Chapter 4
Depending on the day and the interviewee, a typical Sausage Talk recording requires me to eat anywhere from two to five hot dogs that usually sit like a brick in my stomach, my fingers smelling like ketchup and wiener water by the time the day is through.
It all generally helps feed into my miserable persona for the segment.
But as I walk into the office for today’s shoot with Cooper, there’s a very real chance that I won’t be able to stomach a single bite with the combination of nerves and bitterness that’s been fermenting in me the past three days.
But hey, if I puke on him during a live stream, it’ll probably be great for views, which is all I’m good for at this point.
While all of this is coming together with miraculous speed, the last few days have been a sick and slow type of torture, each hour hitting a new milestone of views and comments on my video.
The post left its ideal audience of righteously indignant women and started picking up steam with trolls and incels.
While it genuinely makes me laugh that any of these men (and some women) think they can hurt my precious feelings with a predictable and derivatively scathing comment, I never anticipated being called various forms of bitch at such a rapid frequency.
But, for every horrible thing someone tries to say about me, there are five other strangers hopping in with clever responses and digs in my defense that take a troll down a peg or nine.
Cooper, for his part, has been surprisingly silent on the whole thing.
The guy I knew six years ago severely lacked impulse control or any type of filter, so I have no doubt this tight-lipped response is because some ludicrously expensive publicity firm has fitted him with a muzzle while his public adoration and accompanying brand deals teeter in the wind.
I’ve seen speculation posts about a few sponsors cutting ties with his brand, which makes his agreement to do this absurd sham of a live “interview” fairly obvious. This is a publicity stunt on his part, plain and simple.
Swiping through the security gates of the building, I take the elevator to the basement where the Sausage Talk set is housed.
When the segment first gained some online attention, there was talk of shooting at an actual hot dog shop or one of New York’s countless corner stands, but the powers that be decided it was more cost-effective to give me a dank corner of a storage area perpetually dressed up like a 1950s soda shop where they could microwave us cheap weenies on demand. The glamor is staggering.
I throw my purse on (at) the rickety IKEA side table I use for hair and makeup, plopping in the foldable chair as I take in my dismal reflection.
The bags under my eyes are almost as dark as my brown irises, declaring loudly and proudly how little sleep and how much doomscrolling I’ve done lately. My mouth is pinched in a perpetual frown, and a lovely cluster of stress zits on my temple complement the grim look.
This just won’t do.
I pull out my makeup bag, getting to work on concealer and foundation with the focus of an artist at her canvas, flicking on my cat-eye liner like an executioner sharpening her blade.
I tousle my hair and paint my lips and groom my eyebrows until the woman in the mirror reflects the woman I want to feel like on the inside—cool, unflappable, a bit imperious.
All in all, hot as fuck.
I’m a lot of things—coarse, sarcastic, anxious, aggravating, aggravat ed , emotionally stunted—but vain tops the list and I’ll own that sin with pride, wear it like a scarlet letter to match with my perfect red pout.
This wasn’t always the case. Vanity is a vice I’ve worked toward and cultivated the past few years.
As the depressingly average middle child with five high-achieving siblings, I spent most of my adolescence blending into the wallpaper.
My dad remarried when I was nine, and my stepmom, Laura, already had three teenage boys from her first marriage who instantly became the sons my dad always wanted, their penchant for sports and the promise of scholarships to D1 schools absorbing all his attention and adoration.
By the time I was eleven, my dad and Laura had moved on to having kids together— twin girls who were perfect from their first breath—and I was deemed self-sufficient enough to manage my level of mediocracy while they cultivated the girls’ beauty and brilliance.
It became standard practice, pushing me to the side.
How could my mandatory chorus recitals or school-sanctioned art shows compete with Derek’s track meets or the twins’ pageants or Chris and John’s tennis matches?
I couldn’t even be sad that my dad and Laura didn’t show when it would have been far more painful for them to see me in my lackluster misery.
I went through college with a similar dullness, keeping my head down and praying that one day my ideas and thoughts would shine bright enough to earn me the recognition and worth that my siblings grasped so easily.
It wasn’t until Cooper talked to me in that lecture of my junior year that I’d ever felt any type of attention, and some greedy part of me became an instant addict to the warmth of another person’s interest.
But even after that short fling went to shit, I spent my early twenties dimming myself down, making myself as palatable as possible for the people I was dating in the hopes that they’d tolerate me enough to stick around.
They left me anyway.
I eventually realized—with a tremendous amount of consistent and exuberant hyping up from Aida and Ray—that Hot Girl isn’t something someone is born as.
Hot Girl is an armor you put on. An impenetrable fortress of makeup or dyed hair or fake nails or killer clothes or expensive perfume or any other bodily adornment that makes you feel fucking good . Powerful.
Hot Girl isn’t a look or a style, it’s a commitment to doing whatever makes you feel unstoppable in the face of life’s fuckery. And I’ll be damned if I am anything but my hottest possible self on today of all days.
The problem is (to my total mortification) I’m spiraling out with nerves about seeing Cooper again after so many years.
Not only was my post-sex expression of feelings to Cooper the most morbidly embarrassing thing I’ve ever done—the past few days excluded—but I also did not take well to being ghosted.
It would be fair to say that I leaned deeply into the scorned-woman trope with some of the more, uh, colorful texts and voicemails I left him—ranging from pitifully vulnerable to unhinged rage. All I can hope is that he blocked me early and never received them.
But if that one-sided melodrama of a situationship wasn’t bad enough, here I am, six years later, drunkenly dragging him on the internet and now having to soberly confront him like I’ve been carrying a torch this entire time. Not very Hot Girl of me, I’ll be the first to admit.
“Well, fuck me, don’t you look amazing,” Aida says, punctuating her greeting with a wolf whistle as she comes up behind me.
I give a humble little bow, locking eyes with her in the mirror.
“We’ll have to put a not-safe-for-work tag on the video with an outfit like that.
” Her hands fuss around my boobs and I bat her away, readjusting my admittedly low neckline.
I’ve layered an oversized red linen shirt over a black lacy bustier top that does wonders for my virtually nonexistent cleavage, bringing the upper half all together with a stack of delicate gold necklaces that force attention to my chest, and finishing the look with high-waisted, wide-legged trousers for an overall coastal-grandma-meets-slutty-vampire vibe.
“You’re going for blood with this one, aren’t you?” Aida’s eyes are wary as she watches my Cheshire smile.
“Landry and William want views, and I’m nothing if not a dedicated team family fuckhead whatever,” I say sweetly, leaning forward to clean the edge of my lip line with my fingertip.
“Beautifully put,” Aida says with a frown. “I’ll have HR add that to our onboarding pamphlet.”
My smile grows more devious.
“Are you worried about your nipples?” she asks after a beat, making me blink.
“My nipples? What about my nipples?”
“That they’ll pop out and bounce everywhere on a live stream.”
My eyes ricochet between Aida’s concerned expression and my tits. “I wasn’t even slightly concerned about my nipples until you brought them up, thanks.” I place a protective clutch on my boobs, like that’ll save me.
Aida offers a skeptical shrug. Her phone dings, and her frown grows as she scans the message. “Rylie’s on his way down,” she says with a sigh, then levels a look at me. “I know Landry and William want drama, but I’m begging you to do that in the most drama-free way possible.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” I say, studying my nails. I painted them black to match the lace of my bra.
Aida ducks her head, forcing me to meet her stern expression.
“You know exactly what that means, you little shit-stirrer. This is not a public execution or WWE smackdown. You’re representing Soundbites here and he’s trying to save his own sponsored ass, so keep it funny but civil, get the job done, and, for the love of god, stick to the script. ”
The “script” is a loose outline of a mutually-agreed-upon flow for the conversation.
A few opening quips from me, banter, banter, hot dogs, banter, wrap it up on a high note with just enough zing and a hint of hope to keep tongues wagging and begging for another episode…
which I refuse to even consider, but I’ll cross that minefield when I get to it.
It’s sterile and whittled down in a way that theoretically will not make this man cry using only my words and an artfully arched eyebrow on a live stream, but I’m not making any promises.
I open my mouth to say something sarcastic and not at all reassuring when the double doors behind Aida swing open.
And in walks Rylie fucking Cooper.