Page 5

If nothing else, it would be entertaining. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

“Fantastic,” Emerson Leigh said over her shoulder as she swished away. The door closed with a click behind her, and I slumped down in my chair, the smile sliding off my face as my gaze settled back onto Bennett Richard Macalester Wright’s review.

I want what you have.

I jumped in my chair. Had I really just thought that? You have plenty, I told myself. Be happy with your followers and your status. You’re going to achieve everything he has, only you’ll be proud because you actually worked for it.

You’d be happier if you got paid a salary and benefits and had an expense account to do what you love, if you got to take risks and be yourself, instead of having to spend most of your time fetching and smiling for the top one percent, I said back. It’s not fair.

Always a good sign when the voices in your head were arguing with each other.

To be clear: I knew I had privilege. I had a good job that paid me almost enough to live on and a safe place to live and a family who loved me. If I suddenly lost my job and my apartment burned down, I could move back in with my parents until I got back on my feet. A lot of people didn’t have that. I was lucky I did.

Still, spending my time with people like the Deckers, it could be hard to remember that. It could be hard to not feel like I was the dirt beneath Emerson Leigh’s high-heeled shoes.

“I don’t need your prestige,” I mumbled at the page. Then sighed and swiveled away from it to my computer. Mr. Decker’s Florida house manager had emailed me to complain that their cable bill hadn’t gotten paid last month. Unless I woke up tomorrow morning to the news of a trust fund established in my name by a previously unknown, mysteriously rich, and very dead great-aunt, who was somehow prominent enough in food media to give my résumé to someone important at a place like the Scroll, this was my life.

And there was no point obsessing over it.

3

If I could live in any apartment in the city, I’d choose one with a view of Central Park, the most expansive green space in Manhattan, full of trees and grass and water and one very fancy duck. I didn’t even care which part of the park I lived by. The zoo with its sea lion fountain. The knotty, wild Ramble. The Reservoir surrounded by its running track, or the elegant Conservatory Garden. Not just because it would make me happy to sit out on my balcony and sip tea while gazing serenely over the coveted green space, or because it would be really nice to step outside and unwind with some plants instead of the gray concrete sidewalk and one sad tree planted outside my current building in Brooklyn.

No, because it would mean I’d have had a quick, easy, relaxing commute to the Central Park Food Festival today instead of having to take a circuitous, construction-fueled route that took me over an hour to get to where I stood now, outside the Museum of Natural History.

I took a deep breath. The topiary dinosaurs gazed down at me with their blank black eyes. My underarms were slick with sweat, even with the application of deodorant this morning that should’ve made me smell like baby powder, and wisps of hair were fraying free from the high bun I’d piled it into this morning to keep it out of my face while eating. I cursed under my breath, digging into my satchel for my tiny emergency bottle of gel. “There you are,” I said under my breath, pulling it out . . . and immediately dropping it. I reached for it, but like I’d accidentally fallen into a comedy of errors, a group of masked tourists tromped by, chattering in French as their feet ground the bottle into the dirt.

I cursed again, not under my breath.

“Someone’s not having a great morning,” Alice said from behind me. I jumped. One more point in the “Alice is Magic” column. I turned to find her looking way more put together than me, her red sweater sweat stain–free, her round, serious face neatly framed by her frizzless black bob.

“It’s better now that you’re here,” I said. “Do you have any gel, by chance? Or hair spray?”

She shook her head. “Sadly, no. I don’t like anything that makes my hair feel stiff or crunchy.” She paused and considered. “If it’s any consolation, I like the frizzy bits. I think they make you look relatable.”

I sighed. “We’ll go with that.” It wasn’t like I had any other options. “What’s going on with you?”

She linked her elbow with mine, and we moved forward into the park. The path was crowded; streams of people were making their way toward the assemblage of tents and booths in the distance. “Nothing, really. Except I’ve been getting to know the other girl on my team.” Her face lit up. “It’s been so nice having another girl around. Her name is Kelsey and she’s so smart. I’ve been walking her through our database and our libraries, and I’m making sure she’s up to code on our framework—”

“Ha, up to code!” I said. “I get it.”

She looked back at me blankly. “Get what?”

“Your pun. It was an excellent pun,” I said, but when she continued to just look at me blankly, I sighed. “Never mind. Go on.”

Her face lit back up again as she continued to talk about coding minutiae I knew nothing about, but I nodded along, genuinely smiling, enjoying the excitement in her voice and the passion behind it. When she’d first started taking computer science, she hadn’t been in love with it; she’d grown up poor, and her goal wasn’t to follow her passion but to make a sizable salary in a career field where she’d always be in demand, one that—unlike lawyering or doctoring or finance—didn’t typically have ridiculous hours, leaving her time to follow her passions on the side.

But she’d found once she started that she really enjoyed coding: the way it presents you with a problem that has a hundred routes to fix it; the beautiful symmetry of the screen, with its rainbow of colors; the power to bend computers and robots to your will (she usually cackled when she said this, but her eyes were dead serious). She’d even found herself taking freelance projects in her spare time because she enjoyed it, though I didn’t think it was her passion in the sense that she’d keep doing it if she wasn’t being paid for it, which was the way I felt about food writing.

She finished up with a story about how she and Kelsey had fixed a bug that had caused their team’s code to duplicate everything that came out. I had no idea what was going on, but she was laughing, so I laughed, too.

By the time she was done talking, we’d reached the gates of the festival, where throngs of people were waiting for the bag check. Excitement bubbled inside me. The tents were colorful, the voices joyful, the smells incredible. Seriously, my mouth was already watering as we strode onto the expansive green lawn that would soon be tromped muddy and brown. I barely noticed the city skyline painting the horizon as I pulled out my phone and scrolled to my list.

“Let’s film a quick introduction,” Alice said, because she was the absolute best. She was also the absolute rightest: I had to get the intro out of the way. I couldn’t get distracted by all the delicious smells. I tried to push the thought of my messy hair out of my mind as I plastered my usual smile on my face.

“Hey, everyone! I’m here at the Central Park Food Festival and I’m so, so sorry”—dramatic pause—“that nobody’s invented smell-vision yet, so you can’t smell what I’m smelling right now. How many times can I smell the word smell in one sentence?” Let my smile relax wryly, poking fun at myself. The viewers loved that. “We’ll see. Anyway, come along with me while I taste the very best the food festival has to offer!”

A quick pan around, and we were done for now. “I’m thinking we’ll do a short video at each stand, and make sure to photograph everything well so that I can do recap posts later,” I said.