The Knockoff (9 page)

She glanced at her watch and thought about the sound of the ice machine. What did she have to lose?

“I could probably join you for an hour or two. What exactly is there to do here?”

“What isn’t there to do here is the better question! My lady, I am going to give you the full DISRUPTTECH! experience.” Rashid bent down to one knee. “Are you ready for this?”

Imogen shook her head from side to side. “I don’t actually think that I am.” The young man handed her what looked like a milk carton.

“Here. First have a box of water.”

“Box?” She flipped the rectangle over in her hands.

“Better for the Earth. Entirely made of recyclable biodegradable hemp-based cardboard.” The writing on the side of the carton simply read: “I am not a water bottle.”

Rashid introduced her to two of his colleagues. AJ, his chief technology officer, was the tallest Asian gentleman Imogen had ever seen in real life. He wore a faded T-shirt with two cartoon frames on the front. In the first box a male stick figure was bent over and in the second he was petting a baby bird. Bubbly writing across the top read: “How to Pick Up Chicks.” The chief operating officer of Blast!, Nathan, was a soft-spoken Owen Wilson doppelgänger with tousled hair, tired eyes and a nose that did a jig in the middle that made him look odd and yet handsome.

Over the course of the next three hours they took 3-D selfies at the Netherlands HEARTS Technology tent, where hulking Low Country boys with light hair and light eyes lounged about like attractive furniture. They ate a piece of candy made by the same 3-D printer, though Imogen cowered at actually putting a piece of food in her mouth that
was printed right in front of her. It was candy-apple flavored and a little too sweet, but there was something completely delightful about it. They listened to a panel about how the globalization of digital products helped students in war-torn countries use their smartphones to map safe routes to school in the morning. Imogen found it fascinating, even though she needed Rashid to translate half of it. They stood in a long line to take pictures with two famous dwarf cats, one whose tongue lolled lazily out of its mouth and the other who looked perpetually frustrated. They opted against jumping onto the Nest.com moon bounce, but they accepted the free massages in the Cottonelle Toilet Paper of the Future yurt. She grabbed a couple of black and yellow DISRUPTTECH! hoodies for Johnny and Annabel.

“Where are all the girls? Women?” Imogen asked as they walked from the Chevrolet-3M-Esurance Ideas Exchange Pavilion to the Pepsi Bioreactive #MediaFuture Plaza, where a pool party was taking place complete with an open bar, live DJ and a pool full of blow-up orcas. Who wanted to go to a pool party when they were working?

Rashid’s topknot bounced up and down as he waved to a guy riding a Segway while wearing a helmet with a video camera attached. “These things can get so bro-tastic. There are some awesome women in tech, but the ratio at these conferences is so skewed, dude.”

“And why do I feel like everyone is staring at me? Because I am old enough to be their mum?”

“I actually think it’s because they aren’t used to seeing a beautiful woman here.” He blushed, his cocoa-colored skin turning a dusty rose. “You aren’t the oldest person here. This conference
is
young though. You go to TED and you’ll see the billionaire version of DISRUPTTECH!, where Sandra Day O’Connor shares a crème brûlée with Nathan Myhrvold while chatting about archaeology, barbecue and the legality of digital permanence.”

Imogen considered that for a minute. “Right now I am a beautiful woman who is starving. I wonder if we can get a reservation anywhere in Union Square at the last minute.”

“No need.” Rashid smiled. “We can go to the Samsung-Blast! Food Truck Court.” Before Imogen could protest, Rashid took off around the corner to dart into a vast parking lot resembling a trailer park.
Upon closer inspection, Imogen realized it contained rows and rows of food trucks.

“They come from all over the country for this,” Rashid said proudly. “One of my team members came up with the idea.”

While standing in line for kimchi fries they were jostled by a large round man wearing an acid-washed denim vest over a turquoise zip-up hoodie, black jeans and pointy black ostrich-skin boots.

Imogen flashed a winning smile at him.

Finally ready to order, Rashid asked her what style of kimchi fry would suit her palate.

“I am afraid to confess this, but I haven’t been a fry girl in quite some time,” Imogen admitted sheepishly.

“I figured,” Rashid began as he looked over the menu to catcalls from the peanut gallery urging him to hurry up. “But come on, YOLO with me a little.”

“YOLO?”

“You only live once.”

“YOLO.” Imogen let the foreign word roll off her tongue. “Okay. I’ll take the most straightforward and honest fries they have.”

“Good decision. You get too many toppings and things get weird.” He turned his attention to the boy behind the counter. “Two regular kimchi fries.” Then he tapped a gunmetal-gray plastic bracelet to the side of the cart.

“Do you need cash?” Imogen fumbled for her wallet and pulled out a few bills.

Rashid laughed. “No, we’re cool. I just paid.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.” He held his wrist aloft. “Cashless currency. There is a chip in my wristband that connects to my credit card that pays for everything I do here at the conference.”

“Can you use it anywhere in the real world?” Imogen marveled at the simplicity of its smooth surface.

“Not yet. It’s in beta. They’re testing it here and at a couple of other festivals around the country this year.”

By the end of the night, even though she’d had way more fun than she expected, Imogen was happy to return to an empty hotel room, even one as depressing as theirs.

She put in a quick call to Ashley to check in, and though it had to be close to midnight on the East Coast, the girl said she was still in the office.

“Are you having fun at DISRUPT?” Ashley asked. “I am having the worst FOMO looking at Eve’s Instagram. Were you with her in the pool with those big inflatable whales?”

“I wasn’t, but I saw those. What did you have? YOLO?” Imogen tried out her new word.

Ashley giggled. “YOLO!” she sang. “No, no, I had FOMO, Fear. Of. Missing. Out. It’s like you’re looking at all these pictures of your friends and people you know being awesome and doing awesome things on, like, Facebook and Instagram and you get all tense and freak out and you get FOMO because you are not there doing something as awesome as they are. I get it all the time!!”

“That can’t be healthy,” Imogen said, to which Ashley just sighed.

“Don’t I know it.”

Sometime, many hours later, hands drumming on Imogen’s feet at the bottom of the bed jolted her awake.

“ ‘Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panda moms, Brando,
The King and I
and
The Catcher in the Rye
…House on FIRE good-bye! We didn’t start the fire, It was always burning/Since the world’s been turning. We didn’t start the fire.’…Sing with me, Imogen!”

Imogen sat up and rubbed her eyes, still blurry with sleep, to see Eve whipping her hair back and forth, hunching her shoulders to a beat that lived in her head of a bastardized version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

“What’s going on, Eve?”

“We took the Karaoke RV back from the Buzz party and Reed Baxter paid an extra thousand dollars to have him drive to Marin and back so we could sing…”

“Eve, we have a six a.m. flight. What time is it?”

“Three. Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland…come on, Imogen…it’s an old song. You have to know it.”

She did know it, had actually sung along to it once at the Piano Man’s beach house in Sagaponack.

“Ugh. I would like to get an extra half hour of sleep.” Trying to focus on Eve’s pupils, she couldn’t tell if the girl had taken something or was high on herself.

“You’re no fun, Imogen.” Eve pouted as Imogen rolled over and pulled the thin pillow over her head to drown out her former assistant.

“You’re right. I’m no fun, Eve.”

E
ve did not understand why she had to put her laptop away for takeoff. Turning off cell phones and putting away computers on planes were antiquated rules that should have been thrown away when they told people they had to quit smoking.

Eve refused to put away her laptop for takeoff.

“Don’t you get how much work I have to do?” she tried to explain to the flight attendant.

“Miss, rules are rules. If you don’t comply with the FAA’s practices for takeoff I will have to ask you to get off this plane.” The woman exhaled, glancing nervously at the tan curtain that separated the coach cabin from first class.

“You’ll ask me to get off?” Eve dropped her voice on the final word, offering it as a challenge, clutching her slim MacBook to her chest as she gulped down the last sip of her diet Red Bull. “You’re going to ask me to get off the plane? That’s ridiculous. That’s so ridiculous that I think I should share that. I think I should tweet that out to my huge network of followers from Glossy.com. How do you feel about that?”

Imogen touched her elbow.

“Eve.”

She shook Imogen off. The old stewardess seemed to think she
was kidding. Or maybe, like Imogen, she didn’t even know what Twitter was. She didn’t know the power that could come from one little tweet.
I’ll show her
, Eve thought.
This will teach her not to fuck with me
.

“I am tweeting right now—@JetEasy Airlines is forcibly trying to take my computer and phone away from me like it is a bomb.”
Okay and one more
. “YUP! @JetEasy is acting like I brought a bomb on a plane. They’re treating me like a terrorist! I mean!”

That ought to show them.

It didn’t take long for the air marshals to remove someone when she tweeted about having a bomb on a plane and made a joke about being a terrorist. It took almost all of Imogen’s miles and two hours with Homeland Security to get the two of them on the next flight back to New York City.

Eve was thankfully several rows behind her. Imogen let the roar of the plane’s engines drown out the pounding in her head as she pulled out her notebook to make a list of reasons why she should not stay on as the editor in chief of Glossy.com.

At LaGuardia Airport Eve popped two slim blue Adderall tablets and grabbed a cab straight into work, even though it was past four in the afternoon by the time they landed. Imogen went home. The walls of the old town house squeezed her like a mother who hasn’t seen her child in a long while. Her own kids were out with Tilly, and the hubby, as usual, was at work. Imogen fell into the cloud of freshly
laundered sheets, let her head sink into the downy pillows and curled herself into the folds of her worn cashmere blanket. Soon she fell into a deep sleep. She never set an alarm.

In her dream, Imogen was in secondary school but she hadn’t studied for any of her exams. She didn’t even know what her class schedule was or how to go about looking it up. She found herself in an algebra class at a small desk with an exam book in front of her and no idea what test she was about to take. The teacher whirled to face the students from behind the large wooden desk at the front of the room. It was Eve Morton. The bell rang and Imogen woke up.

SEPTEMBER 2015

T
he new and improved Glossy.com website and app launched without a hitch.
The Times
business section dubbed it a triumph for Mannering Inc., and Worthington was praised for having an eye for fresh young talent. While all of the press mentioned that Imogen Tate was still at the helm of Glossy.com, it was Eve all the reporters wanted to talk to.

Imogen began studying Eve more carefully. As the weeks passed, Imogen learned that a special schizophrenia characterized Eve’s behavior. In meetings she was dynamic and charismatic. One-on-one she was standoffish, cold, even reptilian, but over email and social media she oozed abundant warmth, trying to prove to the recipient and the entire world that she was a good person, fun, fair and aspirational. To that end each week Eve sent an email crowning someone the “Office Prom Queen,” an honorary title that, so far as Imogen could tell, came with no clear benefits save for that Thursday morning email filled with effusive praise in the language of middle-school girls, and the one-week possession of a cheap plastic tiara. The title was awarded to the week’s best team player, according to Eve. On this
particular Thursday that young woman was Amy from the Customer Insight Team.

From: Eve Morton ([email protected])

To: [email protected]

Hi all,

I couldn’t be more excited to crown this week’s Prom Queen. HURRAH! This lovely lady has recently rocked it with more than 40 blog posts (Yes, we’re counting!). Can we say WINNER! She has really stepped it up with her management of the Bling vertical and she was a gem of a gal organizing this week’s three-legged races when we all worked late on Wednesday night. What a doll baby J.

This PQ is hardworking, witty and packs a major punch in her size two frame (zero on a good day—YAY JUICE CLEANSE). Please join me in congratulating our newest and cutest (LOL!) trophy winner…Ms. Amy “Pink Undies” Dockson.

GO, Glamour Girls!

Hugs,

Eve

The email came through just an hour after Eve had stood on a table in the middle of the office to berate the staff members who hadn’t been using the
Glossy
app in their personal lives.

“It’s been brought to my attention that some of you haven’t even bothered to download the
Glossy
app,” Eve said, her eyes narrowing and her voice oozing disdain. “This is completely unacceptable to me. Everyone needs to be using our product. That’s the only way we can make it better and better. If you are one of those people who have refused to install the app or you don’t feel like using it when you shop, do yourself a favor and find a job somewhere else.” Eve expected applause after her grand statement. Instead, heads bowed and Imogen could see at least three girls furiously downloading the
app when they returned to their desks. Eve obviously expected the Prom Queen announcement to make everything rosy again.

Imogen was just trying to assimilate everything in the email when the real-life Eve began hovering over her, devoid of LOLs and hugs. “So I need you live-tweeting Fashion Week starting tomorrow. Can I have Ashley set you up on Twitter? You aren’t on it yet, right?”

Imogen was barely on Facebook and had signed onto that only because the kids’ school used it for all of their PTA updates (important news about early dismissals, fund-raisers and wear-green-to-school days) and to keep an eye on Annabel now that her daughter was growing more and more distant and mature. The thought of being forced to be witty in just 140 characters made her stomach churn. It was a giant time-suck in an already full day. Imogen didn’t exactly hate technology. She just didn’t understand it and felt overwhelmed by it. She longed for the days when everyone’s eyes weren’t glued to a small screen; when you walked into an elevator and smiled at a stranger, or had a conversation with a cabdriver; when your dinner companion didn’t spend the meal art-directing an Instagram shoot of the peony centerpiece. Imogen sometimes wondered if people weren’t letting social media dictate their entire lives. Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram? Did they decide to read a story just so they could tweet about it? Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we’ve stopped enjoying our lives?

“It’s good for the brand,” Eve said, sensing her reluctance about Twitter. “If you do a bang-up job, you might just get to be the Prom Queen next week.”

One could only wish.

This was a fight she wasn’t going to win. “I’ve been meaning to set it up.” Imogen smiled. “I’m sure you can teach me a few tricks.” As if on cue, Ashley appeared in her doorway, teetering in anticipation of her next step in six-inch heels. One day, Ashley would master the art of walking like a lady in tall shoes. Today would not be that day. When she walked her toes turned in slightly, forcing her knees to kiss each other with every step. Imogen marveled at what a fashion chameleon the girl was. She could be seventies YSL or nineties Versace. One day
she channeled a boho Talitha Getty and the next she would be an L.A. surfer chick. She was dedicated. Her perfectly imperfect hair and makeup must take her at least two hours to prep each morning. “Let’s do this!” Ashley clasped her hands in excitement. “Twitter time.”

Getting Imogen onto Twitter was trickier than they expected. A rabid
Glossy
fan, a drag queen from Saint Paul, Minnesota, who did bear Imogen an uncanny resemblance in full makeup and a blond wig, had hijacked her name, @ImogenTate.

“I’ll call Twitter and see if we can deactivate this account,” Ashley said right away, blushing as though she were embarrassed for Imogen.

Drag queen @ImogenTate was hilarious, with his strong opinions about fashion,
The Real Housewives of Orange County
and at-home waxing treatments. It would have been much easier to hire him to write all of her tweets during Fashion Week. Imogen did the mental math: airfare from Minnesota, a room at the Soho Grand, a couple of meals here and there. New wig—$5,000 tops and worth every bloody penny.

“Never mind. We need Glossy in there anyway. Eve is @GlossyEvie. I am @GlossyAshley. We can just make you @GlossyImogen.” Ashley made a few clicks with the mouse and entered the characters. “@GlossyImogen it is. You’re set.”

Imogen stared at the screen name and the light blue square with the lonely egg inside.

“We’ll need a headshot.”

Imogen thumbed through her phone and found a picture of her at an event with Alex a couple of months before her surgery. Her face was a little fuller then, in a healthy way. She had her hair pulled into a “Belle du Jour” ponytail perfectly tucked under a black fur collar.

“Does this work?”

When Ashley scrunched up her nose her foundation created little grooves around her mouth. “Sure, for now. Eve likes the pictures to be a little more candid. She likes to say ‘accessible.’ See? Here is her picture.” The girl pulled up Twitter.com/GlossyEvie to reveal a half-body shot of Eve in her favorite pose, all boobs and teeth, her mouth wide open and head thrown back like a donkey braying for her supper.
Imogen wagered that Eve practiced that pose over and over again, taking picture after picture until she achieved exactly the right shot. There was nothing candid about it.

“I’ll work on it,” Imogen said. “It won’t be a picture just like this one, but I’ll find you something fabulous. Just use this as a placeholder for now.”

“So tell me what you know about Twitter.”

“It’s fairly self-explanatory, isn’t it? I type and I hit send.”

“That’s pretty much it. Let’s make you a quick bio. What is your title now?”

“It’s still editor in chief.” Imogen felt her ego crash.

“Okay, so what should we say?”

“Editor in chief of
Glossy
.”

“Glossy-dot-com.”

“Right, Glossy-dot-com. So what else do I need to say in it?”

“Hmmm, this is mine….” Ashley clicked on her personal Twitter profile. “Top of the line, slim face, fair behind. Tweets are all ME! ROFL.” Ashley shook her head. “That probably won’t work for you. Let’s find someone more age appropriate.” She bit her lip, thinking, tapping her thumb anxiously on the side of the keyboard. “I’ve got it! Here is Hillary Clinton’s: Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD….”

“I can’t beat that.” Imogen laughed. Hillary Clinton was preparing to run the free world and she still had time to tweet and compose a perfectly droll Twitter bio that made Imogen feel like a slacker. “How about this: ‘Editor in chief of Glossy-dot-com, mum, wife, daughter, a lover not a fighter in the mad, mad world of fashion.’ ”

Ashley cocked her head to one side like a golden retriever thinking about where it has left its favorite ball.

“I like it,” she said with her requisite clap. “Since you know what to do, I can just leave you to it. Once you start, you’re going to be completely addicted. I already followed everyone here at the magazine for you and we will tweet from our main account telling all of our two million followers to start following you ASAP.
Fun!
”

Alone with her Twitter account, Imogen felt her palms leak sweat.
How hard could it be? You put in a sentence or two and you just hit tweet. What a funny word, “tweet.” Every time she heard it she imagined a time traveler from the year 2000 desperately trying to understand all the world’s new verbs, like “tweet,” “Google,” “twerk.”

She just put in a line and then. Oh no. That wasn’t what she wanted to say at all. No worries, she could go in and edit it. It wasn’t clear how to edit a tweet. Were they uneditable? She would just delete and start over. How do you delete? Imogen desperately didn’t want to ask Ashley for advice. She couldn’t see the old tweet so maybe she had already deleted it. She would try another.

@GlossyImogen: Hello Twitter! Here I am twerking.

@GlossyImogen: Hello Twitty! Here I am tweeting.

@GlossyImogen: That isn’t what I wanted to say at all. Twitter not Twitty. Sorry, new followers.

@GlossyImogen: I am new to Twitter. Still figuring it out.

@GlossyImogen: I swear I am not drunk. Just learning.

@GlossyImogen: Bugger. I give up.

Slowly step away from the Twitter. No good could come of continuing this exercise. Twitter would still be here this afternoon and right now she had something like four followers, Ashley, Eve, and two people she didn’t know whose photos were still the light blue background with an ominous egg. At least no one saw her epic tweet fail. She would call Massimo after lunch and ask him how to delete the tweets. Massimo was a self-described rock star on Twitter, on a mission to gain more followers than Lady Gaga.

“It’s shitty if you don’t follow back the guy in the wheelchair,” he always said.

The next hour was overtaken by a conference call with the creative director for Carolina Herrera during which Imogen described
the evolution of
Glossy
into Glossy.com and how they could get Carolina involved.

“We’ll see” came the answer at the end of the call. Imogen had never received so many “We’ll see”s in her life. As she hung up the phone, an out-of-breath Ashley ran smack into the spotless glass door to her office, hardly letting it stop her from stumbling inside.

“Stop tweeting.”

“Ashley, I stopped tweeting more than forty-five minutes ago. I am still getting the hang of it.”

“You’re. On. Tech. Blab.”

“What is that?”

“TechBlab-dot-com. It’s a techie site, gossipy, like Page Six but for people in tech. And your tweets are on it. We have to fix it before Eve sees it.”

Imogen typed the name into her browser. What kind of a name was TechBlab anyway? It sounded made up.

She emitted a small gasp. There was her picture, a lovely one of her on the red carpet at some event. With a closer look, she knew exactly what photo it had been cropped from. The larger picture showed her with Steven Spielberg at a benefit for Breast Cancer Awareness in March.