Then she grabs a phone from one of the masked women and starts recording a video. “It’s so hard to say this,” she says. “But I’m not going to hide it any longer. I won’t be complicit. Devin was abused. Devin is a victim. I’m going to ask the Richual community to come together to support her during this difficult time.”
When Arianna turns to look at me, her face has melted into my mom’s face. Two streams of blood are running from her nostrils into her mouth.
“Evan touched me, too,” she says to me. “He touched me when I was dead.” She takes my hands and puts them on her breasts.
I woke up in bed in the dark, groggy from my nap, a sour taste in my mouth. “Maren?” I yelled.
The sound of her voice, speaking to someone in the living room.
“Who’s here?”
“Just me,” she called back. The daylight was gone. I turned on the lamp on the nightstand, which was covered in dust and Starburst wrappers, a bottle of Kiehl’s self-tanner that had leaked onto my copy of The Clarity Cleanse, and my Fitbit charger.
She brought me my phone in bed. “Khadijah picked it up. I didn’t try to unlock your password or anything.”
I had thirty-eight missed text messages, mostly from Katelyn. I scrolled for Evan’s name. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not even a You ok? No Call me if you need me. I’d defended him, hadn’t I? I was sure he would text me later that night. He would offer to come over and this time we could talk. Really talk. I wanted to hear him say, I’m worried about you. It was my turn for sympathy. With my camera on selfie mode, I assessed the damage: my face was sleep-creased, my eyes bloodshot, my hair ratty and tangled, my eyeliner surprisingly intact. In low light, I looked like I’d just been fucked.
“Should I offer to bring you a sheet mask in bed?”
“Very funny,” I said. I remembered why my mouth tasted like puke.
“Have you ever seen Evan’s mask?”
“Evan’s ‘mask’?”
“It’s something I found at his house.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. I didn’t want to know what Maren knew that I didn’t.
“On one side it says—”
“Don’t tell me, I said.”
“—‘fuck’ and on the other it says ‘sleep.’”
Yes, I’d seen the mask. I had the same one in my nightstand. It was from Kiki de Montparnasse and cost $195. “So what?” I said, getting out of bed. My blouse was glued to my torso with sweat. At some point I’d taken off my pants.
“It just seems like he has a hard time distinguishing the difference between those two . . . states of being,” Maren said.
“That’s his thing,” I said. “His Sleeping Beauty thing. I don’t ask you about your sex life.”
“I don’t have a sex life. I have Zoloft.”
I went to scrape my tongue in the bathroom and then drank a glass of room-temperature filtered water. If Evan would just text me, I could ask her to leave. I started tapping the energy meridian points on my face using the Emotional Freedom Technique. “Even though I have to appear perfect to survive,” I whispered, “I deeply and completely accept myself. Even though I have to appear perfect to survive, I deeply—”
My phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number with a 212 area code.
“Hello? Evan?”
“Devin? Hey! It’s Clem from Dragg and Dropp. I was at the summit this morning?” Her voice was rushed, breathless.
“Thank you so much for your concern, but I really can’t talk right now.”
“My crew got some incredible footage of your fireside chat that we can use for the pilot episode of Stay Woke, Y’all. In-cred-i-ble. It was such a visceral moment. I’m sure you felt that as well. We got a few interviews on-camera with Richual users who were at the event about the beach towel reveal and what it meant to them.”
“What it meant to them?”
“What it means to live in a world where even women don’t believe other women. This isn’t even about Evan anymore, you have to understand that; it’s about the culture. You don’t know how to get in touch with Khadijah, do you? She hasn’t responded to my last two emails. I need access to the Slack channel.”
Maren was standing across from me at the kitchen island, mouthing, Who is it?
“No,” I told Clementine. “I don’t.” And then I hung up.
My cofounder, my work wife, my business bestie was staring at me with total pity. Maren would always be stronger than me. It had something to do with where she came from, and what she’d overcome, growing up on the kind of food they sold at Walmart. She was solid as a punching bag. She wasn’t desperately checking her phone for messages that said she mattered to someone, someone who would notice if she dropped dead. She could exist without validation. It was true what she said: I had a wine fridge, a monthly unlimited subscription to Pheel, an apartment that she would never be able to afford, not even to rent. So why was I so alone? Why didn’t anyone want to share it with me?
“I quit,” I told Maren. “You can have Richual. You can be CEO. I can’t do it anymore.”
“You can’t quit,” she sighed.
“Yes, I can. I’ll go on a silent vipassana meditation retreat.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll . . . adopt a shelter dog.” I knew I should just ask Maren to untangle the knot of Stay Woke, Y’all and get us out of it. But then I would have to admit how stupid I was for greenlighting a web series where women debated the stupidity of other women like me. The title was stupid, wasn’t it? Had the title been my idea? Why hadn’t Khadijah stopped me when she was in the room? Wasn’t she supposed to be in charge of our content strategy?
“I just don’t think I’m strong enough,” I told Maren. “To be CEO.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“You’re a strong person, so you don’t understand what it’s like.”
Maren leaned over the kitchen island until her face was nearly touching mine. Her teeth were ringed with purple stains. “That’s why Evan chose you.”
“Because I’m not strong?”
“No, because you are. This guy has a type. I’m sorry, but he does. He picks a powerful, successful woman, and then he assaults her while she’s asleep. Do you have anything to eat that has cheese in it?” She was looking inside the fridge.
“Evan never assaulted me,” I said.