Page 52 of Everyone Is Lying to You

“Right now?”

“Get some food. Clear our heads. Go somewhere that we can talk and lay out what we know that isn’t your rental car. There’s a halfway decent watering hole down the road. And by down the road I mean about twenty miles away.”

“It’s early for a drink.”

“It’s never too early in the desert, and besides they have a rib eye that will knock your teeth out and their drinks are all watered down because they pretend they don’t believe in overindulgence here.”

What a strange woman Olivia is. And convincing. I agree. I’m hungry and spent and I want to get out of my dusty rental car to eat some red meat and sip on a watered-down lager.

It isn’t until we get settled in a booth at a place literally called the Rib Eye that I remember I took a picture of the license plate of the truck that was in the driveway. I pull it up on my phone to show Olivia.

“Is this familiar?”

She squints and then puts on a pair of massive yellow reading glasses. I wonder if she has them in every color to match every suit and every piece of hair flair. If so, the dedication to the vibe is impressive. “I’m not in the habit of memorizing license plates,” she says. “So I’ve got nothing for ya. You’re a reporter though. Don’t you know someone who can search these kinds of things?”

I do actually. Or I did. A friend from a long time ago who used to work for the NYPD who now works in private security.

“It’s harder than you think. I doubt it.” For some reason I still don’t want to show Olivia all of my cards because I’m pretty sure she isn’t showing me all of hers.

“In the meantime, I think you should get writing. Get Rebecca’s story out there. Create a safe space for her to return to.” Olivia helps herself to a Twizzler from the pack I brought inside with me.

Her phone rings. The ringtone is Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

“Inside joke,” she murmurs about the tune, and looks at her screen before pushing a button to send it to voicemail and beckoning the waiter over to our table. She orders a steak that is “so rare it is bleeding out on my plate,” and a cup of chili.

“You have to get the chili.” I do. I match her order except I ask for less gore.

Once the waiter is out of earshot I ask if I can turn on my recorder.

“No recording. But you can write some notes. Let’s talk on background for a bit.”

“I did what you said. I spoke to some of the women at the conference. And one of them told me that there were dangerous men, powerful men, supporting Gray, men who could be after Rebecca now. What do you know about that?”

Olivia nibbles on the end of the Twizzler and then perches it between two fingers as if it’s a lit cigarette.

“There probably are. No…no. That’s not right. There definitely are. You don’t know much about this part of the country, do you, Lizzie?”

I want to say, of course I do. I’m not one of those East Coast snobs who doesn’t “get” the rest of the country, who refers to everything west of Philadelphia as flyover country. But if we’re being honest here, that’s exactly what I am. I grew up in thePhilly burbs, went to college in the city, moved to New York, and haven’t left the tristate area except for vacations for my entire adult life. I know more about the UK from being with Peter than I do about anything between California and Ohio.

So I admit what I don’t know and ask her to explain it to me. Sometimes you need to know exactly when to show your ignorance. Male reporters are terrible at it.

“You all like to think of Silicon Valley when you think of tech. But all those tech companies need you to be the product. They need content. They need users. And this is where they get both. This place is ground zero for it. It’s Valhalla for influencing and digital creating. It’s where the mommy blogs began and where they all died to give birth to the influencers. It’s why I chose to move here from Los Angeles. I saw something in this desert. Everyone I worked with in Hollywood thought I was a fucking moron, but I saw what was coming. My dad worked in the entertainment business in the nineties.”

“What did he do?”

“He was the assistant, the right-hand man, to this big shot music producer who built boy bands. There was a lot of traveling and the head honcho always wanted Dad around so I got homeschooled on the road and the studios paid for it. We’d go all over the country auditioning teenage boys, plucking out the cutest ones with a modicum of talent and nice hair and clear skin. Made them dance and prance and show their hairless little chests. Made them millionaires. You remember that one music video of the band SweetBoyz, the one where they’re all puppets, marionettes, bouncing around on the stage? That’s how I always thinkof my dad’s boss. That motherfucker was the puppeteer. He was pulling all the strings.”

“Where is he now?”

“Prison. Embezzlement. He was a greedy bastard. But brilliant. It would have been any other little girl’s dream, getting so much access to those bands. But those dudes always seemed so silly to me. It wasn’t until I was a little older and my dad wasn’t doing so well anymore that he sat me down and explained what they had done with those boys, how those teams had molded them to be exactly what teenage girls, and even horny moms, wanted. That’s when I understood. I wanted to do what his boss did. It felt like the perfect combination of business and art. So I got a dual degree in management and accounting from UCLA. I got in-state tuition, which I needed because by 2002 we didn’t have that much money. My dad’s job ended when the big guy went to prison. Pop’s cancer treatments were expensive. I started working at different accounting firms and then at talent agencies. Got my law degree at night. I think some people felt sorry for me. They used to see me sitting in the wings at those concerts and in the hotel lobbies while my dad scurried around getting shit done.”

Her hands are flying all over the place, intensely animated. She loves telling her story to me. Most people do. It’s one of the things I learned when I became a journalist. Get someone talking about themselves and 99 percent of them won’t shut up until you ask them to.

“I realized early on that social media was going to be the future of media. And then I found the women here. They werebloggers at first. Their churches encourage women to stay home and have as many kids as possible, but they also encourage journaling and they loved the idea of the blogging. It showcased the lifestyle in a way they liked. It was a way to bring new people in. Come for the beautiful pictures of four blond children pulling eggs out of a chicken’s ass and stay to find out how to save your eternal soul. Plus the girls are gorgeous.”

I take note of the fact that she calls them girls and not women.

“They’re all blond and blue-eyed with skin so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it because they’ve never had a drink or a smoke in their lives. You don’t smoke, do you?”

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