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“So you don’t have any idea who she is?”
“Nope,” she says, and my heart sinks. “But my dad would. He never forgets a name.”
“This is going to sound ridiculous, but I really need to talk to your dad. And I can’t explain why.” It’s a long shot, but there’s no way I can get to him without her help.
She barks out a laugh and opens her laptop back up. “Why, so you can join the hordes of people dying for an Elsewhere internship?”
“God, no.” I say it with too much distaste. Insulting her parents’ company isn’t the way to get into her good graces. “I mean—I read it, and there’s plenty I like. But I’m not looking for an internship.”
At this, Lucie softens.
“If you help me, I’ll—I’ll do your laundry for a week.” An empty promise, but she doesn’t need to know that.
“I can do my own laundry, thanks.”
I pause, taking a long breath. There’s something else. Something I’ve assumed I’d never use. “Do you remember the last article we worked on together?” I ask.
It wasn’t that long ago—early senior year, a retrospective for our school’s fiftieth anniversary that a few of us collaborated on. Lucie fumbled some alum’s quote, and he called the school to complain.
Please, Barrett, she said, and if I looked at her hard enough, I could see a hint of the old Lucie in there. I won’t hear the end of it if my parents think I screwed up.
So I took the blame, the disappointed look from our advisor. I owe you one, Lucie said. I waved it off, only barely thought about it afterward.
Now it’s time for her to pay up, and from the recognition dawning on her face, I can tell she knows.
“I guess I’m done with classes for the day….” She trails off. “I’d have to go with you, though.”
I give her my most angelic grin. “I’m free now.”
“You’re really not going to tell me why this professor is so important to you?” Lucie asks when the Uber drops off us in front of Elsewhere, a downtown Bellevue skyscraper. At the very top is the company logo, the SEWHERE perched on the horizontal line in the L.
“It’s for an article. For the Washingtonian.” The lie is easier now. This seems to satisfy her, at least. “Did you interview for the paper?”
“Oh—no. Not exactly. I’m not actually sure I’ll write for it this quarter.”
“Wait, what?” That doesn’t compute. “You were the editor in chief of the Nav, and you’re not going to write for your college paper?”
Lucie’s quiet for a moment, toying with the end of her auburn ponytail. “Journalism… was always more of my parents’ thing than mine,” she says finally.
“I guess I assumed you were going to major in it too.” I think about her crying in the stairwell, realizing how little I know about her.
“Guess we both have secrets,” she says before hitting the buzzer at the building’s entrance.
Elsewhere is a high-octane mix of clickbait and hard-hitting journalism. They have offices in Seattle and New York, and the Lamonts fly between the two. I wasn’t lying when I told Lucie I didn’t want an internship here. When I picture myself as a professional journalist, I imagine the kind of office that doesn’t have its own cereal buffet or racquetball court. I’d meet my subjects wherever they were most comfortable, and then I’d take my work to a coffee shop, typing away until the baristas asked me to leave. And I’d be so immersed, I wouldn’t even notice they were about to close.
“My dad’s up on the twelfth floor,” Lucie says, leading me forward into the chaos: bright colors and brighter lights, people running between each other’s desks, one of them even riding a scooter. “My mom flew back to New York from St. Croix.” None of the hullabaloo seems to impact her, even though a couple of people stop what they’re doing and go quiet, as though Lucie Lamont herself has some control over their jobs. She walks with an indifferent kind of confidence.
The elevator is all glass, modern, and one entire wall of the twelfth floor is a window with a view of Lake Washington. Her dad’s office is at the end of the corridor.
“Luce?” Her dad gets out of his chair when she knocks on his open door. “I was just about to call you! This is certainly a surprise.”
Because it’s four o’clock. This is who she’s talking to every day.
This is who makes her cry in a stairwell: Pete Lamont, twenty-first-century media mogul, millionaire, consistently on lists of most influential people in journalism. Even though I’ve seen him in passing at school functions, I never went to Lucie’s house during our short-lived friendship, so this is the first time I’m seeing him up close. He has a mustache and the same ice-blue eyes behind thick-framed glasses, and he’s dressed more casually than I thought a media mogul would be, in jeans and a button-up over a T-shirt that says ELSEWHERE COMPANY PICNIC 2007.
“A good one, I hope?” she says, and when he grins, I can see how he’s charmed hundreds of investors and other important people over the years. His teeth practically shimmer.
“What brings you in? You change your mind about that internship?”
