A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

entirely involved, some with fond, moved looks on their faces as if they were remembering their own initiations.

“I do,” I said.

Caroline raised her eyebrows. “And just as importantly, do you swear to take care of yourself, to be kind to the shining, special goddess you are—”

“A boss witch!” a woman in the crowd whooped.

Caroline pursed her lips in annoyance. “Please don’t interrupt,” she said to the circle, before turning back to me. “To be kind to yourself because you are a woman who deserves the world?”

“I do,” I said.

She gazed at me benevolently like Lady Liberty, then lifted her chin, delivering the climax of a campaign speech that she had delivered dozens of times before, but that she was still working hard to imbue with passion and excitement. “Will you be a nasty woman, a badass who smashes glass ceilings and then reaches out her hand to help another woman climb through that shattered ceiling with her?”

“I will,” I said.

“Amazing,” Caroline said. She reached out to put her arm around my shoulder, then realized she was too short for that, and put it around my waist instead. “And now for all of the rest of us,” she continued, turning to the crowd. “Do we swear to welcome Jillian with open hearts and minds, to lift her and support her as we were once lifted and supported?”

“We do,” the group said as one. “To Jillian!” Then they all lifted their glasses, and we toasted. This was it, the grand initiation? Bit of a letdown. Vy tore a hunk off the yeast blob with her teeth and choked it down her gullet.

Dozens of women, a band, a pride, beamed at me. I smiled back, as all the decorative girl-power signs hummed in the background. But the part of me that smiled at the women was only a facade, while my brain stepped out of the circle and observed, taking notes and trying to remember for later. My brain took a moment to mark that this shell of my body held its arms so awkwardly. How had these women not discovered the ruse of me yet? I didn’t belong with them. Some part of me would always be standing outside of the circle, of any circle, uncomfortable in a group, my mind buzzing with what I told myself in my more confident moments was healthy cynicism, and what I knew in my lower moments was self-hatred.

For a few seconds, before I flung it off, a pure desire shot through me, a wish that I could force my brain back in my body and look into all the faces around me with no facade at all. That I could accept their acceptance of me, and belong.

SIXTEEN

The next morning I woke to the buzz of my phone, my head fuzzy from the glasses of champagne that Nevertheless members had pressed into my hands. Miles was calling.

When I told him what I’d done, Miles was going to sigh. He had a particular way of doing it—heavy, as if the bad job that you had done caused him physical pain. His sigh was a perfect embodiment of that terrible not mad, just disappointed feeling. I’d never provoked it, but I had seen coworkers crying quietly at their desks in its aftermath.

As the phone rang, the door opened downstairs. Rob and Sara, back already, stomping around their new home like perky dinosaurs. Right before Miles’s call went to voice mail, I finally picked it up, dread churning in my stomach.

“Beckley,” Miles said. “I’ve been waiting with bated breath here. How did it go?”

“Great. I’m officially in, it’s officially weird.” I mustered up all the levity I could and continued, “Only problem is they made me sign a pretty intense nondisclosure and it seems like if you break it, they throw you into the ocean.”

Silence on the other end of the line. I braced myself for The Sigh. But instead his voice got low, tight, and somehow that was worse. “How intense was it, exactly?”

“Um. They basically implied that they disappeared the last woman who broke it.”

“I told you not to sign anything without consulting us first.”

“I know, I know,” I said, still trying to keep things light. Maybe if I refused to acknowledge how serious it was, it wouldn’t be serious at all, and we could just move on. “But, God, you wouldn’t believe how secretive they were about it all, like I was signing on to be a member of the fucking French Resistance.” I laughed. He did not. I began to pace, desperation creeping in as he stayed silent. “I didn’t have a choice. They wouldn’t let me take a moment with the contract and they weren’t going to bring me back to the clubhouse if I didn’t sign. There was no way—”

“There’s always a way!” I flinched. “Dammit, Beckley, I’ve been vouching for you with the higher-ups. I’d been excited about this.”

“You can still be excited! Trust me, if I hadn’t signed, I wouldn’t have been able to get proof, and the story would be dead. But now—”

“It’s dead anyway,” he said, still in that devastating, low tone. “If it’s that intense of an NDA, the bosses aren’t going to fight against it for some story about how a bunch of rich women like influence and astrology, or for some catalog of the insipid girl-power posters they’ve got up on the walls.”

“It’s not going to be some insipid catalog,” I snapped back. “There’s more going on here, I know it. There are clearly some very real secrets that they don’t want getting out. And we haven’t even gotten into Nicole—”

“You keep bringing up Nicole,” he said. “But it sounds like you’ve been having too much fun being a part of the club to get a shred of evidence about her.”

“Hey,” I said. “That’s not fair.”

“Unless you find a bombshell, and it’s fucking ironclad, this whole thing isn’t going to be worth it.”

“Please,