Last Woman Standing

“I should really be toasting my former employers at Runnr,” she said, ignoring me. “These Silicon Valley types pride themselves on large-scale vision, but they have poor day-to-day management skills. And shockingly short attention spans.” She giggled. “It took the admin ages to get around to changing my passwords and revoking my access.”

“Access to what?”

“Everything.” She raised her eyebrows. “User data, code—half of which I built from scratch, by the way. Eventually I had to turn over my laptop and sign mountains of nondisclosure and noncompete agreements—proprietary tech and IP theft is what they care about.” She took a big gulp of wine. “But by that time, I’d already gotten into the code and left a number of back doors open for myself—along with a few bugs. After I left, they were too busy putting out fires without the help of their best programmer to double-check the metadata. Particularly the user database. There is a lot of information in there, my friend.”

“So Neely uses Runnr?” I said, finally catching up.

“Everyone uses Runnr,” she said, then looked at me. “Well, everyone whose time is worth more than the Runnr fees. Which are dirt cheap, because it’s ridiculously easy to get signed up as any kind of runner, even the ones you supposedly need to have a license for.”

“Like massage therapist.”

“Right. You should see all the garbage they let slip through the cracks. You know they don’t even do background checks? They don’t advertise that, but it’s been in the news. People just don’t care enough to stop using it.” She laughed. “If they knew how few runners actually make a living at it, they’d care. I mean, how do you trust someone who just turns up at your door and says she’s a massage therapist when she’s only making, like, twenty bucks for a two-hour massage?”

“Yeesh.” I made better money hawking hand-stamped stationery at Laurel’s.

“Well, to be fair, I programmed an auto-bidder to make sure I got the run, which drove the price down. Usually female runners make more because there’s a higher demand for them. Imagine that.” She rolled her eyes, then shrugged. “Anyway, it was no big deal getting in with the camera. After that, Neely did the rest.”

I replayed the ghastly intimacy of it, the greedy expression on his face, his hairy flesh looking somehow more naked for being half covered by the robe. “It’s perfect,” I agreed. “But what if you’d actually had to do the massage? And what if he’d—tried something else?” Now that I was talking about someone else’s safety rather than my own, I suddenly realized what it was that had paralyzed me in the back of the SUV that day. It was the inarticulable fear that if I made the wrong move, or any move at all, the situation would turn from mere humiliation into something else entirely.

But Amanda was shaking her head. “He was too impatient to sit through a massage. You know the water he gave me? I’m ninety percent sure he put something in it. I didn’t taste it, of course, but it smelled funny. I think part of the game is some kind of sedative. Just to get you a little woozy, so you don’t move as fast. He’s a total coward.”

I felt a surge of nausea, and bile rose in my throat. The smoothie with the chalky aftertaste. I had been so sure Jason and I had the same bug, but I never threw up, just got dizzy and slept for twelve hours afterward. Amanda didn’t say anything, but from the way she was looking at me, I could tell she’d already had the thought, probably when I first told her the story. I took a moment to catch my breath. So I’d been roofied in addition to being . . . whatever you called what he’d done to me.

“So where are we going to post it?” I said finally.

“Post what?”

“The video. Or do we send it to a news site anonymously? Or what about those comedy forums you mentioned? Let him be the butt of the joke, for once.”

“We’re not showing anyone this video, Dana.”

I stared. “But—isn’t that the whole point? Show the world? Show everyone what he really is?”

“It’s worth way more to us hanging over his head.”

“Blackmail?” I stood up, and my voice rose, just as it had when Amanda had followed me out of the comedy club. I hated losing control, and talking about Neely, even thinking about him, brought me too close to the edge. “Are you doing this for money? Because I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything from him. All I care about is that it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

“It won’t,” she said. “Trust me. Neely doesn’t know who we are, but he knows we have this video. We know everything about him, and we can get to him at any time. That’s why he turned tail and ran back to L.A. I’ve got ways of knowing what he’s up to, though—not limited to Runnr, by the way.” She looked pleased with herself. “Besides, I think I got my message across. After this, he’s going to be too para noid to pull his signature move on anyone for a long time.”

“But why not just release it?”

She looked at me pityingly. “Out in the world, the video is falsifiable. His PR reps will make up stories, spin it for the press. And in the meantime, since we’ll have done all the damage we can do, he won’t be afraid of us anymore. He’ll hire investigators to find us. Trust me, you don’t want that. You don’t want to be the lone woman standing up against a celebrity with an accusation like that.”

“But there’s proof,” I said, losing steam.

“If it ever went to court, they’d find a way to get the video thrown out. That’s what rich people have expensive lawyers for.” She shrugged. “But nobody enjoys spending their money that way, and nobody wants the publicity. As long as we keep our fingers hovering over the button, he’s going to do everything in his power to keep us from going nuclear.”

There was a moment of silence as I processed this. “Okay, so we don’t go nuclear,” I said. “Even though—I wouldn’t be in it alone, right? If something went wrong.”

“No. You wouldn’t. If it came down to it, I’d be right there beside you, in court or anywhere else. I promise.”

I sat back down on the sofa and took a long, warming swallow of wine.

“So,” she said, tapping her fingers together with excitement. “Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“It’s your turn.”

“Ha-ha,” I said, after a long pause.

“I got your back,” she prompted, her voice level. “Now you get mine.”

“Funny joke.” But I knew she wasn’t joking.

“I’ve got a name for you.”

I was starting to panic. “I never asked you to go after Neely, Amanda.”

She gave me a long look, and the excitement slowly drained from her face. By the time she turned toward the window, her gray-green eyes had gone perfectly flat and opaque. For a moment I thought she might cry.

Instead she got up from the sofa, opened a glass door, and stepped out onto the balcony.

She didn’t ask me to follow, but after a few uncomfortable minutes passed, I did. I found her sipping her wine and staring out into the night sky, which had cleared of clouds and was now glittering with stars. To the right, far down, I could just see the Congress Avenue Bridge, a garland of streetlights over the dark river. I stepped toward her and looked up at her profile, lit from below by the balcony lights. No wonder she kept getting auditions. Her cheekbones could’ve won an Academy Award all by themselves.

“Great wine,” I said. “Really, uh, jammy.” I took an overly enthusiastic sip and choked.

“Look, you don’t have to do it,” she said wearily. “Obviously, you don’t have to do anything. When we were talking the other night, I just thought—” She stopped abruptly. I opened my mouth to reply, but she started again, more forcefully this time. “I thought we understood each other. But if you think I enjoyed watching Aaron Neely jerk off in that hotel room—if you think I got off on playing his victim, even for a minute—”

I felt stricken. “Of course I don’t think that.”

“He’s a huge guy. Like you said, he could have turned on me any time. It wasn’t exactly fun.”

“I know,” I said. “And I can’t thank you enough.”

“Not nearly enough,” she said, whirling on me. “But I didn’t do it just for you, Dana. You never see the big picture, do you? You don’t read the forums or listen to the stories, so you don’t get it. The problem is so much bigger than what happened to you. These guys do the same thing, over and over again, until somebody finally stands up to them. You have to find a way to hurt them more than they can hurt you.”

I took it in silently. I’d said that what mattered to me was that it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. But what had brought me over to Amanda’s apartment tonight? What had filled me with joy on the bridge with Kim earlier today? Wasn’t it just that Neely wasn’t my problem anymore?

“Anyway, you got what you wanted,” Amanda said, as if she could read my guilty thoughts. “Buy me a drink sometime, I guess.”

“What do you want me to do?” I said, exasperated. “Go find your ex-boyfriend and get revenge? He’s kind of far away, isn’t he? Believe me, if I could be in Los Angeles right now, I already would be.”

“If he lived in Austin, you’d do it?” she said, looking out over the city.

“Probably,” I said. Then, struck by a sudden impulse to firm up the lie: “Yes. Yes, I would.”

“Doug Branchik, my old boss from Runnr.” She took another sip. “He lives here now.”

“In Austin?”

Amanda uncurled her index finger from around the bowl of the glass of wine and slowly extended her arm. “There. He lives right there.”

6

What?” I said, ducking instinctively. “Where?”

“Across the street. The balcony with the orange deck chairs.”

“Amanda—” The slender ledge of concrete we were standing on suddenly felt unbearably exposed.

“If you’re going to ask did I know he lived here—of course I knew,” she said, ignoring my discomfort. “After I got fired, they transferred him to Austin to help start up the new office here. You know, the well was poisoned for him at the home office. Or maybe it was damage control from on high. Either way, I wouldn’t waste too many tears on Doug Branchik.” She said his name so loudly that I winced, looking across at his balcony. “I’m the one who’s blacklisted. He’s doing fine.”

Unspoken: She knew how he was doing because she could watch him from her window. “Did you—”

“Come here because of him? No. Just a happy accident.” I must have looked skeptical, because she laughed, lightly annoyed. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. Tons of people move from L.A. to Austin every year. The way people complain about it here, you’d think we were a plague of locusts.” She whirled and went back inside, and I followed her, relieved. “Anyway, he’s not going to be there much longer. That’s a Runnr-owned crash pad. They’re just putting him up there until his wife finishes decorating the six-bedroom mansion on Lake Travis.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the window. “Aren’t there some blinds you could draw or something?”

“Come on, just listen. I’ve got it all worked out.” She cracked a grin. “And the beauty of it is, you’d never even have to see his face.”

I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t say no either.

The next day was the Funniest Person semifinals, but I couldn’t concentrate on prepping my set. Memories of the grainy, sordid video haunted me all day. When evening came, I walked through the door into Bat City with some trepidation, wondering if a guilty shadow would hang over my performance. In the waiting area, I kept my headphones on with the sound turned off, bopping my head to imaginary music while comics all around me gossiped about Neely’s absence. The replacement judge was rumored to be Cynthia Omari, one of my favorite comics and the host of a hugely popular podcast. As I stepped up onto the stage to start my set, I glanced toward the judges’ table, expecting—what?—dust motes where his shape had been? Ominous music?

Instead, there was only the exhilaration of relief. The set did not feel particularly inspired. It did not feel uninspired. It happened almost without me.

That was how light I felt, how free.

I remained in this floaty state of oblivion for the rest of the night, right up until the emcee announced my name as one of three comics moving on to the last round of the competition. As the crowd roared, I looked at my fellow contestants, and the words I made it to the finals ran through my mind. I felt my real life turning on with a click.

I stumbled through the bar, past the comics reaching out their hands to congratulate me, and into the women’s restroom, where I locked myself in a stall and pulled out my cell phone. The screen still showed Amanda’s last text from the night before.

Trust me now?

“Trust me, this is going to be epic.”

Our senior year in high school, Jason tried to get me to help him steal Mattie’s truck.

Mattie still scared the shit out of me, though I did my best to hide it from Jason. Kenny the German shepherd had run away and gotten hit by a car the year before, so at least I no longer had to worry that the giant dog would come bounding through the dog flap in the garage apartment and put his massive paws on my shoulders and growl, which was the way he’d been taught to greet everyone but Mattie. But Mattie himself had only grown more menacing. I felt him looking at me all the time now.

As practical jokes went, the truck caper seemed to me both incredibly juvenile and nowhere near what Mattie deserved. I never knew what exactly Mattie had done to inspire it, but whatever it was, Jason seemed to have snapped. Maybe he just couldn’t take Mattie’s ribbing about his manhood anymore, and with Kenny gone, he had no excuse not to try something. At any rate, Jason had decided that it would be hilarious to take the truck in the middle of the night while Matt was sleeping off a payday bender, drive it three counties over, and leave it in the middle of a field, roughed up, as if it had been stolen by a local kid for a joy ride.

“It has to look like something some methed-up punk would do,” he’d explained when he saw my expression. “He’ll get it back. The tires’ll be slashed and it’ll need a new paint job, that’s all. And I’ll rig up the steering column to make it look like it was hot-wired. I found a book at the library with instructions and everything.”

“Why don’t you just hot-wire it for real, then?” What I didn’t say out loud was that if he hot-wired the truck, he wouldn’t need me to get the keys. Mattie kept those keys on him at all times. As far as I could tell, the only two things he’d ever cared about were Kenny and the GMC. When Jason insisted I was the only one who could fit through the dog door in Mattie’s garage, I was flattered, but skeptical; Jason had filled out in the shoulders that year, but I’d been filling out more or less continuously since the third grade. Moreover, the idea of crawling through a dead dog’s door at night and stealing keys from the pocket of a drunk’s dirty jeans while he slept a few feet away nauseated me. I told myself that would be true even if that drunk were someone other than Mattie.

But Jason was getting defensive. “Because this is a prank, not a crime.” He snorted. “I’m not a criminal.”

“Oh yeah. Grand theft auto, totally legal.”

He’d started on an angry retort, then caught himself and laughed. “Okay, okay,” he said. He ran his hands through his hair, and I could see that his palms were sweating from the damp trail they left in his bangs. “Maybe I’m also a little worried I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I nearly failed shop.”

“So that’s why you got mono last year.”

“Saved my GPA,” he admitted.

My own GPA was in free fall. I’d already guessed I wasn’t going to UT with Jason next year and wanted to spend as much time with him as I could. In the end, I had agreed to do it for the same reason I agreed to everything Jason wanted: because he wanted it.

I was supposed to set an alarm for one a.m. and sneak out of the house, and I went to sleep early but full of adrenaline, sure that I would roll out of bed at the first beep. Instead, I awoke to a desperate tapping on my window sometime in the early-morning hours, still dark but way past one. Lost in a thick waking haze, I couldn’t tell if I actually saw Jason standing outside my window in the bushes, pale and shivering, or just heard him furiously tapping. But whether awake or asleep, I knew that I would never crawl through that dog door and steal Mattie’s keys, much less follow Jason to a field three counties over and watch as he banged up Mattie’s truck so I could drive him home afterward. I told myself I wasn’t really awake, and the tapping sound followed me into my dreams.

I caught up to Jason the next day in the cafeteria. Standing in the nacho line, he couldn’t get away from me, but he wouldn’t look at me either.

“Okay, top ten reasons I didn’t do the plan last night,” I said. “Number ten: It was a stupid fucking plan.”

Wrong move. He stared resolutely at the floppy cardboard boats under the heat lamp, their tortilla chips stuck together with greasy cheese, then slid one onto his tray.

“Number nine: Dreamed I was helping; woke up in the bathroom trying to shift the toilet into third gear.”

Nothing. I swallowed.

“Number eight: I’m a rotten friend.” I touched his sleeve and, in a different tone, said, “Jason, I’m sorry. Really.”

As if he hadn’t heard me, couldn’t even feel my hand on his arm, he mechanically heaped sour cream and guacamole onto his nachos.

“Fine, skip to number one,” I said. “I chickened out, Jase. I didn’t want to tell you, but I was scared.”

Eyes still fixed on his tray, he slowly grinned, then chuckled. “You should have seen the look on your face when I was telling you about it.” He tossed the guacamole scooper into the hot-water tin with a splash. “It was like hurdle-jumping day in gym class all over again.”

I beamed, relieved. “In my defense, I still don’t think you should have to have a doctor’s note when you’re obviously a midget.”

By the end of the day, we were acting like it had never happened. Jason never brought up pranking Mattie again—although he took up smoking shortly afterward, which seemed related somehow—and when his girlfriend dumped him right before prom later that year, he gave her ticket to me. Standing next to him in a pile of silver balloons for the picture, my red column dress looking slightly silly next to his Texas tux, I felt thoroughly forgiven.

Deep down, though, I knew I had lied about the reason I’d stayed in bed that night. It was true I was scared of Mattie, but I wouldn’t have let that stop me from helping Jason out. The number-one reason I hadn’t helped Jason steal Mattie’s truck was that he couldn’t admit he was too scared to do it alone. We both pretended he’d have gone through with it if only he’d had the keys, but he wouldn’t have. And that was ultimately why I couldn’t join him in crossing the line. He needed me too much.

Trust me now? The question still hung unanswered in the little speech bubble on my screen.

Amanda had crossed the line without me, unhesitatingly, on my behalf.

I do, I typed into the text box, and pushed send.

7

Absolutely not.” I glared at the red cross-front apron full of spray bottles that was lying on Amanda’s sofa. “You said I’d be a runner. You never said anything about a maid.”

“It’s the only Runnr service he uses regularly!” Amanda protested. “Think of it like a part.”

“I don’t do maids.” One of the reasons I’d stopped scouring the audition boards years before I left L.A. was that I got sick of showing up to read for the best friend and getting handed sides for the cleaning lady.

“It’s just a costume,” she said, seeming genuinely bewildered. “And you won’t be wearing it long. Once you get inside—”

“I know, I know.” I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was a finalist for Funniest Person in Austin. “Just shut up and give it to me.” Amanda dropped the apron into a shopping bag, and I stalked out to the car with it wedged under my arm.

Once home, I donned the cleaning outfit as quickly as possible, to get it over with, and forced myself to look in the mirror. The red Runnr apron aged me ten years, and the half-empty bottles of cleaners in the pockets along the front forced my shoulders into a heavy slump. I thought of my mother hustling off to work in heels every day, her shoulders thrown sharply back. Even after getting laid off from her secretarial job at the helium plant, she had refused to return to the housecleaning work she’d done when she first came to Texas. “I don’t clean up messes anymore,” she’d insisted. “Not your father’s, not yours. Not anyone’s.” I pulled my own shoulders back, straining against the apron straps, and even attempted an old acting-class trick of inventing a walk for the character. But in the end, my waddle more or less invented itself, an attempt to minimize the sloshing of the bottles as they bounced off my belly. Pilot idea, I thought, then stopped myself. Too depressing.

I checked my phone for activity on the app. For a regular weekly job like this, Amanda had explained, Branchik would get a notification on his phone to approve the run before it went out on the app. It was part of the company’s philosophy not to allow standing gigs to go to the same runner week after week. That might foster an independent relationship between user and contractor, encouraging them to drop the middleman altogether.

“The Runnr philosophy is based on the fungibility of labor,” Amanda explained, and then she saw my blank expression and clarified. “Price, speed, and quality are the only variables that are supposed to matter to the algorithm. The way Runnr sees it, familiarity breeds wage inflation and tolerance for mistakes. You get to know someone, you learn their kids’ names, suddenly they’re a person. The Runnr customer is supposed to be able to order up human help like an appetizer, at the spur of the moment, without worrying about that stuff.”

Just then, the notification arrived with a ding. The words We have a Run for you! popped up on my screen, a shower of confetti raining down behind them. I tapped details and watched as Doug Branchik’s address came up with the specs for the cleaning job; bathroom, kitchen, laundry, all boxes checked. At the bottom of the screen, the bidding price Amanda’s program had auto-generated to ensure I would win the run: $16.79.

Unbelievable. If this were a real run, my percentage of the take would barely cover round-trip bus fare. And the bus was, unfortunately, a vital part of this plan, so my car wouldn’t be seen downtown on the day of the strike. I tapped the ACCEPT icon and stormed out the door.

The bus arrived at the stop by my apartment complex ten minutes late. Climbing aboard, I was already sweating heavily, feeling at once ridiculously conspicuous in my uniform and angry at how invisible it made me. By the time I reached Branchik’s door and typed in the key code that had been sent via the app, I was already sick of the whole thing.

Looking around the condo, however, I felt a fresh surge of inspiration. I’d thought I was messy. Branchik’s floor was wall-to-wall dirty clothes and empty takeout containers. An overturned juice bottle labeled POWER PULP lay on the gray sofa next to a greenish splotch. Boxer shorts lay twisted up on the carpet and draped over the elliptical machine in the corner of the living room. This was the cleaning job Branchik expected some faceless runner to perform for $16.79? An anarchic spirit of rage swelled in me as I surveyed the scene. I’d show him “fungible labor.” I crossed the squalid living room and drew the blinds with a brief glance up at Amanda’s balcony—she was on lookout duty—before peeling off the apron and kicking it viciously into a corner. Then I took off all my clothes, pulled the blond wig out of my apron pocket, and slipped it over my hairnet. It was time for my close-up. Naked except for the wig, I put my phone’s camera in selfie mode and started clicking.