Chapter 5
First Peach of the Season
Hello, friends, Susan begins her LinkedIn post. It’s been a hard year for those of us in creative industries.
It’s eighteen months into the pandemic, and though her whole life has changed, she can’t help but feel that she’s slipped into the past, where everything is just as she left it.
Susan keeps typing: I never thought I’d leave my job at Rider Die Media. But perhaps getting laid off was the kick in the butt I needed to make a change. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working as a freelancer with incredible clients on projects I’m passionate about.
Though she used to find this sort of gig-fishing embarrassing, it’s Susan’s world now.
As a contractor she needs to network to keep the work coming.
She lists the companies she’s worked for—a mix of streamers, dating apps, and clothing brands—and describes how she creates brand strategies on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, developing concepts for promotional videos, crafting voice and tone and aesthetics for each new launch.
She’s good at it, this marketing stuff. Susan knows how to get people on the internet interested in new things. Understanding the audiences for brands is not that different from knowing about music fandoms. Fans are fans.
She’s even gotten used to working remotely.
On weekdays she sleeps until right before her first meeting, drinking coffee with her camera off, not showering until lunchtime—if at all.
No one notices, or if they do notice, they don’t bother to say anything.
No one is paying much attention to anyone but themselves these days, their own images trapped in small squares on their screens.
She wonders if being a freelancer is really just looking for more work forever, or if she’ll ever hit a point where it sustains itself.
It’s exhausting, but she doesn’t care that much about the work, which is oddly nice.
It’ll never take over her life the way Rider did.
She can have emotional boundaries, which she supposes is a net positive.
Net positive. Even Susan’s thoughts have new lingo.
She sums up her skill set as best she can, concluding: I’m always looking for new opportunities, so if any of this sounds relevant to you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. She can hardly believe her own tone when she writes this. It sounds so adult.
A few minutes after she posts, a message pops up from some guy named Dave Weinberg.
“Send me your email,” it says. “I have a project that might be a fit.”
Susan replies quickly with her email address and a “Thanks,” then closes her computer and gets under the covers, scrolling through soup recipes on Instagram until her eyes can’t stay open anymore.
Above her bed, she’s removed the teenage posters that used to crowd the wall, and the room feels strangely naked. She falls asleep trying to remember what it used to look like when she was in high school. The longer she lives with her parents, the harder it is to leave.
At the start of the pandemic, while everyone else Susan knew was sheltering in place, Angie was working longer and longer shifts in the ER.
People banged pots and pans from their balconies at 7 PM every night while Angie texted Susan, “Just put another person on a ventilator.”
When they saw each other, Susan noticed Angie was becoming too skinny, stooped over. A question mark that had once been an exclamation point. And then they couldn’t see each other at all; it wasn’t safe. They didn’t know how the virus spread yet, and they still didn’t live together.
A couple of years ago, Mia had moved out, having decided she wanted to try living in Manhattan.
Susan didn’t ask Angie to take her place.
Instead, unable to pay the rent on the two-bedroom, she found herself a little studio in Crown Heights above a bodega, with big windows and a joke of a kitchen, perfect for one person who never cooked.
Susan felt strongly that she needed to experience living alone for a bit, instead of going straight from a roommate to a live-in girlfriend, and Angie, as always, was understanding.
Their friends teased them for being so unlike other lesbian couples; they protested that they didn’t need to cohabitate to be committed.
The one exception was when Angie got top surgery, and Susan stayed with her for a month to help take care of her.
Otherwise, they were happy living separately, or so Susan thought.
But then one night a few months into quarantine, Angie called her from her separate apartment and said, “I used to think your life was wild and exciting, but now all I can see is how different we are.”
At first, Susan was defensive. She was in bed with her laptop, wearing the same sweatpants she’d had on for a week. “My life is not wild and exciting anymore.”
“You know what I mean,” Angie said. “Someday the pandemic will end. Our lives are not going to get more similar.”
“I feel like I’ve spent our whole relationship waiting for you to realize you’re too good for me,” Susan admitted. “I’m spiraling about tweets while you’re saving lives. You probably want someone who can understand the stress you’re under.”
“Yeah,” Angie said, and Susan could hear the relief in her voice. “That about sums it up. But I’m not too good for you. Just different.”
Susan hated that they had to break up over the phone, but beyond that, she was okay.
It wasn’t cold, the phone call. It was the best they could both do, given the state of things.
They even said I love you before hanging up forever.
Susan had known, deep down, that she and Angie weren’t going to last. It was as if they’d each been waiting for the other person to pull the plug.
She was glad it had been Angie, and not her, who made the final call.
She probably could have let it drag on for another three—or ten—years.
They stayed in touch over text for a little while in an attempt at a friendship, until one day Susan woke up without a “good morning” from Angie, and that’s how she knew it was really over.
After that, everything else fell like dominoes.
People she knew started leaving the city. Heather decamped to LA; Mia went back home to Chicago.
And then Tamara decided it was best for the business to pivot from Rider Die Media to Rider Die Studios, abandoning editorial completely in favor of sponsored content, and Susan—along with her entire team—was laid off on a company-wide Zoom call, her email shut down before the meeting was over.
She was given a measly four weeks of severance.
It was impossible to find a new job. Every other media company was in the midst of layoffs, too.
The checks the government sent to people who got laid off didn’t cover her rent.
Her landlord let it slide for three months—more than most would—before asking her to move out of her precious little studio.
There was a new law protecting people from getting evicted, but the truth was Susan was relieved to have an excuse to bail on the life she’d built for herself.
She was tired of trying to hold it all together on her own.
She didn’t want to go down the bureaucratic rabbit hole that would have allowed her to stay. So she left.
Before she knew it, Susan found herself back at her parents’ house, as though the past ten years of freedom in Brooklyn were a wish that came true and then was taken back by the fickle genie who granted it.
The only bright spot was that shortly after Susan moved home, Katie and Jake did, too.
They had chosen the safety of Katie’s parents’ house, where they didn’t have to hear the endless, ominous drone of sirens that filled the city streets and could be outside without fear of someone breathing on them.
Susan began freelancing for brands, at last understanding that her skill set wasn’t limited to the music industry.
Heather had reached out with some projects promoting TV shows, which helped her network in new spaces.
She was too tired to worry about selling out, too burned-out on the false promises of indie rock to feel like something had been lost. She’d work a few hours and then head over to Katie’s for the rest of the day, and sometimes the night, too.
But then, just as they’d all fallen into a routine of baking cookies and watching movies together, Katie got pregnant. Apparently they’d been trying for a while, which was news to Susan. She was a little hurt that they hadn’t told her sooner, but she understood. It was private.
Katie gave birth to Allen a couple months ago, and Susan has seen Katie only a couple of times since: once when they first got home from the hospital, masked and in the backyard, and a few days later when Susan dropped off her first and last attempt at a lasagna.
The main problem is that Katie wants Susan to quarantine for three days before spending time with them, which is fair, but Susan’s parents are refusing the newly available vaccine (“Why would we inject something into our bodies that hasn’t been tested long-term?
” her dad said, despite her begging and sometimes yelling about it), which means even if she stays home, she could be exposed.
Two months feels infinitely long in this strange new world, where the passing of time in general has lost meaning.
In lieu of hanging out with Katie and Jake, Susan has started rewatching old TV shows from start to finish: True Blood, Friday Night Lights, Game of Thrones, The L Word. At night, she dreams of monsters: vampires, football players, dragons, LA lesbians.
Her only other form of entertainment is watching Ramona get dragged online. Someone has, at last, surfaced the photo of her with dreadlocks.
The next morning, Susan drinks coffee with her parents while she reads through Apple News, checks Instagram and Twitter and TikTok. Only after she showers and puts her sweatpants back on does she sit down at her desk and open Gmail.