Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
When I get home early that evening, I collapse on the couch and google Zoe Grant.
I’ve done this a handful of times since graduating college, but never in the last few years. I gave up when I began to feel like a stalker with nothing to show for my efforts. I always thought it was odd Zoe didn’t have LinkedIn, but who was I to judge? I haven’t been on true social media since my senior year of high school—when I deleted Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook in one fell swoop.
But this time, the search results pull up something new: feature articles Zoe has written for The New York Times Book Review.
I make a small noise of shock.
Zoe works for The New York Times. Zoe’s a writer for The New York Times.
It makes absolute perfect sense.
I pull myself off the couch and meander to the kitchen, reading her reviews. They’re smart, witty, incisive. She’s mostly kind, but occasionally, I come across a sharp line of criticism that gives me full-body shivers, and my empathetic heart stretches out to those authors. I can relate; I’ve been on the other side of a Zoe Grant criticism, and it’s usually so poignant, all you can do is bow your head and accept it while thanking her for thinking of you at all.
I pour a soda over ice and head back to the couch, still reading. The more I read, the easier it is to call forth what she was like.
My friendship with Zoe made absolutely no sense on paper. She wrote short stories during study hall, had blue streaks in her brown hair but wouldn’t indulge in a manicure. I, by comparison, hadn’t shown a naked fingernail in public since age twelve and spent my study halls organizing my Pinterest fashion boards. During the first month of senior year, I remember Zoe—the new girl—scribbling furiously in a notepad all the time, like she was beholden to some sort of ticking clock. It wasn’t until I caught the word princess on her notepad followed by something like Elthior that I realized she wasn’t doing homework; she was writing fiction.
I pondered this all day and night, obsessing over what this princess of Elthior might dress like. Was she a utilitarian, warrior-type princess? Or did she prefer feminine ball gowns? What was the culture of fashion in Elthior? How expansive was the princess’s closet?
The next day, I worked up the courage to talk to Zoe for the first time. I asked if I could read her story—while her face bloomed tomato red—and then explained why. So I could draw the characters’ outfits.
Oh my gosh, Zoe said, clutching her notebook to her chest. You’re secretly weird too! Which might have been the first time I’d ever felt seen by someone my age.
I didn’t have any close friends and hadn’t for the duration of high school. My family spent every moment I wasn’t in school at Sea Island—a luxury beach resort in Georgia—where I kept the company of college-aged staff and wealthy adults who mostly talked about their real estate portfolios. During the summer between eighth grade and freshman year, friend groups formed, and I wasn’t invited to become part of one. I didn’t love sports, or drama, or band, and it didn’t help that freshman year, I started dating a senior (who took a shine to me because he’d known my older brother from the lacrosse team). I hung out with his friends until they all graduated, and he subsequently dumped me.
By the time sophomore year rolled around, I’d established an aura of aloof, distant, other. Social media was being piloted that decade; I focused on my online persona instead. Crafting it, curating it. Which was addicting, and rewarding in doses, but it didn’t solve my truest dilemma: nobody actually wanted to be my friend in real life.
On the handful of occasions I got invited to something, there were so many inside jokes I didn’t understand. I was never good at making people laugh, voicing an opinion, getting others to open up. I’d usually just clam up and leave early, then go home and watch the fun play out online instead. It was social anxiety, through and through, but back then, I couldn’t name it so easily. Interacting with followers who liked me online was better. I could take the time to consider my words, analyze every detail of what I showed to the world.
I could curate myself in a way people responded to positively.
By the time Zoe appeared at Woodmont High, I’d given up on finding a best friend in high school, and certainly didn’t expect one in her. But she did let me read the short story, and I did draw designs for the Princess of Elthior that night. When I showed them to Zoe during our next study hall, she loved them, even put them on her Tumblr feed with the story itself.
After that, Zoe Grant became my best friend. We’d go to Friday night football games together covered in red paint. We’d gossip over our English teacher’s toupee. She’d write stories; I’d illustrate the characters’ outfits.
And eventually, Zoe told me what happened between her best friend in Austin and her twin brother, Will—whom I tolerated but didn’t often speak to directly. Mainly because he was sullen and unfriendly, but also because he’d hurt Zoe’s feelings by stealing away her best friend and he hadn’t even realized.
I invited her to Sea Island with my family over fall break. When we started applying to colleges, Zoe informed me I’d love the University of Texas. I didn’t think I’d get in, but Zoe convinced me to apply anyway. She wanted to go somewhere more prestigious but never made me feel dumb for not being as smart as her, for not having a chance at the places she was applying. (In return, I never offered opinions on Zoe’s outfit choices, even though I wanted to.)
It was my favorite year of high school. My parents even released me from the usual Sea Island obligation over spring break so I could go on the senior trip with the rest of my class. I was determined for it to be the best trip ever. I wanted to finally feel like I had become part of the group, to make memories and remember high school fondly.
And then Will Grant and I kissed on the beach, and the only thing I became was another villain in Zoe’s story.
A sharp rap startles me enough to drop my phone on my face.
“Ow,” I grunt, my nose scrunching.
“Josie!”
I turn my head sideways. My friends Giovanna and Leonie are in the middle of my rosebushes, their faces pressed up to my living room window. Behind them, the sun is dropping. Gio points at it emphatically and taps her wrist three times.
“Coming!” I shout, launching off the couch. As quickly as possible, I change into shorts, a tank top, and my tennis shoes, and then I’m at the kitchen sink, filling up a water bottle. They meet me by my garage door. I strap on my helmet and check my tire pressure.
Giovanna is a slender, gorgeous Italian woman with dark hair and olive skin. I met her during cycling class—a single-hour PE credit we took when we were college sophomores, which we proceeded to make our entire personality. Her girlfriend is Leonie, a naturally blond and waiflike full-time yoga instructor who met Giovanna a couple years ago during a one-on-one yoga class that ended unprofessionally, as the story goes. They have a combined following of one hundred thousand people on Instagram and are considered the lesbian darlings of Austin.
“Let’s get going before we lose the sunlight,” Leonie says when I’m ready. “I still want to get in twenty miles if we can.”
“You lead,” I say, and Leonie takes off.
“Everything okay?” Gio throws me a concerned glance as she hooks her leg over the bike and straightens her handlebars.
“I’m fine.” I climb onto my own black-and-pink Liv bicycle. “Just distracted. This will help.”
“Did you get hydrangeas?”
I follow her gaze to the flower beds that line the left side of my place. Four giant hydrangea bushes are in bloom, the petals shifting in an ombré from pearl white to baby blue. Beneath them, a fresh bed of mulch has been laid.
“Huh.” I stare at this addition to my foliage for the first time.
“When did your landscaper come?”
I think on it. “Two weeks ago?”
“Josie,” Gio says.
“Gio,” I say.
“And you only just noticed?” She rolls her eyes and starts pedaling. “Does your brain ever turn off?”
“Honestly? No.”
I look back at the hydrangeas one last time, pleased now that I’ve taken the time to notice them. My landscaper has been servicing this house since Cami and I were just renters and the property belonged to our landlord. We moved in first thing after college graduation. Cami lives with her fiancé now, but I grew so attached to the house that when our landlord put it on the market four years later, I made sure to offer.
I pedal behind my friends, settling into the rhythm as we cruise down one street, then the next. With the sun creeping lower and the wind slipping past my skin, the scent of barbecue in the air, the feel of the rubber beneath my grip, I’m back in the present. Here. Now. I’m twenty-seven years old, with a mortgage and a business and a best friend who’s getting married soon and a biker gang.
Today was an off day, but everyone has those. Tomorrow, I’ll refocus. No more spite, no more vulnerability. Or shame, or self-consciousness, or doubt. My reunion with Will Grant is just a means to an end, and that end is: B Corp Certification.
We ride hard, making up for the twenty minutes of lost time by pushing ourselves against the sunset, but it’s exactly the workout I need. At 8:26, we climb off our bikes at the Austin Beer Garden and lock up, ordering beers and wedging our salt-kissed bodies onto the end of a family-style picnic bench outside.
“Should I be worried my older brother’s teenage son wants to do his own laundry?” Leonie asks with no preamble.
Gio turns sideways to face her girlfriend. “ Why do you know this about him?”
“Remember when I house-sat last week? I watched his kids and their dog? Well, I thought doing the laundry would be a kind gesture, and the girl was nice about it, but the boy, like, freaked out when I went to grab his laundry hamper.”
“Why are you calling them the girl and the boy ?” I ask.
“Because I can’t remember their names.” Leonie’s eyes widen comically. “It’s either Steven and Taylor or Stephanie and Tyler. We didn’t speak much, it wasn’t written anywhere, and we never directly addressed each other.” She takes a sip of her pilsner. “If it wasn’t obvious, my brother and I aren’t close.”
“Josie, do you know your niece’s and nephew’s names?” Gio asks.
I frown. “Meyer and…”
“Ha!” Leonie points at me. “It’s hard !”
“My brother lives in North Carolina,” I retort. “I hardly ever see his family. And anyway, I remembered. The girl’s name is Poppy. Their names combined sound like a lemon poppy-seed muffin. It’s a memory trick.”
“The fact that you both need a memory trick to remember your older brothers’ children’s names.” Gio rolls her eyes.
“I’ll have to come up with one for Thanksgiving,” Leonie says.
“Anyway.” Gio traces the rim of her beer glass. “He’s a teenager. That math is totally mathing for Tyler-slash-Steven.”
“To show your support of his sexual exploration, you should buy him some new socks for Christmas,” I say with a grin.
“Revenant has great socks.” Gio winks at me. “And we have a discount code.”
“Don’t you dare,” I mutter, my voice darkening with an empty threat, “let Leonie’s older brother’s teenage son masturbate for twenty percent off in this economy.”
“Gosh, sometimes I forget about the CEO thing.” As soon as she says it, Leonie immediately pops her head up and glances around. As if she’s worried she spoke too loud and now I’m about to get swamped by paparazzi. (Which does not happen, now or ever. People are more likely to want a picture with the two of them than with me.)
“Sometimes I forget, too,” I say. Which isn’t true, but I suppose I’m trying to make Leonie feel better about the fact that she doesn’t look at me and think chief executive officer. “To be honest, founding Revenant was mostly an accident.”
Giovanna watches me, her expression thoughtful. “I know that’s what you always say, J, but I don’t buy it and I never have. You can act nonchalant when you’ve got helmet hair and sweat around your crotch—”
“So, every other day,” Leonie interjects.
“—but you don’t become a CEO by accident. You care, and you try, and you want. Just like the rest of us.” Gio winks at me again, this time like she’s in on a secret I’m hiding.
Maybe she’s right, but none of this felt intentional when I started out. The first few designs I posted on Instagram when I was a junior in college—on a secret account—took off right away. Before I knew it, I wasn’t posting only my illustrated designs anymore, but the actual clothing I’d sewn on a machine. Then I was doing drops, making money. Nervously answering questions, showing my face on stories: Where do I get my fabric? How did I learn how to sew? How old am I, and what contour do I use, and what do I study in school?
After a whole year, I finally let the followers know my name. They could see that it was me behind Revenant. Me, Josephine Davis. A twenty-one-year-old college senior with a lucrative side hustle ballooning by the day. It was me they wanted to see modeling the clothes, testing the designs. Revenant was me, and I was Revenant, and together we were a brand, something new and exciting and wholly different from the half-baked, aloof It Girl I became in high school.
But as soon as I realized what was happening—that people’s opinions of me were also their opinions of my designs, and vice versa—I took myself out of the spotlight, where I’ve stayed ever since. It was the only way I knew how to protect myself from criticism. To carry on, to believe I wasn’t a doomed failure, even when a design I loved didn’t sell or a perfectly legitimate business critique put me in a spiral about my self-worth.
But at that point, it didn’t matter. Everyone knew my face and my name. I became another archetype: female founder. And throughout my twenties, I watched as the media caricatured me.
I’ve never been anyone’s real-life inspiration. That, I firmly believe. But one thing I’ve always been is everyone’s favorite stranger to follow.
“How’s the bachelorette planning going?” Gio unclips her silver helmet as we climb off our bikes. It’s nine thirty now and the two of us are back at my house.
“That question needs a content warning,” I mutter.
She laughs. “I’m here to help, aren’t I?”
“Everything’s been ordered,” I say, passing through my kitchen to the main area of the house.
My table is an array of pink and white, stacked with cowboy hats, plastic straws, feather boas, shot glass necklaces, a white sash, iced sugar cookies shaped like tequila bottles with Down the hatch, down the aisle! carefully scripted in frosting by a local bakery. On my couch, I’ve lined up the hangover kits: mini packs of Advil, Liquid I.V. supplements, Band-Aids, eye masks, individually wrapped makeup wipes. On the coffee table: tote bags I custom ordered with each bridesmaid’s name. On the floor: a bachelorette sign I’m only halfway finished painting, outlined on a piece of butcher paper I got from an art supply store.
“When it’s my turn for this shit,” Giovanna breathes, “I want to go to a spa here in town with, like, four local friends, and then get cocktails before we fall asleep in our own beds.”
“When it’s my turn for this shit,” I reply, “I want to spend the day on Lake Travis with no bachelorette props and exclusively drink Corona.”
“Deal.”
“Do you want to paint the sign or stuff the tote bags?” I magnanimously offer.
“I’ll paint,” Gio says. “You stuff.”
We get to work, and Gio selects a Spotify playlist to keep us company. “This one’s called ‘Country Pop Hits—Singers Not Yet Canceled,’” she says.
“Sounds promising.”
“So, about those hydrangeas.” Gio dips a paintbrush into the pink paint and eyes the faint pencil tracings I marked on the butcher paper. She’s kneeling over the sign, elbows on the carpet. “How many household tasks are you currently outsourcing?”
“All of them.” I grab a tote bag. This one’s for Mariana, Cami’s cousin. “I have a landscaper, a house cleaner, a pest guy, and someone helping me with minor renovations.”
“Like what?”
“A garbage disposal!” I announce enthusiastically, stuffing Mariana’s tote bag with a shot glass necklace. “Now I won’t have to use a plunger in my kitchen sink!”
“Remind me why you didn’t buy a house from a decade more recent than the thirties?”
“I like this place.” I look around at the sunny yellow walls, the old hardwood floors. “It’s homey.”
Gio makes a humph noise and keeps painting. “Have you furnished Cami’s old room yet?”
“I will, as soon as I have a guest. But I never have guests.”
“Not even male guests?” Gio asks.
“Why would a male guest stay in the guest room?”
“He wouldn’t, ideally.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem, Josie,” Gio says, her voice exasperated, “is you own a house you’ve lived in for six years and a company you’ve been heading up for seven. Those are very impressive facts. But you haven’t dated anyone since you and Clay broke up after college—which is just fucking absurd, because you are gorgeous and also accidentally hilarious. I mean, as long as you aren’t talking about inventory. You bore me to tears when you talk about inventory. But, like, even back in college, I don’t think I ever saw you get drunk enough to take a man home from the bar. You’ve never made a single impulsive decision in my presence.”
I flinch and briefly squeeze my eyes shut.
Gio doesn’t know about the impulsive decision I made in high school that sort of ruined the concept for me. The only person I met after high school whom I told about that is Camila.
“What exactly are you getting at?” I ask.
“Don’t you ever wish you were living a little bit more like a twenty-something with a tasteless wardrobe and a perpetual hangover who doesn’t have it all figured out?”
“First of all, wardrobes are personal. There’s no such thing as tasteless, in my opinion.”
“Okay, Grace Kelly.”
“And second, I do not have it all figured out,” I retort, shoving the sparkly cowboy hat into the tote bag. It doesn’t fit.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“You’re the one in a stable relationship.”
“You should try it. Codependence is sexy.” She turns and shoots me a wink.
“Do you know the look I get from most men when they find out who I am?” I tie the string of the cowboy hat to the strap and put Mariana’s party bag in a corner. “It’s like…” I look at the ceiling, thinking back on all the occasions over the course of my singledom in which a man has hit on me. “It’s like the fact that I have a CEO title instantly emasculates them. I can see the change on their face when I say it, and any flirtation is squashed from there.”
“That’s a them problem. Besides. I can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but not all men are like that. You have to find someone so secure in their manhood that your professional authority is just part of your charm.”
Instantly, and against my will, my thoughts draw back to Will Grant. How he’d admitted he was professionally intrigued by my business model . The way he stood up when I walked in or out of a room. Like a modern man and an eighteenth-century English viscount combined.
“What’s got you so focused on my love life?” I ask.
“We’re going to be twenty-eight next year. That’s, like, officially our late twenties. ”
“The horror,” I deadpan.
“Camila’s getting married, J!” She gesticulates, and a splotch of pink paint flicks off her brush and onto my carpet. “Fucking married! And your little social media fashion brand is about to open its first physical store, and Leonie’s talking about taking out a loan so she can open her own yoga studio! What am I doing?”
“Single-handedly carrying the Rare Beauty PR list on your back?”
“And delivering groceries!” she reminds me. “I’m the poster child for the gig economy. By the way, is this sign supposed to say Cami Gets Slammied? ”
“She picked that out, not me,” I grumble.
“Frankly, I’m surprised Camila Sanchez is letting you plan a single thing.”
“The whole itinerary is a secret,” I remind her, starting on my third bag. “Just not the coordinated outfits, or the slogans, or the props.”
“So, the branding, Camila controlled.” She throws me a grin, a smudge of paint already drying on her cheek. “Makes sense.”
“And yet you claim,” I say, pointing a flamingo-pink penis straw at Gio’s face while her expression contorts in lesbian horror, “that I’m the one who can’t leave work at the office.”
“Prove me wrong,” she challenges. “Do something reckless and youthful and emotional and impulsive.”
“Maybe I will.”