EIGHT
Before the Streamify contract
Maeve
I roll over in bed, which is practically my entire room in my tiny New York City apartment, and pick up my phone. It’s been buzzing incessantly, so loudly that it woke me up even though I didn’t go to bed until two a.m. and it’s now only seven. Last night we got slightly too fucked up and released our third podcast episode, which verged on inappropriate and got five hundred downloads in the first three hours, a new record for us.
But now my phone is positively vibrating with more notifications at once than I can count. Episode download alerts, people tagging me in Instagram videos and TikToks, threads, tweets—everything that could be going off is.
I lean over the edge of my bed and throw a pillow directly at Finn’s face. “Finn! Wake up!”
He groans and throws an arm over his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Doesn’t matter! You need to see this.”
He must hear something in the tone of my voice because he sits up very fast, very suddenly, and turns those light blue eyes toward me. For a moment, with him looking at me so intently, his hair mussed and the imprints of my spare sheets across the side of his face, it feels like we’re having a first “morning after.” That would never happen. But I falter, thrown, because for an instant I wish we were having a morning-after moment. Even though we’re having a moment that is much better, more irreplaceable, our fifteen minutes of fame per Andy Warhol’s wise assessment. But I’m stunned by the intensity with which I briefly want that something more, something that I thought I’d convinced myself I don’t need.
“Maeve. What is it?” His words cut through my thoughts. It’s just his eyes that make me think confusing things, really. I need to get my head on straight.
I hold up my phone. “We’re viral. Like, really viral.”
Finn leans in to look at my phone and pulls himself up on the bed. I’m under the covers and he’s on top, our legs tangled but with the thin barrier of my sheet between, his arm behind me as he watches my phone. He’s so close I can smell his morning breath, and I’m sure he can smell mine. But we’re close enough that it’s okay, I don’t care, even though in the back of my mind I think maybe, just maybe, I might start to.
Suddenly Finn reaches out and covers the phone. “Wait. Let’s guess.”
“Guess what?”
“How many downloads.” He leans his head back in thought. “I think five thousand,” he says as he climbs under the covers with me.
Without saying a word, I tuck myself under his arm, against his bare chest, me in my tank top and boxers. “I guess fifty.”
“Thousand?”
I turn toward him, so close with the way we’re lying that I can barely see him, only the details of him. The slight scar on his chest from when he fell into a fence, the stubble on his chin, the underside of his eyelashes, longer than a boy’s lashes had any right to be. I always assume I look worse like this, at a strange angle, so close. But maybe if you like someone enough, they always look good. “Look how many notifications I have! I don’t even want to see your phone.”
Finn looks down at the floor. “It’s probably dead.”
I’m sure it’s dead, because he would be getting ten times as many notifications as I am. I open my phone and it feels like time stands still for a moment while we check the downloads number. I don’t feel Finn exhale under me until I’m looking at the screen and trying to figure out if this could possibly be a practical joke. Maybe one of my sisters learned to code? There’s seemingly nothing Claude doesn’t excel at, so it’s totally possible.
“Is that real?” I refresh the page, and the number goes up by five thousand: 3,567,310 downloads.
“Fuck,” Finn swears quietly.
I turn my phone face down. Then when it keeps vibrating, Finn reaches out and powers it down all the way. He throws it onto his makeshift bed on the floor. A twin-size air mattress that we only half filled last night before collapsing, drunk on the episode and too many glasses of wine and weed seltzers. I want him to say something. His parents are certifiably famous, and he’s adjacent to that in the way that all children of celebrities are. He can make it through four years at a normal college with me, but if he steps into a nice club in New York or LA, he’s getting photographed by the paparazzi. He’s one fall or jump away from actual fame. And this was a fucking leap.
So when he wraps his arm around me and pulls me close before letting loose a fake scream, my body sags with relief. I giggle, but then push forward and ask my real question. “I guess we’re viral. Are you disappointed?”
Finn tucks my head in close to him. “No. It was inevitable with you; I knew that. You just didn’t believe me.”
“You never said that. Why would you have done it then? It’s the opposite of your whole ‘I’m not my mother’ vibe.”
He squeezes me tighter. We were never like this in college. But somehow, since coming to the city, we went from having walk-of-shame brunches to telling three and a half million people how to give oral sex to cuddling half clothed in bed. Maybe now that we’ve pledged to the world we’re just friends and looking for Mr. and Mrs. Right, we don’t have to do that awkward dance that most male-female friendships have. I just need to tell that to the chills running up and down my arms.
Finn notices my goosebumps and rubs my arm absentmindedly while he thinks about what I said. He must think I’m cold. Because it would be laughable to think we’d ever be together. “With you, I thought it could be fun. You want to actually help people, not just cash out and have your face on a billboard. For that, with you I’ll let the fame happen.”
Finn has the kind of face that is destined to be on a billboard. It’s always been obvious to me that he would ultimately become someone , and when we’re hanging out alone it feels almost criminal that I get to stare at him for hours, just me. I’m pretty. I know that I am, and on good days, most days lately, I do feel that way. But sometimes intrusive thoughts sneak in and I start thinking things like I am now: You could never be on a billboard. You’re not your sisters. Your face is forgettable. People are just tuning in to watch Finn. And I have to stop and consciously remind myself that, no, I love my hair. I love my freckles, that multiply in the summer, that just the other night Finn tried to count but gave up after 237. My skin is clear and bright, which back in middle school I would have given anything for. I like myself. I try to repeat it in my head in moments like this. I like myself. I am beautiful. I am grateful. But I hope there’s a day when I don’t have to remind myself to do that anymore.
“Should we get brunch?” I ask. “I think I need coffee and a massive amount of grease before I confront the contents of this episode.”
Finn sits up, and my shoulder feels cold where the warmth of his chest was just flush against it. “Let’s leave the phones off. I don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say about it.”
Our episode detailed exactly how to give oral sex. The descriptions were graphic and our arguments over technique were heated. At one point I thought Finn might demand we prove the validity of our strategies. I had planned on the show being more relationship advice than sex how-tos, but I was fresh off talking to my sister about yet another man who didn’t know how to get the job done, and then Finn tried to say that not all women knew their stuff either, and suddenly our iPhones were propped against cups, cameras on, and we had the rented recorder I signed out from Columbia flashing red. If we had waited until the morning to put the episode out, I never would have.
So, phones off sounded pretty good to me. “Agreed. I don’t want to know if I’m fired until Monday.”
I walk to the bathroom while Finn pulls his clothes from the day before back on in my room. I have four roommates, since on a college therapist’s salary I can not afford a New York City apartment. I can barely afford a room in one, and my parents think it’s ridiculous that I didn’t move back home and find a job in Pittsburgh. I don’t know what made me want to bleed money on New York, but being here feels like possibility. I don’t have the special something my sis ters so clearly do—I spent my childhood trying to do my homework in a moving minivan as my mom shuttled us between their various events and awards ceremonies—but here, maybe, I could find a place that was different than the one on the sidelines I’d always thought I would have.
And so when, senior year, Finn asked if I was moving to New York after school, I said, Of course, I move next week .
This podcast … it’s definitely something . Alone in the bathroom I dance around, overcome with euphoria at how absolutely wild this is. Suddenly, Finn flings open the door.
“I could have been naked!” I shriek.
He just laughs and steps into the tiny bathroom with me, and I see he’s holding my laptop. “I could hear you dancing. You need music.”
I reach over and give the computer my fingertip, then he opens YouTube and types P-A, and that’s all it takes for my favorite song, “Paper Rings,” to pop up. He hits Play, and it’s blasting, definitely waking up my roommates, but I couldn’t care less, because we’re dancing wildly, and he’s taking my hands and spinning me around, trying not to knock my computer off the toilet seat, and we’re laughing. Because Tell Me How You Really Feel is definitely the start of something.