INTERNS
by Anika Jade Levy
FLAT EARTH and ISSUE 10 are coming to volume0.com on November 4th.
Read Anika’s original VOLUME 0 story below.
I was Valerie’s first friend at NYU. She transferred from Barnard, which she described as a “Lesbian Grinder.”
Not like the dating app. Like a meat grinder.
Valerie said she transferred for academic reasons, but she didn’t seem to care about her classes. The truth is she was too misogynistic to get along at women’s college. She needed men, the threat of their proximity, the affirming concentration of their attention. Her favorite thing was to be perceived. The male gaze was invented for a reason, she told me early on.
I had a couple of friends at school, but when Valerie entered my life, they became extras. Compared to Valerie—who wore high heels which clicked importantly every time she entered a lecture hall—everyone else was a non-player character. Valerie had straight black hair and sharp collarbones. She descended from oil money, but you wouldn’t clock it by looking at her. Her trust fund had a self-erasing quality—and not just because it wouldn’t kick until she turned twenty-five.
She was different from the rich girls I’d attended synagogue with in New Jersey. These were girls who performed their wealth like drag, wore gold jewelry, and carried miniature designer handbags from the time they could walk. Valerie displayed herself with a denaturalized femininity that allowed her to fit in anywhere. She had short pin-up bangs and wore a uniform of starched wool shirts, buttoned all the way to the top. The reason for dressing nondescript, she told me, is so men can project whatever they want onto you. Valerie loved advertisements; she told me they were the only reason she looked at the internet. I told her about the woman who learned she was pregnant on Instagram, when the algorithm started serving her ads for baby clothes and designer formula. Her eyes lit up when I recounted this to her. Valerie was someone whose eyes lit up often. She herself was not unlike an advertisement; loving and malleable with an archetypal beauty.
I had an ambient, circumstantial attraction to her—the way I might have had a crush on the boy that sat by my desk in an especially boring class. Neither one of us would have admitted to engaging in Sapphic experimentation in college, but at times we were more than friends. We messed around once—she kissed me, she put two fingers inside of me, she told me: You are still a virgin.
We were always looking for the men in the room, imagining them, looking at us.
The summer before our junior year, Valerie took an editorial internship at Conde Nast. The office was on the 85th floor of One World Trade. She spent the first few weeks dusting monstera plants and tabulating her supervisor’s menstrual cycle. She spotted Adam on a lunch break, while they were both smoking at the 9/11 memorial his corner office overlooked. She told me he looked dejected and lonely lighting his second cigarette with the cherry from his first cigarette. Valerie had a theory that smoking makes you look like more of whatever you already are. She knew who he was, knew that he had just sold his website for a hundred million dollars, a popular music criticism blog that ranked albums on a scale of one to ten. He wore a ripped t-shirt from the Japanese tour for the Joy Division record CLOSER, but the edges were faded so it read like LOSER. Valerie complimented the shirt and the cigarette, told Adam that when she was in the psych ward as a teenager, she prayed to a printed-out picture of Ian Curtis and a Newport 100.
It’s pretty, isn’t it? Adam asked her.
The memorial is a black pool the size of a city block with a smaller concentric pool leading down into nowhere. The water had been drained and men in high-visibility orange vests walked around inside the bigger pit.
They do hate us for our freedom, she said.
Do you remember 9/11? He asked her.
Sort of, she said.
He asked for her phone number and she gave it to him. She figured Adam must have been savvy, because he’d managed to push the sale of his website through before news broke of his soft cancellation. He was never accused of anything violent, but he’d earned a reputation for courting young musicians and making elaborate promises, which often went nowhere.
Adam was the white whale Valerie had been waiting for: a rich old man with a drug problem. The sort of man who would keep his AirPods in during sex, who would pay a thousand dollars extra for the privilege of ejaculating inside of her and then order Plan B on UberEats.
A vulture, Valerie told me. Not a predator.
We were living in a roach-infested tenement in Red Hook, eating dollar pizza every day, spending what little our parents sent on inhalants and tennis skirts. Valerie constantly complained that when she left Barnard her parents cut her off for all but the essentials: her rent, her cell phone bill, her tuition, and her meal plan. Somehow, though, she always seemed to have money. When we would be out at the cheap bars near campus, she would produce a fifty-dollar bill as if by magic. But Valerie was transactional. I always had to trade her at least two tablets of my anxiety medication if I wanted her to buy me a drink.
She was committed to performing poverty. Our apartment didn’t have air conditioning or internet, an arrangement that seemed increasingly insane to me as I figured out just how much money Valerie’s family had. We would climb onto the fire escape to steal our neighbor’s wifi and browse SeekingArrangements.com, a website that pairs rich old men with poor college girls (or poor old men pretending to be rich with rich college girls pretending to be poor). Valerie received hundreds of messages a day. I did it all wrong—used my real name and the photograph from my New York University ID card. We never actually met anyone from the site in real life; I had a dream my Rabbi messaged me and deleted my profile. We lost interest and started doing research on Adam. He was a semi-public figure and there was a lot of material to get through.
Valerie had very little baggage concerning transactional relationships. Men were constantly buying her things: drinks and drugs, textbooks for school, expensive facial creams with infantilizing names like AGE REWIND and BABY FACIAL. Whenever I voiced any objections she just said, I’m a socialist: I’m for a massive redistribution of wealth.
We did not discuss the fact that Valerie could have pleaded with her parents for money at any point. My mom was a social worker and my dad was dead. I had no such safety net.
I suspected that Valerie wanted to receive money for her body because of some back-of-the-shelf psychological deficiency. Like she thought that if she got herself sex-murdered by one of these men, the girls from Barnard would mythologize her forever and she would finally get her 16-millimeter films screened.
In the worst weeks of summer, we spent hours at a time in the empty NYU library, lounging in the air conditioning, taking long pulls from Valerie’s hash pen and reading novels we wouldn’t remember. Once, during a heatwave, we stayed until the bell rang at midnight. It was too hot to go back to our apartment. We wandered around Manhattan until we came to a nightclub in an old Italian restaurant. The club had demonic red lighting and a dozen twin-size beds scattered around it. It was like a dream-world version of an NYU dorm except it wasn’t air-conditioned.
At the bar, I wiped the sweat from my face with a paper cocktail napkin. I looked at my reflection behind the bottles. The napkin had left a black streak across my forehead. Valerie put her index finger in her mouth and spit-cleaned my face like a Semitic mother.
Have you been downstairs yet? The bartender asked us. We have something special for the heatwave.
In the basement, girls stumbled around like fawns on broken legs. A thick Slavic man in a green tracksuit stood at the entrance to a walk-in freezer. The thermostat was set to zero degrees. The special thing was: For fifteen dollars, you were permitted to walk into the freezer and choke down as much well vodka as you wanted for as long as you could endure the cold. It seemed like a recipe for date rape. I knew that I wanted to do it.
I gave Valerie two tablets of my medication and Valerie gave thirty dollars to the tracksuit. When we stepped inside the freezer, he closed the door behind us. The cold covered my body like a sheet. On the shelf, bottles of vodka were encased in blocks of ice.
You first, Valerie said.
I picked up the ice block with both hands and turned it over in my mouth. The ice burnt the insides of my hands and my eyes watered. The cold spread through my throat and my lungs as I swallowed the vodka. When I set the bottle down, I saw that I had made an impressive dent. It was three-quarters full and my teeth chattered.
Your turn, I told her.
Vodka doesn’t agree with me, she said.
I gave her a hard look. She gave me a kiss on the mouth. The next day, there were red blisters on the inside of my hands from where I’d held the block of ice.
Adam sent a car service to pick us up from Red Hook. A black Suburban, the expensive kind of Uber. The driver offered us miniature bottles of water and chewing gum and the aux cord so we could play our own music. As we crossed the bridge, we sang along to the Killers and Britney Spears and Back Street Boys—our soundtrack was all of the music that Adam had built a career out of despising while Valerie and I were taking our first steps.
Like most men, Adam had lofty ideas about his character that had almost no basis in reality. He liked to imagine himself as possessing a libertarian streak, but he watched Rachel Maddow every night religiously, anticipated the President’s impeachment, and was litigious in his work life. He called himself a perfectionist, but from what I could tell, he was just a germaphobe.
By the end of the summer, we were referring to Adam’s Soho duplex as our Manhattan apartment. He had three spare bedrooms, one of which he furnished with bunk beds for us, as a joke. He ordered them on Postmates and summoned a TaskRabbit to assemble them the first time we visited his apartment, insisting that we stay the night and that he was not trying to have sex with us.
Think of it as a dorm room, he told us.
Valerie and I looked at each other and then looked at Adam.
Seriously, he said. I just like to look.
I didn’t know what he meant by that.
A long con, Valerie called it.
If Adam was interested in an arrangement with both of us, he didn’t tip his hand. He was focused on Valerie, willing to give her whatever she wanted in order to consummate the relationship. My company was part of that unspoken contract.
The week before school started, Adam flew to Paris for a music festival his website was throwing. He left us the keys and told us to water the plants.
You don’t have any plants, I told him.
Yes I do, he said.
The building was three blocks from NYU and Adam had a subscription for everything he had conditioned us to want: orange wine and Japanese whiskey, cases of Mexican mineral water, Blue Bottle cold brew. These things replenished and unpacked themselves every three days like magic, like one substance inside of a system, rainwater dissolving into wet air.
There were televisions in every room, which we always left on, usually set to the news. Television was a novelty to us. The President’s daughter announced a fifty-million-dollar plan to empower women. We had already empowered ourselves.
Before Adam left, he gave us the key to a safe containing a library of pharmaceuticals and hallucinogenics. We had every drug we had ever heard of. We had an expense account at Dean and Deluca. We had a credit card that we had been instructed only to use in emergencies.
We had a doorman. He opened the door for us.
Valerie wanted more. She wanted everything she had ever seen in an advertisement. She fell asleep under three weighted blankets browsing The Real Real and woke up wanting a twelve-hundred-dollar baseball cap that said BALENCIAGA in the Bernie Sanders campaign font. She had a dream that Adam bought her a thirty-thousand-dollar horsehair Hastens mattress and an apartment at the Dakota.
You’re like Marie Antoinette but worse somehow, I told her.
You know that his last girlfriend was paid nine hundred dollars a day.
I reminded her that we were not Adam’s girlfriend.
But you would agree that we fall somewhere on the girlfriend-to-daughter spectrum? She asked.
Yes, I said. Interns.
The day before the semester started I was stoned and staring at an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog from 2003—the back-to-school issue. Some philosopher had written the copy. We had been treating Adam’s apartment like it was our Brooklyn tenement, letting dishes pile up around the sink and leaving collectible records out of their sleeves. I was getting anxious about the squalor. I reminded Valerie that Adam would be back from Europe in a few hours.
Valerie said, Let’s go down to the shop and get a coffee. And then I promise to be domestic with you.
The place downstairs charged seven dollars for a matcha latte, but the barista was the hottest person either one of us had seen in real life. When we came in, he changed the music from Arthur Russel to Yves Tumor. I liked to imagine that we made him self-conscious.
He told us good morning, even though it was the afternoon.
When he caught Valerie examining the dirt under his fingernails, he made fists with both his hands.
Sorry, he said. I came straight from my pottery studio.
I scanned his tattoos while he whisked the matcha. He had the number 0 etched into the inside of his hand. The perfect number: Nothing. I wanted him to shove clay into my mouth.
I always caught myself believing that these interactions with the hot barista might mean something. And then I had to remind myself that these were transactions; I paid for them with money.
Valerie doled out prescription stimulants from Adam’s safe and I started washing dishes. Valerie was doing a kind of pretend cleaning I had seen her perform in our Red Hook apartment, methodically gathering beer bottles and inspecting the glassware I’d just washed, like a housewife supervising her maid on television.
That night we fell asleep in Adam’s bed with the television on. We were watching reruns of To Catch a Predator on Dateline. Chris Hansen always asked the same question.
Chris Hansen: What do you think should happen to you?
Predator: Sent to an island. Exile.
I tried to curl up around Valerie, but she rolled away from me, and in her sleep she said: Stop.
In my dream, I woke up alone in Adam’s bed. Valerie was nowhere to be found. I was naked except for the sticky non-slip socks they give you at the hospital. There was a record spinning in the living room—Peggy Lee whining “Is That All There Is?” In the bathroom, I found my dress folded in a tidy pile. Someone had placed an ounce of gold on top of it.
When I described the dream to Valerie, her eyes lit up even though I could tell she wasn’t listening. Valerie was a person whose eyes lit up too often. To me, this tendency seemed theatrical and disingenuous, but to everyone else she came across as the most attentive person in the room. I rolled my eyes at her and she plucked a copy of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols from Adam’s bookshelf. She said, Don’t worry babe—we’ll get to the bottom of this.
Adam returned without luggage. He seemed disappointed and vaguely confused to see me sitting at his kitchen island, reading a book. He hung up his coat and poured himself a drink, as if trying to reorient himself in this apartment we had colonized.
Valerie’s just on the roof having a cigarette, I said, anticipating the question.
We were both visibly relieved when Valerie reemerged. She greeted Adam with calculated enthusiasm, pretending as if she had to restrain herself.
We’ve been waiting for a hundred years, she said.
He was about to stand up from the table to embrace her when she placed herself in his lap. He put his hands on her thigh, and then her stomach, as if unsure of what to do with her.
Tell us everything, she said.
Long flights. A lot of meetings. Didn’t see much music.
You should take us with you, she said. One of us has never been on an airplane.
That’s because only one of us has a father who works for Lockheed Martin, I said.
Adam laughed as if we were all very old friends.
I figured that my extended sleepover with Valerie was over, that I would go back to Brooklyn alone and let her finish the job, but Adam insisted on taking us to some steakhouse in Midtown. I surveyed the wood-paneled dining room, wondering how the three of us appeared to other people.
Somewhere on the spectrum between daughter and girlfriend, I thought. Adam ordered a bottle of red wine that was older than we were.
What does it taste like? He asked.
Grapes, I said. Valerie pinched my leg under the table. She meant to reprimand me, but I allowed myself to enjoy it.
Bourbon, Valerie said.
Good girl, Adam nodded to her. It’s barrel-aged.
The waiter returned to the table to take our order, a skinny, messy kid who looked like he felt bad for me. I started to ask for a bowl of rigatoni but Adam cut me off.
Maine Lobster and Filet Mignon. Rare. Plus a couple dozen oysters and a shrimp cocktail.
When the food arrived, Valerie widened her eyes. Adam went to work on the meat right away, cutting into the bloody center.
The lobster was the size of a house cat. It was garnished with boiled potatoes and lemon. Its antennae made it look almost intelligent, like something that would survive a nuclear holocaust.
Adam said, In colonial times, they would feed lobster to prisoners. It was considered cruel and unusual punishment to serve it more than once a day.
I think we read that essay for school, Valerie laughed. She poured an oyster into her mouth.
A lot of delicacies are disgusting, I said.
You’re not eating, Adam said. He pointed his steak knife at me like an accusation.
Yes I am, I told him. I was thinking about the dried pasta in our pantry in Brooklyn, cooking it with butter and cheese like my mother would when I was little. I was really hungry.
She’s a good Jewish girl, Valerie explained. She’s Kosher.
I’m really not that Jewish, I said.
So you’ve never had lobster, Adam said. He was speaking with a mouth full of meat.
I’d have a bite of steak, I offered.
Valerie took the cracker from her place-setting and broke into one of the claws. These were utensils she had used before. The meat was pointy and pale pink.
Just taste it, she said.
I’m really not hungry, I said.
Here’s a fun idea, Adam told me. How about I give you a thousand dollars to eat your food?
You’re kidding.
I’m serious, he said. Only because I know you’ll enjoy it. And because I like to look. Isn’t that generous of me?
I considered the offer, thought about what I could buy with a thousand dollars: a real winter coat, all my textbooks for next term.
I’m not hungry, I said.
Valerie looked irritated and bored. She rolled a potato around her plate.
I find that hard to believe, Adam said. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and began stacking crisp fifty-dollar bills onto the white tablecloth.
The waiter came to the table and refilled my wine glass. He pretended that he couldn’t see the money.
I was waiting for Valerie to change the subject, save our dinner, but she had recused herself completely. She was studying her split ends.
Don’t be difficult, Adam said. I just want to have a little fun.
Valerie reached across the table, pulled a lobster leg out of its socket and tossed it on my plate.
When I was little, she said, if I didn’t finish my dinner, my father would force me to eat it for breakfast. This is like that.
I picked up a tiny fork and pulled some of the meat out of its shell, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it in my mouth.
Eat your food, Adam said.
I feel like you guys are hazing me, I said.
You think you’ve got it bad, he told me. When I was your age I was eating fifteen-cent top-ramen twice a day and using the computer at the public library. You girls don’t even remember 9/11.
I felt sick to my stomach. I took the napkin from my lap and covered my plate with it, unable to look at the lobster leg.
I’m sorry, I said.
Just go home, Valerie told me.
So I did. I grabbed my sweatshirt and my book bag and walked out onto the hot dark street. I walked twenty blocks to the subway, hopped the turnstile, and took the above-ground train to Brooklyn.
When I realized I was still in possession of Adam’s credit card, I walked to the nail salon on Bedford Avenue. The technician cleaned the dirt from under my fingernails, polished my hands like heirlooms. She massaged my hands with pale blue lotion. I almost cried at how good it felt to be touched in this way.
The white polish on my fingers was still drying when I turned to leave, so I didn’t want to reach into my pocket to tip her. I gestured to the twenty-dollar bill poking out of my tiny denim pocket. She reached in and retrieved it.
I had swiped a dozen micro-doses of psilocybin from Adam’s safe, and that night I decided to take six of them at once. I was sitting on my bed, staring at my hands, and streaming a Radiohead album that came out the year I was born. (Adam’s website had given its 20-year-anniversary reissue the rare “Perfect 10”). I kept telling myself that any second now Valerie would slink into my room in her iridescent party dress and lay her head in my lap.
When I let my eyes relax, I saw cockroaches scattering at the edges of my peripheral vision like tiny lobsters. I closed my eyes and pictured fifty-dollar bills falling on top of me.
Valerie dropped out of NYU. I figured she had left the city, started over at another school. I rented her room fully furnished to a stranger from the internet, a nursing student who was never home.
I had resigned myself to never seeing her again, but the next spring I took an internship at a magazine down the street from Adam’s apartment. I was at Dean & Deluca, picking up salads for my three bosses and a green juice for myself when I spotted Valerie in the coffee line, looking thin and sullen. She had cut her hair short. She wore velour track pants and a white men’s undershirt. It was twenty degrees outside, and for a second I felt worried for her. I remembered that she had just had a birthday—even still, her trust fund wouldn’t kick in for another four years. But then I realized that she must have just popped downstairs from Adam’s apartment.
I thought about saying hello to her. I could have told her that I had finally eaten oysters and saved up for a decent winter coat and lost my virginity to the hot barista, and I had done it all without her. But I didn’t have time for that conversation. My bosses were waiting for me back at the office. Just like Adam was waiting for her.
Copyright © 2025 Anika Jade Levy.