Free The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes, Jo Piazza

York the week before college, Eve Morton had wanted to be one of those people who took cabs with abandon, who didn’t constantly stare at the meter and think about how many meals the cab fare would add up to. She could count on one hand the number of cabs she took the first year she lived in the city.
    Now that she actually made a living wage, better than a living wage, although not nearly anywhere near the absurd salary they were paying Imogen Tate (when did they decide that magazine editors should be paid like brain surgeons?), she enjoyed watching the meter rise and knowing she could afford it. It was something she actually missed when she took one of these sleek black Uber Town Cars and the fare was charged automatically to a credit card on file and no money ever changed hands.
    Eve knew better than anyone that Imogen was not tech savvy. Part of her job as Imogen’s assistant had been to print out and then reply to all of her emails. Pretty standard assistant stuff back then. Still, she had assumed that her old boss had caught up with technology in the two years she had been away at school. The entire world had caught up by now.
    Breakfast went okay, she thought.
    The way Imogen handled the Adrienne Velasquez situation was just so completely uncool though. It wasn’t as if Eve couldn’t make friends with Adrienne on her own if she wanted to. Imogen was so weird about the whole thing. People like Imogen were so precious about their networking, about how and when they would bring you into their circle. Thank god her generation didn’t behave like that. Eve loved how connected she felt to all her peers. If she was friends with them on Twitter that was equal to being besties in real life. She didn’t discriminate. The old guard of fashion had so many bullshit hierarchies and unspoken rules. It was frustrating.
    At least Imogen could be useful (if she went along with the program) in helping navigate some of those barriers. She held the keys to the kingdom for the new
Glossy
app
—if only
she got it just a little bit more.
    Eve glanced down at her phone, seeing an email that made her give out a little yelp. It was last-minute, but who cared. This was huge. Eve quickly dashed off an email to Imogen.
From: Eve Morton ([email protected])
    To: Imogen Tate ([email protected])
    Subject: DISRUPTTECH!
    We have to fly to San Francisco tomorrow afternoon. We got accepted to come to Disrupt Tech conference. Hza. C more here.
    www.Disrupttech.com

<<<  CHAPTER FOUR  >>>
    T he next evening Imogen pressed her forehead against the cool Plexiglas window in economy class on the plane, looking down at the lights of Manhattan as they curved around the island, twinkling on the dark canvas like jewelry laid out for a fancy party.
    Imogen was wearing her layered traveling outfit, perfected over years of shuttling to international shows twice a year—a lightweight long-sleeved gray cashmere T-shirt, black ribbed cardigan, large Hermès gray and black scarf that doubled as a blanket on chilly plane rides and her low-slung Rag & Bone boyfriend jeans. Classic black Ray-Bans pushed her hair off her face. For the past fifteen years plane travel had been a welcome respite from the busyness of life on the ground—a space free of phone calls, text messages, emails and the Internet. She knew all that was changing, but she still clung to the notion of a flight as a few sweet hours of uninterrupted time to indulge in a digital blackout, along with her stash of celebrity trash magazines.
    “Didn’t you bring your laptop?” Eve asked her right as they reached cruising altitude, snapping her own screen open in a salute.
    “No. We’re only here for a day,” Imogen said, dipping her hand into her bag for her copy of
Us Weekly
.
    “The plane has Wi-Fi,” Eve said incredulously, as though shecouldn’t imagine the availability of something as precious as the Internet going unused for a single wasteful second.
    “That is so lovely for the plane,”