The Herd - Andrea Bartz Page 0,105

on like a migraine, like a seizure, and I whirled around. Mikki stood in the doorframe.

“Baby girl,” she said, her lips curled into something between a smirk and a grimace. “Are you creeping on my desk?” She took a few steps forward and paused by her open closet door. She leaned against it, and the hanging organizer stuffed with cocktail jewelry and feathers and beads slid along the wood.

My brain was doing something frantic—the graffiti, the tagging, what does it mean that she did that—while my torso took over with something much more primal: fear. “I just wanted to see the collages you’ve been talking about!” I stretched my mouth into a smile, groped around for a joke: “Figured I’d give it the ol’ collage try!”

She smiled. “Why were you in the dark?”

“I—I didn’t want you to think I was snooping. Which I totally am.” I realized I was still clutching the pinstripe photo and casually dropped it on the desk behind me.

“Well, what do you think?” She crossed her arms. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the collection for a while.”

“I’d love to see a finished one. Where are those?”

“What were you looking at?” She crossed the few feet between us and I flinched; she reached past my hip and picked up the picture scrap of the Herd’s Gleam Room wall. Without looking up: “You recognize this, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure. Hey, I should get going.” I shifted my weight and she looked at me, her thin frame somehow formidable.

“You recognize this, I can tell.” She dropped the scrap on the bed and its soft landing made me think of a snowflake.

I shrugged, channeling all my energy into seeming casual. “I know I know it, but I can’t place it. Is it the Herd?”

“Ding-ding-ding!” She aimed a finger-gun my way. “That’s exactly where it’s from.”

“I love that you worked it into your art!” I gave my shoulders a cheery shake. “Your beautiful aesthetic is all over the Herd, on every square inch—and your package design, obviously, on the products in the Gleam Room.” Why was my heart pounding, jittering my entire torso? Mikki still hadn’t said or done anything nefarious. But there was something I was so close to seeing, a revelation hovering on the tip of my tongue. “And now you’ve worked it into your own art. It’s like a hall of mirrors!” I thought crazily of the foyer in Eleanor and Daniel’s townhouse, the big mirror-fronted closet doors. A million Mikkis, Hanas, and me’s fading out into the distance.

“I guess you could say that.”

“Were you just getting the striped wall here?” I asked, my fingers sweeping toward the image. “Or were you actually capturing the graffiti? That would be very…avant-garde.” Because there’s no way you could’ve done it, I tried to beam from my brain to hers. You would never antagonize Eleanor like that.

“Don’t tell anyone, but I was actually pretty proud of how I pulled it all off.” She leaned against the wall. “I knew Eleanor wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t think it would really throw her off her game. She hates the word so much. Cunt. Why give it all that power? It’s just a word. Don’t be cunty.”

I grinned conspiratorially, as if all of this were logical—nay, brilliant. “I love that. Reclaiming the word. Did you spray-paint it yourself?”

“In the West Village, yeah. It was easy; there were security cameras in the elevator, but not the stairs. Obviously I wasn’t in San Francisco or Fort Greene—I had friends do it there. I was hoping to have a whole collection of collages done by the end of the year. And I figured out the name for it: It’ll be WOMEN, but with the W in white and ‘OMEN’ in red.” She flourished her palm, as if seeing it on a wall.

“Great title. Very ominous.”

She nodded. “It was gonna be a representation of just how fucked women are in society. It’s like, women unfairly can’t own up to their shit because they’re punished so harshly for not being perfect. Men can fuck up and move on, but not women. If you’re a woman, you’re always one mistake away from being worthless again. You go through life waiting for everything to be taken away, bending over backward trying to prove your worth, driving yourself crazy trying to get everyone to like and respect you. We do it in jobs, we even do it in our extracurricular lives—fuck, look at the Herd, women