Chapter 1
The company, Rampart, allows her to work remotely.
She mostly writes their content, but occasionally, they have her design social media graphics because young + female = good with fonts?
Eve doesn’t love it. But when PRELAPSARIAN came out, she only made enough money to keep her dream alive, not her body.
Rampart became her side hustle. She can churn out SEO-friendly articles like a machine.
No one hides a witty Easter egg in a social media post like Eve.
It’s easy to evoke emotion in potential customers because humans hate feeling vulnerable; they don’t like to hear that their data is exposed like an upside-down turtle.
The word vulnerability, Eve has learned, comes from the Latin vulnerabilis: “wounding.”
Eve is in the Denver airport waiting for her flight to JFK when her Rampart email spontaneously logs her out. That’s fine; she was mostly writing lyrics in her Notes app, anyway. She tries to log back in but can’t get through. Maybe something’s wrong with the Wi-Fi in here. Back to lyrics.
VULNERABILITY: When PRELAPSARIAN came out, the big review site called it “humid” (which they meant as a compliment) and “guarded” (which they meant as an insult).
“Moments of insight are eclipsed by stilted overproduction—descriptions of heartbreak and first love feel like they were written by six men in a boardroom.” There was no boardroom. Eve is all six men.
In the past four days—and that’s how long it has been since the car accident, four days to end things with Fletcher and pack up all her belongings while they took turns sleeping on the couch—she has written nine songs.
She needs at least one more. She knows how the album starts but she needs a final track.
Something with hope, but not in a bleh way. No one wants to be called saccharine.
This is the first time she’s written songs like this, fluidly and confidently, since she was a teenager.
Maybe they have only taken four days to write, but they’ve also taken four years to write—four years of Boulder, four years of feeling trapped, four years of Fletcher asking her not to write songs about him.
Her computer is littered with snippets of half-finished projects, and she feels less like she’s creating something and more like she’s snapping pieces into predetermined places.
VULNERABILITY: If Eve does not turn her relationship with Fletcher into art, then she wasted half of her twenties.
Eve gets a text from Diego, her work friend.
Diego: Rampart email being weird for you?
Eve tries to log in again. No luck.
Eve: server down maybe?
Diego: Dunno, I’m getting weird vibes
Diego: I heard there was some big meeting this morning
Eve: ooooo keep me in the loop pls
Eve shuts her laptop and gets in line to board.
She wonders if it’s true that she’s too guarded.
PRELAPSARIAN contains no direct references to sex even though that’s what the entire album is about: coming of age, wanting and being wanted, wondering whether your desires are weird.
But the album isn’t meant to be feelings-y; it’s meant to be clever.
So it’s full of allusions to Milton and Melville and Miller, canonical references she amassed over an English lit/history double major.
She sang about temptation in the Garden of Eden, but she couldn’t bring herself to write about her own body touching and being touched.
She could not bear the thought that her family would listen to it.
VULNERABILITY: Once, Josh—Eve’s first serious boyfriend, early college—rolled to face her in the extra-long twin bed and said, “It’s weird how you spend all this time writing songs about feelings but I never actually know how you feel about anything.
” Fletcher never asked Eve how she felt.
He did not care to know. For a long time, this felt like the perfect solution.
Just as Eve is hoisting her carry-on into the overhead bin, her phone begins to buzz. She slides into her seat and answers in a whisper.
“Hey!” Shannon says. Shannon is Eve’s best friend; they met on the first day of rush freshman year, promptly quit the process, and spent the rest of college being smugly anti–Greek life.
It’s unclear to Eve who she would’ve become had Shannon’s last name (Offenbach) not been alphabetically adjacent to hers.
“I’m just getting on the plane,” Eve says.
“What did Rampart say? I’m asking as your friend, obviously. Consider my reporter hat discarded.”
“What,” Eve says, “are you talking about?”
“About the data breach.”
“What data breach?”
“Oh,” Shannon says. “Oh no.”
The woman seated next to Eve gives her a look (fair enough) and Eve tilts her head toward the window.
“Can you give me the thirty-second recap?” Eve says.
“Someone hacked the shit out of Rampart, and seeing as their whole business model was to, like, not get hacked, rumor has it that the company will essentially not exist this time tomorrow.”
“Wow,” Eve says. “That was only ten seconds. Fifteen, tops.”
“Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m totally panicking.”
“Deep breaths. This will be fine.”
VULNERABILITY: Just before Eve finished college, she got a record deal.
It was nothing huge, but, you know, still a record deal.
Her dad looked at the projected numbers and told her he would get her a job at his bank.
She said A) that was nepotism, and B) she wasn’t interested.
He told her she was irresponsible and childish.
She told him twenty-two was the perfect age to follow your irresponsible and childish dreams. He said, “If you do this, you need to know you will not see a single cent of my money. We’re not your patrons.
You’re an adult now. And you can’t stay in this house. ” So Eve moved to Boulder.
“In the spirit of full disclosure,” Eve says, “my bank account is a teensy bit very depleted at present.”
“And you definitely can’t stay with your parents while you find a new job?”
“Definitely not.”
“I would say you could stay with me,” Shannon says, “but my landlord is so weird about guests. We could sneak you in and out under cover of night?”
“I’ll talk to Julian when I land. I was going to stay with him until I found a place anyway. Maybe I’ll just . . . stay a few extra days.”
Eve very much hopes “days” does not mean “weeks.” Or “months.”
“Is that going to be okay?” Shannon asks.
“Positive thoughts,” Eve says.
“What if,” Shannon says, “and this is just an idea, no pressure, but what if you wrote a super fucking awesome album and then released a song and it went totally viral and then everyone realized how neat you are and you made a shit ton of money?”
VULNERABILITY: Eve will not make it as a musician.
There’s this idea in creative professions that if you just keep knocking on the door long enough, it will eventually open.
But Eve is beginning to wonder if it’s less like knocking on a door and more like panning for gold in a river. Not all rivers have gold.
They’re somewhere over Ohio when the plane hits turbulence.
Eve is not usually a nervous flier but she is entirely convinced she’s about to die.
A mountain lion and a car crash in quick succession will do that to a person.
And her fear—as the seat belt light comes on, as the captain says in a too-tight voice that flight attendants should take their jump seats—is that she will die with this album still halfway trapped inside her.
What if she dies and it never becomes real?
She opens the Notes app in her phone and writes a song about hope.
The title of the song is “retrocognition.” She’s pretty sure retrocognition is a synonym for hindsight but decides she will need to verify this upon landing.
It’s apt because this album feels retro—new wave, synth-pop, indietronica.
She types the word at the top of her Notes app and it feels gut-right: “retrocognition.” Lowercase intentional.
The song comes like it’s been there all along.
It’s directed at Fletcher. What a feeling—to remember the dead dreams you once had for the future. It’s like watching an episode of The Jetsons in the 2020s. Oh, to remember what we thought we could be.
In the song, she tells Fletcher she hopes he finds someone who makes him happier, which is true. It’s all right. They put up a good fight. She hopes he really loved her but that he loves the next girl more. At least they’ll always have hindsight.
When the plane does not, in fact, crash, the fasten seat belt sign turns off and Eve makes her way to the bathroom. She whisper-sings “retrocognition” into her phone in one take so she doesn’t forget how it’s supposed to sound.
As soon as they land at JFK, Eve sends everything she has, all ten songs and the lyrics and the bits of sound she’s been splicing together, to her manager with the subject line: Do we think this sounds okay?
Her manager emails back while Eve is at baggage claim.
Halfway through but yes. Have a new producer in mind. When can you be in New York?
It’s all so exciting and distracting that Eve can almost ignore the other email she has received, this one from the CEO of Rampart. It uses a lot of corporate jargon to express deep regret.
Diego: Well, nice working with you
Diego: Let me know if you have any job leads
Eve: rip
Eve: o’er the ramparts we watched crash and burn
Diego: Hey, wasn’t your brother’s company a client?
Eve says, “Uh-oh.”
VULNERABILITY: Eve has heard murmurs from Shannon that things are not going so well at Julian’s app.
Investors are concerned. You know what would be a really inconvenient thing to happen to a precariously situated dating app?
An app with an enormous amount of sensitive, personal, and highly traceable user information?
A data breach. That would be, as they say, a big fucking vulnerability.
It’s unclear to Eve how, exactly, she’s going to get her assorted suitcases from the Jamaica AirTrain to the E—or the LIRR?
—and she’s considering if she will regret spending a hundred dollars on an Uber when the automatic doors open and through them emerges Shannon with a cardboard sign.
It says WELCOME HOME NEVER LEAVE ME AGAIN!
!! Shannon spots Eve, brandishes the sign overhead, does a little dance, shoves the sign in the recycling, and jogs to help Eve with her bags.
“I love you so much,” Eve says.
“I know! Hug, please.”
They catch up on the train to Julian’s even though they’re always in semiconstant contact and there’s not that much to catch up on.
Shannon gives Eve her phone to read an article she’s drafting on facial recognition software.
Eve gives Shannon her phone to listen to the disjointed files she has tentatively labeled ski rat.
“Eve, this is, like—” Shannon says.
“Surely they must be regulating who has access to facial recognition,” Eve says.
“You’ve gone indietronica. I love it.”
“Anyone can just download this software?”
“We’re going to talk about your thing for a minute,” Shannon says, “but thank you.”
Eve concedes: “I think I had all these songs in the back of my mind, but I didn’t want to write any of them because I thought it would hurt Fletcher. Or myself.”
“Let me see the lyrics,” Shannon says.
Eve shares the folder. She knows Shannon will return the songs with notes: “Hard to parse this” and “Cliché” and “Singsongy rhyme.” Shannon has never once sent a grammatically accurate text, but that’s mostly irony. No one gives better edits.
At the apartment, Julian lets them in. He hugs Eve then holds her at a distance, blinking down with pale lashes like little filaments of glass.
Julian is twenty-eight. Very tall, very thin, very pale.
He is beautiful like a Victorian ghost. He wears casual clothes but steams and irons all of them.
He has been reading The Power Broker for the past four years.
On his nineteenth birthday, he got a tattoo on his rib of the Augustus Saint-Gaudens golden statue of Diana in the American Wing of the Met—that was where their grandmother took them for lunch growing up—and he cried because he regretted it so completely.
In the bottom drawer of his nightstand, he keeps a deflated stuffed polar bear named Professor Snowflake Van der Doodle.
When they were kids, he would sort all their Halloween candy so Eve could have all the best pieces. He is Eve’s favorite person.
Shannon has to get back to work, so she hugs them goodbye and leaves.
“I should get back to work, too,” Julian says. “We’re in a bit of a shit show. On account of a data leak. Perhaps you’re familiar.”
“Really,” Eve says, “so sorry about that.”
“Grab whatever you want from the kitchen. Gigi’s at a work lunch. You just missed Danny. No pressure, but remind me how long you’re staying?”
“So, Shannon’s lease ends in a month . . .”
“Ah.”
“But I can, like, totally couch surf for a while.”
“You’re not going to couch surf,” Julian says. “Just be really nice to Gigi.”
“Done. I promise. So nice. I love Gigi.”
Gigi is grumpy and gorgeous and terrifying, but Eve has always felt like she and Gigi could love each other if given enough time, so this is not so much a lie as it is willful optimism.
“Right,” Julian says, “just please don’t take her coffee? Or her shampoo. Oh my god, do not eat her pita chips. Gigi loves pita chips.”
“I’ll be invisible,” Eve says. “A little mouse.”
“A little mouse who doesn’t eat pita chips.”
Eve salutes. After a pause, she adds, “Thanks for not suggesting I ask Mom and Dad.”
“They’d say no.”
“Yeah. Ever think that’s kind of weird?”
“All the time, Eevee. Now please let me work.”