Chapter 3
No One New
It’s Monday morning and Susan is on the toilet swiping through Tinder.
She swipes left so many times that eventually she gets the same message she always sees: “There’s no one new around you.” It’s oddly poetic.
Susan is addicted to dating apps. She can’t stop looking at all the beautiful—and even the not-beautiful—girls who fill up her phone with bathroom selfies and pithy bios and stilted pickup lines.
She can’t stop swiping or talking to new people even after she’s met someone she likes.
Each individual match feels like it has the power to spin off an alternate universe where she could be anyone, have any sort of life.
At this point, though, women have also started to blend together; she can’t keep track of who is originally from what suburb or who is vegan or who is afraid of dogs or who hates the smell of red wine.
She hooks up with bartenders, DJs, party promoters. Trust fund babies and weed dealers; trust fund babies who are also weed dealers. People who text her all day and then drop her as soon as she gets attached. Girls who look like they would have bullied her in middle school.
Katie has stopped learning their names and refers to everyone Susan dates as “the new Ramona.”
Mia, Susan’s roommate, bangs on the door. “Can you hurry up? I’m late for work.”
Susan sighs, rests her phone on the edge of the sink while she flushes.
Mia is Black and very pretty and fashionable in a way that’s unfamiliar to Susan, with an endless collection of brightly hued designer pantsuits and a generous habit of buying luxury candles for their shared living room.
Mia takes the bigger bedroom and pays a larger share of the rent while Susan crams her life into what is definitely supposed to be a closet and pays much less.
Their apartment is in Bed-Stuy on a block in the midst of a tense transition; an overpriced cocktail bar sits next to a dusty hardware store, and apartment buildings designed to look like gray boxes stacked on top of each other fill the spaces between beautiful old brownstones.
Out in the living room, Mia is perched on the couch in her silk pajamas. “Sorry, I just really can’t be late today.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Susan says. “I fell into a Tinder hole.”
“I feel you.” Mia laughs, then pushes past her into the bathroom, not stopping to ask Susan if she’s done. She’s not—she hasn’t even begun to get ready—but it’s okay. She can be late for work. She’ll get ready after Mia leaves.
While Mia is in the shower, Susan picks out her outfit.
Asymmetrical black layers, a gray wool coat, a lime green beanie hat; she likes to look like a wintry Brooklyn witch.
Then she flops onto the bed and opens Tinder back up, refreshing it a few times to see if it’ll recalibrate and show her new people.
It doesn’t.
“All you,” Mia calls, finally vacating the bathroom.
Susan takes the G to Williamsburg, which spits her out about a mile from her office, but she doesn’t mind. She likes the walk, even if it’s freezing and she has to dodge black puddles. Her commute is her only form of exercise.
On the way, she calls her mom. “What are you doing today?”
She has to turn the volume up to hear her mom over the bustle of the Metropolitan intersection. She misses how quiet it used to be, before the Starbucks and Urban Outfitters and luxury condos. Salt crunches under her boots. Everything is wet and gray and loud.
“Hi, honey,” her mom says. “We’re going to go to the grocery store, and then your dad has a doctor’s appointment. I miss you. Are you coming home for the weekend?”
“I miss you, too,” Susan says, looking both ways before she jaywalks. She miscalculates and has to jog to get to the curb before a green cab whizzes by, splattering sludge on her boots.
“And no, Mom, remember, Katie and Jake are getting married this weekend?” she says. She’s a little out of breath from dashing across the street, cold but now sweating in her wool.
“That’s fine. Go live your life,” her mom says, as though Katie’s wedding isn’t a major event.
Susan’s parents were invited but decided to send a check instead of attending, citing their joint pain, which is worse in the cold.
“I’ll come out next weekend,” Susan says. “Promise.”
They hang up and Susan feels guilt like a rock in her stomach.
She’s felt guilty ever since she moved out of their house a few years ago, despite how blasé her parents were about it.
Without her there, she’s not really sure how they are getting by, how they’re managing the physical tasks of homeownership or navigating the bureaucracy of the healthcare system and bill paying.
But she’s never regretted leaving. Not for one second.
At a certain point, she had to choose herself.
She stops at the coffee shop to get her usual, hoping they won’t be playing that same Ed Sheeran song that’s everywhere right now (they are).
The days of her 9 AM arrivals to the office are long over.
It’s already after 10 AM. She has earned the right to arrive late, and she likes the feeling of rolling into the office with her sunglasses on and a coffee in hand when everyone is already at their desks working.
As the social media manager, a job she practically clawed her way into, she has seniority.
She also likes that she’s not responsible for anyone else’s coffee anymore, though she almost always brings Heather one just to be nice.
Heather is, after all, her closest friend at work.
But this morning when she texts Heather for her order, Heather doesn’t write back.
“Helloooooo,” Susan writes, and when a few minutes go by without an answer, she assumes Heather must be in a meeting and forgets about it.
At the office, a bright and airy loft a few floors up from the original dust dungeon, she settles at her desk.
Though she tries to stay on top of it, her work area is a perpetual mess, crowded with magazines and press mailings and CDs and records and free concert tickets and gifts from labels and brands.
A small corkboard has Polaroid photos of her and her favorite artists, many of whom have become friends, or at least acquaintances, or at least people who know her name and seem happy to run into her at parties.
A few years ago, the blog had suddenly started generating traffic.
Maybe it was the mainstreaming of indie rock or the nonstop hunger for celebrity news or the rise of the influencer but, regardless, more traffic meant more advertisers, more advertisers meant more money, and more money meant they had to keep doing the thing that was making money.
Somewhere along the way, the company had become less of a record label and more of a digital media platform, focusing on the content they could make instead of the artists they could represent.
It even got a new name—Rider Die Media—though everyone still just calls it Rider.
Susan peers over her computer and sees Ben across in the area where the ten-person editorial team lives; he looks angry.
Now in his forties, Ben has started to age rapidly; he has a beer belly and a bald spot on the back of his head but is still squeezing himself into those same old skinny jeans and the staff makes fun of him behind his back.
When he bends down, his hairy ass crack shows, his love handles spilling over his belt.
In other ways, he hasn’t changed at all; right now, he’s yelling at the events girl.
“Fuck,” Susan says.
Frankie, a graphic designer who wears all black every single day, leans over from the neighboring desk. “I heard he went home alone last night.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Susan says.
Everybody knows that if Ben doesn’t go home with someone after one of the company’s many parties, he has a temper tantrum, usually aimed at the events team, who is responsible for introducing him to the models on the VIP list. Every now and then Susan suggests to one of them that they don’t have to provide this service for Ben, but she’s usually met with an eye roll.
Ben’s toxicity is so baked into the fabric of his company that very few people seem to be able to imagine it running any differently.
It horrifies Susan whenever someone actually goes home with him. But Ben is rich and powerful and well connected now, and Susan assumes that counts for a lot with the much younger fame-hungry women who trail after him.
Ben, having finished yelling at the events girl, saunters over to Susan and looms over her desk.
“Hey, Assistant,” he says.
He still calls her this even though she runs a team of four.
“Hey, Boss,” she says: their shtick.
“Did you have fun last night?” His chest hair looks like it’s climbing out of his collar.
“I, uh.” She pauses. “I didn’t go.”
“You didn’t go,” he repeats, drumming his fingers on her desk. “Well, perhaps you had a good reason. Were you doing the nasty?”
She laughs, because there’s nothing else to do when Ben gets like this. “Sure,” she says.
She’d been home smoking pot and watching Law & Order: SVU on the couch with Mia and had fallen asleep with the bowl of popcorn in her lap, woken up to the end credits and a puddle of drool on her chin.
“Hey, long story, but,” he says, his tone shifting into something vaguely resembling professionalism, “Heather is no longer with us. Can you cover for her?”
“What?” Susan’s mouth falls open. Rider doesn’t run without Heather. “What happened?”
“She didn’t like our office culture anymore.” He shrugs.
“Our office culture?” Susan pinches the bridge of her nose where a stress headache is about to grip her. “Ben, what did you do?”
“What did I do?” he shoots back. “What have I ever done?”
It’s a rhetorical question. Sometimes she really hates him.
“Just promise me you’ll replace her soon. I don’t think I can run social and PR indefinitely.”
“Never doubt yourself,” he says, missing the point on purpose.