“Nine.”
“Nine.” Taylor smiles. “So it’s a delicate time. The business press is all over you. The board is up your ass, am I right?”
Juliana winces at the crudeness of the description; a nicer way to put it would be that the boardis watching things closely. But yes, it’s true.
“Especially that one guy, let me think, the lead director, right? Daniel Scott?”
“How do you know who’s on my board? The company isn’t public yet.”
“Crunchbase,” Taylor says. “You know Crunchbase, right?”
Of course Juliana knows Crunchbase.
“It’s amazing what you can find out there. Anyway. Scott especially. I did some reading on him. Politically conservative. Socially conservative. A whiff of impropriety would really turn him off, wouldn’t it? Like, if it got out that the company’s founder got her seed money by sleeping with some dying old man...”
“No,”says Juliana.
“Yes!” says Taylor. “This stuff happens all the time. I mean, maybe notthisspecific situation. But I can see it. I can practically write the press release from the board.We lost confidence in our founder. We’re canceling our IPO and we’re reevaluating our options. Something like that. Then, the next thing you know, you’re out. They bring in another CEO. You still own—what?”
“Thirty percent.”
“Thirty percent. Okay. Not bad. But that thirty percent is just paper. And what if they put off the IPO for a year? Now you’ve got no job, so you’ve got no paycheck. I’m not sure what you put down on your house here, but it wouldn’t take me long to find out. I’m guessing you’re mortgaged to the hilt. The decorating, all those parties... I’m speculating here, Juliana. Or Jade. Or whoever you are. Maybe you stretched yourself a little thin this summer, knowing you had a big payday coming. You wouldn’t be the first founder who spent money before they had it.”
This time Juliana keeps her face impassive, neither confirming nor denying. Taylor has hit the nail exactly, precisely, on the head.
“And what do you do with the rest of your life? You can’t get another job at the CEO level. Who wants to hire a leader who was removed from her own company? You can’t get a job at a lower level, because now you’re overqualified. After all, you’ve been a CEO. You founded your own company!”
Juliana will give Taylor credit for being sharp.
Taylor the Mind Reader leaps on Juliana’s next thought beforeshe even has time to formulate it. “And what’s the name of your foundation? I’m sorry, I can’t remember. Keeping so many things in my head, you know.”
“Girl/Power.”
“Right. Girl/Power. Decent name. And it does what again?”
Juliana has said this so many times it comes out like memorized lines of poetry in a high school English class. “We empower lower-income first-generation female college students to become business entrepreneurs.”
“I love that,” says Taylor. “I really do.”
“Thank you,” says Juliana, before she can catch herself. “We’ve done a lot of amaz—”
Taylor cuts her off. “But what happens to the foundation when it comes out thatthis particularlower-income female entrepreneur slept her way to the seed money?”
“I didn’t—”
“I mean, you did. But. Again, it doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t do. It matters what the perception of what you did is. There goes the reputation of your foundation. There go the donations. There go the girls you want to help. I guess they’ll have to figure things out on their own.”
That’s it. Juliana stands and walks away from Taylor, parallel to the water’s edge, picking out spots where her feet can find smooth sand between the rocks. The waves come in choppily. Everything feels like it’s on fire: her heart, her brain, her hands and feet. The sky over the wind turbines has grown dark, but above the beach it’s still clear. The air is heavy—portentous.
She hears Taylor calling her name and she turns. “No,” she says, as Taylor moves closer. “No. You can’t do this. You can’t take everything away from me.”
“Well,you,” says Taylor, “can’t take everything away from me.”
“You just work for your dad. I created something out of nothing.I’ve been fighting every day since I was seven years old. You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand,” says Taylor. “I understand perfectly. I understand that it’s hard to be a woman in a man’s world. Believe me, I understand that. I can see where it might have been hard to get the funding you needed to start your business, a girl like Jade Gordon, no connections, not the slightest idea about how to get the attention of the VCs. No income while you got your business off the ground.”
“No rich daddy to lean on,” spits Juliana. “You might have done the same thing.”
