“I don’t know. Be awesome, I guess.”
“Are we supposed to go around and introduce ourselves?”
“Yes, you talk to other people. It’s called mingling.”
“My inner geek is my outer geek,” I say.
Li Ann returns with our drinks. “We could talk about sex,” she says, handing us each a flute of something orange and bubbly. “I would really like to have sex with Rory.”
“Vegan Rory?”
Destiny takes a sip of the orange bubbly. “What the fuck is this?”
“Skin-contact champagne,” Li Ann says. “We almost did it, but then I told him about Breathe Life and he was not supportive, and I never sleep with a man who doesn’t fulfill my need to be affirmed.”
“I would never get laid if that was my rule,” Destiny says.
“Yeah,” I agree. “High bar.”
Li Ann takes out yet another sample of Breathe Life. These look more like the first ones. I switch one on, take a deep breath. “This tastes like marijuana,” I say.
“It is marijuana,” she says, nodding. “Best thing for your lungs. All-natural, wild-grown, foraged, and dried on sustainably sourced sheepskin mats.”
“What was Rory’s objection?” I ask.
“The inside of the hardware contains plastic,” she explains. “He’s against plastic in all forms.”
“I guess there’s going to be a lot of leftover plastic in the afterworld,” Destiny says.
“Rory lives in a plastic-free commune in Bushwick, and they make their own toilet paper.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of other pieces of paper.”
“His poor butt,” I say. “You should definitely have sex with him. For the sake of his raw behind.”
“What? I’m not going anywhere near that thing.”
“I just meant in general—never mind. Let’s go talk to other people.” Just then the host takes to the stage, and the room goes quiet. “I’d like to introduce our panel for the evening,” she says. “Ladies, welcome to Mary McGreen, Manishala Brown, and Selina Lewis.”
We clap. Three impeccably dressed women take seats onstage. The woman in the middle, Manishala Brown, has long braids falling down over her shoulders and enormous boots on her feet. I love her immediately. She is flanked by two white women, both sporting the kind of calm confidence and grooming that comes from being older, wiser, and richer than everyone else in the room. “Each of our panelists has had enormous success in crashing through the glass ceiling. They’ve started companies, taken companies public, sat on boards, and seen the whole funding cycle through from seed to IPO. What would you tell your younger selves about the challenges and opportunities of being a female founder?”
The woman on the left, Mary McGreen, speaks first. “I would tell her to relax and have more fun,” she says, and the audience titters. “No, but seriously. Ask yourself if you’re enjoying the ride. Because with all the pressures heaped on us, it’s easy to forget that we need to find joy too.” I nod, feeling joyful, or maybe just high from Li Ann’s pot.
“I would tell her to take less bullshit,” Manishala Brown says.
“Amen!” someone from the audience shouts.
“The number of times I brushed off some sexist or racist comment, thinking, well, that guy’s a product of his generation, he didn’t mean it—each of those times, I knew I was giving a free pass to someone who did not deserve it, but I didn’t have the confidence to call him out.”
More cheers. I find myself doing a “Woo-hoo!” and thinking of Crazy Craig and those guys in suits and even Rupert, who almost never looks at me, even if he’s asking a direct question about the algorithm I invented.
Selina Lewis clears her throat. “If I may,” she says in a clipped British accent, “I must disagree. Let’s be realistic. If we don’t sometimes give men a free pass, as you say, we are going to sabotage ourselves. You may think, from reading the newspaper or social media, that the world has fundamentally changed, but it hasn’t. It’s still the same people in power, and if you want to get into the club, you have to first play by the rules. Then, perhaps, you might have the fortune to change it from the inside.”
“Selina, with all due respect, I just don’t buy that,” Manishala says.
Selina does an exaggerated shrug. “You can buy it or not—it’s reality.”
“So you’re saying we should all be on board with a little light workplace harassment?”