As I walked to the train, I watched the likes roll in. Huda had also forced me to make my account public, so a lot of them were from wannabe influencers, people who want free gifting from Magdelena, men from across the world whose DMs, asking me to meet them in Budapest, Tel Aviv, lingered in my inbox.

I got a few glances from men on the platform as we waited for the train together. Like most women, I’d been getting looks like that since I was a teen. But unlike some women, I was able to harness that power a little bit earlier, to recognize it and use it to my advantage. I knew I was pretty, beautiful even. As a little girl, I’d been told as much by shopkeepers at boutiques, by relatives at family holidays. Later, from older men after they’d had too much to drink. That knowledge was how I climbed to the top of my small high school’s social ladder, the perennial popular girl destined to fall from grace, to topple mightily later in life. Except, I hadn’t. Not yet.

I thought about this as the train jerked its way north, on my way to a date with a man ten years older than me, who was so clearly using his wealth and connections to woo me. I didn’t speak to anyone from Westchester anymore. I had dismissed them as soon as I showed up at NYU. They were part of a Suburban Vera that I wanted to shed as I metamorphosed into City Vera. I followed a few of them on Instagram, though. Their lives seemed stable enough. Most of them worked in finance, or were marrying men working in finance, living lives less interesting than, but somewhat parallel to, mine in the city. What would they think of twenty-seven-year-old Vera, whose power and influence seemed only to be on the verge of growing greater?

Quinn always made fun of me for being popular in high school. I was the only one of our college friends who had been, and in the early years of our friendship he would introduce me as “Vera who was prom queen twice.” I insisted that I wasn’t mean, that I was a benevolent overlord to my Westchester disciples. But that wasn’t true. If I wasn’t an outright bully, I had definitely excluded people, wielded my power over them in order to assume authority. And I asked myself why? Why did I need to do that? Was I just another teen girl with a narcissistic mother who took out her anger and sadness on her more submissive peers? It all seemed so cliché, so afternoon special to me, far from what I wanted to think my psyche was like, that I tried not to dwell on it too much. I pushed it out of my head as I headed into Manhattan.