“This will just be a blip,” Gaby said, staring at her phone, reading and talking and strategizing all at once. She looked up, locked eyes with Cleo, who was settling in behind her highly organized, extremely neat desk, unwinding her scarf that warded off the late-spring chill, sinking into her chair that needed some WD-40 again to stop the squeaking. “I’ll squelch this like . . .” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
“I know,” Cleo said. “This doesn’t worry me.” A beat. “All that much.”
She reached over and straightened a pile of color-coded folders, then brushed some dust off the silver-plated picture frame with a shot of Lucas when he was a toddler and dressed as a chocolate-chip cookie for Halloween.
“We can have the bitch killed,” Gaby said, laughing just a little. She knew, as a black woman, that she had to manage her anger, at least outwardly, though not so much in front of Cleo, who had known her since their second year at Columbia Law. If she said this aloud outside the office, the headlines would go on for days, likely ruining her career and possibly ruining any hope of Cleo’s run for president.
“That might be extreme: death,” Cleo replied. “She’s just nursing a grudge from high school, though the paternity stuff is wildly out-of-bounds. Obviously.” She tapped her mouse, zapping the screen saver of the suffragettes and waking her computer. “Still, I suppose I could have been kinder back then.”
“We all could have been kinder in high school.”
“Weren’t you elected, like, homecoming queen?”
“Well, sure.” Gaby reached for a protein bar from her bag. She was training for a marathon and had to eat every two hours. “But I didn’t get there by being nice. Homecoming queens are elected by playing dirty.”
“I wouldn’t know. I was not homecoming queen.”
“I don’t list it on my résumé,” Gaby said. “Though it was pretty great training for now. Is Lucas OK?”
“Fine, actually. He knows it isn’t true.” Cleo sighed. She had real work to do and just wanted this to evaporate. “I can reach out to MaryAnne. I think she still lives in Seattle. I can apologize.”
Gaby inhaled sharply. “You only apologize when I tell you to.”
“I just meant that I think I could smooth the waters with her.” Cleo thought of her old friend, and even with her public betrayal, she recognized that maybe MaryAnne’s wounds weren’t entirely unjustified. Her tactics? Yes. Her inaccuracies? Well, sure. But Cleo had burned the two of them down. That also was true. And maybe it still stung for MaryAnne in ways that Cleo had numbed herself to.
“If there had been a time to make it go away, it would have been before the op-ed on that ridiculous site, which, let’s be clear, is not even journalism,” Gaby said. “Besides, you’re a single mother who has a fifty-four-percent approval rating. We can withstand one bump as long as it’s managed.”
This was true. People did like Cleo. That’s why donors were lining up, encouraging her to run. That’s why her office was stacked with photos of her with musicians, actors, and plenty of big hitters in DC too. Both sides of the aisle, which was no small feat these days. She was measured and level and generally batted straight down the middle but wasn’t afraid to swing at a curveball or a breaking ball, an analogy that she felt she could own, since she was the only girl who’d still played Little League at eleven. By twelve, the boys were outpacing her, and her parents gave her the option of switching to tennis. Initially Cleo had been heartbroken, but then she quickly wised up that it wasn’t baseball that she loved; rather, it was winning, and if she couldn’t be the best at second base (her position), well, she’d be the best from the baseline. It didn’t really matter all that much to Cleo. She just wanted the trophy. And she knew how much her success delighted her parents—she was precocious enough to recognize it even then. Still, she managed to tamp this ambition down in just the right ways in adulthood: too pushy and you were unlikable, not pushy enough and you’d never run for Congress (or president!) in the first place.
“People do like me,” she said. “But maybe apologizing is the right thing to do anyway.”
“What did you do?” Gabrielle was now finished with her breakfast bar and was moving on to a green smoothie from the mini fridge that sat under the flat-screen, where news spun around the clock. Cleo eyed the anchor, Bowen Babson—inarguably a man who should have been on Cleo’s radar and in her league, but he was five years younger than she and had a reputation for women ten years younger than him, and so she was theoretically over-the-hill while he was just hitting his prime. Cleo didn’t think she’d ever gotten more than a collegial smile from Bowen, which was fine, she supposed; she didn’t have time or really the inclination for a romance. A quick hit of sex, well, sure. She wasn’t going to turn that down. But even that led to complications of publicity, of gossip, and when you are in the public eye, you can’t afford a scandal such as occasionally sleeping with the anchor of Good Afternoon, USA, even with his green eyes and jaw that looked like Captain America’s. Today Bowen must have been sitting in for the regular morning anchor. Cleo didn’t mind. She didn’t mind one bit, actually.
“What did you do to her?” Gabrielle repeated. “Because you know I don’t care, to be clear. High school shit is high school shit.”
“Says the prom queen.”
“Homecoming queen,” Gabrielle corrected.
“Forgive me, is there a difference? We had neither.”
“You didn’t have homecoming? Or . . . prom?”
Cleo shook her head. “We had both, but I grew up in Seattle, you’re forgetting. They didn’t believe in anointing women—or men, I guess—into categories. Or winners. Or whatever. We didn’t have cheerleaders either.”
Gabrielle’s eyes grew wide. But she was from Texas, and other than Election Day, the Super Bowl was the most historic day of the year for her.
“So she’s not mad at you for going Carrie on her at homecoming. OK, I can cross that one off.”
“If you seriously thought I was the type to dump blood on someone for wearing a tiara, I feel as if we have other questions to address.”
Gabrielle laughed at this, and Cleo did too, deflecting for the moment that Cleo had not always been as likable or as kind. (Was she kind now? She didn’t even know.) Gabrielle reached toward the mini fridge and grabbed a second green juice, sliding it across Cleo’s desk, which, despite its organization, had too many folders and too many papers for a clear path from A to B. Thus, Cleo did not reach for the bottle when it became moored behind a stack of files.
“Come on, you need your energy. This might be the only healthy thing you eat all day.”
Gabrielle, marathon trainee, was practically lit from within. Her skin glowed, her energy was boundless, and her teeth—which had little to do with nutrition and more to do with a wonderful Dallas-based orthodontist—were as white and as straight as those of all the celebrities in the photos in her office.
“Fine,” Cleo acquiesced. “I’ll try it, but I won’t like it.”
“Welcome to Washington; that’s basically our motto.”