Losing Our Edge Read online

  “And you threw out all of my quinoa,” Hunter says.

  Randy turns to face him.

  “That brown stuff that was in the fridge? I thought it was rice that had gone bad.”

  Cody says to Hunter, “I’m just glad they finally opened a Whole Foods in Kitty. Try getting anything organic at the Food Lion.”

  Hunter says to Cody, “That’s like shopping in a third-world century. Trans fat galore and everything’s in a box with a cartoon character on it.”

  “I don’t know what it is with you two,” Randy says. “Would it kill you to eat a Pop Tart?”

  Cody says, “Eventually, yes.”

  Randy goes to the fridge, opens it. There’s nothing inside that’s his.

  “You eat all this micro-organic local shit, and yet you drink Pabst Blue Ribbon. What’s that all about?”

  “It’s ironic.”

  “It’s shit.”

  “Jesus, Randy,” Hunter says. “It can be both.”

  Randy slams the fridge shut. Inside, bottles of an all-juice cleanse belonging to Hunter knock together to make a sound like what’s coming out of their laptops.

  Cody says, “You’re also late with the rent again.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve been late every month for almost six months—”

  “I know.”

  “—and I keep having to remind you.”

  Even though he’s talking to Randy, Cody’s eyes are fixed on his screen, and his fingers never stop moving across the keyboard.

  “Look, we all knew this was a weird situation when you moved in, what with you being … you know.”

  They can’t even bring themselves to say the word. As if it were a virus they could catch.

  “Old, you mean?” Randy says. “What with me being old? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Cody refuses to take the bait. He continues in an even voice.

  “The lease is in my name, Randy. If the landlord wanted to be a dick he could kick us all out, and that would ruin my credit rating.”

  “Credit rating? When I was your age I never worried about my goddamn credit rating.”

  Cody stops typing. He finally focuses on Randy.

  “And now look where you are.”

  Randy stomps out of the house, slamming the door behind him. From the sidewalk, he can hear Cody and Hunter laughing. He turns to where his rust-covered ’97 Tercel is parked on the street, sandwiched between Cody’s all-black GTI and Hunter’s bright-blue Honda Hybrid.

  They both have better cars than I do. How is that possible? They’re just kids.

  Randy gets in the car. His head feels like it’s on fire and his stomach is doing somersaults. He needs food and coffee, but first he has to check his email. On days when he goes to work, Bill, his boss, will sometimes email him, telling him to come in late, or early, or not at all. Usually Randy hopes to be given the day off due to it being a slow day or double scheduling. But with only $52 in his checking account, nothing in savings, and payday two weeks away, Randy prays for that not to happen today.

  There’s nothing from Bill, but he’s surprised to see an email from Charles, an old friend of his. The guy he lived with after they both got kicked out of college.

  Randy reaches for the cigarettes in his pocket. He lights one using the Bic lighter he keeps in the drink holder between the two front seats, the dashboard lighter having stopped working long ago.

  “Corporate jackass,” he says out loud. Randy takes a deep drag, exhaling through his nose. “He’s probably in a meeting right now.”

  Someone took all the erasers. Craig stands at a whiteboard, the big one in the conference room. He has a red marker in his hand, his back is to the room, and for the last twenty minutes he’s been outlining his user acquisition strategy for Q4. One side of the whiteboard is filled with boxes that have words in them like PAID, GROWTH, ORGANIC, and CHURN. The other side has circles with dollar amounts and percentages. Arrows in different colors run from one set of boxes to the other. Craig now writes out his slogan for the fall marketing campaign that’s going to culminate in a big holiday push. LET SEATR BE YOUR SLEIGH THIS CHRISTMAS. He then adds SEATR—WE GET YOU THERE.

  Seatr is a website that’s supposed to let users buy and resell airline tickets, but—even though they’re live and getting traffic—the site doesn’t allow anyone to actually purchase anything. So, technically, Seatr’s not getting you there. But everyone at the company’s trying to ignore that.

  Craig writes SOCIAL and then MOBILE and then stops. There’s no room to write LOCAL. He has run out of space.

  Craig turns around and sees Josh—Seatr’s CEO and Craig’s boss—and the other members of the board squirming uneasily in their chairs. Josh, at twenty-six, is already a millionaire. A few years ago he sold his first company to Microsoft.

  I’m losing them.

  Craig quickly erases a few bullet points with the heel of his palm, leaving a red smear, and writes LOCAL. As he describes to the board his three-tier consumer value proposition, he’s careful not to put his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t want to get red ink on his designer jeans. The jeans cost $200. He doesn’t know why. They don’t seem any different than the $40 Levi’s he can buy at the mall. But three of Seatr’s board members wear this brand, so he figured he had better wear them, too.

  Craig is about to detail his strategy for search engine optimization when Josh interrupts him.

  “This is all awesome stuff, Craig. Awesome.”

  The board members, including the co-founder of Josh’s previous company, advisors from other local startups, and the angel investor who supplied most of the first-round seed money to get Seatr started all nod and repeat, “Awesome.”

  “The problem,” Josh says, “is that we’re live now. We need to start getting users. Quarterly projections and plans for the holidays are all well and good, but we need people today.”

  “Yeah, but the site’s not even working properly,” Craig says. “Our database is too slow, the user interface is confusing, and transactions are failing because of—”

  Josh shakes his head from side to side.

  “Craig, Craig, Craig, I hear you. I hear you. And I love what you’ve done.” He waves at the whiteboard. “I just need you to rethink all of this so that we get users now, not in the fall. Okay? ‘Get Big Fast.’ That’s our slogan.”

  “Actually, that was Amazon’s slogan.”

  “And look what it did for them,” Josh says. “Sixty-one billion in sales last year. Not too shabby.”

  Once again the board members nod their heads in unison, whispering under their collective breath, “Billions.” On the table is an assortment of Sigg bottles, Nalgene bottles, cans of Red Bull, Hint water, even a beer. That’s it. No notebooks, no pads of paper. No one’s writing anything down. Only Josh, with his open laptop, seems to be paying much attention.

  At forty-five, Craig is considerably older than anyone else at Seatr. The next closest person in age is a thirty-one-year-old coder whom all the other coders call Granddad. Behind his back, Craig’s known as Grandpa Moses. Even Granddad makes jokes about how old Craig is. His last job was at a PR firm in Charlottesville. He’d worked there for ten years and—even though it paid well—the long hours and exhausting commute finally became too much to handle. So he started looking for a new job. When a friend told him about Seatr, it seemed like a good time to try something new. That was seven months ago.

  It was liberating at first, freeing himself from all the corporate bullshit he’d endured for so long. Craig enjoyed taking it easy, drinking beer while he worked, and having meetings on the roof or the patch of grass downstairs. Josh was a good kid and maybe he was on to something. Maybe Seatr would be a success and they’d all be rich. Or maybe they’d pivot to something else and that would be the thing that would make them rich. The world was full of billionaires who’d done less. But lately it’d been a drag. Craig’s not sure how Seatr is supposed to actually make money, and he’s tir
ed of always being the oldest person in the room. The coders laughed at him for not knowing how to run an SQL query. And even though Josh tried to be patient during their one-on-ones, Craig had begun to sense some tension. And now he’s in a conference room, standing in front of a whiteboard, holding a red marker, and someone took all the erasers.

  Craig just sits down, not knowing what else to say.

  “Now,” Josh says, sounding exhausted. “What’s next on the agenda?”

  While the head of product gives an update about the redesign of the Android app, Craig—bored, deflated—opens his laptop and checks his email. He scrolls through his inbox and sees an email alert from the Kitty Courier. The story’s about the band Bottlecap getting back together for a concert. Craig saw Bottlecap live a bunch of times when he was younger. He even used to have their records; although, since his divorce, most of that stuff’s in storage and hasn’t been listened to in years. He tries to calculate, to do the math.

  That was twenty years ago.

  Mismatched furniture. McJobs. Getting so drunk on Tuesday you still had a buzz when you woke up on Wednesday.

  Ashley.

  The girl he’d met in college and lived with for years until it finally imploded after Charlottesville. The first girl he’d ever been really serious about. The girl his parents had met and loved.

  Ashley.

  “Craig?”

  He looks up. Josh and the board are staring at him.

  “Meeting’s over, dude.” Josh stands up. “Want to join us for sushi?”

  “Uh, no—no,” Craig says. He’s still thinking of her. “I’ll stick around and work on these sales projections.”

  Josh nods, bows at the waist, and says, “Namaste.” Everyone but Craig files out of the room. He turns back to his laptop, muttering.

  Ashley. Ashley. Ashley.

  Margot has come by to show off her new baby, and even though there’s not enough room everyone has squeezed into Ashley’s office. Ashley and Margot shared an office during the first two years they worked together—a different office, not the small one Ashley now has—so she was the first person Margot wanted to see. Margot was the last person Ashley wanted to see. It’s bad enough that most of the women she works with have kids, so to now have Margot coming by flaunting her baby while the whole company—even the receptionist is there—squeezes into her office, feels like too much.

  Lucy is three months old, her skin creamy smooth, and her head covered in wispy blond hair. As Margot takes her out of the Baby Bjorn, Lucy drools and makes bubbles out of her spit. Margot places her in the center of Ashley’s desk. Lucy is dressed in a pink Janie and Jack outfit that’s color-coordinated with the ribbon that’s stretched around her head. She knocks over a cup filled with pencils and pens. Everyone thinks this is adorable.

  “Look at those muscles!”

  “She’s going to play soccer!”

  “How’re you sleeping?”

  “Is Zach pitching in?”

  Ashley thinks back to when Margot first got the job. Margot hadn’t even met Zach yet. She remembers the Monday after they had their first date—they were set up by mutual friends—when Margot went on and on about how handsome and sensitive Zach was. She was sure that he was “the one.” Ashley, having heard this a few times already, was cynical and counseled caution. And now, three years later, Margot’s in Ashley’s smaller office with her newborn baby and is beaming.

  “She looks just like you!”

  “What a face. What a face!”

  “And just look at that smile!”

  “And so much hair!”

  “Ashley, you have to hold her.”

  Ashley looks up after hearing her name. She’s not even sure who said it. When a baby’s around, all women’s voices sound the same.

  Before she can answer, much less make up some excuse (I have a cold, I’m contagious, I have polio, don’t touch me), the little girl is placed into Ashley’s arms. Ashley doesn’t know what to do.

  “It’s just a baby, Ashley,” someone says. “She’s not going to bite.”

  Margot says, “Want to bet?” and the whole office explodes with laughter.

  Ashley juggles Lucy more than holds her. She brings the baby to one shoulder and then the other, before trading her for the crook of her left arm and then the right. Finally, she just grabs Lucy under her shoulders and holds the baby up to the fluorescent lights of the office, like in that Disney movie, until someone else takes Lucy.

  Ashley is just about to make up some excuse to slip out of the office when her boss, Deborah, suddenly joins the group. For some reason this elicits a new round of oohing and ahhing over the baby.

  “Those eyes! I just can’t get over her eyes.”

  “Such small hands.”

  “The cleft chin she must get from her father.”

  “Turnadot,” Ashley tries to break in. “Anyone ever see Turnadot? Andrew and I saw it last month in Arlington. Amazing soprano, let me tell you.”

  Margot points to the baby. “You want to hear a pair of lungs? You should see this one when she’s hungry.”

  More laughter, Ashley’s attempt to change the subject fizzles into yet another round of questions about the baby’s sleeping patterns, how long Margot was in labor, and whether or not they’re going to send Lucy to private school. When Margot pulls out her breast and starts feeding the baby, Ashley has to look away. She’s staring at the floor when Bea announces that the food has just arrived and lunch is being served in the break room.

  Everyone finally leaves Ashley’s office. Everyone except a young woman named Sherry who’s new and works the front desk. Ashley’s not sure why Sherry’s still here, but she wishes she’d leave.

  Ashley catches Sherry’s glance at her wedding ring. She says, “You and your husband have any kids?”

  Ashley stiffens.

  “Us? No, we just—no.”

  “Well, you should. You really should. They’re a joy. Such a joy.”

  “Joy, yes. Look, Sherry, I really have to—”

  “My fiancé and I are planning on having a large family. A large family. We both come from large families.”

  “Fiancé?”

  Ashley notices Sherry’s ring. It’s huge. Little diamonds surrounding one big diamond. When Sherry sees Ashley looking at the ring, she looks at it, too.

  “Can you believe it? He proposed two weeks ago. I’m going to be a June bride. Next June, of course. We’re going to be married on Hilton Head. His family has a house there.” Sherry looks from the ring to Ashley.

  “How about you? Where’d you get married?”

  “City Hall,” Ashley says. She stands up. “Will you excuse me? I have to go grab—I want to get a salad.”

  Sherry looks toward the break room. The voices of the women carry down the hall, with Lucy’s howling added to the mix.

  “But Deborah ordered food. Bea just said. We have salad.”

  Grabbing her bag, Ashley says, “I just need a little air.”

  She exits the office. Not wanting to wait for the elevator, she takes the stairs two at a time. Twice she almost trips in her heels. Outside, the cool air is a balm on her flushed cheeks. She puts a hand to her forehead and feels sweat. She tries to breathe calmly, but it’s difficult.

  Ashley reaches into her purse for a prescription bottle. She removes the cap—she’s an expert at doing this with only one hand, even on the childproof kind—and brings it to her lips. She downs two pills, even though she’s only supposed to take one at a time. She’s also supposed to take them on a full stomach, but she hasn’t eaten since breakfast. She’s also only supposed to take three a day, but the two she just swallowed dry are already numbers four and five.

  She leans against the building and waits for the pills to take effect. When they do, she’ll be able to face them all again.

  Ashley closes her eyes and waits.

  When Mark finally wakes up, he can’t believe it. He’s back home in his old room. It’s exactly as he had left
it. For a few minutes, all he can do is wonder if he’s somehow gone back in time.

  He sees a row of encyclopedias he doesn’t remember ever opening sitting on a bookshelf sandwiched between a set of Encyclopedia Brown books and a dozen Hardy Boys novels with blue spines. Beside the bookshelf, a stereo sits on a walnut stand—a space framed by speakers filled with vinyl LPs. Mark squints but can’t read any of the bands’ names or album titles from across the room.

  Mark crawls out of bed and puts back on the jeans he was wearing yesterday. He walks across the room and opens the drawers of his dresser. He finds musty-smelling underwear, T-shirts, and socks. He then looks through an old storage trunk and finds yearbooks, cassette tapes, Polaroids of people he doesn’t recognize. Amid a pile of old papers, he finds a card from Laura from their first anniversary. He remembers she gave it to him on a night she’d cooked a romantic dinner. He opens it slowly and instantly recognizes her delicate handwriting: Happy Anniversary. I will always love you.

  Mark shoves the card to the bottom of the trunk.

  He moves over to an old corner desk that belonged to his late uncle. While rummaging through papers in one of its drawers he finds a photo of Bottlecap. Mark, Steve, and Gary are playing what must have been their first or second show. They’re at the Scene, the only place they played for the first year or so while the band was together. He can’t believe how thin he used to be, or how happy he looks in the picture. If there was a mirror in the room, he’s sure he wouldn’t look that happy now.

  On top of the desk is a tattered and bulging manila folder with a yellow Post-it note that reads: Thought you might like to see this. It’s in his father’s handwriting. Mark opens the folder and finds dozens of faded clippings from magazines and newspapers about Bottlecap—reviews of their records, reports of their shows. There’s even an article from the Kitty Courier about when they first got signed and another about Mark leaving the band: KITTY LOCAL SAYS ‘NO’ TO FAME.

  Why did he keep all this?