“Hey, I’m kidding. If you really need something, you can text me, and I’ll help you figure it out. But I promise it’s not as hard as it looks.”

“Okay.”

The two women got to work, Alex walking them through the ins and outs of their analytics dashboard. As the party’s Director of Social Media Strategy—an impressive title, undermined by the fact that she ran a team of exactly three and collected a barely livable salary—Alex lived and died by that dashboard. It was the heartbeat of the Worker’s Horizon Party: its relevance, its reach, its ability to convert catchy videos and timely memes into actual voter registration. They had exploded in popularity four years ago when she helped Carter Stephens, one of the party’s earliest candidates, go ultra-viral for his impassioned speech the night before Philadelphia’s mayoral election. He lost by a slim margin, but overnight, the party went from 5,000 national members to 270,000—and for the first time since her undergrad years, Alex felt like she had a real purpose.

There was a language to politics that engrossed her, the perpetual challenge of finding the right combination of words to sell your ideas. It didn’t matter what was true on a data sheet or a survey, it mattered what people believed was true, and the analytics gave her a constant, real-time view on how well the party was doing at the game of perception.

“That’s basically it,” Alex said after giving Clara a brief-but-comprehensive tour of the dashboard. “I mean, there’s more, but you don’t need to know that stuff for vacation coverage. You just basically have to make sure our accounts don’t burn down.”

“And the new video script is—”

“Yes, I’m getting the rest of the content over to Jackie before I leave, don’t worry.” Alex balanced being polite and encouraging with the frequent impatience she felt toward junior staffers who clearly did not read her emails in full. “It’s on my list to finish the research today.”

“Okay,” Clara said, tentatively closing her laptop. “Thank you for going over all that. I’ll let you get back to your video.”

“I’m here until five. I’ll probably be in the conference room until then. Just DM me before you come in next time, in case I’m filming?”

“Yes, of course.”

Alex did not point out that this was office protocol for the social media department. Instead, she smiled in a neutral, distracted way, eager to have the room to herself again.

Two more days, Alex thought.