Chapter 6
SIX
I knew I didn’t have close friends at StyleList, but I didn’t know I had so many potential enemies.
As word spread that I was Lucinda’s new “favorite,” the atmosphere on the floor grew chilly, with reactions ranging from pretending I didn’t exist to downright animosity.
The lifestyle-and-beauty girls rolled their eyes at me as I passed them in the hallways.
The copyeditors and fact-checkers who’d always appreciated how detail-oriented I was now gave me skeptical side-eyes.
And Tara refused to even look at me, making it clear that Lucinda had been lying about her acceptance of my new position.
Even Natasha seemed salty. When I stopped by her office to ask how that gushing speech I’d crafted for her was received, she said flatly, “Lots of applause, wunderkind.” I had a feeling I could kiss my fashion closet castoffs and designer discounts goodbye, which was fine by me, as long as she made good on her promise to let me shadow her on a cover shoot.
When I popped up at the photographer’s studio during the next shoot, Natasha begrudgingly described how the StyleList team created the covers that had been breaking newsstand records—until recently, apparently.
First, we talked about choosing subjects to coincide with major cultural events.
StyleList would be shooting Julia Roberts that day because she was coming off the success of Notting Hill and was about to release her next movie, Runaway Bride.
The issue would get added visibility because it featured a popular star on newsstands during the peak of her next movie’s marketing campaign.
Then Natasha walked me through the importance of well-worded and intentionally placed cover lines.
We talked about having a concept and a palette for the cover—we were shooting Julia in a couture wedding dress, so people would think of the movie, against a dark green background that would contrast with her auburn hair.
Natasha told me that we’d need enough images for the inside profile, with at least one close-up beauty shot, as well as a vertical full-body shot for the table of contents.
Then Natasha showed me the racks of clothing selects and informed me that she always saved the biggest designer for the cover. It was a master class.
Now that I was a senior member of the editorial team, I was also gaining expertise in all aspects of magazine making.
I thought I knew a lot after three years at StyleList, but now I was sitting in on strategy sessions about long-term issue planning, sponsorable editorial packages for the sales team, possible bookazines and other brand extensions, multi-issue franchise development with prosocial components, and sell-through and reader satisfaction scores.
I was getting a PhD in being an editor in chief.
While the StyleList team was hating on me, everyone else in my life was thrilled: Joseph was excited, my parents were proud, my girls were pumped.
But when my expanded responsibilities made me miss one too many girls’ nights out, Denyse, Sofie, and Teresa decided to make a surprise evening visit to my office.
When the after-hours Park Ave Pub lobby attendant called my desk, I thought my Chinese food had arrived.
Instead, my friends spilled out of the elevator with cupcakes and champagne.
As I often thought when we all hung out: We made an odd group.
Flaxen blond with icy blue eyes, Sofie was six feet tall in bare feet—which is, apparently, average height in her native Amsterdam.
She’d moved to New York five years ago after a semisuccessful modeling career in Europe.
She and MC WhiteHot, a white rapper whose cred as a gifted lyricist offset the slight corniness of his pale locs, fell for each other immediately.
And he bankrolled Sofie’s Café, a French bistro on Grand Street with red leather banquettes, mirrored walls, and lighting so low you needed the table candles to read the dinner menu.
Sofie added rotating DJs playing hip hop and R&B mixes and curated a cool crowd, transforming the restaurant into a music- and fashion-industry hangout over which she presided in heavily accented English peppered with random urban phrases.
Teresa discovered Sofie’s Café after a shoe-shopping extravaganza in SoHo for which she was, naturally, wearing high heels.
She’d heard New Edition’s harmonies spilling out of the restaurant’s open door and hobbled in to give her aching arches a rest. After being welcomed by Sofie herself, who gossiped with her while she recovered from the strain of maxing out her credit card, Teresa was a convert.
She brought me and I brought my closest college friend, Denyse, and the three of us had been going there regularly for years—so much so that it had become our Batcave.
While Sofie was a nomad from the Netherlands, Denyse was an old soul from a prominent Bowie, Maryland, family.
She’d never failed to make her dorm room bed, cooked nightly, and was dozing with curlers in her hair by 10:30 every night at Howard.
I convinced her to go to a few step shows, but she’d prioritized her beauty sleep, her straight A’s, and her efforts to make inroads with the recruiters who occasionally visited our campus to find interns and junior hires among the best and brightest.
In addition to being the most driven, Denyse was also the most politically militant among us.
Though she was always good for a rant about microaggressions and the lack of diasporic representation at Fortune 500 companies, her real focus was generational wealth for the Black community.
Well on the way to her goal of learning on the inside so she could transfer the skills to our people, Denyse was now the youngest vice president in the marketing department at the third-largest financial institution in the country.
With her fresh cacao skin, swingy chin-length bob, and lush figure contained under conservative pantsuits, she looked the part.
I could always get a rise out of her by saying she was the token Black woman corporations always trot out in their human resources pamphlets.
Ironically, Sofie was the only one among us who would regularly wear urban gear, like terry cloth minis, NBA dresses, or pastel-colored tracksuits with Enyce or Baby Phat logos splashed on the back.
Ordinarily, we would have dismissed her with two snaps and no backward glance.
But Sofie was her own free spirit: She gave no fucks about race or sexual preference, and she was always the first person on the dance floor.
Sofie was all right in our book and had become the fourth member of our crew.
“The mountain has come to Muhammad,” Denyse exclaimed now, brandishing a chilled bottle of Veuve and wrapping me in a warm hug. “I see that look on your face. You can spare thirty minutes for us tonight.”
“Oooh, Nik, this place is even more fly than I thought it would be.” Sofie high-fived me as she looked around appreciatively. “There have to be flutes somewhere on this fancy floor so we can toast you properly.”
Only Teresa slid her eyes around the vaunted offices with more than a little suspicion.
“We should toast Lucinda for having the good sense to finally give you an overdue promotion,” she muttered, kissing my cheek.
Since I’d told Teresa about Tara’s “Bobbie in whiteface” comment, she was loaded for bear every time StyleList came up in conversation.
I knew better than to share that remark with Denyse, who might have burned the place down.
Denyse and Sofie opened the champagne, drowning out my protestations about still having work to do by turning up Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills” on the boom box they brought.
I relented and the four of us sat in a circle on the floor of StyleList’s hall of magazine covers, getting buzzed under their cheerful gaze.
“Yo, the way these women are cheesing, I feel like I’ve stepped into a toothpaste commercial.” Denyse had stood up and was checking out the decades of framed white women. “I swear, I can hear them humming a jingle.”
“Welcome to my world.” I smiled wryly, then pointed at Teresa. “Don’t you say anything!”
Teresa shrugged and pantomimed zipping her lips.
“I mean, they can’t be mean muggin’ on a cover, Denyse,” Sofie said, sipping her champagne. “When I was modeling, I used to put Vaseline on my teeth so I could smile through a whole shoot.”
Teresa rolled her eyes. “Their bright smiles aren’t the issue, boo…”
Denyse jumped in before Teresa could get going. “Oh, chillax, Tee. They obviously promoted Nikki to shake up the place, get some more melanin in the mix.”
“Something like that,” I demurred, then switched the topic to boys so I wouldn’t have to share the mixed emotions I had about the new position that my girls had come to celebrate.
While I now had Lucinda’s tacit stamp of approval and more perks—clout, cash, invites to A-list events, a new office—I felt less like I belonged than ever.
Kiara had been mining her contact list to give me the inside scoop on the lifestyles of the urban rich and famous, and Lucinda was properly impressed with my sensational exclusives.
But every time I pitched a story on anything other than sex, socialites, and rappers, Lucinda’s eyes would start to wander.
“Doesn’t Paris Hilton or Charlotte Ronson have a charity or something? ”
Every now and then, I would reach out to Marie to vent, but she was not trying to hear it. Her response was always some variation of: “Blazing a trail is hard, my friend. Suck it up for all the women out there trying to make it.”