The Podcast

Chapter 11

Thursday Afternoon

Manicured ivy snakes diagonally across the custard-painted brick wall, rising fifteen in the air. Perfectly spaced Italian cypress skim the wall from the outside, towering above the brick as a fortified line of pine-green sentinels, standing watch at forty feet high. A large pyramid-shaped umbrella is patterned with cobalt blue dogs and trinkets, the fabric sourced from Paris. It stands proud and expanded on the left edge of an outdated glamor kidney-shaped pool. A man dressed in all-white scrubs makes himself useful and scarce as he hangs a new banana bag, flicking it hard with his thumb and middle finger to initiate the drip.

Akari pulls her Mercedes Coupe into the half-circle drive, garish figurine fountains spitting perfect glittering streams of water at one another. Not exactly her style. But there's something fuck-you about the outdatedness of it. An inside joke for the old money elite: that it's embarrassing to constantly be upgrading and modernizing, living in overpriced glass boxes like a doll, screaming that you've made it. Old money chuckles—never shouts.

Three large dormers stare down at Akari like cannons protecting a fortress. She steps out of her car, her Louboutin pumps narrowly missing the diagonal ribbon of hand-cut emerald grass that slices between red pavers. She hands her keys to an ancient looking valet who she hadn't even noticed when she pulled in, his face expressionless and gray like the fountain figurines.

At one point in time, she'd have viewed this as a major transgression. A breach of her professional commitments. She might be savage but she prides herself on her loyalty. She would've denounced this decision as sloppy, short-sighted—two things Akari Zimmerman most certainly is not.

But after yesterday, she sees things differently. Several small events of the last few months culminating into something bigger. The tingling of a shift in the power dynamic. And if there's one thing Akari's loyal to above all else it's the momentum of power.

In the backyard, Romi stretches one arm above her head on a Carlisle Chaise Lounge with wrought iron wheels like those on a child's antique toy bike. She turns her head and bites into the second half of her bagel, cream cheese gathering in the corners of her mouth. After years of living and partying among LA's elite, she has perfected a now internet-famous hangover remedy: one glass of freshly squeezed and extra pulpy orange juice with a healthy splash of Belvedere, one toasted onion bagel with extra cream cheese, two Advil, and a banana bag IV drip administered by her family's concierge medical staff. She may have her father's nose, but she also has the luxury of her model mother's heroine chic metabolism. Besides—she half-joked to herself throughout her adolescence—she could simply buy her mother's nose if she really wanted to. The ease of attaining it made it far less appealing.

Romi favors her father in every way, finding her mother quite pathetic and unimpressive by comparison, her best accomplishment in life getting pregnant by Romi's father while he was married to another woman. Romi loves being her father's daughter, his youngest of five. She takes great pride, even as a small girl, when friends of her father would meet her and say, "oh, Ari, she's your little mini me, isn't she?" The similarities between them are unmistakable, the way their lips and noses are too big for their faces, nearly spilling over with a rare audacity that paradoxically drew people in. It's like others hoped some of the effortless Amar family grandeur might rub off on them, purely from proximity.

"I still cannot believe you actually dated her."

"Romi..." Archer grumbles against a chaise lounge cushion, his box dyed platinum hair glowing unnaturally against his olive skin.

"I'm just saying, she's such a stick in the mud, you know? She didn't even show up last night."

"She's not really the going out type." Archer flips over onto his back, his body thin and sinewy with lean muscle. A scattering of tattoos like stickers covers his abdomen and arms. His 'tattoo tour' video on YouTube has 13.7M views. Only a handful contain actual sentimental value.