Chapter 2
Rider Die
“Blueberry and a large cold brew?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Susan grins, thrilled that the tattooed barista at New York Muffins has memorized her order.
There are trendier cafés on this block in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but she doesn’t care about three-foot-tall slow-drippers or single-origin espresso.
She just wants something strong and cheap in a big cup.
Susan is twenty-two, a recent college graduate. It’s New York’s hottest summer on record, six weeks after the largest oil spill in American history, and her life has finally begun.
While she waits for her breakfast order, she examines her reflection in the dingy mirror on the wall, trying to arrange her mullet-y layers into something that looks intentional, or at least less like she rolled out of bed and directly out the door, which is, in fact, what she did.
At least she showered before going to sleep last night, though it must not have been a totally thorough cleansing because yesterday’s eyeliner is still crusted around her eyelashes.
She’s wearing a Sleater-Kinney T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, creating long armholes that reveal her neon green sports bra, and ripped black skinny jeans. She looks, she thinks with not a small amount of satisfaction, very gay.
Today marks four weeks into Susan’s job as an assistant at Rider Die Records, an indie label—a job she has thanks to Jonny Lakes.
Before his phone number faded from her arm, she scribbled it onto a Post-it and then saved it among her most treasured possessions for nearly five years.
She hadn’t actually expected him to pick up when she nervously called him from her bedroom a few weeks before her college graduation and begged to be his personal assistant.
He’d laughed, but not unkindly, at the implication that he could even afford a PA, and then offered instead to put her in touch with Ben Kaplan, the CEO of his label, who apparently owed him a favor. That favor was hiring Susan.
Since then, Jonny has become something of a mentor, though Susan generally thinks of him as more like a guardian angel.
They’ve seen each other a few joyous times at the office, Jonny coming in for meetings about his record sales and publicity strategy, but for the most part, their relationship takes place over text.
Susan frequently reaches out for guidance as she navigates the new waters of adult life, and Jonny always seems happy to help.
The label’s office is a big room in a converted warehouse building a block from the water’s edge.
In her first few weeks at Rider Die Records, which all the cool people just call Rider, Susan arrived before everyone else so many times, eagerly waiting in the hallway for more than an hour until someone could let her in, that they gave her a key.
Now her cold brew is slippery with condensation and hard to hold along with her bag as she unlocks the squeaky metal door, but she manages without dropping anything. She pushes the door open with her shoulder and that’s when she sees him: Ben, her boss, passed out on the office sofa.
Splayed out face up like a starfish, he has one retro Air Jordan still on and the other is nowhere in sight.
His stomach hair is exploding out the bottom of his maroon V-neck T-shirt, his mouth hanging open.
He’s still wearing what he had on yesterday, down to his salmon-colored skinny jeans.
The coffee table is cluttered with empty Pbr cans and McDonald’s wrappers.
The office is a mess, even without the remains of what she assumes was Ben’s party.
Sagging bookshelves that overflow with magazines serve as DIY walls, sectioning the room off into different smaller areas, only an illusion of privacy between what’s supposed to be a lobby and a conference room and different people’s workspaces.
Still, she looks around with great fondness at the posters covering the walls and the stacks of CDs littering every desk.
Despite how hard she works, she loves being here—there’s always new music to be discovered, and helping bands get the attention they deserve (or, at least, helping the people who are helping to do that) gives her a kind of satisfaction she’s never felt.
Susan tiptoes around Ben like he’s a sleeping lion, but the ambient dust gets the better of her and she sneezes, several times in a row.
He opens his eyes on the fourth one. “Oh, hey, Assistant,” he says, sitting up. His eyes are puffy and red.
She’s a few feet away from him but Susan can smell his breath. Tobacco and stomach acid. “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t realize anyone would be here yet.”
He doesn’t seem surprised to see her. Instead, it’s like he’d counted on being woken up by whoever got to the office first. She’s not sure how she feels about being his alarm clock. It certainly wasn’t in her job description.
He stretches his arms over his head, then pulls a device out of his pocket and checks its screen. “Hey, you seen one of these yet?”
“What, the new iPhone?”
“Yes, my young ward,” he bellows. “The future is now. When are you going to get rid of that fucking flip-brick you drag around?”
“Maybe when you put me on salary?” she suggests. Susan makes twelve dollars an hour working for Ben.
To her relief, he laughs. “You’ve worked here for five minutes, and you already want a raise? I swear, you goddamn millennials.” Ben is probably in his mid-to-late thirties: Gen X, the last cool generation, or so they’ve labeled themselves. “That a cold brew?”
Susan nods, resists the urge to say, Obviously.
Ben searches the coffee table for an empty Solo cup and holds it out to her. “Go on, then.”
Reluctantly, she takes the lid off her coffee and dumps some of it in.
He downs it in one sip, then sits all the way up and studies her. “Assistant, take a load off,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ve just been quietly churning out press clippings for a month. Tell me what’s up.”
She sits down nervously on the ratty armchair. “What do you want to know?”
“Where’d you go to school? What did you study?”
“Baruch,” she says, trying to hide her dismay that he’s forgotten the basic details of her life, but maybe he never knew any of her details to begin with. “I studied music management.”
“The finest major.” He looks at her with renewed interest, as though having something in common alerts him to the fact that she is indeed a fellow human.
“And where do you live?” Smells are coming off him; she gets whiffs of fries and Old Spice deodorant, the coffee doing his breath no favors.
She has to breathe through her mouth so as not to react.
“Um.” She pauses, not wanting to tell him. “On Long Island.”
“Oh, that’s a fucking miserable commute,” he declares. “How are you supposed to go to shows?”
“I go to shows,” she says in a small voice.
Susan is somewhat of a fixture in the local Long Island music scene, but her commuting schedule has made it difficult to go out in the city with any regularity.
Ben sniffs this out quickly. “Shows here?” he says, and she looks at her feet. “I thought so. You need a crash pad.” He gestures to the couch. “Feel free to use the office for sleeping purposes anytime. I mean, anytime I’m not using it.”
“Thanks,” she says, though the thought of sleeping on a couch that Ben’s entire body—and all his smells—has been on makes her want to throw up.
“So,” he says, now stretching his legs out on the coffee table.
He kicks the remaining sneaker off. His socks don’t match; surprising, given how much he seems to care about appearances.
Maybe it was a deliberate choice. “I meant to ask.” He takes out a bag of loose tobacco and begins to roll a cigarette. “You’re a lesbian, huh?”
“Queer as a three-dollar bill.” She nods, and then blushes.
Why did she say that? Who even put that dad joke of a sentence in her head?
“Interesting.” He licks the rolling paper and a few flecks of tobacco get stuck on his beard. “No guys, ever?”
“I mean…” Susan trails off. “I guess I sort of dated a guy in high school.” She’s sweating. She’s not sure if Kyle counts.
Ben lights the cigarette. “I knew it. You know, sexuality isn’t completely black-and-white. We should all be open to possibilities.”
Susan quickly clocks the windows and doors, trying to imagine how she’d get out of the office if she needed to make a break for it. Just as she decides she could knock a magazine shelf over if Ben tries to touch her, the rest of the staff starts filing in.
Heather, the label’s publicist, walks over to them, shouting, “Ben, you total fucking slob! Did you sleep on the couch again?” She’s standing over him now, arms folded across her chest. “And you know we all hate it when you smoke in here.” Heather is wearing a galaxy-print minidress.
She has a jet-black bob and baby bangs and a nose so tiny there’s no way it’s the one she was born with.
She’s also the only one who talks to Ben like this.
“Oh, Heaths.” He smirks, although Heather’s name doesn’t easily lend itself to abbreviation. He puts his cigarette out on the table. It folds in two, wet from his saliva. “I was just planting seeds with the assistant.”
“You were what?” Heather says.
“In case one day she decides not to be a lesbian anymore. Now she’ll think of me first.”
Susan clenches her jaw, a surge of rage heating her cheeks.
“I cannot believe we have to work for you,” Heather says, rolling her eyes.
He shrugs. “Not my fault the assistant is cute.”
It makes Susan feel small to be talked about like she’s not there, and she feels herself starting to slouch.
Cute doesn’t feel like a compliment. She’s spent her whole life feeling like she’s missing something other girls know about how to present themselves, like she can’t get a solid grip on gender because the world is spinning too fast. Femme vertigo.
Heather turns to her. “Susan, what are you doing today?”
“Um,” Susan says. “Whatever you need?”