The Nissan Sentra in front of me had been sitting through a fully green light for what I could only assume was a very good reason. Maybe they were having a medical emergency. A stroke. A seizure. A sudden and catastrophic loss of consciousness that rendered them unable to perceive the color green. Maybe their accelerator had failed. Maybe their engine had died. Maybe a small animal had crawled into the undercarriage, and they were frozen with moral indecision about whether to proceed and risk becoming a murderer. Maybe they'd received devastating news: a phone call, a text, the kind of life altering information that makes a person forget where they are and what they're doing and that a green light means go, it had meant go since the invention of the traffic light, this is not ambiguous, this is not a philosophical question, green means go, it has always meant go, and if you did not know this you should not have a license.
I lay on the horn. Nothing. The driver's head tilted down, definitely looking at a phone, and did not move. Did not acknowledge the existence of the color green, or the concept of forward motion, or the fact that there were seventeen cars behind them operated by people with places to be. I contemplated committing the kind of violence that lands you on the evening news.
"Oh, you have got to be—" I hit the horn again, longer this time. "MOVE. Move your car. Move your stupid— what are you doing? What could you possibly be doing right now that is more important than— GO. Just GO."
The light turned yellow. The Nissan finally rolled forward and made it through. I did not.
"ARE YOU KIDDING ME? YOU MOTHERF-"
I sat there, gripping the steering wheel of my 2014 Honda Civic. I tried to breathe. I tried to count to ten. I tried to employ the anger management techniques that a therapist I saw twice in college, and then ghosted, suggested. I sat there and thought about the fact that the Nissan driver would continue their day, blissfully unaware that they had ruined my morning, and that they would face no consequences for it.
The light turned green again, and I made it through this time, merging into the expressway aggressively, in a way that would've made my mother weep and brake from the passenger's seat. A BMW tried to cut me of,f and I accelerated harder.
The guy in the BMW flipped me off. I flipped him off.
I lit a cigarette with one hand, cracked the window, and told myself that was fine. Everything is fine. This is just what Monday looked like when you were twenty-eight, and your life had not gone according to plan. Or any plan. Or the vague suggestion of a plan.
The thing about plans is that they require the kind of faith I'd never been great at. Faith and I had a complicated history. My mother had raised us Catholic, so I grew up listening to Father Donnelly talk about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, how suffering has a purpose, and that if you just trust and believe, the path will reveal itself. And then my father got sick, and my mother worked herself half to death taking care of him and prayed every single night on her knees beside her bed, pleading for my father's recovery. And God did technically answer her prayers, because my father got better. And then he left her for another woman six months later, which I guess was the mysterious way the Lord was working that particular year.
I'd built my entire identity around being good at writing. Structured four years of coursework around it, interned at two newspapers and a magazine, graduated with honors, and then entered the job market and discovered that the job market did not give a shit.
Which is how I ended up at The Daily Byte. It is a "digital media company" that produces content. Not journalism. Content. There is a difference, and if you don't think there's a difference, congratulations, you'd fit right in. The site published somewhere between forty and sixty articles a day, most of them about people you'd never heard of doing things that didn't matter, written at a pace that made accuracy optional and quality irrelevant. TikTok Star Claps Back at Hater in Viral Video. This Beauty Influencer's Morning Routine Will Change Your Life. You Won't Believe What This Youtuber Said About Her Ex.
Half the staff didn't even bother writing their own pieces. Gayle knew. Gayle did not care. Gayle cared about clicks and speed and keeping the content pipeline full, and if a robot could do it faster than a person, that was innovation, baby.
I pulled into the parking lot at 9:14, which was fourteen minutes late by the official clock, but exactly on time by my own internal one, because I'd decided months ago that my real start time was 9:15 and I would simply not engage with any information to the contrary. I stubbed out my cigarette on the pavement, checked my teeth in the rearview mirror, and went inside.
The office was open plan, which is a phrase they use when they mean "everyone can hear you breathe." There were twelve desks arranged in a pattern I believe was meant to encourage collaboration, but in practice just meant I could smell Tyler's can of tuna every single day. And I hate him for it, with a purity of emotion I've never felt for another human being.
"Morning, Nell!" That was Priya, who sat across from me and was annoyingly cheerful for someone who spent eight hours a day writing about influencer drama.
"Morning."
"Gayle's looking for you."
Gayle's office was a glass-walled room at the back of the floor that she'd decorated with an unironic GIRL BOSS mug and a framed print that said CREATE THE CONTENT YOU WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD. She was in her early forties, blonde in a way that required significant maintenance, and was an enthusiastic HOA board member. She wasn't mean, exactly. She was passive-aggressive and utilized a lot of therapy speak.
"Nell, there you are." She said this with a tight smile on her face. She did not mention I was late. She didn't have to. Her expression said it for her. "So, I have something fun for you today."
Nothing Gayle described as fun had ever been fun.
"Great," I said, and sat down in the chair across from her desk, which was slightly too low, a detail I was now fully convinced was intentional.
"Do you know Brynn Kessler?"
I shook my head.
"She's a lifestyle creator? Huge on TikTok? She just launched a podcast, and it's already trending. It's very exciting." Gayle pulled up something on her monitor and turned it toward me. A twenty-something-year-old in a matching pink workout set smiled back at me from a ring-lit room. "So she posted a series of videos this weekend about her—" Gayle lowered her voice slightly, as if she was sharing state secrets. "Fertility journey. Very raw stuff. People have been eating it up."
"Sure."
"Well, another creator— Jade something. I'll send you the handle— she posted a whole series of videos basically accusing Brynn of faking it. The miscarriages, the IVF, all of it. She's claiming the timelines don't add up, that Brynn was spotted at a club the same week she claimed she was on bed rest, and she's got screenshots of Brynn where she is supposedly joking about engagement metrics on her fertility content." Gayle's eyes were bright. This was Christmas morning for her. "It's everywhere. The comments are a war zone. Brynne posted a response, crying, saying she can't believe someone would accuse a woman of faking a miscarriage, and Jade came back with receipts, and now there's a petition to deplatform Brynn, and the whole thing is just—" she clasped her hands together. "Chef's kiss."
A woman was being publicly accused of fabricating dead babies, and my boss had just said chefs kiss.
"I want you to write it up. Both sides. The accusations, the responses, the fan reactions, the whole timeline. Deep dive."
"A deep dive into whether a woman is lying about miscarriages?"
"Exactly! And don't editorialize. We're not taking a side. We're just presenting the discourse. Let the readers decide. Oh, and make up some quote from a fertility specialist about how common it is for women to feel pressured to share their journeys publicly. Makes us look unbiased.
I wanted to say: I have a journalism degree, and you are asking me to referee a content war over someone's dead or possibly fictional baby. I wanted to say: I would rather be hit by a bus.
"Sure," I said. "When do you need it by?"
"End of day? Fifteen hundred words." She smiled. "Oh, and Nell— try to keep it positive? Last time you covered one of these, the tone was a little..." she waved her hand in the air.
"A little what?"
"Depressing. You know. Just warm it up a little. We're just summarizing the drama, not critiquing anyone."
Right. Because God forbid we apply. Single critical thought to anything. God forbid someone who went to school for this bring even a shred of analysis to the content pipeline. No. No. Warm it up.
"Got it," I said, and went back to my desk.
I wrote the piece in under an hour because I could write these in my sleep, all about Brynne Kessler's fertility journey, complete with embedded TikTok's and a quote I pulled from a women's health website that said something anodyne about the importance of openness. It was exactly what Gayle wanted, and the bar was so low that it didn't matter.
I emailed it to her and stated my screen and thought about Sarah Price.
Sarah Price was a writer for The Atlantic who'd published a piece last year about labor exploitation in the Hollywood Management industry. It had taken her eight years to research, and it had actually changed things. Companies restructured, contracts were rewritten, and people who had been screwed over were compensated. That was journalism. That was what journalism was supposed to do. Not react, not aggregate, not celebrate. Investigate. Uncover. Hold power accountable and write it so well that people had to pay attention.
I wanted that. I wanted it so badly that thinking about it too long made my chest hurt, the same physical ache I used to get as a kid pressing my face against a window looking at a toy I couldn't have. The problem was that wanting didn't get you anywhere. I had clips from The Daily Byte and an apartment I could barely afford, and a resume that made serious editors wince. I'd applied to real outlets: newspapers, magazines, investigative nonprofits. I'd sent pitches. I'd sent cold emails. I'd sent follow-ups to cold emails that went unanswered. The responses I did get were always some version of the same thing: love your voice, but we're looking for someone with more experience. More experience. In what? In writing? I wrote sixty pieces a week. In journalism? Nobody would let me do any. It was the kind of circular logic that made me want to scream into a pillow, which I did, regularly, in my crappy apartment, where the pillow smelled like mildew.
By 5:30, I'd written three more pieces: one about a beauty influencer's alleged nose job, one about a couple that went viral for breaking up on a live stream, and a roundup of celebrity airport outfits. I gathered my things, which consisted of a bag I'd had since college and a jacket with a mysterious stain I'd stopped trying to remove, and left without saying goodbye to anyone.
Rush hour turned a twenty-minute drive into fifty, and I spent most of it behind a truck that was leaking something onto my windshield. A Jeep with no turn signal cut across three lanes, and I said, "Oh, go fuck yourself" with such conviction that I startled myself. A Prius going forty-five in the fast lane forced me to brake so hard that my bag slid off the passenger seat and dumped its contents onto the floor, and I called the Prius driver a word I will not repeat but that I feel was entirely warranted.
My phone buzzed in the cupholder and I ignored it because I was already in a bad enough mood without adding communication to the mix. It buzzed again. And again. And again. Seven buzzes in a row, which meant it was either a crisis or it was Gigi, and the Venn diagram of those two things was basically a circle.
I waited until I'd parked badly, half in someone else's spot, which I'd deal with later or not at all, and finally checked my phone.
Gigi. Seven texts in the span of two minutes.
It was not going to be important. Gigi's definition of important included but was not limited to: a good sale at Zara, a celebrity posting something she had an opinion about, a new episode of whatever reality show she was watching, and once, memorably, the fact that she'd seen a dog wearing shoes. I loved my sister. I did. But our thresholds for importance were calibrated on entirely different scales.
I climbed the stairs to my apartment: third floor, no elevator, a building with unreliable plumbing, and a hallway that always smelled faintly of hot dogs thanks to the couple in 3A. The door stuck, as it always did, and I shouldered it open and was immediately greeted by the thick, cloying fog of nag champa incense and the sight of Kristen sitting cross-legged on the living room floor surrounded by crystals.
Kristen. Okay. Kristen is my roommate, and I want to be unbiased about this. Kristen is not a bad person. Kristen is, by all accounts, a kind and well-meaning human being who recycles aggressively and always asks before she borrows my things. She was also someone who believed that Mercury retrograde was a valid explanation for a bad day, who owns more tarot decks than plates, and who once sage-cleansed my bedroom without asking because she said it had "heavy energy."
"Hey, babe!" she called out, not looking up from whatever arrangement she was making with the crystals. "How was your day?"
"Stellar. I wrote about a woman's ovaries."
"Oh, cool! Was it like a health piece?"
"Sure."
I dropped my bag, kicked off my shoes, and went to the kitchen, which was technically just one end of the living room separated by a counter that had a crack running down the middle. I opened the fridge. The fridge contained: Kristen's oat milk, Kristen's kombucha, three containers of something Kristen had meal-prepped that looked beige, and a single beer that was mine. I took the beer.
My phone buzzed again. Gigi.
I called her because it was easier than being summoned by text for the rest of the night.
"Finally! Oh my God, I've been — "
"Giana Marie, do you know how many times my phone buzzed in the last ten minutes?"
"Don't full-name me, you sound like Mom."
"I will full-name you when you send me fourteen texts while I'm operating a vehicle."
"It was seven texts."
"It felt like fourteen."
"Okay, well, if you'd just answered the first one — "
"I was driving — "
"Whatever. I have news. Are you — "
"If you tell me to sit down, I'm hanging up."
"I wasn't going to! I was going to say are you home?"
"Yes."
"Hi, Gigi!" That was Kristen, calling from the floor, where she was still performing surgery on her crystal grid. She loved Gigi. Gigi loved her back. They followed each other on Instagram, and Kristen had done Gigi's birth chart, and apparently, they were "cosmically compatible."
"Is that Kristen? Hi, Kristen! Tell her I said hi."
"She can hear you, Gigi. The whole building can hear you."
"Okay, ANYWAY. So. Oh my God, Nell, okay, so today the most insane thing happened, so I was at work, and this girl comes i,n and she's wearing — "
"Three."
"What?"
"Two."
"Are you counting down at me?"
"One."
"FINE. Okay. The point. The point is." She took a breath so dramatic I could hear it through the phone. "Dane is coming. Here. To our city. In two weeks. And I get to see Logan."
"Okay?"
"Like, live. In concert. Logan got me tickets. VIP!"
"Nell."
"What?"
"She got us tickets."
"Who got who tickets?"
"Logan. Got. Us. Tickets. You and me. VIP. Backstage."
A pause. A long one. I took a sip of my beer and waited for the part where she explained why this involved me.
"Nell? Are you there?"
"I'm here. I'm just waiting for the part where you explain why I would go to a Dane concert."
"Because I'm asking you to?"
"Gigi, I don't — I don't listen to Dane. I don't know Dane's music. I don't care about Dane's music. I would rather spend my Saturday doing literally anything else, including but not limited to laundry, jury duty, and staring at a wall."
"You're so dramatic."
"I'm dramatic? You sent me four emergency texts about concert tickets."
"This is an emergency! These are VIP, Nell. Backstage. Do you know what people would do for these tickets? People would commit crimes for these tickets."
"Good for them. They can have mine."
"Nell." Her voice changed. Got quieter. Got dangerous, because quiet Gigi was guilt-tripping Gigi, and guilt-tripping Gigi had a success rate I wasn't proud of. "We never do anything together. Like, ever. When was the last time we did something? Just us?"
"We had dinner last month."
"You came over for forty-five minutes and spent half of it on your phone and then said you had to leave because you had a piece due."
"I did have a piece due."
"You always have a piece due. There's always something. And I get it, you're busy, you have your job and your life, and I'm just your little sister who's annoying and likes things you think are stupid — "
"I don't think you're — "
"But I'm not asking you to like Dane's music, Nell. I'm asking you to come to one thing with me. One. Because you're my sister and we only have each other, and sometimes I just want to hang out with you without it being a whole hostage situation."
That landed. She knew it would.
"Also, Logan really wants to see you."
"Logan," I said, trying to place the name against a face and coming up mostly blank. "That's — which one was she? Was she the one with the glasses or the one who was really into horses?"
"Horses? Nell, that was Brianna. Brianna moved to Ohio in eighth grade."
"Okay, was she the tall one who— "
"Nelly, she was legit at our house literally every day for four years. How do you not remember her?"
"They all kind of looked the same, Gigi. You had like three friends, and they were all just there. In the house. Constantly."
"Oh my God. You're the worst. She always gave you cigarettes? Ring a bell?"
"Wait, are you talking about Puff?" A vague shape assembled itself in my memory. Round face. Always stuttering. Always hovering around me. Always had a pack of Marlboros on her despite being approximately twelve years old, which I'd never questioned because free cigarettes were free cigarettes. "She's the guitarist?"
"Yes! Just come. Please? Please please please?"
"Gigi— "
"Is that a crime? Wanting to spend time with my sister? Lock me up. Call the police. Gigi Capri, guilty of wanting to hang out with the only family member she has who isn't working all the time or living in another state with his new girlfriend."
Low blow. Effective, but low.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. The incense was giving me a headache.
"Fine," I said.
Gigi screamed.
"I will go, I stand there, I endure whatever noise you people consider music, and then I leave. That's it."
"YES! Oh my God, okay, we need to talk about outfits. I have ideas. I have a whole Pinterest board— "
"Absolutely not."
"Just LOOK at it, Nell. I'll send you the link. And we can — "
"I'm hanging up now."
"Wait wait wait — I'll send you a picture of Logan so you can see what she looks like now because you're going to die. You are going to literally — "
"Goodnight, Gigi."
"CHECK YOUR TEXTS!"
I hung up. Drank the rest of the beer. Stared at the ceiling. Kristen was smiling at me from the floor.
"That sounded nice," she said. "Sister stuff."
"Please don't."