Chapter 3 #3
Maira checked her watch. “The sail-away party isn’t for two hours, but I bet people are already marking their spots on the deck. I have the perfect place, you’ll see.” Maira crossed her arms. “Have you met them before?”
“Who, Boy Talk? No.” Annie laughed, as if this were an easily accessible task, open to anyone. “I don’t even know if I’d want to, honestly. Doesn’t it seem kind of weird? Like, for them to be people? I don’t think I need them to be people.”
Maira rolled her eyes. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll see how you feel when they come out. I’ve met them all like twenty times, and I still lose my shit. I used to work for Scotty—did I tell you that? I know them all. You want to meet them, you’ll see.”
Annie pulled her laptop out of her bag and set it down on the small desk, where it was already fighting for space with a curling iron and a power strip.
“I’m just going to check my email and put on my auto-reply.
I’ve heard the service gets spotty once we set out.
” Maira nodded approvingly and then sat on her bed, took out her phone, and began to scroll, a long fingernail tapping lightly against the phone’s screen as she flicked.
It was a Thursday—there shouldn’t have been anything pressing, and the magazine had known for months that she was going away—so Annie was surprised to see an email from her boss pop up. She leaned in.
Dear Annie, it read. We know the timing of this is awkward, but we also thought that you having a few days to absorb this info might be useful (and in such a joyous environment!).
Annie felt her stomach clench. Along with the business manager and our managing editor, we have decided that upon your return, we are going to slightly rearrange the marketing team.
Exciting changes afoot! You will be working directly with Kayla, who has done such a terrific job during her internship that we’ve decided to bring her on full-time.
You two would both be working with the marketing team (each other), and though Kayla’s title would technically make her your boss (you’ve seen her TikToks!), that’s really a matter of semantics.
Annie skimmed the rest of the email, mostly to make sure that it wasn’t a badly worded joke, then slowly lowered the laptop screen until it was closed and blinked at herself in the mirror. Not a joke.
“You okay?” Maira asked.
“I think—I…Well. Well, no. I just got demoted, and my new boss is our intern.” Kayla was practically minutes older than Annie’s daughter.
She had a sixty-four-ounce water bottle and an app on her phone that told her when to drink it.
To Annie’s knowledge, Kayla had never even been to the opera.
When Annie started at Opera Weekly, Kayla had been in the fifth grade.
Surely there’d been a mistake. Annie had spent more than a decade building relationships with people at all kinds of companies—luxury brands who advertised in the magazine, companies that wanted their logo on a backdrop behind the divas at award shows, at showcases, at fundraising luncheons.
She would call Geoff. She picked up the phone and pressed the button next to his name.
It rang three times before Geoff answered. He took a deep breath, and Annie giggled involuntarily, her nerves escaping through her throat.
“Hey, Geoff,” Annie started. “Um.” She hadn’t really thought through what she would say to him.
“Annie,” Geoff began, his voice friendly. “Ship to shore! Got my email? You know what the numbers are like. This is the sound of dinosaurs collapsing into the tar pit. We’re the brachiosauruses, you and me. Brachiosauri?”
Geoff was ten years her senior, so close to retirement that he could almost kiss it.
He wasn’t a bad guy, and Annie almost felt like apologizing, hearing him say what was clearly the truth, but then she remembered that he had just made her subservient to her idiot baby of an intern, and she got mad.
“Yeah, well,” Annie said, “this feels bad, Geoff. Kayla’s never even done a request for proposal on her own.
” It was as harsh a thing as she’d ever said to him.
RFPs were her bread and butter—Annie could do them in her sleep.
She could hear his chair roll around on the floor.
The younger people all worked from home as much as they could, from their beds, as far as Annie could tell, but Geoff was always in the office.
Annie could picture every inch of it—the photos of him and his wife, Deborah, in front of the pyramids, in front of the Eiffel Tower, in front of Big Ben, like all they did was go on vacation and find something huge to stand in front of.
Deborah had given Annie a wide berth since her divorce, though of course Deborah had written to say how sorry she was, that she’d always liked Chris.
What a terminally stupid thing to say. Annie didn’t need to know who liked Chris!
She needed to know who had always thought that he wasn’t good enough for her.
Deborah didn’t get it. She and Geoff were going to be married until he dropped dead, and then she would just go to the opera and the ballet with her friends instead until she died too.
“I know,” Geoff said. “I feel bad too. But they love those TikToks.” They were the board.
They didn’t have TikTok accounts, but their grandchildren did.
There had been a #MeToo debacle and a DEI debacle, and the board was scared, Annie got it.
They were trying not to drop into the tar pits themselves.
Across the room, Maira shifted her seat on the bed, which made a squeaking sound.
Annie caught her eye in the mirror and tried to jerk her mouth into a smile, which didn’t quite work.
Geoff was still talking, but Annie was distracted and had missed the first part of his sentence. “…try to have fun, okay? Are you on the boat already?”
Annie swallowed. “Yup.” It didn’t really feel like they were on the water, but she had crossed a bridge, and she could see the Cruise Terminal out the small window between the two beds.
“Listen, think it over. We’ll talk next week. Have fun, okay? Buh-bye, okay? Buh-bye.” Geoff hung up, and so Annie did too.
For a few seconds, the room was quiet.
“Well, we got the drink package, right?” Maira asked.
It had seemed expensive—fifty dollars a day for all the booze you could drink.
Annie had imagined it being something out of a mid-century movie musical, waiters in nautical outfits, elegant dancers gliding across marbled floors.
Surely she’d want a glass of champagne here and there.
Annie nodded. “Then let’s go,” Maira said.
“Won’t fix it, but it might make it feel better for a minute or two. Plus, the guys? Come on.”
“Okay,” Annie said. She felt suddenly very grateful to this stranger, a woman with a plan. “That sounds like a good idea to me.”