The Herd - Andrea Bartz Page 0,1

shoulder. “This place is unreal, Hana. I feel like I’m inside Athena’s vagina.”

She cracked up and let me go, then took a step back. Evaluating. “That’s the Katie I know,” she said, tapping my shoulder. “You’ve been off your game the last couple of weeks. I was beginning to worry Kalamazoo had permanently killed off your sense of humor.”

Ah yes, Hana coming in hot with the thinly veiled criticism. “Don’t scapegoat Michigan. I’ve just been getting my bearings.” I looked beyond her. “Is Mikki here? Oh, and do you know what’s going on this morning? There are cops by the door.”

She frowned. “Somebody broke in last night. Spray-painted some obscenities in the Gleam Room.”

I held up a finger. “Is that a fancy term for the bathroom? Because I will not abide that nomenclature.”

She laughed. “It’s a beauty room with mirrors. You can hire someone to do your hair or makeup or just use the products there, like, if you have a meeting or audition or date to go to.”

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?”