Zoey had decided that if/when the peasants finally rose up to overthrow the rich, she’d just put on some of her old clothes and quietly go join them. It’d only taken a few months of extreme wealth to realize that if everyone back home actually knew how these people lived, they’d have burned the system down long ago. First, there’s the fact that at this level, debt is usually a good thing—it makes you richer. Zoey was getting loans on hilariously friendly terms and was pretty sure that if she failed to pay, the bank would apologize. She could borrow at a low rate, invest that same money in something with a much higher return, then just pay off the loan and keep the difference. If the investment fell through, it wasn’t Zoey who would take the hit—Will said it was always done through an “LLC,” an organization created out of thin air purely to absorb all the risk, kind of a financial bodyguard. Zoey had said it sounded like a free money hack in a video game, though Will insisted it wasn’t that simple.
Then there’s the fact that when you’re rich, people just give you things. When Zoey was spotted at a concert drinking a bottle of some Ukrainian beer that a dude had just handed to her, the manufacturer sent her ten cases of it. She got gift baskets of makeup, phones, shoes, and bras that somehow fit perfectly (that last one kind of made her skin crawl when she stopped to think about it). Restaurants comped meals, she got offered free tickets to events. When she’d mentioned hiring a personal trainer, all of them offered to do it for nothing in exchange for weekly Blink updates from her saying what great results she was getting (she refused; she didn’t need the whole world to know that she was always lucky to make it to the third session). She had a walk-in closet in one of the spare bedrooms that was literally nothing but band T-shirts. She had jewelry that looked so expensive that she was afraid to even touch it, let alone wear it out of the house. She had outfits for ritzy clubs and red carpets and other situations she intended to spend the rest of her life avoiding. She had two hundred pairs of skull-themed underwear in an unopened box somewhere.
She was not, however, going to dress to make this man-eating crime lord swoon. He wasn’t getting the red dress that she’d decided to wear to that benefit banquet while in a particular mood. He was getting jeans and an ordinary black button-up shirt that could be worn with or without another top to make the cleavage more dignified, and today she was covering up to the collarbone. She would wear sneakers, shoes she could run away in. Not cute shoes. Action shoes.
Zoey passed Will on the way downstairs and he looked mildly disappointed but knew not to say anything. Zoey was pleased that he knew.
“Your mother’s here.”
“Oh, good.”
“But we do need to go, soon.”
“Yep, don’t want to keep a psychopath waiting. Makes a bad impression.”
Zoey had summoned her mother after the morning’s meeting, as it occurred to her that she, too, was a potential target with this bounty out there, since they could easily snatch Zoey’s mother in exchange for a confession. It’s understandable if at this point one got the impression that about once a day Zoey flew into a panic believing that her mother was in some kind of mortal jeopardy. In reality it was only slightly less frequent than that.
Melinda Ashe was thirty-nine years old and would probably claim to be thirty-nine for several more years. She believed in the goodness of men, had arranged her life so that she’d had one male or another taking care of her since puberty. She’d been through three marriages that ended horribly but would never say a bad word about an ex. Zoey watched her mother excuse away bruises and black eyes, saw her lie to the cops about pulled knives and threats. When Melinda looked at these tattooed, sweaty men, she saw only the scared little boys inside.
It was last December when Zoey’s mother had in fact walked into an abduction situation, shortly after Zoey came into her money. After having nightmares about her mother in a shallow grave every single night for weeks, Zoey had moved her to Tabula Ra$a, thinking that having her nearby would put Zoey at ease. That, Zoey now knew, had been stupid. What was she imagining, her mother living at the estate under the watchful eye of armed guards twenty-four hours a day? That she would sleep alone? That she would, in other words, live Zoey’s lifestyle? No, Melinda Ashe would shrivel up and blow away without a flock of giggling friends to breathe life into her. And so she had insisted on her own apartment, on getting her own job (as a sex therapist—she could charge five times what she did in Colorado), and within a month, had made more close friends than Zoey had made in her entire life. Her mother seemed to know the names of all of the bartenders at every drinking establishment in the city. She’d had her first shady boyfriend before she’d even finished unpacking. This was how it would always be, Zoey knew: if someone ever wanted to get to Zoey, her mother would be there for the taking.
She made it downstairs and heard her mother’s laughter from down the hall. Zoey turned to her right and followed the sound through the dining room and into the vast kitchen. Sitting at the bar was a woman who could pass for Zoey’s sister if she didn’t seem too pretty to be from the same bloodline, next to a weirdly tan middle-aged guy with neat white hair. Zoey had never seen this guy before. If he was a boyfriend, at any moment she would get the “I have a great investment idea!” conversation. So far, Zoey had paid for a food truck, a tattoo shop, and a rap video.
“Heeeey, Z!” said her mother. “Carlton made us brunch, though we told him not to bother.”
They were picking at a tray of halloumi fries, sticks of hard cheese that were deep-fried, then served under ropes of white yogurt sauce and sprinkled with bright red pomegranate seeds. Carlton’s cooking skills had been developed under Arthur, who’d required him to cook a cuisine Zoey thought of as “upscale county fair.”
Before Zoey could speak, her mother said, “Your lashes look amazing today. God, you are just so beautiful. I wish I had your curves. I want you to meet Clarity.”
Zoey decided right then that she was making a resolution: if somebody gave her a one-word name, or a name that was clearly a phrase or a slogan, she was not going to ask them to elaborate. That was, after all, what they wanted.
“Good to meet you, Clarity.”
Clarity looked like he might possibly be nuts, but he didn’t look like a scumbag or ex-con. Of course, you couldn’t always tell an abuser from a glance. But here was the thing: in many cases, you totally could.
“You have a lovely home,” he offered through a blinding white grin.
“Thank you. It was built with crime money.” To her mother, Zoey said, “Don’t freak out, but something happened last night.”
“Oh, my god. What?”
“Somebody tried to…” She tried to think of a word for what had occurred. “… mail something to me. But we’re okay.”
“Oh, honey. Did you call the police?”
“Sure. It’s, uh, all taken care of. But there might be more of them. Bad guys, I mean.”
“Ugh, Z, this city, I tell you. Did you hear what happened last night at Zero Hour? Me and Maddie were at the bar, just minding our own business, and this guy just slams into me. They were fighting, the bar jammed me in the ribs. I have this huge bruise. Look—”
“Mom, I want you to stay here, for a bit. At the house. And to not go out without security. Just for a while.”
“Well, if they come with me to class, they have to stay outside. I can’t have scary guys looming over the—”
“You may have to skip the classes.”
“I can’t, I’m teaching.”
“If they fire you, we will buy the clinic and put you in charge of the whole thing. A whole chain.”
“Here, have some cheese, I’m full.”
“No, thank you—”
“Drink? Coffee? Anything? I never get to do anything for you!”
“No, I just need to not be nervous, I’ve got a big meeting this morning with … I’m not sure what he is.”
“Oh! I’ve got something for that, too. This is perfect. Clarity and I are selling these mood-enhancing skin creams, it’s an amazing program and the product, oh my god. Here…”
Ah, there it was. Her mother pulled out a white tube the size of a fat cigar, animated flowers dancing on the label. She pulled off a cap and there was a spiral pattern of tiny slits in the end. When she twisted it, the cream squirted out of those slits in thin white layers, then a dotted yellow ball emerged, forming a perfect miniature daisy made of skin cream. Her mother swiped it off with her fingers and spread it between her palms.
“Give me your hands.”
Zoey would have worried about applying a mood-enhancing anything to any part of her body if she for one second thought the stuff actually worked. She let her mother spread it on her palm and fingers. She felt a mild tingle, something they’d added to enhance the placebo effect.
“Great, right?”
“Yeah. So, I’ve got to run—”
“All we need you to do, if you can, is just use this on camera at some point. And say the name of the cream. The brand is Mood Food, there are twelve moods, this one is Amazey Daisy. It builds confidence!”
“Do I … have to say the whole thing?”
“No! You don’t have to do it at all. But if you can that would be huge, I get a free set and fifty credits for a mention. And if you can say the whole thing, yeah, that’d be amazing.”
Clarity said, “Also if you mention the effects, you need to point out that the health benefits haven’t been verified by the FDA.”
Zoey looked over the tube. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but how many tubes of this did they make you buy, as your starter stock?”
Her mother said, “Five hundred.”
Clarity sensed the conversation was taking a wrong turn. “That’s at only half of the sell price! Just moving this initial stock and she can clear twenty thousand dollars, easily. And for every sales associate she recruits—”
Echo walked into the kitchen and Zoey said, “Oh, thank god.”
Zoey’s mother took one look at Echo, then her eyes went wide and she said, “Oh my god, you look a-may-zeen! Look at your hair!”
“Will says it’s time to go.”
Zoey’s mother sighed. “It always is.”
Zoey took the chance to escape and as they entered the hall, Echo said, “Ha, I told him you wouldn’t wear the dress.”