I wake up to the smell of butter melting and Norah Jones blasting from a phone speaker.
At first, I think I’m still dreaming. This is exactly how I used to wake up on Sundays as a child: music, usually Patti Smith or Bob Dylan, blaring out into the living room while my Baba got started on family breakfast.
I’d float out of my bedroom in my pajamas and sleepily take a seat on the couch, watching him crush herbs into a potion. He’s the silent type—kind, but reserved, quiet kindness. Every once in a while, he’d look over at me and wink. I’d attempt to wink back, but my wink was more of blink. He’d let out the kind of laugh that sounds more like a cough and resume cooking.
“Sobekher, crazy lady,” Leila sings to me, and my eyelashes flutter open.
She’s standing in the kitchenette in her bra and panties, an apron with the Birth of Venus etched over it, which I happen to know she bought at the Met gift shop approximately six months ago. She’s holding a pan in one hand and an uncracked organic egg (I can tell it’s free-range by its undead color) in the other. Her hair is unbrushed.
“I’m making eggs,” she announces. “Scrambled.”
Now I’m sure I’m dreaming. The smell wafts past me and fills the living room as the sun peeks in behind the curtains, flirting with the wallpaper. I lie back and stretch my arms above my head, my face settling into a yawning smile.
And then I remember.
“So,” I stutter slightly, trying to choose the right words. “I’m assuming you heard.”
Leila doesn’t look up from the yolk, she is so aggressively whipping. But I see a small smile creep onto her face.
“I told you that you needed to see a therapist.”
“You were right.”
“I always am.”
She looks up and holds my gaze for a few seconds. Concern radiates out of her like a space heater. Then she breaks eye contact and goes back to cooking.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so both sensations get caught in my throat and I burp instead. The last week was the longest year of my life. Everything has changed, and at the same time, nothing. I feel like I’m twelve years old again, and Leila is going to take care of me—she’ll tie my shoelaces and make my lunch and brainwash all of SPP into forgetting the last twenty-four hours.
Speaking of which.
“Where’s my phone?” I ask Leila, as she meticulously shakes the pan, effectively scrambling the heck out of our eggs. Her head bobs to the music, her body slowly swaying like a wind chime. She seems relaxed for the first time in months.
“Not sure,” she replies, melting more butter. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I’ll need to let Loretta know I’ll be late for work.”
Leila puts down the pan, the color draining from her face. Outside, an ambulance siren rolls down our block.
“You don’t seriously think I’m going to let you go back there, do you?”
I pat around the couch-bed, searching for my phone. I could have sworn I stuffed it in here sometime in the middle of the night, unless that was all a part of my terrors. Entirely possible; I was definitely lucid throughout the hour.
“Seriously, Lei, where is it? What time is it?”
I’m digging my fingernails under each cushion and crevice, searching for the device. Leila clicks her tongue and sighs.
“It’s 8:00 a.m.,” she says. “Don’t worry, you haven’t missed a thing.”
She reaches inside her apron and pulls out the phone, extending her arm to me. I get out of bed and walk over to her, but the second I go to grab it from her palm, she yanks her hand away, like a snapping turtle.
“Promise me you’ll call in sick,” she pleads. “At the very least for today. Promise me!”
To Leila’s point, I was almost just hospitalized for a panic attack. That’s definitely not “normal behavior.”
But if I don’t go into work today, who will prevent Loretta from telling the world that I’m C. Bates? Or worse, firing me?
I snatch the phone out of Leila’s hand, laughing maniacally like a four-year-old, then race around the apartment clapping my hands. I feel a huge rush to my head then a bit woozy. I sit down on the floor and hold down the power button.
Sixty-five missed calls. Twenty-four texts. Eighty-seven emails. One Google alert.
My head starts pounding. I should’ve just listened to Leila and kept the phone off. I could have lied to Loretta and told her I dropped it down the elevator shaft. Or that I tragically died in a car crash.
I absentmindedly click into the Google alert, hoping to avoid responding to my messages for one minute longer. I set up Google alerts for Loretta’s name, so I can flag down any bad press to Dickhead Daniel before it gets picked up by larger media outlets. There was once an issue with Popsugar, a paparazzi photo, and a zit the size of Jimmy Neutron’s hair. I don’t really want to get into it.
The Google alert redirects me to a Women’s Wear Daily link, a fashion site that usually covers industry news.
Shifter & Pearce to Fold Vinyl’s Print Magazine after 20+ Years
The brand will live on as a digital-only platform
I drop the phone.
My hands are shaking, and my mouth feels dry.
“Water,” I croak to Leila.
She looks down to find me seizing on the floor and promptly puts down her spatula.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” She runs over with a glass and starts force-feeding it to me then picks up the phone off the hardwood and zooms in on the screen. She lets out a small oh shit.
“I’m so, so, sorry,” she musters up. But I can barely hear her. I’m too busy trying to make sense of this tangled-up mess in my mind.
All the blackout meetings. The weekly secret strategy roundtables. The discretion taken with the calendar locations and invite list. They must have all been P&L meetings with SPP’s upper crust. Budget must have been in trouble for a long time; cuts could have started before I did.
Every single one of Loretta’s feigned attempts at personal branding. The horrible Instagram takeover video, the hours we spent filming, cutting, and reshooting each take. The Experiences event. They were attempts at modernizing her profile, to churn her into a more sellable product. She knew the brand was failing. I have to believe she tried every last-ditch effort to save it.
Which brings me to the war with Digital. This is where the water gets a little murky. There’s no doubt in my mind that Loretta knew that if Vinyl wasn’t profitable in 2019, the print edition would surely become the sacrificial lamb. So she did everything in her power to make sure the magazine’s buzziest pieces were published in the physical magazine, not online—or at the very least, the credit went to her. Jade’s music streaming rights piece. My Beauty Politics column.
That in no way excuses her behavior over the past six months (or Jade’s), but it does, at least, add a little color. She was fighting for survival. Loretta knew it was going to be us or them, and she was willing to protect her own. Even if it meant burning bridges and doing dirty deeds.
Or did she do it all to protect herself?
If Vinyl Print is kaput, existing solely as the carcass of the site, who will dig its grave? I have no clue whether or not SPP would trust Jade to continue overseeing the entirety of the brand on her own, especially after the offensive tweets debacle (which Loretta must have known. Damn). But Loretta has literally zero understanding of how to work on the internet, how to run a digital media company. Sure, she’s a marquee name. Loretta James is synonymous with Vinyl magazine; she brings prestige to the table. But I wouldn’t trust her more than five seconds with my touch pad. Why should an entire audience of readers, who have turned to us for answers every month for the past two decades?
Then I’m hit by a pang of unparalleled sadness. Actually, it’s grief—it spills out of my head and into my body like a carton of milk.
I find myself mourning for Vinyl. Not the place I’ve worked for the past five months. Not the wounds of warfare scarring my arms and legs, or the hours I’ve been overworked with no overtime pay. Not the deceit or the rumor mill, Loretta’s condescending “sweetie” remarks, or Jade’s lethal side-eye. I’m bogged down by the space that will be left in Vinyl’s absence, a hollow melancholy for the magazine I grew up with. The glossy pages and witty profiles and the hundreds of forgettable ads. The photographers and writers and editors who poured themselves onto every single piece of paper. And the readers who slurped it up like ramen.
They deserve better. We deserve better.
I feel a lump in my throat. Seconds later, it’s the size of a New York City bus.
“Lei, I love you, but I have to go.”
We lock eyes, and she silently nods, taking my hand and squeezing it three times. I blink back tears.
It takes me five minutes to get dressed. I opt for a nod to the early 2000s, the years that Vinyl was at its prime, when Loretta had just begun to steer the ship. I cover my entire head in colorful butterfly clips and douse my lips in a shimmery gloss.
I’m ready for Vinyl’s funeral.
As I ride the six train, it occurs to me that I had momentarily forgotten about what went down yesterday evening. I had been so consumed by own career that I’d failed to see the bigger picture. I’d been more self-involved than Kim K. on her way to drop Khloé off at jail.
An older woman wearing a large shawl and glasses pushed to the tip of her nose looks up at me. In her sixties, if I had to guess. Jewish. She’s wandered far from home—this specific flock of art film–loving, sheep farm–breeding, New York Times crossword puzzle–obsessed folks usually don’t venture too far from the romantic prewar town houses of the Upper West Side. Unless, of course, they’re taking a field trip to Katz’s Delicatessen or Russ & Daughters.
The woman looks at me, then down at her phone, then back up at me again. As the train pulls into the Brooklyn Bridge station, she cranes her neck in alarm, double-checking she’s on track to her destination. I take this opportunity to lean over and sneak a peek at whatever she’s been squinting at on her iPad.
Just as I suspected, she has the Women’s Wear Daily article open on her screen. It’s out there, floating through the stratosphere. Everyone knows. I think guiltily back to all the unread messages, emails, texts, and missed calls that continue to blow up my own phone. I’m likely about to walk into the zombie apocalypse, but with more Gucci belts and less vomit. Oh, and far more terrifying.
When I arrive at SPP Tower, Superman can’t even make eye contact with me. Instead, he looks down at his desk as I pass, his chin pressed to his chest. He must have heard the news. It’s had about three hours to spread like the swine flu, infecting everyone it touches. And I was this close to remaining quarantined.
The second the elevator doors fly open on the thirty-second floor, I can hear chatter. I turn the corner then stop in my tracks.
The bullpen is packed with people.
Everyone is whispering with an overtly loud flashiness. It looks like every single Print and Digital editor came into work for the first time in Vinyl’s recent history. They’ve set aside their differences to bond over one commonality, an equalizer greater than hatred: fear. Some are crying quietly at their desks. Others are preemptively decluttering their work spaces. A few look up at me and scoff, as if I’m the Grim Reaper, here to carry them all over into the hellfire.
“What are you doing here?!” Saffron exclaims, running toward me and throwing their arms around my neck. “Shouldn’t you be horizontal being fed fluids through a tube?”
I can’t even laugh. It’s all too horrible.
“I had to be with everyone,” I tell them. “I had to be with my family.”
They take my hand and lead me into the wreckage. Everyone stops whispering and stares at me. One Print editor—Margie, in charge of home and finance content—runs toward me and grabs both my hands.
“Is SPP putting us up for sale?” she asks frantically.
“I bet we’re getting acquired,” another editor chimes in. “I bet Bustle is buying us. Or Vice.”
“Are we all getting laid off?” someone from Art asks.
“Will we get severance?”
“Is SPP going to reallocate some of us to Digital?”
“Who’s leading the site now?”
Every single person speaks out on top of each other until all I can hear is the humming sound of white noise, angry like a wasp. I take a deep breath and clear my throat. The crowd shushes.
“I don’t have the answers you’re looking for,” I say. “But I will go talk to Loretta right now and let you know shortly.”
Kelsea lets out a choked laugh and rolls her eyes.
“You don’t know, do you?”
I study her face for clues as my face flushes. Feeling like a fool, I scan the room once more then shake my head.
“Noora, Loretta didn’t bother to come in today. She’s missing.”