The Herd(2)

A few members had floated by, all perfectly coiffed and clad in stylish, breezy outfits. “Good, ’cause everyone here looks like shit,” I remarked.

A woman with a black bun the exact size and shape of a bagel paused behind Hana, leaning in expectantly. Hana noticed her and jumped.

“Katie, this is Aurelia,” Hana said. “She’s the head member relations coordinator.”

She looked younger than me, early-twenties, impossibly chic in a tailored black jumpsuit. A radiant smile, teeth like pearls. “So you’re Hana’s sister!”

It clicked—she was the woman I’d seen out front. I shook her hand enthusiastically, and she didn’t do the annoying double take we often get when people learn we’re siblings: the back-and-forth between Hana’s thick, dark hair, golden-brown eyes, and dark skin and me, as bland as a cornfield.

“Eleanor mentioned you were coming,” she said. “You just moved back, right?”

“She was researching a book in Michigan,” Hana jumped in. “She’s a journalist.”

“Wow! What’s the book about?”

I’d been practicing this on the subway ride here: “There’s this small technology company there that sort of stumbled into the lucrative world of reality manipulation: fake news, convincing bots, that kind of thing. I wrote a feature about them for Wired and now I’m expanding it into a book.”

“That’s so interesting.” Something in her eyes unsettled me, a quivering intensity. “Eleanor and I were just talking about the falsity of the online world, and how everyone’s craving real connection. She said—”

“I’m so sorry, but she has an interview!” Hana’s teeth gleamed as she sent Aurelia away. When she’d gone, Hana shrugged. “She’s sweet, but she’ll talk your ear off. I want you focused before your big Herd interview.”

“Hopefully Eleanor will go easy on me.” I glanced around. “I think people are looking at us. Are you and Mikki basically celebrities?”

Hana rolled her eyes, but I could sense her pride. The Herd employed Hana as its part-time publicist, and Mikki, another of their friends from Harvard, was its freelance graphic designer. More important, the two freelancers were Eleanor’s confidantes, part of her tiny inner circle. Now everyone in the room was feigning disinterest in us, too subtle to gaze at Hana head-on; instead they tilted their high cheekbones and typed rapidly into their keyboards.

“Anyway, make yourself at home. I’ll find Mikki.” She took off, her heels ticking.

I strode after her and peered into the next room, the one that’d just swallowed her up. White bookshelves stretched from corner to corner, the books organized by color. So neatly aligned I wanted to shove one out at an odd angle, fling a few books onto the floor just to see what would happen. Farther in there was a vast, sunny room, and off to the side, a short hallway plastered in hip wallpaper—a pattern of illustrated red lips smirking and smiling and sticking out their tongues. Someone had sealed off the hallway with a strip of Scotch tape, a Post-it in the middle proclaiming CLOSED FOR A MINUTE! The Gleam Room. I wondered again what was scrawled across its walls—what merited the squad car out front.

Then Hana and Mikki burst in from the sunny room, marching out to meet me near the doorway. When she hugged me, Mikki smelled the way I remembered, sweet and a little musky. Winter be damned, she was wearing a crocheted halter top and loose pants covered in an elephant print, her feathered ’70s-style hair in crumpled curls, her face bare.

“For fuck’s sake, Hana, why didn’t you offer to take her coat?” Mikki pulled at the leather jacket slung over my forearm. “C’mon, let me give you the tour and then I want to hear all about Minnesota.”

“Michigan.”

“Shit. This is how badly I need an update.” She grinned, freckles dancing on her cheeks, and spun toward the sunlight at the far end of the space. I’d hoped to see Mikki a couple weeks ago; she’d hosted a big “Misfit Toys Friendsgiving” in her rent-controlled, ramshackle apartment. But when the day had come, I’d been too tired and disoriented to attend.

Hana announced she had to answer some emails and split off as Mikki pointed out a chic café counter along a wall, avocado toast on vintage-looking plates sliding across its marble top: “Coffee is free, but everything else is expensive.” She bopped along, smiling serenely, oblivious to the Herders stealing glances at us as we passed. Mikki’s superpower is that she very rarely cares—about anything, really. When I’d announced my book deal on Facebook—my most-liked post to date—she’d commented only to say the CEO of the company I was writing about was sort of hot. At the time, it had stung, but now her cheerful indifference was a relief: one less person pressing me about my research, the months that got bunched up and knotted and ended with ambulances, with sirens chopping the air.

She and I hooked right toward a final set of doors; one led into the bathroom and one was marked MOVE with a faint capital L behind the M. But it was the third door that Mikki took me through, into a small room with birchwood lockers on one side and clothing racks on the other, holding up a rainbow of coats.

“You can pay for a locker if you want to keep stuff here overnight,” Mikki said, plunging a hanger into my jacket’s shoulder, “but nobody really steals anything. Just now I left my laptop out on a table.” She gestured back into the sun-splashed room, with its blue velvet workstations and glossy acrylic chairs girdling a long, medieval-looking table. “Everyone’s so well vetted.”