The List (25 page)

Julia and I had made a pact when we first became friends about the way we would leave
the
Capitolist
. We had no grand plans to dart out of there anytime soon; something about the horrible
hours and terrible pay was keeping us in our seats. But we agreed that when we did
leave, it had to be within a month of each other.

Probably notified that his employees were having fun by some internal spying system,
Hardy came to my desk and stared at the top of my head. “What’s with your hair,” he
asked. It was really more of a statement than a question.

“What’s with
your
hair?” I asked, flicking my intricate fishtail braid over my shoulder and looking
at his weird spongy curls.

Instead of answering me, he put the glossy proofs of the next day’s paper on my desk.
“I don’t like this sentence,” he said, pointing to my third paragraph in a piece about
the rapper Common’s new book. “It’s too late to change it now, design will kill us.
But I just wanted you to know that I don’t like it.”

How sweet. Let’s not forget the fact that he edited the piece and could have changed
it then. But no. He let it go into design and then publicly announced it was despicable.

“Thanks for pointing it out, Hardy,” I said as amicably as I could.

Julia made vomiting sounds as he walked away, then lurched for her ringing phone and
eased into a conversation with a source. She twirled the emerald ring on her right
hand and typed up a series of short sentences with her left. Her years at the
Capitolist
had made her such an ambidextrous multitasker that she’d probably learned to pee
standing up to save time.

I had started checking the 175 news sources on my RSS feed when the newsroom loudspeaker
crackled on. Upton, when brought on two years ago, had had his speakerphone wired
to the entire floor so that he could boom news to everyone at once when he felt a
burning desire to echo in our ears like the voice of God.

“Troops. Let’s join in the usual place in five minutes,” he said. The newsroom reverberated
with murmurs of “why?” An all-editorial meeting usually meant we were tooting our
own incredibly well-greased horn for something we’d done. Did we have a new big-name
columnist? Did someone break a huge story? Or perhaps the
Wall Street Journal
had bought the
Washington Post
and everyone at the latter had been fired. Another thing we were all asked to celebrate
as a group was the failure of other news outlets. So maybe the
Post
had accidentally published porn and we all were going to have a champagne toast in
honor of their stupidity.

Sadly, it had nothing to do with adult film. It had to do with a story about a politician’s
shady trip to Eastern Europe, broken by one of our own.

“And we salute Christine Lewis, who broke the story,” said
Upton as all the reporters, producers, editors, and copy editors surrounded him and
cheered. We craned our necks to look for the girl being heralded for her investigative
skills. She popped up next to Upton with red cheeks and a big smile. “She happened
to be online at three
A.M.
on Saturday when she noticed a tweet from an Albanian underground blogger,” said
Upton with pride.

While I had to put my hand over my mouth to stop either bile or laughter from exploding
out, no one else seemed to be surprised at this Albanian blogger detail. I wanted
to scream, “Only perverts and those obeying Singapore Standard Time should be on Twitter
at three
A.M.
!” but I didn’t. At the
Capitolist,
what Christine did was not just normal: it was heavily applauded. We should all be
looking to the former Eastern Bloc for sources.

Still raising an imaginary glass, Upton kept babbling. “At the rate she’s going, Christine
could become the next . . . ” He paused to think about it and then, letting his mouth
spread into a slow smile, said, “. . . the next Olivia Campo!” Everyone around him
started clapping encouragingly and I looked around for Olivia—who was now noticeably
absent.

“It takes a village called the
Capitolist
to get a story like this done, and you should all be thrilled to be a part of it,”
Upton concluded, smoothing back his blond mane.

It was really high time for scientists to discover the
Capitolist
. There were great experiments on mind control to be done.

“What was she doing trolling Twitter at three
A.M.
? What a humongous loser,” said Isabelle. She had stayed at her desk to keep writing
an article about how to choose a State Dinner menu. “You don’t even want to know what
I was doing at three
A.M.
,” she said when we sat back down again. “Okay, I’ll tell you. I was having sex with
a
Wall Street Journal
reporter with mild Asperger’s syndrome. There, I said it.”

“Was it Charlie Stein?” asked Alison, naming one of the
Journal
’s Washington correspondents.

“Obviously,” said Isabelle.

“That’s repulsive,” said Julia, replying to emails on her BlackBerry while talking.

“Repugnant,” added Libby.

“What were you doing?” Isabelle asked Libby with a wounded look.

“I was on a date with that petite man from Fox News. It sucked. We kissed and he called
me by the wrong name, twice. But at least I wasn’t on Twitter. I really don’t envy
that girl’s job, though,” said Libby. “She basically has to squash her bloodshot little
eyeballs to a computer every second of the day, and then when she finds breaking White
House news, she has to write it up, coherently, in five minutes. I would rather be
an undertaker.”

Libby looked at Christine, all twenty-four years of her, now having a tête-à-tête
with Upton. “At my first company barbecue she poured an entire pitcher of Diet Sprite
on her lap and she didn’t even flinch. She just sat there dripping while bugs landed
on her and kept filing a story on her BlackBerry. It was amazing.”

“I remember that,” said Julia. “I bet she gets an intense raise after this one.”

“You think?” said Libby. “I’ve never gotten a raise.”

“None of us have,” said Julia, sighing. “We’re not supposed to talk about money,”
she added, looking at me. “It’s in our contracts. But we all do.”

I nodded, pretending the
List
rules were pasted in my wallet like the Ten Commandments.

“But she’s definitely going to get a raise. I heard that they’re not hiring anyone
to fill Nicholas Wiik’s old job and that they’re
just having Christine, Olivia, Mike, Tim, Jason, and the rest of the White House team
ramp it up.”

“I heard that, too,” added Libby.

“I thought Nicholas Wiik still worked here? I saw him kicking the Coke machine last
week,” I said. Nicholas was one of the only White House reporters familiar with the
words
please
and
thank you
. He even apologized when he realized I was behind him during his soda machine attack.

“Yeah, he worked here last week,” said Libby. “But they fired him last month. His
last day was Friday.”

They had fired a White House reporter? Fired? I didn’t remember him throwing tomatoes
at the president or printing a love letter to North Korea in the paper. What cardinal
sin had he committed to get the ax? I asked Libby and she just smiled at me like I
was a child trying desperately to shove the square peg through the round hole.

“He didn’t
do
anything,” she explained. “He just wasn’t aggressive enough for the White House beat.
Nick never got great scoops and he didn’t produce as much as the rest of them, even
Christine, and she’s the most junior.”

“So they fired him?”

“Suggested he leave,” said Libby. “They don’t like to say ‘fired’ here. They just
tell people this isn’t the right place for them and ask them if they’re not better
suited to another publication, like
Tiger Beat
magazine. Then they suggest they scat within a few weeks. Let’s call it fired, without
the bad press.”

Oh God. That was totally going to happen to me. It was like something out of sorority
hazing where the house president, a girl who usually resembled my sister, told a hopeful
freshman that she was better suited to the fat girl sorority.

We all looked at Christine Lewis, ten years younger and willing to work harder and
longer than Nicholas Wiik.

“You know, that child probably makes double what we do, so she should be on Twitter
at three o’clock in the morning,” Julia offered, spinning around. “If she wants to
sacrifice her one-night-stand years for this machine, that’s her choice. I give fifteen
hours a day to this place. I’m not working Saturdays.”

Libby looked at her and laughed. “You work Saturdays every week! Even when Hardy tells
you not to, you work. You hate it, but you love it really.”

It was true. She did work every Saturday. And most Sundays. Her BlackBerry had a magenta
loop on the back so she could attach it to her hand while she drove.

“You know what he forgot to mention?” said Isabelle, tying back her freshly cut hair.
“That it was her birthday on Saturday, too.”

“It was not,” I said. If I ever had to look at Twitter during the deep dark hours
on my day of birth, I think I would call for the executioner. I celebrated my last
birthday scantily clad in Punta del Este. I was not going to go from naked bonfires
to Twitter trolling in one short year.

“I’m dead serious,” said Isabelle. “Our birthdays are two days apart, and last week
I asked her what she was doing for hers, which happened to fall on a Saturday. She
said, ‘Working late looking for 2012 copy.’ I said, ‘I bet Jason Horowitz can handle
that on his own,’ and she said, ‘I’ve been doing it straight for thirty days. Why
would I stop just because it’s the weekend and my birthday?’ I mean, why would you
stop? Because it’s your freaking birthday! At least salute your mother for pushing
you out of her loins. She’s not doing herself any favors. She should be working on
her Match.com profile.”

“And what was with the Olivia Campo reference?” I asked Isabelle when Libby and Alison
were back at their desks. “Kind of random, no?”

“No way. Upton likes to remind everyone that there’s a younger, hungrier, cheaper
version of all of us nipping at our heels. Even with Nicholas. They could have kept
his firing totally quiet, but they let it leak out little by little.” The classic
List
attitude of forcing people to compete internally while living in fear of losing their
jobs.

“Upton’s been dangling the chief White House correspondent position in front of Olivia
for the last year. Maybe he wants her to try harder for it.”

“But they would never give that job to Christine,” I said incredulously. “She’s barely
out of college! And Tim Schwartz, who has that job now, is forty.”

“Of course they’re not going to give it to Christine. Well, probably not. They just
like making people nervous, even queen Olivia. The
New York Times
is always trying to poach Tim Schwartz, which everyone knows, except you.”

“Right, except me.”

Isabelle laughed at my ignorance. “They are. Trust me. Of course, Upton keeps doing
whatever it takes to keep Tim but we all know he’ll jump sometime soonish. Who wouldn’t?
It’s the
New York Times
.”

“So if he leaves does Olivia get his job?” I asked, trying to sound as disinterested
as possible while still keeping Isabelle talking.

“Well, probably,” said Isabelle. “But there are plenty of other people here who want
it. Mike on the White House team. And obviously Christine. And you know they love
having wunderkinds here. They could just pay Tim a ridiculous salary for a few more
years and then bump Christine into the job over Olivia’s head. I hope they do. She
deserves it. Christine’s pretty dorky, but at least she’s nice.”

I couldn’t believe it. Did Olivia Campo have to worry about
other reporters nabbing her job? Maybe that’s what drove her to start sleeping with
Stanton. Maybe she actually lived in a constant state of paranoia and that’s why she
was so mean.

“God, I love this place. You can just smell the pressure,” said Christine, the anointed
one, with a grin on her eager little face as she walked away from the last of our
colleagues toasting her and moved toward her desk. “There is no newsroom in America
as exciting as this one,” she said to Tucker Cliff, who was walking with her.

“You’re right,” he replied, clapping his hands together. The smack of his palms caused
us all to look up. “We,” he said to Christine, “are on fire.”

W
hen Hardy and then Upton had saluted my work on the James Franco story, it was the
first time I had ever gotten a pat on the back at the
Capitolist
. Most of the time, the higher-ups only talked to you if you had done something wrong,
or as in Nicholas’s case, advising you to seek employment elsewhere. You were expected
to put your nose to the grindstone and never come up for air, let alone compliments
and praise.

But when my first big story broke and I had my hand metaphorically shaken by the top
brass, I felt my perspective on the place change. So what if they wanted to use up
my youth and energy and spit me out? It’s not like they tried to pretend they were
anything but a sweatshop. I knew that if I made it over a year, I would come out alive
and with a bigger name than I had when I went in. But I began to see that if I decided
to go forward with the Olivia story, and if the paper picked me and my scoop over
her, my career would be set.

I had never met a woman like Olivia before: one who pushed everyone and everything
aside for the sake of success. Girls like her weren’t at sisterhood-loving Wellesley,
and they certainly weren’t at
Town & Country
. She was either going to beat us all or crash and burn. And I had the power to make
her burn. If I exposed her affair with Stanton, everyone in the
Capitolist
newsroom would actually know my name. I wouldn’t just be the tall blond girl in the
back of the room who came from some fashion magazine and smiled too much. I, like
Christine, would be the subject of one of Upton’s ridiculous staff-wide announcements.