a three-hole punch, I head for the source of the noise. It sounded like it came from Lillian’s end of the floor.

  All is calm by Lexa’s area—Annabel’s computer is on, but she is not at her desk. All’s well in Beauty, too.

  I sneak quietly toward Lillian’s area, feeling silly, but also genuinely concerned. Those sounded like real screams of panic and terror. Lillian’s door is shut. Around the co
rner, I catch a flash of Annabel’s highlighted ponytail, with two pens stuck into it, disappearing into an open doorway. There are muffled sounds of a struggle. “Shut up! You’re causing a scene!” I hear Annabel say, breathlessly.

  Raising the three-hole punch, I dash over to the door, which turns out to be to a supply closet. Annabel, mottled with exertion, is pinning Bambi, Lillian’s assistant, against the wall. What in the hell is going on here?

  “What in the hell is going on here?” I ask.

  Annabel’s bug-y gray eyes roll toward me. “I’m glad you’re here!” she cries. “Tell her to shut up! If anyone finds out, it’ll be on StakeOut, and the magazine will be embarrassed!”

  Bambi’s cries grow louder when she sees me.

  “Shut up!” Annabel lifts Bambi slightly off the ground, by the neck.

  I’m surprised that Annabel is that strong. I’m also surprised that the first thing she thinks of in a crisis is what the blogs will say.

  “Bambi, quiet!” I command. “Annabel, put her down right now!” I use my best scene-of-an-emergency tone, perfected in my previous life as an EMT. I may not know how to dress, but I sure can bark commands.

  Annabel drops Bambi, who slides down the wall, hyperventilating. Her asymmetrical, goddess-drape jersey dress falls off her shoulder.

  “Get me a paper bag,” I tell Annabel, and push past her into the closet.

  “Don’t go in there!” Annabel cries. But it’s too late. I’ve seen what Bambi saw.

  Lying on the floor of the supply closet between some plastic bricks of the May issue and a circular step stool is the body of the Chihuahua I’d seen earlier. Marc Jacobs. Her diamond collar has been torn off and cast aside. Oh my GOD. I check the dog’s vital signs, but Marc Jacobs, as they say, is over.

  Remaining calm—sort of—in a medical emergency, I put my arm around Bambi and coax her out of the closet, gently pulling the door shut behind me.

  “Someone called for a reprint of our April story on French braiding,” Bambi sobs, burying her tear-streaked face on my shoulder. “I opened the door and even before I flipped on the light I knew something was wrong.”