I hate moving. No matter how well planned and organized one tries to be, inevitably the whole thing goes haywire. The movers were late, one guy had a cast on his hand and couldn’t carry anything heavier than a desk chair, and they put a six-inch gash in the side of Kumi’s couch trying to wedge it down the stairwell. But we made it. By the skin of our teeth, we got the last box off the truck by five. If I’d known getting the cable and internet hooked up would be the least painful part of this ordeal, I might have stayed in Syracuse.

The fifth-floor apartment on Bleeker Street is nicer than I expected, though. Nothing fancy, but wood floors and appliances built after I was born are certainly an upgrade from our old place. Plus, the apartment gets great light, has a fire escape over the tree-lined street, and is just two blocks from NYU. There’s a café next door and a Mexican restaurant below us. Not a bad commute to Riot Street, either. If that becomes relevant.

But that decision can wait.

Despite being exhausted, I’ve still got work to finish. Once I have my desk and laptop set up, I dive into a tangle of email exchanges with three different clients who all believe their immediate needs require my urgent attention. This always happens on deadline day, and damn me for not spreading these out better. I want to tell them to have a bottle and take a nap. Instead, I reply with some version of Sure, no problem. I’ll get that to you right away.

I’m neck-deep in revisions when Ethan texts me another nudge.

He’s attached a photo of himself and people I assume are other members of the Riot Street staff holding up slushies.

His question gives me pause. When he first contacted me about the interview, I mentioned I’d have to come in from Syracuse unless we could push it to after the move. Didn’t expect him to remember the date.

Even if I don’t take the job, making these connections, expanding my networking circle, would be a smart move. All I have to do is pretend hitting a bar with Ethan is a totally normal thing. Simple.

That only gives me two hours to push through my assignments while obsessing over how to approach this meeting. Now that I’m faced with confronting the staff, I realize a new dimension of concerns I haven’t addressed yet: What if the rest of them think I’m a hack? Sure, Ethan is on board, and Cara has a lady-boner for me, but what’s to say the staff didn’t read my essay and roll their eyes? All of them sizing me up, appraising, wondering, What’s so fucking special about her?

Have I earned this job? I wrote something that a lot of people read, but was it good? Was it engaging, articulate, and evocative? I don’t want to be that girl in the office everyone whispers about behind her back. The one who must be sleeping with someone important to have been hired.

What if they’re already thinking it? A newsroom might as well be a high school cafeteria.

Fuck.

My laptop chimes with another “urgent” all-caps email from a client having a complete existential meltdown. One emergency at a time.

Making friends has never been easy for me. Even Kumi and I were sort of an accident. As far back as I can remember about the commune where I was born, every minute of my life I was surrounded by the same faces. I didn’t have to create relationships, they simply imposed themselves. Starting public school after Massasauga at age twelve, I might as well have landed in a foreign country. When every other word out of other kids’ mouths is local vernacular and pop culture references, you just smile and nod and try not to say anything stupid, which means you don’t talk much at all. I survived the best I could, but by high school I was barely treading water. In tenth grade a group of girls made it their mission to terrorize my every waking moment, so my guidance counselor and principal suggested to my mother that she consider enrolling me in an online charter school. Easier to get rid of the outlier than reshape the social order around her.

Life got dark for a while. I found my breaking point and snapped in half.

Then freshman year of college the world burst open for me. I lived in the dorms, met other weird people with weird histories, and found a little corner of society where I could unfold from my shy, huddled posture. Because in college everyone is figuring their shit out. We all have versions of ourselves we’re trying to outrun, deconstruct, or reimagine—all works in progress. But then the research-and-development phase of life ends and we’re supposed to emerge as finished products ready for the marketplace. Only I’m still stalled on the assembly line. I know what I’m meant to be, I understand how my parts should fit, yet I feel like I’ve spent the last year searching for that one missing screw that’s supposed to hold it all together.

This job could change all that.

If I can manage not to make a fool of myself.

Later that night, though, I’m having trouble keeping up. Sitting around a table with a selection of the Riot Street staff is like walking into the middle of an Aaron Sorkin scene without a script. And the more they drink, the harder it is to follow the conversation. To the point where I’m not certain how, but we’ve landed on the topic of chimps.

“A chimpanzee throws a stone at a tree—”

“Let it go, Navid—”

“No, listen, there’s a paper—”

“They never said—”

“But it was insinuated.”

“A chimp throws a stone at a tree, and eighty scientists ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and scratch their heads asking why.”

Navid is quite likely the smartest person in the room. That’s how Ethan introduced him: “Avery, this is Navid Kirmani, our sci-tech writer. He’s a member of Mensa, and Monday he has to give his third deposition to the Justice Department. So anything you say to him may become a matter of public record. Fair warning. Also, never open his emails.”

“Eighty scientists,” Navid continues, “spend hours watching this troop of chimps throw stones at a tree in a ‘high state of arousal’ and suddenly now chimps have a sense of spirituality. I mean, what? They’re calling this ritualistic behavior, but what? When does repetition become elevated to the point of spirituality?”

It’s approaching 10 p.m. in a cramped hole called the Peacock Room. One of those bars so dark and crowded you can’t see the walls. Overhead are sporadic exposed orange bulbs that throw just enough light to see your drink in front of your face but not enough to make an informed decision about the stranger sliding up next to you.

Sitting on my left, Ethan glances at me and smiles, because apparently after a couple beers Navid is prone to these irrational rants about…I still don’t know what. Ethan’s ocean eyes are soft, if a bit glassy from alcohol and laughing, his shoulders relaxed. A lock of hair falls over his forehead as he sips his drink. In this atmosphere, he’s almost a regular person. But it’s just a trick of the light.

“Ignore him.” At my right, C.J. pushes her glasses up to her hairline and rubs her eyes. “Navid just got dumped.”

Ethan introduced her only as C.J. because Cynthia Jane Silva needs no introduction. This morning her editorial on the Supreme Court’s erosion of equal voting rights was picked up across every major news network. Just one year younger, she’s Ethan’s natural successor when he inevitably moves on to bigger publications and fatter paychecks. Or she’ll eat him alive if he stands still too long. Harvard educated and fierce as fire, C.J. chose Riot Street for its independence. They reward her loyalty by letting her write whatever the hell she wants. My goal tonight is not to say anything stupid in front of her. Ever.

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” I answer, because I feel the need to reply.

Ethan pauses mid-sip and stares at me. His eyebrows pull together. “Really, when?”

“Not me, my roommate. Kumi.”

Navid perks up. “Does your roommate like Persian men?”

“I don’t see why not.”

He gives me a satisfied nod and a playful smile. “We’ll talk later.”

“Did you ask her?” Addison walks up behind C.J. and me to put two handfuls of shot glasses on the table. The black licorice stench of Jägermeister burns my nostrils and tickles my gag reflex. “Navid,” Addison says, sitting next to Ethan. “Ask her.”

“You ask her.” Navid sniffs his shot, winces, then swallows it like a mouthful of battery acid.

“Me?” I don’t drink. Never have. It’s generally frowned upon that those who’ve given up heroin take up alcohol. “Ask me what?”

“Don’t,” Ethan says, leaning back in his chair to run his hands through his hair.

Addison Lee is the senior arts and culture writer for the magazine but also pens a sexuality column for the online edition. Much of the column deals with gender identity and Addison’s own experience as a trans man. But there is the occasional letter from a reader asking for advice about a torrid love affair gone wrong or an embarrassing bedroom mishap. Ethan’s introduction included a warning that I never be fooled into recounting my private exploits in the presence of Addison, for anything said might next week show up in a pseudonymous paragraph.

Addison plunks his empty shot glass upside down on the table and shakes his head, blowing invisible fire from his lips. “I’m sorry, but this is kind of cool. You’re The Girl Who Lived.”

“Yep,” I say with a patient smile. Never heard that one before.

“So…” Addison elbows Navid beside him, doing a goading head nod. “Navid wants to know—”

“Hey.” Ethan sits up and snaps his eyes to Addison. “Don’t.”

“Best behavior,” C.J. says. “Remember? We’re not supposed to scare her off.”

“It’s fine.” I push my shot to Addison, who accepts it with a shrug. “What do you want to know?”

“Well…” Addison tosses his head back and swallows the second shot then clears his throat. “We were talking. And Navid was curious…”

“Yeah?”

“In your essay…”

“You don’t have to answer,” Ethan says, a vexed edge in his voice.

I can appreciate him not wanting me to feel like a circus animal, but the perimeter fence isn’t necessary.

“Well, there’ve always been rumors, so…”

“Ask me.”

I’ve heard this question a lot. Or something similar, at least. In one version or another I’ve heard every morbid, salacious, bizarre question a person can come up with.

“Were you guys into sacrifices?” Addison leans in to speak in a hushed, secretive voice. “Like serious Old Testament shit? Slitting a goat’s throat or…”

See, people can’t quite wrap their heads around the point of it all. They’re looking for complicated reasons for simple acts. Once upon a time, my father quietly ducked out of a career on Wall Street right before the crash of ’87. With a hefty stash of other people’s money, he moved out to Northern California and spent some time wrapped up with one of those desert spiritual healing centers. But when the IRS and SEC came calling, he took on an alias, skipped out to the Adirondacks, and lured some disenfranchised urchins to set up camp with him on a two-hundred-acre compound in the middle of nowhere. His “philosophy” evolved into whatever was necessary to attract and keep followers. Those who felt somehow abandoned by society or dicked over by The Man. People with access to enough money to keep the polite despot’s kingdom operating. He was everyone and anything a person wanted to believe in. Became guru and messiah. The great epiphany, sweet nirvana, always just a breath away. Kept that scam up for fifteen years.

“No, we didn’t slaughter a lamb to bless the harvest or execute virgins on an altar. Although…” I lean back in my chair, cross my arms, and stare at the condensation ring around my glass of water. “When I was seven, I had a little brother who was born missing two toes on his left foot.”

Navid inches toward me from across the table. “What happened to him?”

“They fed him to us in a stew with lentils.”

No one makes a sound. They don’t blink. Four pairs of eyes plastered to my face, frozen in shock. Until Ethan’s smirk pulls across his lips.

“But cannibalism doesn’t count, right?”

“Dammit!” Navid lets out a black licorice gust of air and slumps with both elbows on the table. “You fucking had me. I’m staring at you, like, shit, this chick ate her fucking brother like a boss.”

I smile when Addison and C.J. erupt in hysterical laughter. Ethan winks at me, shaking his head. It’s the closest thing to a stamp of approval I think I could have expected from tonight.

“Girl’s got jokes,” Addison says.

Humor helps. Letting people laugh relieves the tension and uncertainty. More important, it tells them you’re normal. You’re adjusted. They have nothing to fear. Otherwise, they regard you as they would a homeless person standing on a street corner with a crinkled cardboard sign. Most of them sympathize, but they don’t want to make direct eye contact.

“Remind me sometime to tell you the dragon joke.”

A man with a ball cap and cargo shorts stands up at the front of the room to announce karaoke will start in five minutes. I suspect this is the ritual hazing portion of the evening.

After listening to three hours of off-key melodies with a side of political discourse, Ethan and I end up across the street at an artsy hipster coffeehouse. The kind of place that serves liquor and gourmet, vegan, gluten-free pastries. Cracking gray paint on the plaster walls exposes the red brick underneath. It’s like a kitschy consignment shop, all mismatched furniture and lanterns hanging from the ceiling. We take our drinks to a gold velvet sofa in a quiet corner, away from the amplifiers and modest audience of a slam poet free-versing in the front room.

Though my earlier apprehension has evaporated, there’s a new kind of nervous energy skittering up my spine.

“I feel like we didn’t get a chance to talk.” Ethan’s face is cast in a soft purple glow from a string of lights tacked along the ceiling. “Did you have fun?”

“I did,” I say, blowing on my coffee. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Have you made up your mind?” He sits forward and places both elbows on his knees, coffee between his hands. He closes the space between us, sucking the air from the room in that way he does that insists all things coalesce around him. “Or do I still need to convince you?”

Without a caterwauling drunk doing a rendition of Elle King at the mic and a table of others to pull focus, sitting under the full force of Ethan’s undivided attention is somewhat…daunting. The effect of him up close, it doesn’t dissipate.

“There’s something I’m still having trouble with,” I admit.

“Which is?”

“Why? Why is this important to you?”

“Isn’t it important to you?”

That’s not the point.

“Is this just about your personal fascination with my father? Because I’m not going to cave on an interview. If you’re playing the long game here, hoping I’ll warm up to you and bring the rest of the scattered survivors out of the woodwork for a big exclusive…”

He smirks. “I’m not sure I’m capable of such elaborate scheming.”

Ethan then takes a sip of his coffee when it becomes apparent I want a real answer.

“You got my attention,” he says. “If I’d never heard of you, if I’d never met your father, I’d still want to know the person who wrote that essay.”

“That much I believe.” I watch a man across the room play chess with himself under a painting of Slim Pickens riding the missile in Dr. Strangelove. “But what gives me pause, which I don’t think is unreasonable, is I want to know if you’re more interested in the topic of the essay than the words themselves.”

He breathes out through his nose and regards me with something on the self-deprecating side of hostile. “You really have a low opinion of me, don’t you?”

“No, I’m being careful. I don’t know you well enough to form a complete opinion.”

Ethan slumps back and his eyes wander for a moment. When he refocuses on me, his demeanor’s changed. The same “abrupt” look that launched him into his lecture during my interview. His no-more-bullshit face. The I’ve-run-out-of-patience scowl.

“You know…” Fingers scratch across his scalp like ants are crawling on him. “It’s killing me not to ask, so here it is: Why? I know you said you have ambitions, and that’s great, but why this essay? Because, I’m sorry, Avery, but it’s like you’re allergic to it. You put this ball in motion, and now you’re backing away from it. I know it wasn’t for attention. Right now…” He reaches into his pants pockets and pulls out his phone. “I could call my agent and by morning there’d be a bidding war for your memoir. A year from now you’d have a New York Times bestseller with a movie deal. Make your first million by the time you’re twenty-five. Go find yourself a house on an island somewhere and live the rest of your life off the royalties. But you sold an essay for, what, a few hundred dollars? Why?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and fill my mouth with dark bitter black. My attention wanders toward the chess player again. He’s locked in a stalemate. “I had to get my foot in the door.”

Ethan’s phone clatters on the coffee table at our feet. “Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re lying to me or to yourself. I’m not sure which. If you don’t want to tell me, fine. But let’s not pretend I don’t know you at all.”

My ears go hot. It spreads across my face and stings my teeth. “What is it you think you know?”

“It’s starting to eat at you. I think if you could keep this thing bottled up any longer, you would. But it’s consuming you from the inside and it won’t stop until it’s eaten its way out.”

I forgot the first rule of talking to another journalist: never engage their curiosity. And never trust someone you can’t lie to.

“All I’m saying is…” He lowers his voice and closes in, compressing the swollen bubble between us. “You’re a commodity now whether you want to be or not. I know this job comes at a steep price for you,” he says, “but you do have an opportunity to control the narrative. Now maybe I’m wrong, but I think there’s a part of you that wants to tell these stories. If that’s true, you don’t have to do it alone.”

It’s a nice idea, using my pen to become the avenging angel of those whose tragedy has become farce. But there’s a reason we’ve resisted the prospect of a life-changing payday. Everyone who came to Massasauga was running from something, and all were complicit in propping up the façade of their private utopia. They’ve suffered enough. I have no interest in inflicting any more pain. I think Ethan forgets that I’m still the daughter of a murderer. There are probably a few people out there who’d sleep easier if my parents and I hadn’t made it out alive.

“Look, Avery.” He takes my coffee from my hands and sets it on the table. As if my undivided attention isn’t enough. “You have talent. I didn’t just read your essay, I read everything I could find with your name on it. And I think you can only get better at a magazine like ours. But the thing that struck me about your essay was how impersonal it was. It read like you were writing about a different person. Like an outsider looking in rather than a participant. Why is that?”

There isn’t a short answer to his question. I don’t like thinking of us as the same person. Echo lives back there. I’m here. Better it stays that way. Ethan can’t understand what a difficult division that is to maintain.

He takes my silence as a response.

“Fair enough.” Ethan scrubs his hands through his hair like reshuffling the deck of his thoughts. “Here’s my advice…” He turns to face me, one leg bent on the sofa, his arm draped over the back. “Don’t write about Echo. Let Echo write about the world.”

“Meaning?”

“You give Cara her essays, but you turn the focus around. You have a unique perspective that no one else can duplicate. What does someone who’s survived what you have, who was raised the way you were, dissect and distill from society? You can sell Cara on that. It’s a compromise, yes, but we’re offering you a platform to say anything you want. What possible good excuse do you have for turning down that kind of freedom?”

Good question.

I spent a decade without the right to fully express myself. Every word manipulated. Every thought stifled. My life was a decaying fantasy created to sustain a megalomaniac’s straw kingdom. We were his toys, and nothing good or charitable he ever did was without self-serving purpose. Like free-range chickens, we were kept just happy enough not to skitter away. Just healthy enough to be tasty.

“And Cara will go for this?”

“You have a brief window to exploit her affinity for you. Don’t waste it.”

“But what about real stories? I want to prove I can be a great reporter.”

“I’m not going to let you rot in a basement. If you take this job, I promise I’ll find other work for you to do. Other ways you can contribute and show off. I know you’re afraid of sinking to the bottom of the pool and being forgotten. I won’t let that happen, Avery. Trust me.”

I want to. It’s quite an attractive carrot he’s dangling. But I know better. Never trust a man promising to make all your dreams come true.

“Are you sure you’ve thought about this?” I ask. “Us working together?”

“I’m game if you are.”

Maybe the magazine’s first offer wasn’t a dream gig, but who am I kidding? I don’t have editors lining up and begging for me. Ethan has gone to considerable trouble to convince me to say yes. Nowhere else am I going to find an advocate with as much clout as Ethan has at Riot Street.

And perhaps now I can picture more nights like this one. Sitting around a table arguing and laughing at a bar with the staff. Late nights over coffee, Ethan and me combing through public records and interview transcripts. Eating takeout at our desks with Ed breathing down our necks to finalize our copy before deadline. Sitting in front of the TV with pizza to watch C.J. eviscerate some arrogant schmuck on a Bill Maher panel. How can I pass this up?

Yet he didn’t answer my first question.

“Why?” I ask again. “Why go out of your way?”

Ethan stares at me for a moment, impassive. “Because you’re completely unpretentious,” he says. “You don’t know how rare a quality that is out there. You’re going to do great things.”

“Thank you, but I’m not sure that’s really an answer.”

“Then let me ask you something. Why become a journalist? After everything you’ve been through, why not live a quiet, obscure life somewhere?”

I suppose it’s for the same reason anyone else goes into this line of work. “I want to change the world.” It sounds simplistic and immature, I know, but it’s the truth. “I want the stories I tell to matter—to do something important and consequential. Because I hate hypocrisy. I hate manipulation, corruption; the things we do to each other. One day I want to write a story that makes a difference. Something people will point to decades later and say, ‘That was the day everything changed.’”

“That’s why I want to work with you,” Ethan says. “That’s the right answer.”