23. Like Soulmate Penguins
LIKE SOULMATE PENGUINS
PRESENT
“Ithought you made sure the staff signed NDAs?” Vi’s voice, normally so refined, borders on the shrill now, her hands at her slender hips, the picture of an irate housewife.
It’s barely seven in the morning. I texted as soon as I saw the headlines and had barely bothered changing (but I had to, given the need to cover my rash) before speedwalking to their room.
I had to fish out two stray pens to put my hair up, but now, in my used sundress and green-pen-hair, there’s no way not to feel out of place in the presidential suite.
Vi’s wearing recovery patches under her eyes, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her makeup free.
Still, it doesn’t change the fact that she’s a model: wrapped in the silky ivory robe of my dreams and with her hair falling out of its nighttime braid, she still looks like the AI-generated image of a starlet getting ready for the morning.
Brody looks tired, but no less glamorous in ice-blue Louis Vuitton pajamas.
A knock signals room service has arrived, and we’re all quiet until the staff leaves. Vi adopts a nonchalant pose and doesn’t glare at Brody until after the door clicks firmly shut.
“The staff signed NDAs.” Brody plops down and searches through the fruit bowl for a lone blueberry.
“But that’s never foolproof. We have a lot of guests who haven’t finished their paperwork—who we mutually agreed to allow—and given the number of performers and additional staff here last night, there was always going to be the possibility of leaks. ”
Brody’s hair is sticking up in a variety of angles, something I would normally tease him about. Instead, I sit with my hands clasped on my lap.
Vi sips at her coffee, crossing and uncrossing her legs without otherwise betraying any anxiety. Her voice is deceptively calm. “You never said how famous Lorelai’s ex was.”
“It didn’t really come up.”
“Given how powerful the Huangs are, given how often we’ve strategized about your career, our lives, it feels like it ought to have come up.”
Brody cracks his neck but doesn’t otherwise defend himself.
“To be fair, our engagement wasn’t really—” I search for a word that’s truthful but doesn’t violate any contracts. “It was a complicated situation.”
Vi rolls her eyes—gracefully, but still. “Has there ever been anything between the two of you?”
Brody’s “Fuck” is timed perfectly with my gurgle of laughter.
“Of course not.”
We look at each other, not sure which one of us should continue first.
Brody takes the lead. “I’ve explained to you a million times. Lorelai is an irritating, beloved sibling I worry about the way someone worries about . . . a six-week-old puppy.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, knowing I’m probably not helping but also wishing Brody could be a little less Brody. No woman wants to hear herself compared to an untrained cocker spaniel.
“You noticed she lost weight. Khloe told me it was the first thing you noticed.” Vi bites her lip and turns her face even more to the side. “You never notice my weight.”
“Because it’s so heavily controlled there’s no reason—” Brody bites off a curse. “I notice things. Aunt Vera’s starting to sometimes wear her wedding ring on her right hand. Sometimes she even takes it off. It’s my job to care about, and sometimes monetize, details.”
“She’s clearly important.”
I squirm, but Brody continues his case. “Lucas, Lorelai, and I have always been the Three Musketeers.” He moves to kneel in front of Vi and tries to take her free hand.
She doesn’t push him away, but neither does she look at him.
“Lorelai and Lucas are soulmate penguins. They’re practically mythical, the animals that mate for life and grieve forever? I would never get in between that.”
I manage a laugh, but I have so many questions I want to ask. Namely whether Brody still believes this, and if this means Lucas never truly moved on either.
“In the pictures, Lorelai is reaching for you, chasing you.”
“I wasn’t chasing—” I start.
But Brody interrupts me, his voice gruff and clearly communicating something to Vi that I cannot understand. “You should know, better than most, how misleading pictures can be.”
I can see that Vi swallows her coffee very slowly. She removes her hand from Brody’s and stirs a drop (actually one drop) of cream into her drink.
“More importantly, if you can’t trust me, what the fuck are we doing here?” Brody’s voice is quiet as he says this, and I feel like a voyeur, even being in the same room.
Vi refuses to make eye contact, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s stirring her coffee into oblivion, she’s the picture of serenity.
And this is what gives me an idea.
I stand, my words spilling out of my mouth before I have a chance to stop them. “I might have a way to . . . ameliorate some of the damage, if I can get my laptop.”
Vi laughs mirthlessly, but Brody waves his hand toward the door in a be-my-guest way. I rush out of the room, almost colliding with Lucas, who must have just heard the news, and Khloe, who is standing right next to Lucas.
My brain flits to a stop for a moment because Lucas left first, but I didn’t track how soon after Khloe disappeared—after the hula dancing but . . . how much after?
I lick suddenly dry lips, wishing I’d done more than stick a couple of pens through my hair now that I see the masterfully casual curls falling over Khloe’s shoulder.
“No time to explain,” I mutter.
When I return, Khloe is standing behind Vi’s chair, squeezing Vi’s shoulder, while Lucas stands near Brody, clearly his second.
They’re an attractive foursome—the CEO and the attorney, the lovely twin models—but I try not to dwell on that.
“Brody’s already got supporters threatening to pull out,” Vi announces.
“That was quick,” I say, stupidly.
Khloe narrows her eyes at me. “Perception is more important than reality. And the pictures are damning. A lovers’ tiff, played out in three acts, with the wrong woman cast in the lead.”
“You had an idea?” Vi’s voice is steady as she reaches for a croissant, having clearly destroyed at least two on her pastry-apocalypse of a plate.
I should have tested it on my own before announcing anything, but at the time, it seemed important to distract and disrupt the too-tense, emotions-too-high moment.
I tuck a strand of my thinning hair behind one ear. The snorkeling did a number on my semipermanent coloring, but that’s a problem for later.
As my laptop powers up, I explain the basics of what a sentiment analysis program does. It’s difficult to get the wording right: Lucas and Brody know too much, and Vi and Khloe are lost until I get to the image-management part.
“Most of the time, I use my program to filter out news I may not want to read.”
“Why not just ignore the news? Don’t go to CNN, Washington Post, whatever.”
I take a deep breath and deliberately keep my eyes glued to the laptop. “I enjoy reading and being aware of current events, broadly speaking. There are topics I prefer to filter out.”
“News about me,” Lucas explains to the room, not looking in my direction, the tiniest tease of a smile at the edges of his lips.
“My program also aggregates and disaggregates public opinion.” I search my mind for an example.
“It doesn’t just tell me sixty-five percent of the comments about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are positive, it gives the geographical regions of the opinions.
In the South, they love the way the couple seemingly embodies traditional gender norms—he opens the door for her, she wears demure lace dresses.
Or that user 12345 really loved Kelce’s old tweet misspelling Chipotle as Chipolte, but also that the stars-are-like-us moment played well for weeks afterward, drowning smaller negative stories that would have otherwise dominated the cycle. ”
I can see Lucas nodding; he saw an older version of this in Abe’s office, and perhaps he guesses where I’m going.
I’m typing even as I explain, trying to test things in real time.
“Brody and Vi are both still in their stars-rising phase, which means there’s less to analyze, but everything so far suggests that the people commenting—and I know that’s only a small portion of who’s out there, but they can be a vocal and sometimes opinion-swaying minority—are upset for two main reasons.
They think Brody’s too wishy-washy, that he’s not taking enough stances and doesn’t have enough connections with the actual community.
Others say Vi is too curated and fake. A lot of the online trolls are saying they always knew Vi couldn’t .
. .” I pause, because online commentators are terrible, and I don’t really want to give them voice, but my plan doesn’t work unless we combat the negativity head-on.
It’s Vi who finishes the sentences for me. “Couldn’t hold down a man. I’m a two-weeks-in-Vienna girl. A two-month-holiday romance. Not the one you stay with. Definitely not the one you introduce to your parents.”
I nod because it’s true. Vi and Khloe have had their share of short-lived, potentially only for the media romances and showmances with low-level movie stars and DJs. One football player. A basketball star. A record producer. “The way to combat that is to feed the internet our own story.”
“I’ve spoken to our publicist,” Khloe interrupts.
“We can deny it, or—and this is their official suggestion that we’re apparently paying them for the privilege of—we can ignore it.
They said they could also plant a story about Brody and Lorelai fighting over something stupid, but Darcy doubts we’d gain traction.
Curated responses often fail to launch. We could also engage a company more experienced in specifically this, but they’re . . . a lot more expensive.”
“Big data requires big compute,” Brody explains succinctly.
“Our publicist is traditional, which wasn’t a problem when we were younger, but—”
Khloe finishes for her twin. “Media-savvy publicists, with algorithm-backed strategies, are the only way to more effectively target a story like this.”