Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
THREE MONTHS LATER
Despite the cold pool of drool beneath her cheek, Brinton intended to enjoy the last forty minutes before her alarm sounded. Since becoming an internet sensation, deep sleep was increasingly rare. Instead, she spent nights googling herself, a search and rescue mission for her self-worth.
She’d seen thousands of posts these last three months. Some shipped her and Jamie Crawford Jr. as a post-racial poster couple for “changing hearts and minds.” Many more ran the gamut of creatively repulsive racist and sexist insults. The resulting dread made her avoid mirrors most days.
Brinton hated herself for letting the poisonous seeds sprout. And yet she also wondered if her full-time critics were somehow right. By doing the Grammys interview, had she brought all of this attention—no, this shame—on herself?
As her eyelids dropped, pulsating bass and needling synth spilled from the Bluetooth speaker on her nightstand. Beyoncé’s husky-smooth vocals did figure-eights through her body. Only one person was so sinister.
Shayla whipped her hips in the doorway, gripping her phone like a makeshift mic and belting “Alien Superstar” so off-key it was actually impressive.
“Shay, what the—”
Shay tapped a button, ceasing her assault. “Mom wanted me to help get your raggedy butt up.”
Brinton slapped the speaker into her nightstand drawer and slammed it shut. “This is helping?”
“It’s Beyoncé,” she purred, arms crossed over her flouncy chartreuse mini-dress. “I cleansed your aura, balanced your chakras, and re-upped your Bad Bitch Energy. You’re welcome.”
Brinton lifted her torso, body rebelling in a fit of rigor mortis. She was only twenty-seven but felt as vital as an expired prune. “Right, my mistake.” Even she knew better than to downplay a Beyoncé dance break.
Shay, two years Brinton’s junior, was a real-life Alien Superstar.
A successful physical therapist specializing in women’s pelvic floor dysfunction, she lived in a slick Harlem loft.
Her bleached mini ’fro was striking against her maple-brown complexion, and through certain sorcery, her signature strawberry lipstick was always intact.
Sometimes, Brinton felt guilty envying her little sister as much as she loved her.
Shay snatched back the heavy gray blackout curtain from the bay window opposite her bed, releasing a surge of white sunlight into the glorified shoebox. Brinton hissed like Nosferatu.
“Oh good, you’re up.” Brinton’s mother, Athena, breezed in carrying a tray of flaky croissants from their favorite bakery, Biscuit Wench; a steaming carafe of coffee; and mugs for the three of them.
She pushed aside the graveyard of half-empty glasses, granola bar wrappers, and unread books to set the tray on Brinton’s nightstand.
As usual, Athena wore one of her favorite cream linen lounge sets. This one was short-sleeved and showed off her Michelle Obama–worthy biceps. She and Brinton had the same rich complexion, but Athena always looked lit-from-within. Her corkscrew coils were perpetually buoyant.
By this point in the morning, her mom had likely done her reading, taken a yoga class, made celery juice, and seen a patient for a therapy session.
Five years ago, Athena amicably divorced Brinton’s father, a curator for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. , and her glow-up had been next-level.
Brinton fantasized about how much easier her life would be if she had inherited her mom’s executive function. But, fine. Getting her high cheekbones was still a win.
“Baby, I know things have been difficult, but it’s not good for you to…languish,” Athena said. “And would it hurt to change into some pj’s before bed?”
Brinton appraised herself: yesterday’s jeans and a white T-shirt with a stoic portrait of Maya Angelou on the front. She gestured down the length of her body.
“Mm, not nearly as efficient. See? I’m already dressed. Technically, I’m ahead.”
Shay poured a gleaming stream of coffee into a mug. “They teach you that girl-math at Columbia, or did you think of it yourself?”
She glugged in half-and-half and passed it to Brinton. It smelled like chocolate, caramel, and life itself, rendering her useless at conjuring a witty retort.
“You aren’t still worried about that little video, are you?” Athena asked. “The world has moved on. I think you should too. And I can’t help but beg you to consider that, if you took care of yourself, these panic attacks wouldn’t stand in the way of what you really want.”
Having a licensed psychologist as a mother probably should have done wonders for Brinton’s mental health.
However, her father, whose discipline she admired, was ruthlessly pragmatic, encouraging her to see logic as far more reliable than emotions.
It was a protective measure, she understood.
His attempt to buffer a world where her naked otherness didn’t fit into prescribed contours.
Inevitably, she never felt equipped to process the maelstrom inside, and feared she never would.
“Yeah? Even without the panic attacks, I’m still the struggling, failed artist of the family,” she said. “So, what do you make of that?”
When Brinton first graduated from college, she tried and failed to get her short story manuscripts published. Journalism was the easiest pivot, and now, working at Landmark, she at least had the status of writing for a legacy publication in New York City. That made her somebody.
Brinton groaned as her mother frowned. It wasn’t yet nine a.m., and she was exhausted.
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Mom, but in the worst moment of my life, millions of people decided who I was.
I’m reminded of it every day. And that’s including the people I work with, who barely look me in the eyes. ”
Ultimately, her interview with Jamie drove millions of hits to the website, which saved her job. That and blaming her sickness on eating bad shrimp. Still, she felt the pang of isolation from her co-workers—from her sense of self—marrow-deep.
“Just because people think they know you as one thing doesn’t mean you can’t change,” Shay said, ripping off a hunk of croissant. She pinched the golden dough between her glossy, black-manicured fingers. “Like this perfect French pastry, you got layers, baby.”
Truthfully, Brinton’s life stalled well before she’d moved back in with her mom a year ago, right after Eli dumped and then not-so-politely evicted her from his Financial District high-rise.
Athena squeezed Brinton’s foot through the baby blue quilt she’d had since seventh grade. “What if the magazine isn’t the right fit? You’ve been so miserable. What about creative writing, like you studied in school?”
The best thing about attending Columbia University was learning from a decorated faculty of literary creatives. The worst thing was that in doing so, Brinton owed more in student loans than she made annually as an actual writer in New York City.
Saving for an apartment was a Sisyphean feat, and she refused her mother’s persistent requests to help. Brinton’s confidence couldn’t survive another hit.
“Or you could sell pictures of your ears?” Shay mused. “Make an app and call it something sexy like…‘Only Lobes’?”
Athena and Brinton exchanged perplexed looks.
“I’ve seen your feet. Nobody deserves that.” Shay cackled, drunk off her own wit.
Brinton launched a throw pillow at Shay’s head. “Ha-ha. You should take this routine on the road, like back to your apartment.”
She turned to her mother and softened. “If I quit now, the last four years were a waste. I’ll figure it out.”
“Girl, wake up!” Shay waved her withering croissant in the air.
“Don’t you get the sense that they’re using you?
They’ve had four years to promote you but haven’t.
Why? Because as long as they have one Black person on the masthead, they can pretend to be this forward-thinking company that”—she made air quotes with her index fingers—“values diversity. You’re a melanated bargaining chip. ”
Deep down, though excruciating to admit, Brinton knew this.
Even with her recent post-Grammys slump, her work was solid, and while she wasn’t particularly close with her colleagues, she’d never received a single disciplinary action that would warrant being benched as an entry-level staff writer for so long.
“Remember your first day?” Shay tutted. “Rich talked all that mess about being your ‘authentic self’? But we know what he really meant was, be ‘authentic’ to his expectations. Approachable, but not ditzy. Savvy, but not a know-it-all. Malleable enough to notch into both obvious and covert perceptions about you: where you were from, where you went to school, if that was your real hair.”
“Whether or not I grew up with a father,” Brinton put in, shaking her head. “I thought Landmark was going to be my big break. I wanted to leave my mark.”
When she first started at Landmark, Brinton spoke up in meetings, questioning problematic story pitches that leaned heavily on racial stereotypes.
There were only so many “hip-hop’s unlikely white savior” discussions Brinton could stomach.
She was always met with a chorus of groans and calls that she was being “too literal” or “too sensitive” or “too much.”
She offered to help with brainstorming for future issues. This, of course, only led to her own burnout. Eventually she was doing the work of three different people for the same title and meager pay.
The last straw came on her one-year anniversary, when Brinton finally had the courage to demand Rich change the office-wide playlists to only feature versions of songs that edited out the N-word, which none of her colleagues bothered to omit when singing along off-key.