This surprises me, mostly because Eleanor is ambitious. I’d assumed she had the same ambitions as me—to rise through the ranks and gain enough experience to run a record company one day. Then again, her indie label is much smaller than mine. Not as many executive positions in the first place, and those that do exist probably stretch a person that much thinner.
“I’d like to have an impact at the label,” she goes on, “and help Josie develop a strategy for the future. But discovering new artists and supporting their careers is what I love to do. I have no interest in taking on a bigger role in finance or business aspects.” She gives a self-deprecating laugh. “And in case it wasn’t obvious, fiscal responsibility is not my strong suit.”
“Sure,” I tell her, a bit distractedly. The thing is, as much as I hate to admit it, there’s another reason I assumed Eleanor wanted to be an executive. It makes my skin itch and feel too tight for my frame, to think about the things people have said about Eleanor. To acknowledge how much of it I readily believed.
Eleanor wasn’t the only intern people gossiped about—me being Atlas’s son was certainly a topic when we started,and everyone liked to rag on another kid whose uncle was a producer. Nepotism runs rampant in this business, something that’s ridiculed by bitter peers at the same time it’s accepted as the norm. So it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Eleanor went from being one of us, almost an underdog considering she had no industry connections, to the person all the other interns collectively decided didn’t belong.
If I had to choose one moment that turned the tides against her, it’d probably be the day she brought everyone band merch. Which sounds ridiculous, because it was ridiculous, that a bunch of underpaid interns who were always psyched to score free stuff reacted with anything but gratitude. The problem was, the swag came from a marketing meeting with Exeter’s biggest artist of the year. A meeting Eleanor had no real business attending as a lowly A&R intern.
We were all eating lunch in the kitchen area when Eleanor came in and dropped the armful of T-shirts and stickers and other swag right in the middle of our cramped table.
“Oh, sweet,” said this kid Sanjay, immediately lunging for a branded baseball cap.
“Whoa, hang on, were you at the Reagan Marquette meeting?” This came from Dana, the only other girl out of a half-dozen interns.
“Yeah. Mr. Hastings asked me to sit in.”
Dana was sitting across the table from me, so I was the one she made eye contact with. Her brow quirked, and it read to me asthat’s some bullshit, am I right?
I dropped my gaze back down to my lunch. I didn’t even look up when someone finally broke the dead silence that had settled over the group with a mumbled “Of course he did.”
It hadn’t escaped any of our notice that Griffin had taken a special interest in Eleanor. And it hadn’t taken long for jealousy to turn into speculation, about what kinds of things happened in their closed-door meetings, about whether it was a coincidence that they came in on the same elevator some mornings.
Eleanor cleared her throat. “They had samples of all this stuff sitting around, so I figured you guys might want some of it.”
“How thoughtful,” Dana said as she viciously stabbed at her salad.
It was beyond clear that Dana did not read this gesture as thoughtful. She—all of us, maybe—had read it as calculated. Like Eleanor only brought us that stuff so she’d have an excuse to brag about meeting Reagan.
That’s how it went from then on. Every time Eleanor tried to defuse the tension and offer an olive branch to the other interns, it blew up in her face. I was an asshole, and a sheep, so I never defended her. I didn’t even tell Billy to knock it off when he dragged her after I closed Maya’s contract earlier this year, or when he said that stuff about her and Griffin on the phone this morning.
At some point I matured enough to understand how unethical Griffin’s actions were, yet I still bought into the idea that Eleanor is a social climber. Or that she was trying to skip ahead like her career was a game of Chutes and Ladders.
Meanwhile, I’m the one who is never satisfied with my position in life. I’m the one who is never successful enough, who is always shifting my own goalposts, always looking for the next win. And taking backdoor deals along the way.
The reality is, Eleanor never bragged about opportunitiesshe got from Griffin. If anything, she tried her hardest to downplay the relationship, for as long as she could get away with it.
I feel like I understand Eleanor so much better, after today. Yet there’s still one thing nagging at me. I turn to sit facing her, feet planted on the cement ground. “Hey, can I ask you a personal question?”
Eleanor eyes me for a moment. “Okay,” she says, putting a false-positive inflection on the word that tells me she’s not really sure at all.
“It’s relevant to the game,” I add quickly. “Sort of. In the sense that it’s about your dating history. Or—well, your taste in men, I guess.… You don’t have to answer.”
“Spit it out, Shaw.”
“What did you see in Griffin? Like… how did you two even get together in the first place?”
She laughs at this, which I suppose is a better reaction than her telling me to mind my own business. But it makes me nervous all the same, and I start to regret asking before she’s even given her answer.
“You’ve seen him, right?”
“I have.” And I’m willing to acknowledge he’s not a crusty old man or anything. He’s in good shape for his age, and still has all of his hair. That’s about as generous as I can be. “I’ve also spoken to him. Guy’s an asshole.”
Eleanor rolls her eyes. “Yeah, but he’s a total daddy.”
Nope. I do not like hearing that. I don’t know what kind of answer I expected, or whetheranyanswer would have landed better than this one, frankly. But this insight into their dynamic has my baser instincts surfacing fast.
“… Ah,” I manage.
