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  “This isn’t the kind of thing you want to win,” I say.

  “Shameless trash talk,” he says. “You’re a savage.”

  “Ha,” Chloe says.

  “I, as a twenty-nine-year-old, have to create a management presentation for a twenty-five-year-old client who has already graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and from Yale Law School, has become a partner at a hedge fund, and started his own company that he is going to sell for a billion dollars,” Tripp says. “I was here until three thirty working on some other shit, and then right before I left, my analyst messaged me by accident that ‘Tripp is such shit,’ when he meant to message his buddy.”

  “Get out,” Puja says. “Which analyst?”

  “Mitch,” Tripp says.

  “Who’s Mitch?” I ask.

  “The one who went into a seizure last month,” Tripp says. “So then I get home, and I wanted to watch a little TV to decompress. I tried to torrent Pirates of the Caribbean and accidentally downloaded a porno, like a huge-budget one, and it was way better than I thought it would be. Anyway, because my body clock is so fucked from this job, I watched the whole thing and only slept about an hour.”

  How are those fucking frozen eggs now, Chloe?

  “Wow,” Puja says.

  “Beat that, A,” Tripp says.

  “No,” I say. “You win.”

  “See?” he says. “Now go get staffed like a fuckin’ champ.”

  I grab my yoga journal as I leave the pod. I will keep all notes in one book today—notes for AS, notes for Skylar—to keep suspicion to a minimum, and will type my baseline later. Armed, I walk the short trip to Jason’s. He spots me through his all-glass office wall and waves me inside, smiling. I sit at his two-person round table.

  “Hi, Jason.”

  “Hello, you,” he says.

  Like Skylar, Jason has resting smile-face. Unlike Skylar’s, his is not a joyful smile. It’s more of an I’m sorry, please don’t hate me grin that makes him likable despite the fact that his only job is to assign work, usually a massive amount of it, due ASAP. Jason and I don’t interact in any other capacity. I swing by, he names a new company for me to service forever, and then I leave.

  Staffing HG can’t take that much time for Jason, though. It’s an office riddle: What does Jason do all day? Sometimes he just sits at his desk looking fucking un-busy as shit. We’ve spitballed theories at the pod. I’ve said he occupies himself by keeping his desktop from going to screen saver with carefully timed wrist flicks. It’s considered an act of service for a VP to be the staffer for a year. Tripp says he would do it for half what they pay Jason.

  “How are you doing?” Jason asks.

  “Never better,” I say.

  Everyone here has to be high-energy and positive. Your attitude is rated by a group of higher-ups, and the lower your score, the lower your bonus. One second-year analyst, Kim Jee, worked his ass off last year, clocking a legendary number of hours on headlining deals, only to get stiffed on his bonus because he never smiled. A second-year analyst like me will receive a bonus of somewhere between $70K to $120K depending on, among other things, how euphoric I act as Jason continues to ruin my life.

  “Great,” he says. “I have a new company for you.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Titan,” he says. “Do you know it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  It’s huge.

  “There’s absolutely nothing to do right now—we just want to put the company on your radar,” Jason says. “There may be a meeting coming up in the next couple of weeks.” He continues to smile. “The associate on the team is Tripp Thompson. Vivienne Wood is the senior VP, and Mark Swift is the MD.”

  Be cool. Becoolbecoolbecoolbecool.

  “Swift,” I parrot. “Haven’t worked with him before.”

  “He’s been with the client for years on the equity capital markets side,” Jason says. “I’m sure you two will enjoy working together.”

  Titan is an enormous managed care company. It makes about $100 billion per year by reducing clients’ healthcare costs. The bigger the company, the bigger the deal, and bankers get paid according to deal size. So Anderson will do a lot more free work for them because we expect that goodwill to come back to us in the form of zillions of fucking dollars when they buy, sell, or restructure epic amounts of shit. Making this the second time I have been fucked today.

  I leave Jason’s office. I don’t think I can be mature about this. Mark heard me moan and whisper horrible, whorish things. He orgasm-grunted on me. I gagged with him in my mouth. I know the angles he saw me from (and I seriously don’t look good from those). He went down on me, and I wasn’t prepared for that, aesthetically. Show me an analyst who gets waxed regularly. I spend my whole analyst career here basically invisible to senior management, and now the one MD I want to avoid is on Titan with me.

  I crumple into my office chair at a sideways momentum, so that it rolls into Tripp’s chair like a bumper car.

  “Welcome back,” he says. “How’d it go?”

  “Titan,” I say.

  “Noice,” he says. “What do they do?”

  “You’re on it,” I say.

  “Oh, right, Tetris,” he says.

  “Titan,” I say.

  Tripp mouths the syllables until the lightbulb goes off. “Oh, right,” he says. “But nothing’s happening on Titan. Why are you freaking out?”

  I force an unnatural laugh and straighten a stack of papers—old printouts covered with handwritten comments—that did not need to be straightened. I end up just pushing the stack into a left-leaning slant. I pull out my phone and check Instagram for some sanity-saving distraction. Skylar has posted a new photo with the caption, “Fall in love with taking care of yourself.” Oh my God, Skylar, please save me.

  “You guys hear about the new MD?” Puja asks. I scroll through the feed a bit faster.

  “Yeah,” Chloe and Tripp say at the same time.

  “I’m on Tetris with him,” Tripp says.

  “Titan,” I say.

  “Right,” he says. “What’d I say?”

  “Literally nothing,” I say.

  “I did an IPO with him last year,” Chloe says. I scroll through Instagram even faster, until the square pictures form a continuous blur of color. “We were meeting in his office to go over some deck, and he sat at the head of the table and pumped some forearm-muscle-squeezer thing the whole time.” She shakes her head. “I just remember thinking, What a dick.”

  “I should get one of those,” Tripp says.

  “Throughout the whole meeting, he just kept pumping,” Chloe says. “He must be obsessed with his body.”

  “You mean like Hubert?” Tripp asks. A laugh ripples across our pod. Hubert is a VP of investment banking lore. The story goes that, one day, this Hubert just stopped showing up to work and did everything remotely. He was on track to be fired, but that took a while because the administrative process of actually letting him go was bureaucratic and slow. After a few months, he returned to the office looking like an Olympian. Fat Hubert had been spending his days at SoulCycle, the indoor cycling studio. Now he is a SoulCycle instructor, and, as the legend goes, he looks fantastic.

  “Hubert isn’t real,” Puja says.

  “You don’t know that,” Tripp says.

  “God, you’re an idiot,” Chloe says.

  “So,” I segue, “do you know anything else about this Mark?”

  “Or Vivienne Wood?” Tripp asks.

  “Tripp, you are on a team with her,” I say. “You know her.”

  “Do you know how much shit I have on my plate?” Tripp asks. “You’re lucky I even remember your name.”

  You don’t.

  “Well, guess we’re about to find out,” Tripp says, tapping my computer screen with his pen. A new message flashes in the bottom corner of my monitor. It’s Vivienne’s welcome email, a standard send-out from the MD or VP to any new team members. In this particular one, she notifies us of
a meeting in one hour in Mark’s office. Leaning very far left and using my keyboard, Tripp finger-pecks off a response to say that we will be there.

  My baseline journal sits on my lap, daring me to add an honest update. What’s going on now, Allegra? Well, right now, I’m remembering Mark’s left hand on my shoulder and his right hand on my hip as I stood folded at the waist over the counter of his kitchenette. He did this weird thing where he drew a circle around my hip bone with his index finger and asked in a low voice if I liked that, and I totally did not but didn’t say anything, because the rest was so good. Now that creepy hip bone circle is replaying in my head like a movie I can’t unsee. Fuck, why do guys suck at dirty talk?

  chapter 5

  2:04 p.m.

  Yep, this is a new low. Sitting in the office of the MD I slept with last night. We will be working together. He is late to our meeting.

  Don’t want to look at anyone or anything in this room. Barely even looked at this VP when we met. Registered that she is some extremely pale, black-haired woman with a British accent. This is a “welcome meeting” she says, but honestly, she is the most unfriendly person I have ever met. Her last review must have told her to have better people skills or something.

  Waiting for the wrecking ball to hit.

  The air conditioner is loud.

  Vivienne, Tripp, and I sit waiting for Mark in his office. Vivienne has twice assured us that he is coming. I journal and imagine him slicking his hair back with sink water from the men’s bathroom and thinking about all the fun he’s going to have innuendo-ing me at every meeting. Thanks for being flexible on such short notice. But I doubt that’ll happen—we’ll probably do what MDs and analysts always do: ignore the shit out of each other.

  My eyes stay squarely on the journal page in front of me.

  “Team,” Mark greets us as he enters.

  My pen tears a small rip through the page.

  Be calm, Allegra. Do not fucking emote.

  “Hello, Mark,” Vivienne says with the warmth of an ice cube. “Thank you so much for being available. I just wanted to get the team together for a brief hello. Not sure if everyone has worked together before.”

  “Okay,” Mark says.

  I hear Mark wheel himself to the head of the table.

  “You with us, A?” Tripp asks.

  I sense the attention on me like a spotlight and force myself to raise my head. Smile. Look at Vivienne, Tripp, and—Mark.

  Now I see it. Glinting beneath fluorescent ceiling lights, the golden band is unmissable: Mark’s wedding ring. Wedding ring. Wife symbol. What another woman has implicitly inscribed with the warning Don’t even fucking think about it.

  Looking around, I realize I am surrounded. Scattered among the deal toys covering every surface are silver-framed pictures of Mark with a glamorous brunette woman and children. And. Children. Well, that is fucking news. Pictures of them are everywhere. I face a wall of portraits: photograph after photograph of the wife being waist-hugged by Mark on a European street corner, a Mediterranean beach, and in some Versailles-esque garden where he is in a tux and she is in a wedding dress with a train the size of an actual train. The two toddlers in their Christmas card—this is a family.

  I zone back into my journal and add a line for Skylar.

  2:05 p.m.

  FYI that MD is someone’s husband STET and dad.

  I usually don’t indulge in woe is me thinking—“You are the CEO of your own damn life,” as Dad says—but come on. I have a one-night stand in good conscience, and now this? I had no idea he has a family. My thinking was, Yeah. You. Anything. Now. Yoga studio? Middle-aged? I could be murdered? Let’s fucking go. Take my clothes off.

  “Allegra, Tripp, have you met?” Vivienne asks.

  “Yaw,” Tripp says.

  It’s “nah,” in “yes” form.

  “We sit next to each other,” I say.

  “How lucky is she?” he asks.

  No one answers.

  “Let’s do a round of introductions,” Vivienne suggests. “In the spirit of HG’s culture of a personal touch.”

  “Sure, of course,” Mark says.

  Is this personal-touch thing a joke? I’ve never seen this woman in my life, Tripp thinks we’re in a Tetris meeting, and this morning, Mark and I literally said, Goodbye now, after fucking. Mark’s unfocused eyes sweep the room without settling on any one of us. The stiff distance of his gaze echoes his sparse apartment: bare and unfurnished. It is convincingly as if we are strangers.

  An expectant silence.

  “I’ll start,” Mark says. “Name, school, hometown work for everyone? Mark, Yale, Riverdale, New York City.”

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m Allegra. Princeton. From Princeton.”

  “Vivienne. Harvard. London.”

  “I’m Tripp,” says Tripp. Somewhere, a whirring record wobbles itself slower and slower until a new pace entirely has been set, and it continues at half speed. “Went to Duke, go Blue Devils. Born and raised in Newport, Rhode Island. Went to St. George’s for prep. Great surf scene.”

  “Great, moving on,” Mark says. “This should be painless. Nothing to be done at the moment. Absolutely nothing. Titan has a board meeting next week—we are not presenting—and there may be some work coming out of that.” He shrugs. “That, I believe, is the exhaustive update.”

  “They will be here for the conference tomorrow, too,” Vivienne says.

  Oh God. I know where this is going. She means the annual Anderson Shaw Healthcare Conference, attended by all large market cap companies. Last year, the staffer made all analysts sit in the back row to make it look oversubscribed, or interesting, or something.

  “Yes, they will,” Mark says. He is now looking at his phone.

  “It might be a good idea to be prepared with a book of materials for Titan,” Vivienne says. “Just in case you happen to get a few minutes with the CEO or the CFO. Then you’ll have something to discuss.”

  Mark shrugs.

  No, Vivienne. Stop.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll have any time with them,” Mark says.

  “We’re happy to put something together,” Vivienne says.

  His office line rings. He spins round to answer, waving us out of the office. “Yes, my dear?” he asks into the receiver.

  I am the other kind of dear: in headlights.

  * * *

  Judging by her initiative in Mark’s office, Vivienne is very clearly trying to make MD. And judging by her people skills, she very clearly never will be. Senior vice president was a title invented for people too experienced to be VPs but missing intangible qualities needed for the next level. MDs deal mostly with clients, and that means you need softer skills and good relationships, not just technicals. Vivienne does not seem to get this. She may think she can be too productive not to promote, as if she can climb her way to the top on a stairway of unrequested decks. Great.

  Tripp and I sit at the round marble table in her office with our open notebooks at the ready. My seat gives me a view through her glass walls right into Mark’s office, where I watch him pack papers into a floppy brown leather briefcase. Headed home to the family.

  “How are your other teams?” Vivienne asks.

  “Busy,” I say honestly.

  “Great, so for the Titan materials,” she says, “let’s brainstorm?”

  “Fantastic,” Tripp says.

  Mark exits his office and strides past us. I use my pen to write nonwords until he is out of sight. Meanwhile, Vivienne rattles off a list of possible topics for the completely unnecessary book of materials in an uninhibited stream of consciousness. Is she playing finance word association? I don’t think I could recite the alphabet this quickly. My bottom-of-the-totem-pole muscle—which runs between my index finger tip and wrist—actually cramps as I scribe.

  First, she wants an update on the economy. She starts spitting out titles for the slides we will present—such as “High M&A Volumes”—which means, Find the data to support th
at conclusion. Vivienne also wants to show how well the managed-care industry has done, using stock price charts. And the more she talks, the more words she thinks of. She’s pulling tasks out of a Mary Poppins bag of shit for me to do instead of sleep. And Tripp is “You bet!”-ing her every word. Now she wants slides on “strategic alternatives,” whose name is almost as specific as silence itself. Turns out that means merger analyses with companies Titan might want to buy. She runs down the list of names.

  “Wait, those are all private companies, right?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Vivienne says. “So, because they don’t publish financial statements, you might have to do a little bit of digging.”

  Yeah, as in my grave.

  “Oh, and one last thing,” Vivienne says. “I have to attend a closing dinner with clients tonight and then an event for the Anderson Women’s Group until about midnight, but then I can send comments.”

  5:27 p.m.

  Soooooooooo . . . For a company that doesn’t need any materials, prepare a full book that they probably won’t ever see. Include merger analyses, some with made-up numbers. You just found out about it now, but do it immediately, and let’s check in at midnight—before you spend the rest of the night on this.

  “Absolutely,” Tripp says.

  chapter 6

  11:15 p.m.

  Finished another coffee.

  For the record, I don’t even know what I look like anymore. I just zoned out and my screen saver went to black. Then I stared at my reflection like, What the fuck? Me? I squinted. Couldn’t believe it. Looks like I was wind-tunneled.

  We are seconds from sending the deck to Vivienne at 11:30 p.m. I paste my merger model outputs into the PowerPoint file. Now, it’s Tripp’s turn to add his.

  Imminently, Tripp and I will pick up our second dinner in the Sky Lobby and wait for Vivienne’s comments. Every book that leaves Anderson is supposed to be formatted the same way: same color palette, font size, number of decimal places, and align the shit out of it. I have pulled all-nighters just reformatting, but Tripp cares less than most about it and about checking his analysts’ work. This is part of why we get along—I want to leave the industry, and Tripp has what he calls “perspective.”