Chapter 8 #2
Sex like that wasn’t even real. It wasn’t.
It was a lie that biology dangled over you when you were ovulating in order to make you do stupid things.
Made you leave your family, just as her mother had done.
And then you had to dig in, and commit to that bad decision, because going back would be the only thing more humiliating than stepping out in the first place, she assumed.
“Okay. But nobody else.”
“Nobody else. I promise. Well, his family will know. But they’re all tied up in the same interest.”
“Okay,” Anna said. “Then I guess what I’ll do is just continue to refuse to answer questions about your personal life, and after you and Walker make a public appearance, you can go back on the campaign trail. And he can sort of be… on the periphery?”
“Obviously he needs to endorse me,” Addison said.
“Yes. He definitely needs to endorse you. And I think that would be helpful, because he will appeal to a whole segment of people who may not have bought into your whole thing before.”
“I’m sorry, what is that a euphemism for?”
“Well, the people in high school who liked him and not you.”
Addison frowned. “Everybody liked me.”
“Oh, no babe. They did not.”
She blinked. “Really?”
“Yeah. The people you were mean to didn’t like you.”
“I wasn’t mean to anybody.” The whole thing with Walker and prom pressed in on her. “Well, I was, but it was kid stuff, and also, Walker was popular. In his own right, and it isn’t like me not being friends with him hurt his clout or anything.”
“You had a reputation. For being a little bit superior to people.”
She frowned. “I don’t… How was I unaware of that?”
“Because you were in your bubble. Your Addison bubble. Your dad was the mayor, you had good grades, you were pretty, you were a cheerleader, and I guess you didn’t really need the people to like you who didn’t like you, also, it wasn’t like they were going to openly oppose you or anything. You were too popular for that.”
“Yes. I was popular. So…”
She paused. Of course, being popular was a very specific thing in high school. It didn’t actually speak to how many people liked you, so much as a position that you occupied, and for some reason she hadn’t fully taken that on board before this moment.
She had watched enough teen movies to know that a lot of people had resentment for the popular girl, both earned and unearned. The only person she had really been mean to in her recollection was Walker, but she had probably been dismissive of more people than she would care to think of.
She still felt uncomfortable at the idea that linking up with Walker might help her in some way.
Mainly because she didn’t like the idea that her entire existence was going to be helped by other people’s reputations.
Or hindered by it. Honestly, if people didn’t want to vote for her because of the way she had been in high school – obliviously lost in her own bubble, she could accept that, then that was fine. That was deserved.
For people to think that she was qualified for the job because of her dad, for them to question it because of Alan’s defection, or for them to rethink their stance on her because of Walker just irritated her.
Like she existed in the center of a constellation of men, and their feelings, impressions of her and mere presence mattered more than her own.
Because the reality was, most of the popularity, the privilege, all of that, that she had enjoyed came from her dad in the first place.
And it just made her feel… lost.
It made everything feel a little bit pointless. That she needed Walker’s help to save her now.
That none of it had ever been about her.
And yet she supposed she should be grateful because her mother’s reputation hadn’t managed to eclipse hers.
All it had taken was for enough good men to sign off on her.
“I have plans for handling all this on the social media front, but I’m not sure you’re going to love it because it involves automating some things.
But I’ve been talking to some PR companies about positive astroturfing, among other things.
” Anna laid out her plan for making sure conversations online were being monitored, managed and positively contributed to by programmed robots, which was something Addison would rather not know about.
But what could you do when your whole image had been hijacked by videos of the worst moment of your life?
It reminded her so much of the day her mom left. She’d been playing in the treehouse in the backyard, a totally normal day. Until she’d fallen off the ladder at the top and plummeted to the ground below, badly skinning her knee and bruising herself, in addition to scaring years off her life.
She’d thought the fall had been the bad part, and then there had been a secret, worse thing waiting for her. They hadn’t been related, and she did know that, but they had become internal metaphors for her.
Falling wasn’t the worst part.
The wedding, that had been falling. Now there was fallout, and they had to do whatever needed to be done.
“Great,” she said. “Honestly, whatever works for the campaign.”
At this point, she needed that to happen more than she had at the beginning. If she were mayor, at least maybe then she would be judged on her own work.
If she did a bad job, then maybe people would hate her for that, they certainly wouldn’t keep on loving her just because of her dad.
If they loved her, maybe even a fraction of the credit for the work that she did would go to her. Maybe it would be her with no asterisk beside her name. Addison Carey, the mayor of Mustang River. And she would stand on her own two feet, or not at all, but maybe then something of it would be hers.
She wouldn’t be so tied to this… this need to prove herself. This need to pay her dad back. To be this perfect thing, because God knew now it was obvious that she wasn’t.
Feet of clay and all of that.
“Which restaurant are you going to?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say. You don’t think maybe at the resort…”
“No. I would imagine that he wants something a lot more visible. It is Friday night, so if you go to La Befana I think that you’re going to see a lot of the people that need to see you. The people who will be spreading gossip around like wildfire.”
“Great.”
She knew that Walker was trying to reach beyond the borders of Mustang River, but honestly, for her purposes, she just needed it to impact the people here.
She wanted them talking about her in an interesting way, a positive way, rather than shaking their heads and cringing at her embarrassment.
He was right. It had to be big. They had to take this and turn it on its head.
And she did have to care a little bit about what was being said more broadly about her reputation, because if she was going to be the mayor of Mustang River, then where her reputation went, so did the town’s, and the town had worked so hard to become the best version of itself.
To become a place where people could actually afford to live. They had fought through decades of real financial lows brought about by changes in the cattle and timber industry, and they had found their place with tourism.
That needed to keep going. It needed to keep getting better, and she really did feel like she was the person for the job.
For one hysterical moment, she thought about getting on a live video broadcast to all her followers with Walker and just hard launching.
That would seem cynical.
They had to avoid seeming cynical, because they needed people to spin it into a love story.
It almost made her want to laugh, because nothing could be more cynical than this.
Walker didn’t even like her. She didn’t like him.
The heat in her stomach called her a liar, and she chose to ignore it.
Just because he was hot didn’t mean that she liked him. And just because she thought he was hot didn’t mean that it was an action item.
She got off the phone with Anna, and then she nearly passed out from nerves as she dialed her father.
“Any new developments?”
“Well. Yes,” she said. “That’s why I’m calling. Walker and I have worked out a plan.”
“You and Walker?”
“Yes. You’re not going to like it, but you need to know about it.”
To her surprise, her father did seem to like the idea.
“I think it will work neatly,” he said. “Considering the damage that was already done, I think people like a romance, and this will give them something romantic to cling to, and it will round out the story. Politics is all about crafting a good narrative.”
She understood the importance of Mustang River on a personal, visceral level, but when her dad started talking about it like he was a shark from Washington D.C. she always had to suppress a sigh.
She supposed it was a good thing that he took it this seriously, but still.
“I agree. We agree. But I just wanted you to be aware that’s what was happening.”
“I’m glad that you told me. I would’ve worried about you if I thought that were true.”
Of course he would. Because he would worry about her being hotheaded, hot blooded, impetuous like her mother was.
“I’m not telling mom,” she said.
He didn’t really say anything. Not to that directly. “Has your mother been in touch with you?”
“She has been. I mean, she’s called and texted to make sure that I’m okay.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said.
She knew that the way their mom had left had really hurt her dad on their behalf. And the older she got the more she understood that. But of course, her dad couldn’t feel all that happy when his kids were miserable.
Her dad was a high-pressure kind of guy. He pushed both her and Jackson to be the best versions of themselves. He could be judgmental – Walker being a great exhibit of that, but it wasn’t like she wasn’t cut from the same cloth.
He was complicated, in other words.
But he loved his children.
Part of him loving them, though, was wanting them to reach the peak of their potential, and she understood that.
It was evidence to him, she supposed, that they were okay.