Chapter Eight #4
“Oh my gods, come here. You have to sit down for this.” Grabbing my hand, she led me back out to the café floor.
“Okay, so get this,” she whispered like we were back in our gossipy high-school-girl days.
“After you disappeared, I didn’t know how to find you or find out if you were okay, so I followed Sue on socials hoping eventually she’d drop a clue about you.
” She snorted. “And then I kept following her, because I just couldn’t look away from that train wreck.
“It pretty much all started after your sister graduated from Columbia-Southern—”
I held up a hand. “Wait, what? Columbia-Southern?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Is that what they’re calling Columbia U now?”
It was her turn to blink at me. “Columbia University? No, they’re still calling that Columbia U. But Columbia-Southern Community College where your sister graduated is sometimes called Columbia-South.”
“Oh. My. Goodness.” I couldn’t have been more blown away than if Sue walked in right then, sniffed, glared at me, and snapped that it wasn’t a big deal that she lied about where she went to college. “She didn’t get into the Ivy League.”
Court snorted. “If she did, she made the wrong damn choice on admissions acceptance day.”
“Okay,” I cried, blowing back in my seat. “So, Sue attending and graduating from Columbia University—lie.”
“Lie,” Courtney confirmed. “The only thing those two colleges have in common is they’re both in New York.
What wasn’t a lie was Sue’s big, fat, trust fund.
After graduating, she tried to launch her influencer career by backpacking all over the world, and flaunting all her favorite tips, tricks, products, and sex adventures as a solo polyamorous female traveler.
She was dating Alex, Rhodes, and Micah during all this, but non-exclusively.
“Things were going pretty well by this point,” she admitted. “Her followers seemed to really love her whole independent, sex-positive, Asian-women-centered brand. But—”
“I felt that but coming in my soul.”
She laughed. “But then it all went wrong. One day, a video taken by a café customer hit the internet, and it went viral within the hour. It showed another customer clearly bumping into the waitress and making her spill her tray. The problem was... that whole tray of frozen ice mocha lattes spilled on Sue.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, no is right! Sue flipped the fuck out. She jumped up, screaming and ranting at the woman—who was apologizing profusely,” she cried. “Sue picked up her cup of coffee—her scalding, hot coffee!—flung it at the waitress’s face, and called her a stupid, Black bitch.”
My jaw dropped, eyes popping wider than the Yellowstone caldera. “Tell me you’re joking. Please, tell me she didn’t do or say that.”
“I wish I was joking, babe. When I tell you your twin sissy was dragged across the internet superhighway, I’m putting it lightly. And you know she did not handle it gracefully.”
I groaned, never more ashamed to share a face with a person than I was right then. “Let me guess, she didn’t apologize in any shape or form.”
“Nope. Not even when it got out that she gave that innocent woman second-degree burns,” Courtney said.
“Sue just hopped on socials, crying and bawling that she was the real victim. She was the one forever being stalked, recorded, and harassed by strangers who couldn’t understand that ‘everyone has a human moment.’”
“A human moment?! She called that a human moment?!”
“You know she did.” Court rolled her eyes.
“As you can imagine, her complete lack of accountability made the backlash worse—which turned the river she was crying into an ocean. She was the one being bullied and felt unsafe. Her mental health was suffering and the rest of the world were the real monsters because we wouldn’t accept her apology and move on. ”
“The apology she never gave?” I clarified.
“Yep, that’s the one.”
I shook my head. All of that was typical Sue behavior every time she got caught in a lie or terrible act she couldn’t wiggle her way out of, but still, it would never stop surprising me that anyone could live an entire life without ever saying sorry.
“As you can imagine,” she continued, “your sister was canceled hard. All of her sponsors dropped her. None of her followers would support her. Did you really never hear about any of this?”
“I had no idea,” I confessed. “For one, I for damn sure did not follow Sue on socials. I avoided anything to do with her. I didn’t even like looking in the mirror for a full two years after she ruined my life.
Besides, you don’t have a lot of time to mess around on social media when you’re trying to survive into the next day. ”
“Very true,” she said, falling back against her seat.
“Well, if it makes you feel better, after the café incident, Sue’s world tour adventure was done.
She ended up moving back to New York, officially marrying Rhodes, and commitment ceremonying Alex and Micah.
Their baby was born pretty quickly after that, and they settled into domestic bliss. ”
I nodded slow. “Do you know when they all moved to Lantana and into the manor?”
“I want to say it was a little before Taylor was born,” Courtney drew out, her gaze drifting over my head and into the past. “Mom and Dad still aren’t big fans of mine, but they love their grandbaby, and have since I told them I was pregnant.
Mom even threw a huge party for my baby shower and invited your mom.
What’s even wilder is that your mom actually came. ”
“She came?” My brows hit my hairline. “The same woman who called you an insolent slut went to a baby shower for a kid named Chlamydia?”
Courtney giggled even as she swatted me.
“She absolutely did, and she brought Sue. Your mom,” she stressed, “was very polite and courteous the entire time. She congratulated me and gifted Taylor the cutest pair of purple baby booties. But your sister spent my entire baby shower hitting up my family, friends, and all the other moms to invest in her new organic skincare line—SueNaturals. The flagship product of SueNation,” she mocked.
“Yikes.”
“Yeah, yikes, and now we get to the good part.”
“No,” I groaned, massaging my temple. “Please, don’t tell me there’s more. There can’t be more after my sister went full psycho racist bitch on an innocent waitress.”
She gave me an amused smirk. “Oh, there’s more all right.
Sue clearly believed all she had to do was wait for the heat to die down, and then everyone would be willing to forgive and forget.
But she was wrong. No one wanted a thing to do with SueNaturals, or the lifestyle brand she was trying to resurrect.
“She claimed she invented the formula for an all-in-one, all-natural and organic face cream that was a moisturizer, anti-wrinkler, and blemish-eraser. She hawked it like mad, but she clearly couldn’t get the buzz going, because suddenly an ad went up on the Lantana Business Bureau website saying she was taking on affiliates.
“For every jar an affiliate sold, they’d get a seventy percent cut of the sticker price.”
I whistled. “Wow. That was generous of her.”
“Wasn’t it?” Her smirk went nowhere. “All of a sudden, SueNaturals was the talk of Lantana. People were holding parties and inviting all of their friends to hear about this amazing, revolutionary new face cream. They were getting their own followers all whipped up.
“Sue was making money again, and she was loving it. All of a sudden, she was back on the hashtag-femboss scene, going on about expanding into fashion with SueThreads and money management with SueMoola.”
“But...” I drew out.
“But—” Courtney cut herself off giggling.
“All of a sudden, the first batch of SueNaturals customers started reporting rashes, breakouts, hives, and skin infections in the places where they applied her cream. Sue swore up, down, and sideways that it had nothing to do with her product, and she wasn’t responsible, so one of them took it to a lab to be analyzed. ”
She was laughing so hard she could barely get it out. “The report came back and—and—it turned out there was no special, all-natural super formula at all! It was just a bunch of other popular face cream brands all mixed together with the special ingredient! Poop!”
I jerked in my seat. “What! Did you just say poop?”
“Poop, Sarah! Bird poooooopp! Shit! Excrement!” She was crying, she was laughing so hard.
“Sue scooped the crap out of the bottom of Tweety’s cage, plopped it in a jar, and charged two hundred dollars for it!
And when the wives of Lantana found out, they sued her ass so hard and fast, she couldn’t sit down for a month. ”
My jaw worked for a full minute. “They... sued her?”
“You bet they did. Not only that, but she was slapped with a huge fine by the FDA and ordered to stop selling immediately,” she said.
“Sue settled all the lawsuits out of court and made them all sign NDAs as a condition for payment.
I guess she thought that would be enough to make it all go away because, yes, she did attend the Lantana Street Fair last year with her SueNaturals booth.
“But she wasn’t the fucking h-headliner.” Court caught another case of the giggles. “Sarah, they chased her out of there—screaming and pelting her with anything they could get their hands on. Someone actually stole a tray of my cupcakes just to throw at her!”
If there was something to say in response to all of that, I didn’t know what it was. For eight hours, my sister blathered on and on about her perfect life and successful business, and it was all a lie.
“Wow,” I whispered. “Just wow.”