Wide-Eyed (Holliday Family #2)

Chapter 1

NEW YORK CITY, U.S.A

LYSSA

My crown is called content : a crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.

KING HENRY VI PART III

Lit nerd knowledge drop: Shakespeare invented or introduced approximately 17,000 words to the English language, including the word hurry. As I hurled my frame between the snapping subway doors, only just catching a pole to avoid face-planting, hurry felt insufficient.

This was hauling mine ass.

It took a few moments to catch my breath. An unmistakable pungency filled my nostrils, explaining why this car was so empty. Four seats down, someone had taken a dump on the floor. Again.

I considered changing cars, but my bags were heavy, my stop wasn’t far, and if I breathed through my mouth it wasn’t that bad.

Absently, I wondered what Shakespeare would call subway crap.

A commute most foul? A malodorous peregrination?

If I gave this hypothetical exercise the context of four centuries of linguistic evolution, maybe dastardly deuce drop .

The irony of it almost made me want to laugh. My entire day had been a shitfest, so there was a sick poetry in it becoming literal now.

At one o’clock I’d started filming the most important Get Ready with Me of my entire influencing career. After that, I headed to Bossi, where I used to intern, and began a livestream.

At 2:25 p.m., my life imploded.

Now my phone was on Airplane Mode to avoid all the notifications, and I was running late for a Zoom call with my best friend Caroline and her extended family.

Hence the hauling.

I ran from my stop to my building, sucking in big lungfuls of (mostly) shit-free air.

Kicking my apartment door shut behind me, I threw my wicker clutch in the corner and toed off my platform Balenciaga sneakers, borrowed from the fashion cupboard at Bossi.

I would have returned them—that was actually part of today’s plan—but now that I was banned from the premises, I guessed they were mine?

My apartment was chaos, as usual. I had to rummage through discarded outfits looking for my headphones— shit, battery dead —and my laptop— 20 percent —it would have to do.

With one arm, I swept everything off my bottom bunk and onto the floor.

Clothing, yarn, a soda can, an empty Sweetgreen’s take-out container I was saving to put buttons in, and the balloon dog I’d made out of air-dry clay and was covering in rhinestones: it all went flying.

I cleared everything out of frame other than my cat, Root Beer, who was asleep on my pillow, and the loose rhinestones that were trapped in the folds of my sheets and refused to budge no matter how much I brushed at them.

Oh well. If they stuck to me, I’d pretend it was on purpose.

(This was how I started a viral trend last year for face stickers.)

Tucking my legs under me on my bed, I joined the call and waved cheerfully at the five squares that filled my laptop screen.

But I quickly hid my arm behind my back when I noticed the mascara smear on the sleeve of my pink Birth of Venus sweatshirt, which must have been from wiping my tears as I ran down 57th Street, sobbing.

This morning, which felt like a million lifetimes ago, I’d styled this Venus sweatshirt with a deerstalker hat and bloomers with white bows pinned to the hems. At the time, the bows felt essential, coquette, en vogue !

Now they seemed silly. Embarrassing. Pathetic.

With a tiny shake, I forced myself to focus on the call.

Caroline Holliday and her partner, Chase Sanford, were in their apartment in Chelsea, while Chase’s mom was calling from Toronto, and Caroline’s dad and her brother, Mike, were in New Zealand.

I’d joined a few of these Holli-ford family calls now.

When Caroline used to live with me, I ended up a part of them anyway because the apartment was so small.

Since she’d moved out, she continued to include me (probably out of pity, as she knew my own family rarely called).

It was either very late or very early for Mike and Kevin in New Zealand—the time differences were too confusing for me to keep track of, and I couldn’t tell from the background because Mike’s big build filled most of their frame.

He was kind of handsome, if you liked that kind of thing.

Not handsome in a New York way, but in a lumberjack way.

But he was a lumberjack who didn’t hold me in very high regard. It was clear he thought I was a self-obsessed kook.

And so what? I was.

“Sorry I’m late!” I apologized.

Root Beer jolted awake at my voice and glared from where he was curled on my pillow. Hopefully he was mad because he’d been woken up, not because I smelled like the worst of the subway.

“I had an issue with a livestream.”

Predictably, Caroline’s brother snorted. “ Some people use the internet for remote surgery, but don’t keep us in suspense, Lyssa. How many corners did you cut your toast into this morning?”

“Influencer culture is a billion-dollar empire, Michaelangelo. You should support female digital entrepreneurs.”

“Oh, I do.” Mike grinned. “I just have to put my credit card into a paywall first.”

Caroline interrupted before her brother could say more about his adult content subscriptions. The topic turned to Chase’s new job. I’d heard all of this when I was at their apartment two days ago, so I tuned out.

Holding my phone low in my lap, so others on the call couldn’t see it, I took my phone off Airplane Mode, hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as I first thought.

Alerts rolled down my screen quicker than slots at a casino. I made the mistake of looking at the comments.

twos acting like tens

sad what some girls will do for attention

I’ve been a fan of hers for years but this is too far

The internet had taken Paul’s side. Quickly, I shut everything back off.

“Hello? Earth to Lyssa Luxe?”

My head snapped up. Mike was waving a hand back and forth in front of his camera.

Caroline and Chase were frozen in their square, his hand on her face, their expressions nauseatingly besotted.

Not that I wasn’t happy for my best friend.

I was. But it sucked that Caroline had moved out of my (well, my mom’s) West Village apartment.

Now I went whole days or weeks without seeing the one person in the world who might understand why I’d done what I had today.

Now wasn’t the time to confess everything, though.

Caroline would understand once she watched the livestream.

That awful, career-ending, life-ruining livestream.

I could delete it now, but screen recordings were already doing the rounds in fashion circles—viral videos were like glitter.

And if people were going to be talking about me, the business part of my brain—the part that had leveraged the unique outfits I wore to school into a large social media following, a spot at the country’s finest fashion institute, then a prestigious internship—wanted my content to at least benefit from the traffic.

If I had to endure a pile on, I should at least get views out of it.

“Give Lyssa a break, Mike,” Kevin scolded his son.

“Yeah, give me a break. I have a lot of work to do.”

“Come on, princess, what’s up? You look more rooted than a possum in breeding season.”

I didn’t know what that meant. I never knew what Mike meant. His accent was thick and most of his sayings were incomprehensible.

“What?”

Kevin tried to shush him, but Mike leaned forward, a teasing grin on his face.

“Don’t play, Lyssa Luxe. We both know that you wouldn’t know hard work if it bit you in the ass.”

A laugh tinged with hysteria burst out of me.

I was the youngest intern Bossi had ever hired.

I hadn’t gone a single day without posting content in over five years, and my fan base was international, so I replied to comments at all hours.

I never stopped working. I was shattered from it, and from putting my whole heart into my work.

But people like Mike never understood that.

Neither had Paul.

Chase’s mother jumped in to change the subject—very Canadian of her—and suddenly we were all speaking at once.

“Remind me to send you the recipe I’ve been perfecting. It’s a mushroom risotto?—”

“For your information, Mike,” I said, as cuttingly as a girl with mascara on her sleeve could, “I lost ten thousand followers this afternoon?—”

“Why would anyone care what you had for breakfast?—?”

Caroline and Chase got their internet working again then, and their frame unfroze as they burst back into life. Chase ended our squabbling by shoving his and Caroline’s pet rabbit up to the camera.

Mike, who loved all animals, stopped haranguing me to coo at Pickles.

The conversation turned to grandchildren then, as I’d noticed lots of my friends’ conversations with their parents did once they were coupled.

Evelyn, Chase’s mom, really wanted grandkids.

I couldn’t fathom what it would be like to have a parent so enamored of your existence they were eager for you to duplicate it.

Caroline and Chase signed off not long after that, and Evelyn disappeared to deal with her burning risotto.

Kev threw me a wave before walking out of frame—it was unclear if he knew leaving the room didn’t hang up the call, but it didn’t matter as Mike usually disconnected for them.

Except when I looked up from my phone, Mike was still there.

I reached for my laptop lid.

“Wait, Lyssa.”

It was automatic to stop for a voice like that. Authoritative. Confident. All of my problems had begun with a voice like that.

“What?”

Mike surprised me by asking, “Seriously, are you okay? You look like shit.”

My main concern was that I smelled like it. Thanks MTA.

“Don’t be so rude,” I replied, defensive. “?‘Your tartness would sour grapes.’? ”

Coriolanus , misquoted.

“Huh?”

“?‘Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit, for I am sick when I do look on thee.’? ”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream , quoted perfectly.

“I forget what the signs of a stroke are. Is this one? Lyssa, can you lift your left arm? Wink twice if you’re having a stroke.”

Despite myself, this made me laugh. “I’m fine, Michaelangelo. Like I said, I just had an issue with a livestream. It’s not a big deal.”

It was a big deal.

I had no idea how I was going to pick up the pieces of my career now, or if I could pivot to full-time influencing without my fashion job. Or if I even wanted to. Today, for the first time in twelve years, I wanted to log out of every account and turn off my phone.

“I know I said hard work would kick your ass, but maybe you should come to New Zealand for a bit. Get away from New York.”

I laughed at his joke.

“For real,” he insisted, and I realized he wasn’t laughing. “Why don’t you come and visit? You seem a bit jacked up. It might do you good to get out of your bubble. You can drink real coffee, and breathe fresh air, and chase Mini Mike out of the pantry.”

“Mini Mike?”

“He’s my miniature pony. Hasn’t Caroline shown you pictures?”

“Believe it or not,” I said, rolling my eyes, “our discussions don’t revolve around you.”

Mike fished around the pocket of his shirt for his phone.

The button-down was a red plaid, worn unbuttoned over a black T-shirt, and had been washed so many times its softness was visible even through a grainy Zoom call.

Not for the first time, I thought that such a big chest and soft shirt were wasted on Mike Holliday.

He held his phone up to the screen, and I squinted at the picture of a very small brown horse wearing a pointed hat on its head.

“Cute.”

“Adorable,” Mike corrected.

“Why is he wearing a hat?”

“That’s not a hat!” He pulled back his phone and clutched it to his chest, offended. “That’s his unicorn horn.”

“Sorry. What an adorable unicorn horn.”

Mike looked mollified.

“I really do have to go. My followers are dying to know about my breakfast.”

“Lyssa, wait?—”

This time I didn’t listen. I shut the lid and left Mike where he belonged, as pixels on a screen. His soft shirt and comical pets and bulldozer personality were whole oceans away, and nothing to do with me.

I wasn’t taking Mike’s invitation to come to New Zealand seriously. I was a New Yorker and had been since I was eighteen. I was going to brazen this whole thing out in the city, where I belonged. Besides, New Zealand was too far away.

I stayed in my apartment for a week, wearing unfashionable sweats and eating delivered bagels, reading all the comments and private messages.

My resolve to stay in New York held as I read nothing but vitriol for seven days.

It held when I managed to sleep for a few hours only to wake up to messages from faceless accounts saying I should unalive myself.

It even held when I saw Bossi colleagues I had thought were my friends liking mean comments.

But it was tested when people started making videos with “receipts” that I had always been a terrible person—one video used screenshots of comments I’d made on a now-dead platform when I was fourteen.

(Ironically, people were calling me these words a lot this week, proving once again people were inconsistent as hell when it came to accountability.)

It was an awful seven days, but I was surviving.

Just as I began to feel the light at the end of the tunnel was close, a Hollywood celebrity was accused of what I’d accused Paul of, and people started acting like I was responsible for this too.

Like I had that much power? After that, I was dragged into internet columnists’ think pieces and name-dropped on morning shows.

The person who delivered my bagels recognized me and snapped a picture, which trolls gleefully used as proof I wasn’t hot enough to be telling the truth.

Neither of these men—the celeb nor Paul—had technically done anything illegal, which left me to the court of public opinion, a.k.a. , hell.

I told myself it would blow over, these things had a short shelf life, but I was earnestly scared about what might happen before it did. The constant barrage of abuse made me feel like I was a dinghy at sea in a thunderstorm.

When the doxxing began, New Zealand started to feel like it might just be the right distance away.

I called the cat sitter who looked after Root Beer for me sometimes and got her to come and take him to her apartment. She thought I was overreacting, but I didn’t care. I thought about trying to lay low at Caroline’s, but if trolls could find me in the West Village, they could find me in Chelsea.

They’d never find me in New Zealand.

By the time I started getting death threats in my DMs, I’d booked my flights.