PART 1
1,825 DAYS TO GO
CHAPTER ONE
QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS
Returning from a long Sunday in the office, Rae paused at the top of the stairs to catch her breath. She didn’t want to show up out of breath to her own birthday party, particularly her quarter-century birthday party.
Dabbing her face with the sleeve of her suit jacket to mop up the sheen, she let herself into her apartment—the Perry Street Penthouse, as she and her roommate Ellen had rebranded their top-floor walk-up.
“Happy birthday!” Ellen shrieked from the kitchenette. She was slicing blocks of cheese with a plastic knife.
“I’m twenty-five, not eighty-five,” Rae said. “No need to shout.” But she was smiling. “Where’s everyone else?”
Everyone elsebeing the two friends from college she’d managed to hang on to through the real-world craze of the past few years. The Scramblettes, the foursome called themselves, after their joint culinary invention—a half omelet, half scrambled egg creation accidentally born from subpar flipping abilities. The spelling was inspired by the Rockettes to give it some New York flair.
“Sarah just texted that she’s getting on the subway,” Ellen said. “And you know how Mina is …”
Rae grunted. She’d hoped that midtwenties would be more punctual than early twenties, but apparently the Scramblettes were still the Scramblettes. “Why aren’t you wearing your robe?”
They’d agreed on a bathrobe theme—much more sophisticated than a pajama party, Rae thought, much more adult-ish.
“It’s over there,” Ellen said, pointing to the undersized couch, where an oversized robe was draped over the armrest. “Snitched it from the hotel during my business trip.”
“Very savvy,” Rae said, retrieving her own robe from her bedroom. The termbedroomwas generous. To afford West Village rent, they’d inserted drywall to split the one bedroom into two. The wall stopped a foot short of the ceiling to comply with fire regulations.
Rae removed her bathrobe from one of the plastic hooks that held up most of her belongings, the ones that hadn’t already fallen to the floor. The landlord didn’t allow nails, and her closet didn’t fit anything beyond her black work pants and white collared shirts. In an attempt to mitigate the sexism rampant in investment banking, she dressed identically to the men. She thought the strategy might be working, though perhaps that was only because modern sexism was often too subtle for anyone—including her—to notice.
Online, the bathrobe had looked like a confident white, but it had turned out to be more of an indecisive eggshell. Still, better than the polka-dot one she’d been tempted by. Polka dots were early twenties, not midtwenties, not to mention that robe had been four dollars more expensive.
The glamorous stereotype of Wall Streeters dripping in money didn’t exactly apply to Rae. The investment bank she worked for had slashed salaries for junior employees to improve profit margins, and she had big student loans to pay off. Unlike most of her colleagues, she didn’t come from wealth and hadn’t gotten the job from nepotism. She’d hustled to get in, and she was going to keep hustling untilshe got out. She made herself put ten percent of her salary into her “Poet’s Fund” every month—an idealistic pot that would let her quit her corporate job one day and pursue her writing dreams.
Ellen, too, was money conscious, determined to live frugally now so she could indulge in the lavish lifestyle she was destined for later on. It was one of the things that bonded them—gleefully finding ways to save a few dollars and rolling their eyes at other twentysomethings who spoke so cavalierly of private helicopter rides to the Hamptons.
Rae shed her corporate costume, slipped on the nearly soft fabric, and rejoined Ellen in the living room.
“Start in on this,” Ellen said, pouring her a coffee mug of rosé. The wine glasses were all chipped or sitting in murky sink water.
Rae had specifically requested rosé, as nothing articulated midtwenties elegance more than an accented vowel.
“And look how much cheese we have,” Ellen said, pointing to three plates stacked high with Brie, cheddar, Gorgonzola, and a few other varieties Rae didn’t even know the names of. “But can you believe it, I forgot crackers, so we’ll just have to eat it straight.”
If anyone else had forgotten the crackers in the cheese-and-crackers equation, Rae would’ve been annoyed, but this was just how Ellen was, focusing so much on the details that she overlooked the basics, and Rae loved her more for it. Ellen’s whimsy brought wings to Rae’s logic-driven life, and Ellen swore that Rae kept her from crashing. They worked like that, filling in each other’s gaps.
Rae took a swig of rosé, followed by a goopy chunk of Brie. “It’s a pretty good chaser,” she said approvingly.
“You don’t need a chaser for rosé.”
“At my age you do.”
Ellen was still only twenty-four.
Rae’s phone buzzed. Her heart palpitated—not a fluttering palpitation because a crush had texted but a plummeting palpitation because a boss had.
Decimal points don’t match on pg. 62. Send thru updated version ASAP.
As an investment banking analyst in the Mergers & Acquisitions group, Rae’s job was to prepare PowerPoints, spreadsheets, and financial models to assist the higher-ups as they wined and dined CEOs of big companies and pitched them on why they should buy other big companies to make even more money. If Rae’s bank won the deal and facilitated the acquisition—which involved very little intellectual prowess and a whole lot of extravagant pageantry—they made a disgusting amount of money in fees, none of which trickled down to the sleep-deprived worker bees at the bottom. At its core, Rae’s role was just to be everyone’s personal bitch, accepting each menial request 24/7 with a cheerful “Will do!”
