This Will Look Good Online

Chapter 1: Carpet, Perfume, and Other Lies

I walked into the ballroom and immediately felt the air press a hand over my mouth: lavender pumped through the vents, a smell like laundry that had never seen dirt. The carpet looked expensive but felt dishonest underfoot, too thick, as if it were padding for a landing I hadn’t agreed to make. A violinist on a Plexiglas platform sawed his way through a pop song that had been dental-cleaned into classical, and somewhere in the distance, glasses laughed at nothing and people chimed in.

My name badge read Ethan Marc— and then the last letters smudged into an ink blur. A volunteer in a black dress said, “It’s chic like that,” and put her finger to her lips, which were the color of a small emergency. Behind her, a step-and-repeat displayed the logo of the evening’s sponsor, a philanthropic-sounding wing of a company that had invented new ways to bill people monthly for things they used to own.

I wasn’t supposed to be here. That is, I had been invited, but invitation is not belonging. I’d come because Maya asked me, and Maya was kind, and Maya believed this would be good for me, and good for her too—she handled comms for the sponsor, and I was, at least lately, something like a person who might help their narrative. Last quarter a magazine had profiled me as a “quiet insurgent,” and I knew it was because the photographer caught me staring off in a way that looked almost like principle.

“Ethan!” a woman called as if she were paging my best self. I half-turned and saw an arm waving with a diamond watch on it, a wrist that had learned how to catch light. “Over here!” The arm belonged to a person I recognized but couldn’t immediately place, the way you recognize a hotel on a different continent: the same, but not.

I moved, obedient to the verb of my name. By the time I arrived, I was already trapped.

To my right a man in a checkered blazer gripped my shoulder. He seemed to be trying to steer me, a human shopping cart. “Big fan of that podcast,” he said, not saying which one. His teeth were white in the astronaut sense—prepared for extreme conditions. “Hey, meet Trevor. He’s the guy. He knows everybody.”

Trevor had the face of someone who had given up on nouns and lived exclusively on verbs. “Let’s connect,” he said by way of greeting.

“And this is Willow,” the blazer continued, like a concierge to my evening. “She’s doing meaningful work at the intersection of brand and purpose.”

“I also paint,” Willow said. “Mostly time.”

I glanced at her hands. There was no paint on them. “How’s the medium?” I asked, gently.

“Post,” she said.

A laugh detonated to my left, startling a waiter into jerking a tray of canapés. A tower of tuna tartare in tiny edible shot glasses slid sideways, a silent cascade that ended with a single cube landing on the carpet, where it trembled like a small animal deciding whether to be born. The waiter recovered and smiled the smile of a person whose job is not to be seen failing.

“You made it,” Maya said, appearing beside me with the practiced relief of someone who is responsible for the entire temperature of a room. Her hair was a credible argument against humidity.

“Of course,” I said. “I wanted to see what your clients think giving feels like.”

She winced slightly. “Please be nice.”

“I’m always nice,” I said, and meant: I’m frequently silent. “At least until the violinist gets to his broken-up rendition of ‘Fix You.’”

“That already happened,” Maya said. “You’re late.”

The violinist now approached the bridge of something that had once been a Beyoncé song and was now aspirational treacle.

Maya squeezed my forearm and whispered, “Quick thing: after the keynote, there’s a photo. The board wants you in the picture.”

“The board?” I said. “Maya, you know what happens when I enter photos. I’m the person people later have to ask about.”

“That’s the point,” she said, already scanning the room for someone important to rescue. “You legitimize them; they give you money for the thing you’re always saying you want to build. Symbiosis. Mutual moisturizing.”

“You make graft sound like skincare,” I said, but softly, because she was my friend, and she was right in the way the world is right: by being what it is.

Chapter 2: The Social Trap

There’s a phenomenon I’ve come to recognize at events like this. You cross one threshold too many—the entrance, the coat check, the “So what do you do?” question—and suddenly you’re in the middle of a riptide current. You can’t swim against the people who know each other from other rooms. You can’t swim toward the exit because your shoes have grown sentimental about the carpet. You must swim in place, lungs bright with etiquette, until the ocean chooses to release you.

“Ethan,” said the checkered blazer, who now introduced himself as Jordan, Senior VP of Strategic Spirits or Spirits Strategy—he spoke in a way that made nouns interchangeable. “You’ll love this table. Best energy in the room.”

Before I could deny my enthusiasm for energy, he had shepherded me to a high-top already occupied by a collection of people whose faces clustered in my brain under the category of clowns and jokers. I don’t mean makeup or malice. I mean an appetite for applause that requires no actual performance.

“This is Niles,” Jordan said. “He’s disrupting staircases.”

“Staircases?” I said.

“Vertical mobility,” Niles clarified. He wore a tie so narrow it looked punitive. “Stairs-as-a-service. Subscription steps. We let clients pay monthly for a staircase and then we retire maintenance costs and amortize the climb.”

“Amortize the climb,” I repeated like a spell in a language I disliked. “What happens if the subscription lapses?”

He smiled. “People always ask that.”

I waited for the rest. He used the pause like bad art uses negative space. Finally he said, “We’ve thought a lot about that at the executive level.”

“God, yes,” said a woman with straight hair so glossy it could blind. “The liability alone. By the way, I’m a huge admirer of your work.” She drew out work like there were quotation marks around it. “That essay you wrote about silence? So, so… necessary.”

It was an essay about being too tired to respond to emails.

“I read it aloud to my team,” she continued. “They were like, wow. We scheduled half an hour to process it and then ran out of time.”

“Thank you,” I said, because I was raised normal. “And you are?”

“Cecilia,” she said. “I used to be at your favorite company.” She named a company that had once rejected me with a boilerplate that included a typo: We wish you luck in your future works.

“We should get coffee,” she said. “You should absolutely mentor our interns. They will love your refusal to optimize.”

While I tried to locate my refusal to optimize, a hand landed on my back with evangelical force. A face leaned close, all cheekbones and certainty. “Brother,” the face said, and I knew it for Simon, an old classmate who once ignored me in a small elevator where there was literally no room to ignore me. “Look at you. Look at this.” He gestured at the air, which delivered us nothing. “I always knew you’d do something… like this.”

“Like what?” I said, too quietly to be heard over the violin’s affront to rhythm.

“Like being you,” he said. “You’re you. You know?”

I nodded as if I knew. In Simon’s universe, being oneself was apparently a career.