A couple of the girls from marketing recognized Adam from photos I’d posted of us on Richual.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Jesus?” one said.
“Wow, thank you,” he said, and winked at me.
He’d come into the city for my twenty-week scan. My white OB liked him more than me and she wasn’t polite enough to hide it. They were having a conversation about Linda Ronstadt’s influence on the longevity of Warren Zevon’s career, while I waited for her to look at my fetus and tell me everything that might possibly go wrong so I could prepare myself.
“The baby is in the breech position now, but there’s still plenty of time for the baby to turn. It’s something we’ll continue to monitor.”
“And if the baby stays like that, I’ll have to have a C-section, right?” I asked. “I don’t want a C-section.”
“Like I said, we’ll continue to wait and see. Nothing to worry about yet,” she said.
Adam squeezed my hand. His grip was warm and firm, an anchor.
“Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Giving Birth Vaginally but Were Afraid to Ask,” I thought, self-soothing the only way I knew how, by translating my anxiety into content. “Are the Organic Skin Care Products You’re Putting on Your Face Safe for the Baby in Your Womb?” “So You’re Pregnant and You Just Ate Two Bites of Bleu Cheese: One Woman’s Story.” “Here Are the Symptoms of Preeclampsia, the Life-Threatening Disorder Kim Kardashian West Knows All Too Well.”
My legs were so restless they felt haunted. Even bracketed by pillows, I woke up throughout the night, thinking about how I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Maybe I was just lonely. As much as Adam assured me he was there for me, here for this, I needed him to show me. I yawned constantly, trying to unpop my ears. Pregnancy was not something I could compartmentalize, like a hobby or a grudge.
Wherever I browsed online, I was seeing ads for Stretch Marks Survival Kit, Prenatal Cradle belly band, Organic Nipple Butter. There was no end to what I could buy to change my body or keep my body from changing or heal my body from a change.
My mother said I was spending too much time in internet forums, letting strangers tell me what was normal and what wasn’t, instead of asking someone who’d known me my whole life.
“You haven’t been pregnant in more than twenty-five years,” I told her on FaceTime.
“You think we did it different back then?”
“It’s not that. It’s how much information I’m expected to know now, just because I have access to it. Do you think I should hire a birth coach?”
“Say that again?”
Serious question @ 28 weeks, one forum headline read. I was 100 pounds when I got pregnant and I’m 113 now. Dr. says this is normal, but do I look huge in this pic? Be honest!
I took a screenshot for Maren. Richual was missing out on this market segment.
Adam was on his hands and knees, fixing a wobbly leg on my desk with the Swiss army knife he carried in his pocket. The marketing girls and I watched from above.
“What else can he do?” one of the girls—Marisa—asked.
“He builds tiny houses,” I told her, just to watch her jaw fall. She took out her phone.
“Is it okay if I take a picture of this for our main channel?”
Adam said sure. But then Marisa’s face darkened.
“Oh no,” she said. “Look.” She opened a new tab on my computer and showed me the headline: “Women’s Empowerment Summit Interrupted by Protestors Who Demand Justice for Victims of Richual Founder.”
“That’s not even right,” I said. “Evan’s an investor, not a founder.”
We all watched a nine-second video of Devin’s face crumpling like a paper bag. I felt mortified on her behalf. I nudged Marisa out of the way so I could sit at the steering wheel of my own vehicle. Who were the protestors? “A crowd of women in coordinated outfits and masks,” it said. Adam was still underneath the desk, looking up at me, confused. In another window, I looked at the live tracking of our user stats. They were dropping precipitously. We were getting dozens of account deactivations a minute.
“Find Katelyn,” I told Marisa. “She has to demand a correction.”
“She’s not here.”
“That’s why I said find her,” I snapped.
I clicked through the slideshow attached to the article. There was Arianna Tran making Devin laugh in a wingback chair. There was a white woman seated in the front row smiling with tears in her eyes, her hands clasped over her heart. Then I saw the masked activists. I kept clicking as their masks melted off their faces. I recognized two of them right away from their profile photos on Slack. NicoletteLee and Aja_dontgothere. Shit. There was our intern Diana. There was a woman who looked just like Gili nursing a baby.
Well that was an absolute nightmare , Maren texted. I’m sure you saw.
I signed into the Stay Woke, Y’all Slack channel. I hadn’t checked it since the news broke about Evan—it didn’t seem like a very high priority, but what I’d missed was all their planning. As I scrolled, I pieced it together. Once the Richual press release went out in Evan’s defense, all the New York–based users decided how they would take us down. Diana rose to the challenge of matching their outrage word for word. I will not have my labor further exploited by a company funded by a sexual predator and led by his sycophant, she wrote. First they would disrupt the conference and confront the sycophant directly. The_s_is_silent couldn’t be there in person, but she came up with the idea of wearing sheet masks. Diana would bring the towels she knew were in Devin’s office. Then, using all the viral media footage of the disruption, they would call for a massive wave of user cancelations.
I had to make sure Maren never found out about the Slack channel.
I saw , I texted her. Holy shit.
Now what? Should I express my condolences, ask if there was anything I could do? I couldn’t post anything publicly in defense of Devin or Richual or Evan, not until I found out what our official line was. I did what Devin would have done: to the internet, I pretended nothing was wrong.
“You okay?” Adam asked. “Can I get you a snack?”
“Stay there,” I told him, and snapped a picture of him holding the screwdriver. Work work work work work, I wrote in the caption.
Could you do me a favor, Maren said, and ask Diana to go to the summit and get Devin’s bag? It’s in the green room it has her phone.
But Diana was no longer with us. She’d emailed her letter of resignation. I screenshotted it for Maren.
Hey y’all,
I will not have my labor further exploited by a company funded by a sexual predator and led by his sycophant. I acknowledge my privilege in that my parents have been paying my rent and living expenses during my internship so that if I quit, I will not be homeless. (Also, FYI my dad is a lawyer, just in case you were thinking of pressing charges for borrowing the towels. Think again!) For the sake of my future in the job market, I cannot have my personal brand associated with Richual. I want to give a shout-out to Khadijah, who has been a really great boss who literally supported my growth. Now I’m deleting my account. If you want to stay in touch, find me on Insta.