Read Online All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Janelle Brown
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companies, all of whom want it back. Now.)
All that Monday, the first weekday she hadn’t worked in months, maybe years, she’d sprawled on her couch in an uncharacteristic stupor, chain-smoking cigarettes and watching CNBC—the cable hijacked from an upstairs neighbor—while fanning herself with a six-month-old copy of Granta. She was hypnotized by the endless loop of inscrutable symbols scrolling by on the bottom of the screen; every twenty minutes her father’s symbol—APPI—would swim by, and her pulse would quicken, and the bills would go ignored for a few minutes. The numbers crept upward, always. She wondered what each fraction represented to her father: A hundred thousand dollars? Five? A million? What had he done to deserve that kind of money—prey on male vanity with overpriced placebos? And then she thought of her own numbers creeping ever higher, each minute adding more interest to the bottom line of her credit card debt. Not to mention the money she owed Bart. It was incredible that her father’s portion of just one of those Nasdaq fractions—one-quarter! one-half!—was probably more than her entire debt.
The thought had flickered across her mind then—just as it did this morning when Bart e-mailed, and just as it does even now, as she gazes down at her $18 microgreens—that one call to her parents would, in all likelihood, make her financial problems go away. But she refuses to do it; she has too much pride to go groveling back to Mommy and Daddy. She just knows that they have been waiting for her to fail for four years now—she can just imagine the “I told you so”s she’d hear when they found out about the magazine’s demise. She can already hear the lectures about fiscal responsibility, see the disappointed faces reflecting on her “lost potential.” So why give them an excuse to judge her? (This may be, she suspects, the reason she still hasn’t summoned the strength to tell them that she and Bart broke up, either.)
And besides…just maybe…maybe there’s still a chance she could resuscitate Snatch. Right? Stuart could change his mind and call. Better yet, she could do it by herself: She could find funding elsewhere. Or the ad salespeople could suddenly materialize with an enormous buy (never mind the fact that on Monday she’d told them, along with her other two part-time staffers, that Snatch was on a publishing hiatus). Or…something. She’s just not ready to succumb to the fact that it’s over, and until it’s really, truly over there’s no reason to tell her parents. She can fix this.
Anyway, she hasn’t even had the opportunity to tell her parents about Snatch ’s demise; her parents still haven’t bothered to return the message she left on Monday, congratulating her father on his IPO, and she certainly isn’t going to call them twice.
Then again, if they called her and just offered up some money of their own volition, maybe she wouldn’t say no. Like a grant. Or an investment. But no: That would be a cop-out, too. If she’d absorbed one lesson from her father it was that self-reliance was paramount to self-worth, and it was already bad enough that she’d let Bart lubricate her lifestyle for so long. It would be even worse to skim money off her father; doubly bad that she would be profiting off the morally bankrupt pharmaceutical industry. This was her responsibility. Shaking off these thoughts, she forks up a pile of microgreens and leverages it toward her mouth. Everyone is staring at her. “Hmmm?” she asks.
“I just asked how Snatch was doing,” says Alexis. “When’s that acquisition going to happen?”
The microgreens are quite heavenly, actually, salty and redolent of the sea. Margaret pauses, considers the pillaged mountain of oyster shells, the sweating bottle of chilled champagne, the sparkly gold chandelier earrings ($3,400 at Fred Segal—Margaret was there when Claire bought them), and makes herself smile. She doesn’t have the energy for
All that Monday, the first weekday she hadn’t worked in months, maybe years, she’d sprawled on her couch in an uncharacteristic stupor, chain-smoking cigarettes and watching CNBC—the cable hijacked from an upstairs neighbor—while fanning herself with a six-month-old copy of Granta. She was hypnotized by the endless loop of inscrutable symbols scrolling by on the bottom of the screen; every twenty minutes her father’s symbol—APPI—would swim by, and her pulse would quicken, and the bills would go ignored for a few minutes. The numbers crept upward, always. She wondered what each fraction represented to her father: A hundred thousand dollars? Five? A million? What had he done to deserve that kind of money—prey on male vanity with overpriced placebos? And then she thought of her own numbers creeping ever higher, each minute adding more interest to the bottom line of her credit card debt. Not to mention the money she owed Bart. It was incredible that her father’s portion of just one of those Nasdaq fractions—one-quarter! one-half!—was probably more than her entire debt.
The thought had flickered across her mind then—just as it did this morning when Bart e-mailed, and just as it does even now, as she gazes down at her $18 microgreens—that one call to her parents would, in all likelihood, make her financial problems go away. But she refuses to do it; she has too much pride to go groveling back to Mommy and Daddy. She just knows that they have been waiting for her to fail for four years now—she can just imagine the “I told you so”s she’d hear when they found out about the magazine’s demise. She can already hear the lectures about fiscal responsibility, see the disappointed faces reflecting on her “lost potential.” So why give them an excuse to judge her? (This may be, she suspects, the reason she still hasn’t summoned the strength to tell them that she and Bart broke up, either.)
And besides…just maybe…maybe there’s still a chance she could resuscitate Snatch. Right? Stuart could change his mind and call. Better yet, she could do it by herself: She could find funding elsewhere. Or the ad salespeople could suddenly materialize with an enormous buy (never mind the fact that on Monday she’d told them, along with her other two part-time staffers, that Snatch was on a publishing hiatus). Or…something. She’s just not ready to succumb to the fact that it’s over, and until it’s really, truly over there’s no reason to tell her parents. She can fix this.
Anyway, she hasn’t even had the opportunity to tell her parents about Snatch ’s demise; her parents still haven’t bothered to return the message she left on Monday, congratulating her father on his IPO, and she certainly isn’t going to call them twice.
Then again, if they called her and just offered up some money of their own volition, maybe she wouldn’t say no. Like a grant. Or an investment. But no: That would be a cop-out, too. If she’d absorbed one lesson from her father it was that self-reliance was paramount to self-worth, and it was already bad enough that she’d let Bart lubricate her lifestyle for so long. It would be even worse to skim money off her father; doubly bad that she would be profiting off the morally bankrupt pharmaceutical industry. This was her responsibility. Shaking off these thoughts, she forks up a pile of microgreens and leverages it toward her mouth. Everyone is staring at her. “Hmmm?” she asks.
“I just asked how Snatch was doing,” says Alexis. “When’s that acquisition going to happen?”
The microgreens are quite heavenly, actually, salty and redolent of the sea. Margaret pauses, considers the pillaged mountain of oyster shells, the sweating bottle of chilled champagne, the sparkly gold chandelier earrings ($3,400 at Fred Segal—Margaret was there when Claire bought them), and makes herself smile. She doesn’t have the energy for
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