The Underwriting (6 page)

“I don't want to go work in Syria, Charlie. I'm sorry if you think that makes me a bad person.”

“I don't want you to work in Syria, either. I just want you to do something that's meaningful.”

“It can be meaningful,” she said. “Corporations need money to—” She stopped herself, knowing she'd never win that argument. “It's not like I'm doing it forever,” she said instead. “A lot of people only stay for a couple of years, then go do other things. And at L.Cecil I'll get good training, and meet influential people, and then if I don't feel like I'm making a difference, I can go to Africa or whatever and have more impact than I could now anyway.”

“Do you know how many people say that? They suck you in, Kelly, and then all of a sudden you're fifty and you've given your entire life to some firm that—”

“I'm sick of being poor, Charlie,” she interrupted.

Charlie stopped. They'd both gone to school on scholarship, and she knew he'd been as self-conscious about it as she was.

“Well at least now you're being honest,” he finally said.

“I'm not going to change, Charlie, or get sucked in. You don't have to worry about me.”

“I'm your brother. It's my job to worry about you.”

“Maybe you should find a girlfriend to worry about.”

“There aren't exactly a lot of eligible ladies for atheist American men here.”

“Why don't you come back, then?” she asked carefully. He'd been in the Middle East permanently since 2010. She'd understood at first, but not anymore.

“They need me here, Kelly,” he said.

She nodded at the camera, letting go of the hope that he'd come to California for her graduation.

“I better get going,” she said, checking the time.

“Hot date?”

“Going to a concert.”

“Be safe.”

“Speak for yourself, dear-brother-who-works-in-Syria.”

—

S
HE TOOK OUT
her journal—it was a big day and felt like it deserved to be recorded. Later she pulled up a dance playlist on Spotify and got ready for the night. Her phone buzzed with a text and she hurried to finish glossing her lips, taking one last look at herself in the mirror before grabbing her purse and heading downstairs.

“Don't you look lovely,” Renee said as Kelly got into the passenger seat of her friend's BMW. “Perfect for Kyla, and for your first night with Molly.”

“Are you sure I should do it?” Kelly asked.

“Yes.” Renee didn't hesitate. “Why wouldn't you?”

“It's just—” Kelly started. “I guess I'm just worried something might go wrong.”

“Nothing's going to go wrong,” Renee assured her. “You're going to be surrounded by friends and I'm staying sober all night, so if you get nervous just say the word and we'll leave, okay?”

“Okay,” Kelly said, convincing herself again. “Just promise you'll make me go to bed by two? I'm supposed to speak on a recruiting panel tomorrow about banking internships.”

“Did you decide on your offers?”

“I just signed with L.Cecil.”

“What?!” Renee stopped the car abruptly. “OMG, Kelly. That is
such
great news.”

Renee's excitement was like a salve on the burn from Charlie's disappointment.

“We are going to have
so
much fun in New York after graduation.”

“I know,” Kelly said, “I can't wait.”

Renee pulled the car onto the 280 freeway, heading south toward Mountain View. The sun was setting over the Santa Cruz mountains and the warm air blasted through the windows, making Kelly feel like she was flying.

“Will you get my phone and text Luis to tell him we're on our way?” Renee asked, indicating her tote in the backseat.

“Two new matches on Hook,” Kelly noticed out loud on the phone's screen as she pulled it out of the bag.

“Who?” Renee asked, curious.

Kelly opened the app. Hook was a permanent fixture in her and her friends' lives. The app let you set parameters for guys—age, height, distance from you—then used the GPS in your phone to alert you when guys who met your critera were close by. It showed you a guy's picture and you swiped left to “reject” or right to “approve.” If you approved a guy and he approved you, then you got a notice saying you'd been matched, allowing you to communicate but also to see the guy's reviews from users and the cumulative Hook score based on the reviews.

“Francois is the first one.” Kelly turned the phone so Renee could see the photo, then opened his profile to read it aloud. “Eww, Renee, he's like thirty-four and in the business school—that's so sketchy.”

“Whatever,” she said. “We're seniors now, it's time to start dating older. What's his score?”

“5.3,” Kelly said.

“Okay, that's bad,” Renee admitted. “Who's the other guy?”

Kelly navigated to the next match. “Ah! You matched with Robby!”

“Who's Robby?”

“My RA,” Kelly said. “He's awesome. Totally sweet. I actually just ran into him and he invited us to a rugby party tonight if we want to go after the concert.”

“Oh god.” Renee made a face and Kelly laughed. “I knew you'd say that.”

Renee pulled the car into the Shoreline parking lot and they joined their group of friends.

“Now the party can get started,” Luis said loudly when he spotted the pair, causing everyone else in the group to turn in their usual agreement with whatever the suave international had to say. Luis was Mexican—the kind of Mexican whose father ran the country and who occasionally disappeared with no explanation other than that he had to “take care of some family business.” He pulled Renee into a side-hug, her small frame disappearing into his sturdy height, but kept his dark eyes on Kelly.

“Did you decide to join us on Wall Street next year, Kelly?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, blushing, “I just signed today.”

“Rock on.” He smiled. “I'll be around the corner at BlackRock.”

“My parents just bought a place in Soho,” Renee said. “Me, Kelly and Steph are all going to live there. It'll be sick,” she said, then spotted a friend. “Hey, Jess!” She waved her arm at the girl, then left to find her, leaving Kelly and Luis alone.

“You ready?” he asked, bending in close.

“Yeah,” she said, willing herself to be cool before she overthought it.

Luis pulled a small piece of paper out of his wallet and unfolded it, revealing a bright white powder.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“Wet your finger and dip it in, then lick it off,” he said without judging her ignorance.

She did as told, squinting at the bitter taste as he refolded the paper and put it back in his pocket.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Just wait.”

They went to join the rest of the group as Kyla La Grange came onto the stage.

“Do you feel anything yet?” Renee came up beside her, handing her a bottle of water.

She looked at the lights on the stage below and shook her head, then turned to Renee, suddenly worried that meant something was wrong. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing.”

Kelly turned to the stage, then back to Renee: had she said something? No. She'd said nothing. But not nothing as in she'd said nothing, nothing as in she'd said “nothing,” which was something that meant it meant nothing that Kelly felt nothing. Right. She turned back to the stage, convinced.

But this time the stage was moving. Kyla was singing and her voice was reverberating through the grass and a rush of heat spread out from Kelly's chest through her body and she giggled helplessly as the warmth made her shiver. They were outside and the clouds were crossing the moon and she could see the man tucked in the blue shadows and she waved to him and grinned and beckoned him to come play. She looked up: she'd like to find someone to tell.

“Anything yet?” Luis asked from her side.

“Luis!” She didn't realize that's who she was looking for, but here he was.

He smiled and laughed. “There it is!”

—

K
ELLY HEARD KNOCKING
and squeezed her eyes tighter shut, her brain slowly coming alive. She felt her pillow first, then her body stretched out in sheets that were familiarly her own. She opened her eyes and saw next to her the L.Cecil water bottle Renee had filled up when she put her to bed last night. Beyond it, she saw her desk and remembered the L.Cecil offer letter and Charlie being mad and the Molly.

The knocking kept going and she stood carefully to answer the door.

She blinked when she saw him, confused. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood. I thought I'd stop by,” he said. He looked drunk.

“What time is it?”

“Almost three. Were you sleeping?”

She looked at her bed, then back at him. “Yeah.”

“Get up—come party with me.”

“I'm—” She looked back at her bed. “Can we just see each other tomorrow?”

“No,” he said. “Let's hang out now.” He handed her a bottle of water. “Here—have some.”

She looked at the water and realized she was desperately thirsty and took the bottle and drank it in gulps. It tasted sour.

He laughed. “Whoa there.”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said, pushing past him down the hall. She heard music next door and a bunch of guys shouting in the lobby and tried to keep her eyes half-closed against the fluorescent hall lights.

But when she got back to her room, he was sitting on her bed, leafing through a Henry James novel he'd picked up from the shelf.

“I forgot you were an English major,” he said. “Why are you working at L.Cecil?”

“I—” she started, but something in her stomach lurched. “I wanted—” A burp came up into her throat and she swallowed it back down. She felt like she was going to fall over. “I don't feel very well.” She reached for the bed and sat down.

He stroked her face. “It's okay,” he said. “Just lay down.”

She did, letting her head fall back on the pillow. She felt his body next to hers, and turned, searching his eyes. He kissed her and she pulled away. But he kissed her again and it felt too hard to resist and she let his tongue enter her mouth. Her stomach lurched again, but her brain was racing now, alive and spinning as he kept his lips pressed against hers and reached down to pull off her shirt.

But his lips didn't move, and she started to realize they were melting into her own, melding together and cutting off her airway. She coughed but she couldn't shake his suffocating lips off. There's another way to breathe, she thought, but she couldn't remember what it was, and her heart panicked in her chest as she felt him press himself inside her, and then everything went dark.

AMANDA

F
RIDAY
, M
ARCH
7; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK

Amanda Pfeffer wasn't an idiot.

She'd given herself forty-eight hours to be upset about Todd Kent, during which period she'd had a mani-pedi, eaten sixteen dollars' worth of pay-by-the-ounce FroYo, watched eight episodes of
Suits
and taken an Ambien at seven thirty last night so that she could be up, fresh and ready for a new start this morning.

And that fresh start included confronting the facts, which she did as she rode the escalator up from the subway and stepped back out into the cold.

Fact A: Todd was super-hot, incredibly smart and more manly than any guy she'd ever hooked up with at Penn or since. He was also sweet when he wanted to be (Evidence: she'd heard him call his aunt on the phone, twice) and he found her attractive enough to sleep with multiple times.

Fact B: Todd could be an asshole.

Fact C: Fact B was not Todd's fault. Society conditioned men to want to be James Bond as much as it primed women to be Barbie: in the same way it told girls the path to happiness was a flat stomach and clear complexion, it told men that satisfaction came from wealth, power and no-strings-attached sex. As a rich, attractive white man, Todd Kent was born with a leg up on actually getting the life that most men only dreamed of. She couldn't really blame him for pursuing it. In other words, Todd could be an asshole because Todd
could get away with being
an asshole. It was New York City: he didn't have to call, and he didn't have to take her to dinner, and he didn't have to commit to her as a girlfriend, and he'd still have plenty of women to satisfy the noncommittal sex he thought he wanted.

Thought
he wanted.

Fact D: All men eventually realized there was more to life than sex on tap, and Todd would, too.

But it would take the right girl. One who understood, like she did, that being an attractive, rich white man wasn't all fun and games. Sure, Todd had advantages, but those advantages came with the pressure to live up to an impossible bar, and constant temptations that those who were less well-endowed didn't experience. Most of all, though, Todd's privilege allowed him to be blind to others' feelings, but also to his own. He needed a girl who wouldn't judge him for that, and who had the patience to show him that there was a better, deeper happiness to be had as soon as he dropped the magazine fantasies and committed to a real woman.

A real woman like Amanda.

Which is why she wasn't giving up on Todd Kent. He may have said he didn't want a girlfriend, and he may not have called since their fight, but eventually he'd see her for all that she really was, and all that they, together, could be.

Amanda straightened her spine as she walked past L.Cecil's office building. It would have been faster to transfer at Grand Central to the 7 train, but she liked the walk. She scanned the suits streaming into the building from behind her Jackie-O sunglasses, but didn't see him amongst them today. Not to worry, she reminded her calm, confident brain: he'd told her he wasn't going anywhere, and neither was she.

TODD

F
RIDAY
, M
ARCH
7; N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

“Who's Tara Taylor?” Neha asked as they stepped onto the elevator, dragging her enormous suitcase behind her.

“Are you bringing a body with you?” Todd asked, indicating the bag. They were only going to California for two days.

The girl's face flushed. “I wasn't sure what to bring.”

“Tara's a senior VP in Equity Capital Markets,” Todd explained. “She follows the broader markets so she can advise on comps and will help coordinate the road show and the sales syndicate.”

“I've never heard of her,” Neha said, a hint of arrogance in her voice.

“She's good,” Todd said. “She started in our side of the bank, so she knows how to work hard,” he explained. Equity Capital Markets was known for being where pretty, but not pretty enough for Investor Relations, girls and guys who couldn't cut it in other groups landed.

The elevator stopped and Todd spotted Tara across the lobby talking on her cell, her brown hair glossy against her ivory coat, standing out amongst the men in black suits.

“Mom, I promise people are not going to think I'm a lesbian,” Tara was saying. “I have a career, Mom—a career that happens to be going very well right now. They will understand that I don't have a date.”

Tara saw Todd and blushed. “I've gotta go, Mom. Yes, I promise I'll book my flight this week.” She hung up the phone. “Sorry.”

“Everything okay?”

“My Southern mother believes her friends will think I'm a lesbian if I don't bring a date to my sister's wedding.”

“You're single?” he asked, confirming his suspicions.

“To my mother's dismay,” she said.

“When is the wedding?”

“May tenth,” she said. “It's in Maine so I'll just need the one day to slip away.”

“Should be fine,” Todd said, realizing she was asking for his permission and feeling powerful.

“You must be Neha.” Tara noticed the analyst behind him and stuck out her hand. “I've heard so many good things about you.”

Neha took Tara's hand, her chin lifted proudly. The two could not be more different: Neha with her zits and baggy suit, Tara with her silky hair and structured coat.

“I haven't heard anything about you,” Neha said, “but I'm sure that's fine.”

Tara forced a closed-lipped smile. “Better nothing than negative, I suppose.”

“The car's outside,” Todd said, indicating the door. “Shall we go?”

“Is Beau not coming?”

“He's already out there—was working some summer intern recruiting event,” Todd explained.

They got to JFK and, at Tara's insistence, waited for Neha to check her bag.

Todd had asked his assistant to book Tara's seat next to his in business class. Per company policy, analysts traveled coach, leaving Tara and Todd alone.

Tara took off her coat and reached to put it in the overhead bin, giving Todd an opportunity to check out her physique. The jeans she'd worn clung to her hips and showed off her long legs, made even longer by her heels. Her sweater was equally tight, accentuating her waist and downplaying the flatness of her chest. She was a seven overall, but she was so close to having a nine body—he really didn't understand why she didn't just get a boob job.

“Whew!” she said, plopping into the seat.

“Get any sleep last night?”

“Not really,” she said. “You?”

He shook his head. “Too much adrenaline.”

“Do you make it back to California much? You're from out there, right?”

“Yeah,” Todd said, pleased that she knew. “Marin. I try to go back once a year, but it's not really home anymore.”

“Understand the feeling.”

Todd was still deciding how to play Tara. They were obviously going to sleep together at some point during the deal, but he wanted to make sure it didn't happen too soon. The last thing he needed was her getting emotional and causing drama in the deal.

“Seat belts, please,” the flight attendant instructed as the cabin door shut. She was hot and Todd winked at her as he followed her instruction. She smiled back.

Tara waited for the flight attendant to finish, then pulled out a printed copy of the deck Neha had sent around yesterday with a summary of Hook's public financials, turning her attention to the company's revenue streams. He watched her, surprised she didn't want to chat more, then pulled out his copy of the
Wall Street Journal
: two could play at that game.

TARA

F
RIDAY
, M
ARCH
7; S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, C
ALIFORNIA

“Holy shit.” Beau Buckley broke the silence as the car pulled up to a massive glass building on the Embarcadero.

“They used to be in Palo Alto, but San Francisco gave them a tax break to entice the company to move here,” Neha explained. “And it helps them, too, because all the good engineers want to live in San Francisco, not the South Bay. Plus Hook has the best food of any of the tech companies, so they pretty much get whoever they want.”

Tara stared at the girl. She was like a walking encyclopedia, one of the hard-charging, chip-on-her-shoulder analysts whom the firm would work to the bone building models but never give any actual power because they were socially inept.

Of course
Todd would get an analyst like that, she thought to herself. It was true that she'd allowed herself to think the deal might be the start of a serendipitous romance. She'd let her mind wander to the narrative wherein Todd wasn't actually a douchebag—he was a really good guy who just hadn't found the right girl, just like she hadn't found the right guy—and the deal would be the start of what they hadn't finished in college and . . .

She'd been wrong. He was a douchebag. She'd stopped by his desk yesterday to ask a question about the schedule, and he'd been across the room flirting with a receptionist. During a fifteen-minute meeting to hammer out the target syndicate list, he'd checked his text messages four times, and she'd caught him looking at his own stats on his Hook profile. Then this morning he'd been flirting with a flight attendant . . . at eight forty-five in the morning. Now Neha? He wasn't just not what she'd hoped, he was worse than she'd feared.

But that was better, Tara told herself as she got out of the car. Her big break was just starting to happen—it was the worst possible time to finally fall in love. In fact, if Todd
had
been the one, it would have been the cruelest kind of trick by fate, to force her to choose between love and career opportunities when she'd been waiting for either/or for so long. With Todd out of the way and the romance option quashed, though, she could focus on the deal and see what opportunities—professional and personal—a 1.8-billion-dollar deal under her belt would net her.

She'd woken up this morning at four a.m. with that resolve. The gym wasn't open yet, so she'd done her six-mile run on the West Side Highway—it was dark and cold, but invigorating, and gave her time to prepare her mind for today. She'd followed it up with a green juice, a coffee and an extra tablet of Celexa. She'd called her doctor and he'd agreed she should double the dose as a precautionary measure, and given her a Xanax prescription for emergencies. For the next three months she needed to stay focused—she couldn't risk her anxiety causing an emotional spell like had happened when she was fourteen. Then, she'd been paralyzed with sadness for weeks, unable to rationalize herself out of the funk. She couldn't afford that now—not now that things were happening.

The foursome walked into Hook's headquarters, where they were meeting Josh Hart, Nick Winthrop, Phil Dalton and a PR girl named Rachel Liu.

“You must be the bankers!” a young blonde in a tank top and cut-off shorts greeted them as they walked through the front door into the atrium lobby.

“Are we that obvious?” Todd gave the girl his politician smile. Neha had worn a terrible boxy suit, but the rest of them had dressed down: still, their haircuts, postures and lower body fat percentages screamed
New York
in the office's sea of hoodies, flip-flops and muffin tops that showed the consequences of the office's endless free food supply.

“You can take the man out of New York but it's hard to take the New York out of the man.” The girl grinned.

“I'm Todd.” He reached out his hand.

“I'm Julie!” she said, smiling at the group. “I'll get Josh's assistant for you.”