Two
DID COLE HUTCHESON, mid-level production editor at a mid-level commercial video company, seem like he would be the brother of a certifiable hero and internet sensation?
Umm, no .
Cole didn’t possess anything you might call star power .
In fact, he was one of those people you really didn’t notice much. Unless he was actively irritating you—interrupting you in a meeting, for example, or asking you to do something that was technically his job as if you were his secretary (which you most definitely were not)—he was just kind of… there.
The idea that Cole was the brother of Puppy Love?
Mind-boggling.
And yet, who was I to complain?
If my slightly superior work colleague wanted to help me not get fired, I was hardly in a position to say no. Was it my fault if he had some kind of beef with his brother?
But guess what the beef was?
His brother was too awesome.
This guy had the coolest nickname in the world, for one: Hutch.
And things went downhill from there.
“He’s a total badass,” Cole explained, making me write it all down. “He’s morally upstanding and physically unstoppable. He does two hundred push-ups a day. He can hold his breath underwater for three minutes. He has never had a cavity. He’s more of a machine than a human. He just goes around all day doing good deeds.”
“So he’s… too likable?”
“He’s the opposite of likable! He’s perfect.”
“Not sure those are opposites.”
“He’s totally serious all the time. And he’s not a talker. He never talks. He never has fun. His main hobby is frowning.”
“His hobby is frowning?”
“He has no inner life,” Cole went on. “He’s all exterior, no interior.”
“Everybody has an inner life,” I argued.
“Not Hutch,” Cole said, like Trust me . “He just works out, drinks water, eats healthy, and rescues people all day long. He never drinks. He won’t even have one beer. And he hasn’t dated anyone in a year.”
“So?” I said. That could happen.
“Wait till you see him.”
“What?”
Cole shrugged. “He’s good-looking, okay? A guy that good-looking doesn’t stay single unless he hates love.”
“You think he hates love?”
“I’m just saying,” Cole said. “His life choices speak louder than words.”
Huh. “I haven’t dated anyone in a year. Do I hate love?”
“I don’t know,” Cole said. “Do you?”
It was a good question.
Maybe.
A year. I hadn’t noticed until I said it: I’d been single for a year.
But I hadn’t thought I hated love . I’d thought I was just recovering from it.
You couldn’t hate love, could you? Was that even allowed?
But, actually… what had love ever done for me? Other than frustrate, exhaust, mislead, and disappoint me? Hadn’t it just been a waste of time and energy? Maybe I’d been too gullible. Watched too many Disney movies. Imprinted on too many nineties rom-coms.
Maybe I should have been a little more discerning.
“I don’t think I hate love,” I finally said to Cole. “But that’s actually not a bad idea.”
I PERSONALLY HAD been jilted one year ago by my fiancé, the now-very-famous Lucas Banks. Who had been a perfectly nice unsuccessful musician for years—until one of his TikTok videos blew up on the very same night he asked me to marry him.
Truly: the ring had been on my finger about three seconds before his phone started buzzing with notifications that a song he’d posted that morning had hit 100,000 views. People were sharing it. And duetting it—adding instruments and harmonies. At first just ordinary people—but then, suddenly, Noah Kahan jumped in, and before dinner was done, it had over a million. Views. In one day.
I was as excited as anyone, at first. Lucas and I sat in that fancy restaurant until closing time, hunched over his phone, our brand-new engagement fully forgotten as we watched the numbers climb and witnessed him making it big in real time—meeting eyes over and over in astonishment, like Can this be happening?
Next, Lucas had talent coaches reaching out and sponsorship offers with agencies—and his whole life just changed.
In weeks .
Some folks who make it big on TikTok only have one song—or, honestly, just seventeen seconds of a song. Some of them don’t even know how to sing at all—have never even been in a recording studio. I read an article with one manager describing a guy with millions of fans—who couldn’t even keep time. She flew all the way to New Jersey to sign him… and then she left empty-handed.
But Lucas was the real deal. He’d been writing songs since middle school, and he played piano and guitar and harmonica, and he had a whole backlog of songs he could release, one right after the other. When his big chance came—he grabbed it with both hands.
I was happy for him. I was .
But it wasn’t exactly a journey I could go on with him . I was working full time at the University of North Texas back then, in their advancement department, making fundraising videos. I couldn’t suddenly just abandon my standard forty-hour workweek, pack up, and take off like a roadie. I was an adult.
Lucas hit the road alone, playing clubs and filming more videos, and then he got invited to open for the Jonas Brothers on tour, and then he was just… gone all the time. I saw more of him on my phone than in real life.
Maybe it was inevitable that he would cheat on me.
Did everybody else see that coming?
It’s probably a good thing that we never got around to going through with the wedding. Once the frenzy started, he just couldn’t make time to sit down with the calendar. We never set a date, and I didn’t pressure him. I kept telling myself we had a whole lifetime to make it happen.
But then came the internet scandal where Lucas was photographed canoodling with Lili Ventura—herself newly married—and the photos started showing up on gossip sites.
By showing up , I mean avalanching .
Sites I would never have noticed, by the way. But then people started texting me marked-up screenshots of Lucas’s hand on Lili Ventura’s ass, circled with commentary like, IS LUCAS HAVING AN AFFAIR??? and HOW DARE HE OMG!!!
Lili Ventura got the brunt of the internet judgery, to be honest. Lucas somehow got a pass.
But not from me.
I obsessed over the pictures, A Beautiful Mind style.
How could I not?
Did Lucas have his arm draped silkily over Lili Ventura’s shoulder in the red carpet line at the Grammys? Were they holding hands in that crowd shot by the entrance? And did he grind up behind her in that pic at the Grammys after-party?
I was no FBI analyst, but… yes to all.
The night it all blew up, I texted him in LA with no preamble: Hey. Are you cheating on me with Lili Ventura?
To no one’s surprise but mine, he didn’t reply.
The next day he called, sounding hoarse, and said, “Let’s talk when I get home.”
But we didn’t really need to talk.
I could tell from his voice. And the five hundred photos on the internet.
“It’s better to know now,” my cousin Beanie had insisted, and she was probably right.
Apparently, that was a full year ago—and now I was well into my current project of thriving anyway . I’d kicked Lucas out, and bought all new bedding, and taken up crochet. In a late-night compulsive urge for instant self-improvement, I’d cut my own bangs with a pair of kitchen scissors. I’d purchased an air fryer, developed an audiobook addiction, and changed day jobs, from making promo videos for a university to… another job making promo videos. For anyone who hired us.
I was fine.
It was a relief, to be honest. I was never cut out to be fame-adjacent. And there were upsides. Breaking up meant I’d never have to sit quietly and pretend to be enraptured while Lucas played his guitar at me again. Or listen to him parse a conversation with his agent for three hours over dinner. Or—best of all—ever have to go to another awards show.
Awards shows were the worst.
For me, in particular. Because I was basically the opposite of everything that’s valuable at an awards show. I wasn’t famous, or rich, or stunningly gorgeous, or even particularly talented.
All I had, ultimately, was my connection to Lucas. Which wasn’t nearly enough to protect me.
I learned this the hard way at my very first Billboard Music Awards the first year Lucas was famous. I was so proud of him, and I felt sweetly giddy at the prospect of doing something so glamorous. I went shopping and found a vintage-y, floral-print dress that I, personally, thought was gorgeous. I had my hair done and my nails painted. I moisturized my calves .
I fully expected to feel like Cinderella at the ball.
And guess what? I did. At first.
Until I started getting texts that the internet hated my dress.
Photos of me next to Lucas started popping up all over even before the show was over with questions like, Why did Lucas Banks bring his mother to the Billboard Awards? and Who is the frumpy lady with Lucas Banks? and Is Lucas Banks dating Mrs. Doubtfire?
Sorry—did you miss the one where someone thought I was Lucas’s mother ?
I was twenty-six . And he was four years older than me!
And, for the record, none of those comments was actually true. I did not—and do not —look like Mrs. Doubtfire.
Now you’re wondering what I do look like.
For a long time, that was a hard question for me to answer.
I don’t know. I just looked… pleasant.
Unremarkable, but friendly—like your nonthreatening best friend. Five-five. Collar-length brown hair. Arms, legs, boobs—the usual. The single most remarkable thing about me was that I had nondescript hazel-ish eyes with a blurry little pie-piece section in one iris that was light brown. And it wasn’t even that noticeable. I never even noticed anymore. And as far as I knew, Lucas had never noticed at all.
Which was probably lucky, in the end. The last thing I needed was some song about me called “Pie Eyes” or something.
The point is, the most unusual thing about me was something you could see only if you were really, really looking.
And none of us were. Myself included.
I guess I was kind of like those before-and-after pictures of women who’ve had cosmetic surgery where you’re like, “Why did she do that to herself? She was fine before.”
I was the “fine before.”
Or, at least, I’d thought I was.
Until the entire internet disagreed.
Did I cry myself to sleep that night? And declare I’d never leave the house again? And then wake up the next day and immediately decide to remedy my frumpiness by starting what you might generously describe as a “starvation diet”?
Like you wouldn’t believe.
Have you ever heard of those starvation experiments they did back in the 1940s with conscientious objectors to the war? The ones where the men ate so few calories that they lost their minds a little—and one of them accidentally-on-purpose chopped off some of his own fingers?
That was the regime I decided on.
In fact, I watched a whole documentary on it. They gave the men in those studies just over 1,500 calories per day.
So I set my own limit at a thousand.
If those guys had gone crazy, I was going to go crazier .
Which felt, in the moment, like a power move.
My goals were twofold: (1) to be a size zero—or less, and (2) to never let the tops of my thighs touch each other again.
It was such an odd idea, when you think about it: that I could hurt the world back by hurting myself.
But it was the best I could come up with at the time.
I’ll fast-forward and tell you that I did make it to a size zero—almost—and I did stop my thighs from touching—and all it required was obsessive dedication and singular focus to the exclusion of all else.
I never wore a printed fabric again, either. From that awards show on, I wore black jeans and a black T-shirt every damn day without fail.
Black socks and underwear, too.
And that was that. I lived that way for a full year: cranky, hungry, obsessed with all the food I wasn’t eating, and hiding in plain sight.
I used to daydream—frequently—multiple times a day—about shoving my face into a rotisserie chicken and eating my way back out.
The journals I’d kept my whole life had always been full of poems and drawings and thoughts on the books I was reading and leisurely reminiscences of the people and places who had meant things to me. But during that year? They were nothing but lists of calories. A typical entry:
2
black coffee
10
celery stalk
80
apple
284
boneless skinless chicken breast
70
⒈／⒉ cup nonfat Greek yogurt
86
veggie egg-white omelet in nonstick pan
0
72 oz. water
34
⒈／⒉ cup kale, steamed
182
salmon filet (wild caught)
94
cup of steamed broccoli
160
⒈／⒉ avocado—slices
1,002
TOTAL (Do better!)
This was literally everything I had to say about my day. This list was a full 3-D rendering of my inner life. And, for the record: this would have been a heartbreaking list. Any total over a thousand was catastrophic .
Shouldn’t have had that black coffee.
Anyway—I amassed hundreds of these. That’s what my journals became. Just like the starvation study confirmed back in the forties: when you’re starving, that’s all you think about.
I must have become very boring. Honestly.
Sometimes, very late at night, I’d wonder if that was partly why Lucas cheated—before shaking myself by the emotional shoulders and reminding myself, again, of something that I mostly, usually, was determined to believe: It was never the cheatee’s fault. It was always the cheater’s.
Maybe I had become boring. But nothing about that forced Lucas to bang Lili Ventura .
They were broken up now, by the way.
More important, guess what I did after I kicked Lucas out of our apartment?
I ate a gallon of chocolate chip cookie–dough ice cream.
Not a pint. A gallon .
It was a melted soup by the time I finished, but I got there.
And then I ate nothing but ice cream for a week. And then… I bought a bunch of books on body positivity and read them all, unfollowed Lucas and everyone associated with him, gave my thighs permission to lovingly caress each other again… and declared an unstable truce with my body.
Quite the healing journey. I’d come a long, long way in a year. I was proud of myself—and my thighs.
But I was still a beginner, if I’m honest.
It was one thing to be body-positive in theory—and quite another to do it in reality.
I was still wearing black jeans and T-shirts every day. I was still keeping to the sides of the world, hiding behind other people in group photos, avoiding mirrors.
I’d changed my thinking, and changed my behavior, and given myself permission to just eat anything I wanted. I’d even—and this might’ve been a stroke of genius—found some beat-up old art books on the $1 cart of a used bookstore, bought them all, and used them to make a self-acceptance journal. This became a nightly project—cutting out pictures of plump, cellulite-laden Baroque ladies who had been painted naked (admiringly, it seemed) by old masters like Rubens and Titian and Botticelli and pasting them admiringly into a drawing sketchbook.
The idea was to pay attention to images of women who hadn’t been photoshopped. To unlock myself from our current era’s beauty standards. To draft a peace accord with my thighs. To redefine “beautiful” broadly enough to fit my current, non-starving, thigh-touching self into that category. To be at home in my body as it was—whatever that meant.
A tall-ass order.
But I really was kinder to myself now.
I just hadn’t put that progress to the test.
As harsh as it had been to starve myself that way, there was a certain comfort in my vastly oversimplified thinking. It reduced all the chaos of the world into one simple metric that—in theory, at least—I could control. As long as I stayed under a thousand calories a day, I was safe. Nothing bad could happen to me.
To which Lucas, and Lili Ventura, and the entire internet, had said, Challenge accepted.
What do they call those moments when your fiancé cheats on you with a pop star in front of the entire world? Opportunities for personal growth?
I’d grown, dammit. Literally and metaphorically. In all the good, bad, and terrifying ways possible.
Which is why that night, in our after-hours office, after I’d just fully committed to a not entirely specified number of weeks in Key West, on a job I wasn’t qualified for, with a man whose own brother thought he was too perfect … when Cole Hutcheson raised his hand for a high-five and said, “And don’t forget to pack your bikini!”
I burst into tears.