Page 39 of Bad Words

“So, she’s saying play the victim.”

Scott sighed. “She’s saying let people be on your side, Selina. Is that so hard?”

I didn’t answer.

He stood. “If Parker Navarro responds to the petition, or to the Gatehead piece, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, I want you doing coverage of the Booker and the Nobel. People think it’s Murakami’s year. Sound good?”

“Okay. Yes, understood.”

Scott hesitated. I pulled my laptop from its protective sleeve, avoiding his eyes, though I could feel him watching me.

“Let me tell you something,” he finally said. “I joined the staff of City in 1987. The first time I gave a book a really blistering review was eighty-eight, I think. The week after that review ran, the author mailed a four-page letter to the office saying he hoped I never wanted to work in fiction publishing, because his uncle was the publisher at Random House and he’d see to it that nobody in New York would so much as sniff a manuscript with my name on it.”

My hands had stilled on my laptop. In the seven years I’d worked at City, I could count on one hand the number of times Scott had said anything this personal.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I showed the letter to Sandy Reilly. She was the editor then. And Sandy said to me, ‘Scott, are you planning on leaving City in the near future?’ And I said, ‘Well, no.’ And she said, ‘Then you just keep writing like you have nothing to worry about.’”

Scott opened the door. “It’s a gift,” he said, “to write like that. You’d better not lose it.”

A week passed, but Navarro didn’t respond to the Gatehead interview or Lola Xu’s petition. He didn’t mention me in any more articles or venomous short stories. On social media he devoted himself to more normal forms of self-promotion, like inflicting excerpts from High and Dry on the public. At meetings, Hayden kept dropping hints about “marketing cooking up exciting things behind the scenes” and, more cryptically, about “important takeaways,” but in the meantime, my job returned to normal. I felt marginally more sane, as though some enormous hand were untwisting the clamp that had, for the past month, contained my head.

The Monday before Thanksgiving, the editorial staff arrived in the library to find Erica Robson, City’s head of marketing, tugging a projection screen over one of the bookshelves. Erica was tall and rangy and alert, eighteen-inch microbraids swaying down the back of her patterned pantsuits. She gave off the air of somebody who could face a tornado without so much as a raised eyebrow. Trying for fifteen years to make City profitable could do that to a person.

“Afternoon, everybody,” Erica said.

“Is this the part where we find out what Hayden’s been making y’all do downstairs for the last three weeks?” said Kellie.

“Yep. New site feature. It’s really not the worst idea, though.” With a click of Erica’s remote, my review of High and Dry appeared onscreen. “The question was how to take advantage of articles that catch fire. The day after Selina’s video, this review got two and a half million page views, but since we give people four free articles a month, most of them didn’t have to engage with the paywall. So…”

She scrolled down to the bottom of my article. After the end mark, a graphic of a piggybank contained a box that read:

Tip this article: [$1].

[Add comment…]

“Wait,” said Kellie, “do we actually make tips?”

Erica grimaced. “No. Sorry, that’s just the language they wanted to use.”

Kellie blew her bangs off her forehead like a horse dislodging a fly.

“Any other questions?” said Erica.

“Add comment,” I said, eyeing the second box. City had never had a comments section, something that brought me more joy every time I browsed the comments of the Times and The Washington Post.

Erica met my eye. “Don’t worry, they’re not public comments. I had to fight for that one. They’ll come through to email, like a thank-you note. I figured having a say might encourage people to pitch in, and if you’re spending money on the site, you’re pretty likely to be supportive and not … you know.”

“Teeming with verbal abuse?” I said.

“That’s the one. You don’t have to read the messages, but there’s a new tab in your emails if you want to check them.”

A flurry of clicking and laptop-opening as we all navigated to our inboxes. “Oh, look,” said Mike to Joyce. “This is very genteel, isn’t it?”

I leaned over to read his screen.

Tip alert: $3