Page 4 of Nutcracker with Benefits
I shoot a mock glare at Uncle D, and he shrugs. The gift is from him.
“What is it?” Fritz asks. Clara holds it up for the room to see—it’s Forbes magazine’s upcoming edition. On the cover is my face, close-cropped and solemn.
Fritz rolls his eyes and gets back to helping Ricky with the mouse. Despite the tension between me and Fritz, I have to admit he’s a great family man. He’s super patient in helping his son, the shyest kid I have ever known, get his toys set up.
“’Social Media’s Nutcracker’,” Clara reads from the story title. She leans back, the rest of her stocking falling to the floor, forgotten.
“Have you read this?” she asks me.
“A digital version. I haven’t seen it in print yet.”
“You can have my copy when I leave.” My heart drops at the mention of her leaving, a pain I’ve grown used to ignoring. Clara clears her throat. “Now, let’s see here…”
I lean back against Clara, taking the opportunity to press against her side and read over her shoulder.
“’Social media has swept its toxic reputation away, thanks to the team behind the social media company Heartly, spear-headed by Nash Darwish.’ They went very dramatic on this spread.” She lifts the left side towards me, where I can see my own eyes staring back at me again; this time it’s in the glow of a screen, and the rest of my face is hidden behind a laptop.
Clara reads the article, mostly to herself, providing commentary as she goes. “...algorithms discouraging toxic activity, all a part of the coding created by Darwish.”
All right, I hate the idea of the article in general, but these words, especially as read by Clara, make my chest swell.
She knows the story, of course—that in Heartly’s office, under the direction of Rolf, we became obsessed with how to turn social media from a place where negativity was spread to a place where good things happened—without losing audience. Rolf treated it like a puzzle, telling us every step we took was one step closer to cracking the code. He made everything at Heartly a game, and every little piece of the puzzle we figured out was a nut to crack.
“I like this bit about you reframing the hiring process for including more diverse applicants and the work visa program,” she says.
“It was good work,” Uncle D agrees.
A minute later, Clara snorts. “That’s very diplomatic of you.” She points to a line, and I read it. “My birth family and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of topics,” Nash says.
I shrug. “They wanted to talk more about my parents, but fortunately, our PR team vetoed a lot of those questions.”
“Smart,” Clara says, nodding.
The PR people also carefully helped me craft answers that wouldn’t invite questions. It was hard to talk about why the work visa program and computer science camps for kids were so important without bringing up my parents, who are ultra-conservative and restricted my education growing up.
Clara always hated my dad, which was understandable. “I would have used some choice words of my own, but they probably couldn’t print those,” she says.
The final straw for me with my parents had been when Clara and I were sixteen and my dad called her feltene—loose. She didn’t know about that, of course, but the way they treated my sister was enough to have Clara’s hackles up. My sister is the only reason I still have any form of relationship with them—I hope that she sees the light someday. But so far, she’s resistant and spewing as much misogynistic crap as they do.
“Oh my god, we even get a mention! ‘Drosselmeyer has been a father figure to Darwish since he discovered the fifteen-year-old reading books on computer science while his father cleaned the office building.’”
While my dad was cleaning the office building of Heartly, the social media company Rolf founded, he would tell me to sit in an empty office and pray. I wasn’t a troublemaker, but it didn’t take long for me to find programming textbooks in offices and crack them open. Rolf found me one night when he was working late and has nurtured my education ever since, despite my dad’s disapproval.
It wasn’t long after Rolf and I started late-night tutorials that I met Clara. We didn’t know what to make of each other at first—me, a gangly Arabic kid who was often angry at God and my parents, and Clara, a sweet-natured girl with an adoring family.
Clara keeps reading; “’Drosselmeyer and his husband, Craig Cohen, are the found family Darwish needed to encourage his intellectual pursuits. Darwish considers Cohen’s kids, Clara and Fritz, his siblings.’”
She sputters on the last sentence, and Craig chokes on his coffee, too. I had tried to argue against that phrasing because I definitely do not see Clara as my sister, but after a few back-and-forth emails about it, it got to be a he doth protest too much situation, and I let it go.
The line is awkward by itself, but now, in the context of Rolf and Craig knowing about us, it’s downright mortifying.
But the verbiage is forgotten when Clara flips the page. “Awe, look at the photo they included.”
She turns the magazine around to show the room. It’s a picture of Uncle D, Craig, me, and Clara at a gala event last year.
“Which event was this?” Whitney asks, squinting at the page.
Clara flips it back around. “It just says ‘an event in Los Angeles.’” She turns to me. “Do you remember?”
