Make Up Break Up

by Lily Menon

  “I’m sorry.” Hudson’s eyes were still fixed on her. It was unnerving, how he seemed to peer right into her soul. Definitely a cult leader in the making. “I’m not following. How did I steal your idea again?”

  “Let me count the ways.” Annika held up one finger. “First, our names. I chose Make Up and you chose Break Up? Come on—could you be more unoriginal? Second, take our slogans. Mine’s Happily Ever After, Redux and you choose Your Life, Restarted. How much more obvious could you get?”

  Hudson frowned. “Annika, when did you launch your business?”

  “October of last year.”

  “Blaire, when did we launch the Break Up app?”

  “September sixteenth of last year,” she replied immediately, smiling triumphantly at Annika.

  “So maybe you’re copying us, Ms. Dev,” Hudson said. All three of them burst out laughing.

  “Ha-ha, very funny!” Annika snapped. “Look, you can’t deny it. We met at that conference last summer. I … um, told you about my plans for Make Up—” Annika couldn’t help flooding with heat at the memory of where they’d been when she’d told him. “—and then, bam. You launch a company that, I’m sorry, feels like a complete rip-off of mine. Beyond that, your company is anathema to mine. No, actually, it’s anathema to my entire philosophy on life. I strive to reunite lovers and give them their happily-ever-afters, and you do your damnedest to make people miserable and alone for their entire lives.”

  “That’s quite a story you’ve concocted there.” The redheaded dude sniffed. “Is your real name J. K. Rowling?”

  It was the weakest comeback in the history of comebacks. At any other time, Annika would’ve laughed in his face, but she wasn’t feeling very amused at the moment. She gave him a withering look. He stepped back, looking caught out.

  Hudson Craft held up a hand and spoke to the redhead. “It’s okay, Ziggy. People deal with jealousy in all different ways. Annika, apparently, has opted to believe that we owe our success to her.” He chuckled. “Hey, whatever floats your boat. Wish I was that confident. I think I’d be a lot happier about some of my more dismal failures.” His lackeys laughed.

  “My company is not a dismal failure! And I am not jealous! You just—you—” Annika pushed her fists against her head and let out a frustrated groan. “You’re just such an asshole!”

  She turned to stalk out, purposely stomping on as many stupid Nerf darts as she could along the way. “You just moved in and the first things you unpack are Nerf guns and a gong? You’re all adults. Maybe act like it!” she yelled over her shoulder.

  “Nice seeing you, neighbor!” Hudson called as she yanked the door open. She could hear the smile in his voice and wanted to turn around and unload another round of Nerf darts in his face. “Come by anytime! Tomorrow we’ll have cookies and milk.”

  Cookies and milk. Cookies and milk? Annika couldn’t resist asking, “What’s next? A brown bag session with PB&J and ants on a log? Naptime?” She shut the door behind her before he had a chance to respond. Something about Hudson’s easy, boastful confidence—that he had no right to have, by the way—really got under her skin.

  It was hard to believe that this was the guy who’d left her business in the dust. When she’d met him at the conference, he’d seemed … nice. Kind. Maybe even a little lost, a little like he was searching for something. Needless to say, she’d been completely tricked. It was probably just a ploy to get her into bed. Her cheeks warmed again at the thought that she’d hooked up with him. With him. What the hell was wrong with her? How could she not have seen that Hudson Craft was nothing but a giant man-baby with talented pecs?

  * * *

  Back in her office, Annika’s blood pressure—or as her yoga instructor Seetha called it, her “stress elemental”—took about forty-five minutes to get back under control. She got up to open the office door and help June, who staggered in under the weight of a gigantic whiteboard, the hot pink silk of her dress all rumpled.

  Annika propped the board against the wall, right under the Make Up sign. “Wow. You, um, decided to go big, huh?” The monstrosity could double as a pool table.

  “I didn’t want to do anything by half measures, you know?” June’s face was red and sweaty. She smoothed her hair off her forehead and fanned herself. “Is the AC on?”

  Cheering sounded from down the hall. June looked at Annika. “What the…?”

  “Our new neighbors moved in. And you’ll never guess who.”

  “Who? Oh my gosh. Don’t tell me it’s Lady Gaga!”

  June had a completely unhealthy obsession with Lady Gaga. Annika stared at her. “Lady Ga—what? No. This is a different performer, but one you’ve definitely heard of. Hudson Craft and the Break Up Cult.”

  “What?”

  Annika nodded and waited for June to process through all the stages of shock. First came knee-jerk denial, which was soon followed by intense disbelief, and finally, bringing up the rear, was heated indignation. Warm smugness seeped through Annika. She had someone on her side, too. Hudson Craft and his cronies could laugh and snicker, but Annika wasn’t alone in this. Not by a long shot.

  June was still struggling to accept reality. “You’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding, Annika.”

  “You have no idea how much I want to tell you that.” Sighing, Annika walked over to her desk, rearranged her soothing bamboo picture frames, and sat in her chair, swiveling from side to side as she talked. “I already went over there and gave him a piece of my mind.”

  June took her seat, too. “No way. What did you say?”

  “Just that they’re all giant lying, stealing, plagiarizing pieces of shit. I also may have shot him in the face with a Nerf gun.”

  “Oh my god!” June clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sure he deserved it. Did he admit it, then? That he stole your idea?”

  Annika blew out a breath. “Yeah, right. He just doubled down and tried to say I was jealous of his success or some such bullshit.”

  “Arrogant piece of—”

  “It’s okay.” Annika looked out the window at the skyscraper-dotted view. “I mean, what else is he going to say, you know? He probably can’t even sleep at night. I couldn’t, if I was responsible for breaking three hundred thousand hearts and profiting off of all that pain. That’s right—apparently they’ve had three hundred thousand successful breakups, if you can even call them that. Their app is getting insanely popular, June. It’s not good.”

  June made loyal gagging sounds, even though Annika had rehashed her “Hudson Craft is the devil” speech about twenty-seven times a day over the past eight months.

  Annika turned to her laptop and scrolled halfheartedly through her spam folder. “What the hell.”

  “What?”

  “There’s an email here from a beta tester. It went to my spam folder.”

  “Shit, really?”

  “I am so firing our web developer.”

  “Are you still using him?”

  “No, but … whatever. He’s not getting any repeat business when we get our cash flow problems resolved. So many spam emails come to my inbox and the emails I actually want to see are going into the spam folder!” Annika looked up at June. “You know what the problem is? Men. All our problems can be traced back to men.”

  “Men,” June agreed, rolling her eyes. “That reminds me, I went on that date last night?”

  “Oh, the—um—the hedge fund manager?” Annika said, only half listening as she skimmed the missed email.

  “Yep, Hedgefund Harry. Ugh.” June began to tidy up her work surface, like she always did before getting down to coding. Baby Yoda got a prized spot right next to her second screen. “So he got there twenty-five minutes late, just as I was leaving. He looked me up and down and was like ‘Whoa. If I knew you were this hot, I would’ve shown up on time. You need to update your Tinder photo, babe.’”

  Annika shuddered. “Ew.”

  “Where do I find these total tools?”

  “U
m, Tinder?”

  “Right! Why do I keep using Tinder?”

  Annika sighed. “Because you don’t want to end up a no-life, loveless loser like me?”

  “You’re not a no-life, loveless loser.”

  Annika leaned back in her chair. “Really? Then how come every guy I’ve ever loved has dumped me without a second thought?”

  “You know what you need to do.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know, but I can’t just date around like you. Hookups are not my thing. Love is my thing.” June opened her mouth to argue, but Annika was already distracted by the new beta tester’s email. “Hey, should we put this guy on the calendar? Have him come in and work with OLLI?”

  June came over and read the email over her shoulder.

  Hi Annika,

  I’m a junior at UCLA (comp sci major) and my roommate Sean said he really liked helping you train OLLI two weeks ago. Can I volunteer to do that too?

  Colin McGuire

  “Perfect,” June said when she was done reading. “I like that his roommate’s already done this, so he has an idea of how it works. And comp sci majors are normally interested in the tech, so they don’t ask stupid questions like ‘Who am I talking to, exactly? Why do you get to define sentience?’”

  Annika laughed. “You really didn’t like that philosophy major, did you?”

  June grunted her displeasure as she went back to her desk. “OLLI’s a neural network. ‘Who defines sentience?’ Who gives a shit? Just help me train the damn thing.”

  Annika grinned.

  OLLI—the Original Love Language Interface—was completely innovative tech. Once it was ready, it would function as a relationship therapist people could have in the comfort of their own phones, a Google Translate for couples. You’d pull up the Make Up app, leave it on the table while you had a serious conversation with your partner, and OLLI would listen in and facilitate a healthier, calmer dialogue. If things started going badly, OLLI would flash a suggestion to fix your mistake—for example, by rephrasing something in a more compassionate, partner-focused manner. OLLI would also be able to detect anger or highly negative emotionality in your voice and push calming messages to help correct the issue.

  Annika had read a book by a marriage counselor who claimed poor communication was responsible for ninety percent of divorces. Make Up could fix that. That’s where the beta testers came in.

  Annika and June would sit with volunteer beta testers for hours while they answered questions and role-played a communication a user might have in a relationship, to train OLLI on their voice and patterns of speech. Eventually, OLLI would get so smart and self-sufficient that it could be used by anyone anywhere.

  It was, if Annika did say so herself, a completely genius idea. It was just taking slightly longer than either of them had anticipated or hoped to finish the OLLI prototype, which meant the grants they’d won were drying up and there was no new source of income. A fact that Mr. McManor from the Bank of California had clearly noticed.

  But Annika was still optimistic. Little electric sparkles of excitement danced along her skin as she responded to Colin and asked him to come in. This was how she’d felt when she first came up with the idea for Make Up and OLLI, the kind of feeling she got every time she thought about helping someone fall back in love with their loved one. The kind of feeling she lived for. You know, not the dark, sinking desperation that came from being cash-poor.

  Once she was done fiddling with a bit of code she’d been working on, June hung the whiteboard on the only empty wall in their office. Annika put the heinous Hudson Craft firmly out of her mind, and she and June spent the rest of the day brainstorming the one major hurdle Make Up still faced: its financial shortcomings, resulting from the app still being in the prototype phase.

  Empty Chinese food containers littered both their desks, and the scent of greasy lo mein hung like a curtain in the air. After an hour or two had passed, the boisterous laughter and yelling from next door had subsided, which made it easier to concentrate.

  Annika stretched, feeling her spine crackle and pop. She’d kicked off her shoes, so her toes chafed on the tough industrial carpet as she paced. “All right. So. Scalability—getting OLLI ready to use by anyone anywhere—is still the thorn in our side. It’s the ticket to growth, which is the ticket to money, and we’re just not there yet.”

  June regarded the notes on the whiteboard, tapping the end of a red dry-erase marker against her chin. “Yeah. And it’s proving to be a tough one to crack.”

  Annika nodded, coming to a stop at the window. People scurried like ants on the sidewalk below in the late-afternoon sunlight. “Right. I know it’s because we’re being ambitious with the tech. This has never been done before, which is precisely why we need to be the ones to do it. We’re going to change the world.”

  “We’ll change the world if we ever get to release.” June groaned, scribbling a grumpy face in one corner of the whiteboard. “Prototyping feels like it’ll never end.”

  Annika turned from the window to face her. “I know it does. But you know what? We’ll get there.”

  June looked up at her and they said together, “Fail forward.” June laughed. “Remember the very first OLLI?”

  Annika snorted. “You mean the one we called Troll-y?”

  “The iteration that hated everyone! Remember when it told that beta tester that he needed to give up and go home while he was speaking to you? And it told another volunteer that her partner would leave her because she sounded like an ugly narwhal pie? I mean, I know small sample sizes make neural networks weird, but WTF.”

  Annika perched on the edge of her desk, careful not to get anywhere near the empty food container. Grease stains were a nightmare to get out. “Don’t remind me.”

  “But I will get Make Up—and OLLI—ready for release soon. I promise.”

  “I know you will. And if we can get it somewhere close to ready by the time the EPIC pitch contest rolls around in June, we’ll blow them away.”

  June whistled. “Angel investors.”

  “Yep. It’s going to be our big break. Lionel Wakefield is on the panel, and he’s famous for investing in businesses that make a difference—that make the world better in some way, however big or small. So I think that’s where we should begin. Let’s diagram the investors and their personalities and interests—and what’s most likely to capture their attention in a pitch.”

  “Perfect.” June drew a stick figure holding a trophy in one corner. “I have a really good feeling about it.”

  Annika smiled, catching sight of her reflection in the window. She had bags under her eyes, but her jaw was set in a way she really liked. “Me too,” she replied. “It’s about time Lady Luck took our side again.”

  chapter three

  Some people drank, some smoked pot. Others raced ferrets or composed rude letters in their heads. Annika got her high pretzeling her limbs into odd poses.

  She’d been coming to the Breathing Tree Yoga Studio for a whole year now, and she couldn’t dream of giving it up. Even when money was tight, even when the financial wolves were snapping at her heels, she set aside the monthly membership for Breathing Tree just like her grocery expenses. It was cheaper than therapy, and it took care of her body and her mind.

  Yoga had started out as something Annika’s dad had talked her into, but cultivating a daily yoga practice was one of the best things she’d ever done.

  As a seventh grader, Annika had entered into one of the darkest and most tumultuous phases of her life. That year, it had really sunk in that, unlike all her friends, she would never have a mother to go to with questions about her period or boys. She’d never have that nonjudgmental, unconditionally loving maternal perspective.

  It hadn’t seemed like a monumental loss until that year, when hormones and other unknowable adolescent stirrings had kicked into high gear. Not knowing how to cope with something as big and awful as being a motherless teen, Annika began skipping school and smoking pot until the
school threatened to expel her. Her poor dad, at his wit’s end, had suggested therapist after therapist, to which Annika had responded with typical teenage scorn. But then one Saturday, he’d dragged her to a yoga class at the YMCA and that was it. She was hooked.

  Yoga didn’t bring her mother back, obviously, but it made life a lot less shitty without one. Annika fell in love with the feeling of quietness and tranquility within her soul, which she hadn’t been able to find anywhere else. She loved building her strength—loved knowing her body was resilient and healthy and able to do hard things. She’d kept with it through high school and college and couldn’t ever imagine giving it up.

  Now, her brain feeling mushy after all the brainstorming she and June had done, Annika strolled into studio A, the one with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced a tiny patch of grass in the back. The knot in her stomach loosened immediately, and her shoulders relaxed.

  “Hey, Seetha,” she called. Her Indian yoga instructor turned from fiddling with the stereo system and beamed at her.

  “Annika! I was just thinking about you.” Seetha, the most graceful human being Annika had ever encountered, shimmied over to her. Her gray-speckled black braid hung over one shoulder and she wore a simple diamond nose ring that winked in the light. “Ooh, is that a new outfit?”

  Annika checked herself out in the mirror. She’d swapped her office-trendy burgundy peplum top and black skirt for a purple sports bra and turquoise leggings that had silver peacock feathers printed all over. Not bad, she thought. Her high ponytail was bouncy, her arms and abs were toned from diligent practice, and her skin was clear in spite of all the chocolate she’d been stress-eating lately.

  “Yeah, it is.” Annika smiled. “I treated myself last week. Just a pick-me-up, you know. To jostle myself out of the rut.” The rut of growing an ulcer over financial issues, she thought but didn’t say.

  “Well, I have just the thing to jostle you out of the yoga rut,” Seetha said. “Get this, I have a new regimen for the end of class today: partner poses.”