“Jane.” I perched on the bed beside her. But she cut me off, silently holding out her phone. I thought she was going to show me the video again, so it took me a minute to comprehend the email on her screen. She’d been demoted back to her researcher position. She would no longer be appearing on air.
“No! How can they do this?” The idea of her employer seeing the video hadn’t even occurred to me, I’d been so lost in my own guilt.
“They can’t have a women’s issues reporter who jokes about sexual assault,” she said.
“It wasn’tassault, it was just Jeremy Coltrain, he—”
“Are you really going to defend yourself right now?” Her voice was soft but clipped, and the sight of her sitting up against her pillows, her face drawn and pale with misery I’d caused—it was more than I could take.
“They can’t fire you because of this. It’ll blow over. Everyone will forget about it in a day or two.”
“They haven’t fired me. They just don’t want me on TV. And I agree with them. Actually, I think they should have fired me.”
“How can you agree with them? You deserve that job. It’s what you’ve been working toward.”
“Yes.” She looked at me, then dropped her eyes to her lap. “It was.”
“I can help you. I can help you get the TV position back.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Jane, please just let me try. Look, how about this?” I was thinking furiously on the spot. “You could propose a news story about women and the #MeToo movement. And make a public apology on the air. Tell them it’ll help their ratings. Viewers love a scandal, right?”
Her face hardened. I shouldn’t have uttered the wordscandal.
“I’m not going to propose that. They’ll think I’m crazy.”
“But it might be worth a shot, couldn’t it? If it works?”
She raised her eyes to something behind me; I looked around to see Owen standing in the doorway.
“I just want to be alone, Rachel. There’s nothing more to say about any of this.”
“Jane, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Please let me—”
“Rachel.” Owen hadn’t moved, but his voice held a note of authority I couldn’t ignore. “It’s time to go.”
And so I was home, alone, at the deepest rock bottom I’d ever known. I’d ruined everything. Oh, and I hadn’t heard a peep from my mother, which meant either that she was more upset than she’d ever been in her life or that she hadn’t realized anything was amiss.
By nighttime, the notifications had stopped coming. No doubt everyone who knew me was either disgusted or unsurprised, or both.
The silence was worse than the constant pinging of my phone, but I knew I deserved it. I deserved nothing but silence.
CHAPTER 26
I STAYED UP UNTILtwo in the morning, digging into Jane’s LinkedIn connections and drafting messages to her boss, her boss’s boss, her colleagues. But I didn’t send any of them. I couldn’t see how a random message from the other guilty party in the video would help the situation.
Jane hadn’t replied to any of my apology texts. In my nearly thirty years as her pesky little sister, she had never iced me out before. Even when I was seventeen and spilled nail polish on the passenger seat of her car. Or when I was nine and dropped her library copy ofElla Enchantedin the toilet—she’d always had a terror of getting in trouble with the librarian, but she didn’t take it out on me. Or the previous year, when I’d borrowed her Naked eye shadow palette and it fell out of my bike basket and shattered all over the street. “These things happen.” That’s what she’d said. Jane had the patience of a saint. And how did I reward her? By constantly pushing things one step too far. And now…
I just couldn’t believe I’d lost Jane her dream job. And also her reputation. Would she forever be known as the news anchor who had joked about the #MeToo movement?
As I soldiered on with this heavy black cloud over my head, itwas not lost on me that Sumira hadn’t reached out to me at all. She had to have seen the video. She was probably relieved that she’d ended our friendship before it happened. It was ironic that I’d been feeling so sorry for myself a few days earlier after the Sumira debacle, totally unaware that I would soon be sinking so much further into the depths of absolute shit.
Two weeks before Halloween, I polished off a bottle of bottom-shelf pinot noir on my couch while sobbing over old photos of Jane and me in Paris. That trip, the summer after my freshman year of college and her senior year, had been a highlight of my life. Had our relationship been on a downhill trajectory ever since, and I just hadn’t noticed? Did Jane simply tolerate my existence? Was I destined to careen through life like a wayward boulder, crushing everyone in my path?
The next morning, I was rewarded with the worst hangover of my life. Clearly I was no longer cut out for drinking a bottle of wine on my own. Inconvenient, since I had never needed wine more.
One week before Halloween, I got back on Tinder and matched with a guy who appeared to be mostly brawn, not much brain. He asked me to meet up at a mojito bar where an apparently “dope jam band” called Space Owl was playing. I told him I’d meet him there at eight. And then, as the time ticked nearer, I found that I didn’t have it in me. Absolutely zero percent of my being wanted to meet up with some random guy. So I stayed on my couch and sent him a quick message saying I wasn’t feeling well. I felt guilty for bailing on him but glad that I wasn’t out there trying to shout-flirt with a stranger over live music.
