The Boy Kings

mate” or two or three because the rest of his world was a chaos of technically enabled attention and infamy, a million races to beat others at this or that, in which a new race began as soon as the last one ended. In the constant chase after attention and fame, he might now more than ever need someone who didn’t care who was winning, how many followers he had or what he had said online. Saying soul mates then, in our new world, wasn’t about a real relationship but simply an assertion and desire for such a thing to exist, that there be some substrate of real beyond the screen, much like the sustenance in the form of sloppy joe mix that we had just bought at Walmart, that we must eat because, without it, regardless of how much we livein the digital world, we couldn’t subsist. Perhaps one day soul mate, like friend, would be a category of Facebook relationship, content to be neither anything more, or anything less, than that.
    • • •
    A few weeks after my return, there were rumors of an important new hire that Mark had made to the executive team. That Friday, he convened an All Hands to introduce Sheryl Sandberg, a high-powered, multimillionaire advertising and operations executive from Google, whom Mark said he had been courting for an executive role since the Davos World Economic Forum in January. “Sheryl and I met at a party and we immediately hit it off,” Mark announced. “We began talking for hours. She asked me questions about how I was running the company. I was really impressed with how smart she is.” Mark spoke with an uncharacteristic smile and glow, not flirtatious exactly, perhaps a function of some kind of sense of relief, as if he had been seeking someone like Sheryl for some time. “When I met Sheryl the first thing I said was that she had really good skin,” Mark continued, “and she does,” he said, gesturing toward Sheryl, whose face was admittedly creamy in tone. She was smiling, and didn’t flinch.
    Sitting among my colleagues, I felt bemused and a bit perplexed, as I had never heard Mark comment on anyone’s skin before. He obviously had never spoken about any of the engineers’ skin as making them particularly suited to their role. Mark went on to say that, “Everyone should have a crush on Sheryl,” and some engineers claimed in an engineering-wide email thread immediately after the meeting to have the requisite crushes. Itseemed odd to me, as if all of this kneeling to worship Sheryl was some kind of compensation for the fact that no female employee had ever received such treatment before. At any rate, Sheryl had arrived, and would be occupying the role of chief operations officer. I wasn’t sure what that implied at first, but it turned out to mean that she would handle everything that Mark didn’t want to: essentially, all department operations outside engineering. In addition, with her Google ads background, she would have a prominent role in ads strategy.
    At a one-on-one meeting with Sheryl weeks later, I found out that she had an interest in the topic of women at Facebook and in Silicon Valley generally. In her months-long process of getting to know the company, she scheduled individual meetings with all the women in engineering. (By that point, they numbered about fifteen out of hundreds of engineers, including Maryann, who had been promoted into a position as user experience lead on the engineering design team, and would eventually come to manage the user experience team, a new department that was devoted full time to testing new features and collecting user feedback.)
    Sheryl and I met in a small meeting room off the mini-kitchen on the engineering floor. “I don’t know if you know this, but I do a monthly women’s meeting at my house that is women only, where women in the valley can gather and hear an interesting female speaker and talk with one another,” she said, “so I care about this stuff.” She paused for a moment. “Tell me everything,” she said, directly, leaning forward on the couch where she sat. I liked her forthrightness and the way she looked at me directly, creamy skin and all.
    I told her that I was generally happy in my role as internationalization PM, which I was. I also let her know that there were a few situations involving men in the department that I thought she should know about. For example, one of the engineering directors had been known to proposition women in the company for threesomes; I also had an issue with an