Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

  For a moment, the security guard’s nostrils expanded. He nodded to himself, as if he’d been asked a question, and said, “Any chance you’ve been drinking tonight, ma’am?” Emira closed her mouth and took a step back. The woman next to him winced and said, “Oh, geez.”

  The poultry and meat section came into view. There, the Penn State shopper from earlier was very much paused and attuned to Emira’s conversation. All at once, on top of the surreptitious accusations, this entire interaction seemed completely humiliating, as if she’d been loudly told that her name was not on a guest list. “You know what—it’s cool,” she said. “We can just leave.”

  “Now wait a minute.” The guard held out his hand. “I can’t let you leave, because a child is involved.”

  “But she’s my child right now.” Emira laughed again. “I’m her sitter. I’m technically her nanny . . .” This was a lie, but Emira wanted to imply that paperwork had been done concerning her employment, and that it connected her to the child in question.

  “Hi, sweetie.” The woman bent and pressed her hands into her knees. “Do you know where your mommy is?”

  “Her mom is at home.” Emira tapped her collarbone twice as she said, “You can just talk to me.”

  “So you’re saying,” the guard clarified, “that a random woman, three blocks away, asked you to watch her child this late at night?”

  “Ohmygod, no. That’s not what I said. I’m her nanny.”

  “There was another girl here a few minutes ago,” the woman said to the guard. “I think she just left.” Emira’s face checked into amazement. As it seemed, her entire existence had become annulled. Emira felt like raising her arm as if she were finding a friend in a large crowd, with a phone to her ear, and saying, Do you see me? I’m waving my hand. The woman shook her head. “They were doing some . . . I don’t even know . . . some booty dancing or whatnot? And I thought, okay, this doesn’t feel right.”

  “Ummm.” Emira’s voice went high as she said, “Are you serious right now?” Briar sneezed into the side of her leg.

  The Penn State man came up and into view. His cell phone was raised and recording in front of his chest.

  “Ohmygod.” Emira shielded her face with chipped black nails as if she’d accidentally walked into a group photo. “Can you step off?”

  “I think you’re gonna want this filmed,” he said. “Do you want me to call the police?”

  Emira dropped her arm and said, “For what?”

  “Hey, big girl.” The security guard got down on one knee; his voice was gentle and practiced. “Who’s this right here?”

  “Sweetheart?” the woman said softly. “Is this your friend?”

  Emira wanted to bend down and hold Briar—maybe if Briar could see her face more clearly, she’d be able to deliver her name?—but she knew her skirt was gravely short, and now there was a cell phone involved. It suddenly seemed like her fate was in the hands of a toddler who believed broccolis were baby trees, and that placing yourself underneath a blanket made it difficult to be found. Emira held her breath as Briar stuck her fingers in her mouth. Briar said, “Meer,” and Emira thought, Thank God.

  But the guard said, “Not you, honey. Your friend right here. What’s her name?”

  Briar screamed, “Meer!”

  “She’s saying my name,” Emira told him. “It’s Emira.”

  The security guard asked, “Can you spell that for me?”

  “Hey hey hey.” The man behind the cell phone tried to get Emira’s attention. “Even if they ask, you don’t have to show your ID. It’s Pennsylvania state law.”

  Emira said, “I know my rights, dude.”

  “Sir?” The security guard stood and turned. “You do not have the right to interfere with a crime.”

  “Holup holup, a crime?!” Emira felt as if she were plummeting. All the blood in her body seemed to be buzzing and sloshing inside her ears and behind her eyes. She reached down to swing Briar into her arms, placed her feet apart for balance, and flipped her hair onto her back. “What crime is being committed right now? I’m working. I’m making money right now, and I bet I’m making more than you. We came here to look at some nuts, so are we under arrest or are we free to go?” As she spoke, Emira covered the child’s ear. Briar slipped her hand into the V of her blouse.

  Once again, the tattletale woman took her hand to her mouth. This time, she said, “Oh man, oh shoot.”

  “Okay, ma’am?” The security guard widened his stance to match hers. “You are being held and questioned because the safety of a child is at risk. Please put the child on the ground—”

  “Alright, you know what?” Emira’s left ankle shook as she retrieved her cell phone from her tiny purse. “I’ll call her father and he can come down here. He’s an old white guy so I’m sure everyone will feel better.”

  “Ma’am, I need you to calm down.” With his palms to Emira, the security guard locked eyes with Briar again. “Okay, honey, how old are you?”

  Emira typed the first four letters of Peter Chamberlain and clicked on his bright blue phone number. Against Briar’s hand, she felt her heart bounce underneath her skin.

  “How many are you, honey?” the woman asked. “Two? Three?” To the guard she said, “She looks about two.”

  “Ohmygod, she’s almost three,” Emira muttered.

  “Ma’am?” The security guard pointed a finger at her face. “I am speaking to the child.”

  “Oh right, okay. ’Cause she’s the one to ask. BB, look at me.” Emira forced a gleeful expression into her lips and bounced the toddler twice. “How many are you?”

  “One two fee four fie!”

  “How old am I?”

  “Happy birfday!”

  Emira looked back to the security guard and said, “You good?” In her cell phone, the ringing stopped. “Mr. Chamberlain?” Something clicked in the earpiece but she didn’t hear a voice. “It’s Emira, hello? Can you hear me?”

  “I’d like to speak to her father.” The security guard reached out for her phone.

  “The fuck are you doing? Don’t touch me!” Emira turned her body. At this motion, Briar gasped. She held Emira’s black, synthetic hair against her chest like rosary beads.

  “You don’t wanna touch her, dude,” Penn State warned. “She’s not resisting. She’s calling the kid’s dad.”

  “Ma’am, I am asking you to kindly hand over the phone.”

  “Come on, man, you can’t take her phone.”

  The guard turned with a hand outstretched and yelled, “Back up, sir!”

  With her phone pressed to her face and Briar’s hands in her hair, Emira screamed, “You’re not even a real cop, so you back up, son!” And then she watched his face shift. His eyes said, I see you now. I know exactly who you are, and Emira held her breath as he began to call for backup.

  Emira heard Mr. Chamberlain’s voice at the top of her cell phone. He said, “Emira?” and then, “Hello?”

  “Mr. Chamberlain? Can you please come to Market Depot?” In the same controlled panic that started her night, she said, “Because they think I stole Briar. Can you please hurry?” He said something between What and Oh God, and then he said, “I’m coming right now.”

  Emira hadn’t anticipated that the heated accusations would be favorable to the silence that followed. The five of them stood there, appearing more annoyed than justified, as they waited to see who would win. As Emira began a staring contest with the floor, Briar patted the hair on Emira’s shoulders. “Dis is like my horsey hair,” Briar said. Emira bounced her and said, “Mm-hmm. It was very expensive so please be careful.” Finally, she heard the glide of an automatic door. With quick footsteps, Mr. Chamberlain emerged from the cereal aisle. Briar pointed with one finger and said, “That’s Dada.”

  Mr. Chamberlain looked as if he’d jogged the whole way—tiny beads o
f sweat on his nose—and he placed a hand on Emira’s shoulder. “What’s going on here?”

  Emira responded by holding out his daughter. The woman took a step back and said, “Okay, great. I’ll just leave you guys to it.” The security guard began to explain and apologize. He took off his hat as his backup arrived.

  Emira didn’t wait for Mr. Chamberlain to finish lecturing the guards about how long he had been coming to the store, how they cannot detain people without reasonable cause, or how inappropriate it was that they question his decisions as a parent. Instead she whispered, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Emira,” he said. “Wait. Let me pay you.”

  She waved no with both hands. “I get paid on Fridays. I’ll see you at your birthday, Bri.” But Briar had begun to fall asleep on Mr. Chamberlain’s shoulder.

  Outside, Emira jogged around the corner, in the opposite direction of the Chamberlain home. She stopped and stood in front of a closed bakery with cupcakes on display behind a gridded security gate; her hands were still shaking as she texted no one. Breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, Emira scanned through hundreds of songs. She shimmied her hips and pulled her skirt back down.

  “Hey hey hey.” Penn State appeared at the street corner. He made his way toward her and said, “Hey, are you okay?”

  Emira slumped her shoulders in a miserable lift that said I don’t know. With her phone in front of her stomach, she bit the inside of her cheek.

  “Listen, that was super fucked up,” he said. “I got the whole thing on tape. I would turn it in to a news station if I were you and then you can—”

  “Oof. Yeah . . . no,” she said. She pushed her hair out of her face. “No way, but . . . thanks anyway, though.”

  He paused and ran his tongue over his front teeth. “Okay, that guy was a dick to you. Don’t you wanna get him fired?”

  Emira laughed and said, “For what?” She shifted in her heels and put her phone back in her purse. “So he can go to another grocery store and get some other nine-dollar-an-hour bullshit job? Please. I’m not tryna have people Google my name and see me lit, with a baby that isn’t mine, at a fucking grocery store in Washington Square.”

  The man exhaled and held up one hand in surrender. Underneath his other arm was a Market Depot paper bag. “I mean . . .” He put his free hand on his hip. “At the very least, you could probably get free groceries for a year.”

  “Oh, right. So I can stock up on kombucha and shit?”

  He laughed and said, “Fair.”

  “Lemme see your phone.” Emira jiggled her ring and middle finger as she held out her palm. “You need to delete that thing.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked carefully. “I’m serious. This would definitely get you an op-ed or something.”

  “I’m not a writer,” Emira said. “And I don’t mess with the Internet, so give it.”

  “Wait, how about this?” He took out his phone. “It’s your business and I’m happy to delete it. But let me email it to you first, in case you ever change your mind.”

  “I won’t, though—”

  “Just in case . . . here. Type your email in.”

  Because it seemed easier to share her email than convince him otherwise, Emira held the strap of her purse in one hand and began to type with the other. When she saw the email address in the From section, reading KelleyTCopeland@gmail.com, she stopped and said, “Hold up, who the fuck is Kelley?”

  He blinked. “I’m Kelley.”

  “Oh.” As she finished typing her email, Emira looked up and said, “Really?”

  “Alright, alright.” He took the phone back from her. “I’ve been to middle school so you can’t really hurt me.”

  Emira smiled. “No wonder you shop here.”

  “Hey, I don’t usually shop here.” He laughed. “But don’t make me feel worse. I have two types of kombucha in this bag right now.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Did you delete it?”

  “It’s gone.” He showed her the screen and scrolled backward. The most recent photo was a man she didn’t know with a Post-it stuck to his face. She couldn’t read what it said.

  “K.” Emira pulled a string of hair from the gloss on her lips. She gave him a sad I don’t know grin, and said, “K. Bye, then.”

  “Okay, yeah, have a good night, take care.” It was clear he hadn’t seen this exit coming, but Emira didn’t care. She walked toward the train while texting Zara, Come over when you’re done.

  Emira could take a cab—Mrs. Chamberlan would certainly pay her back—but she didn’t because she never did. She kept the future twenty-dollar bill and took the train to her Kensington apartment. Just after 1 a.m., Zara buzzed from downstairs.

  “I can’t handle any of this.” Zara said this from Emira’s toilet seat. Emira wiped her makeup off and locked eyes with her friend in the mirror. “Okay, because like . . .” Zara raised both of her hands up by her face. “Since when is the Running Man considered booty dancing?”

  “I don’t know.” Emira removed her lipstick with a washcloth as she spoke. “Also, we all talked about it?” She said this with an apologetic wince. “And everyone there agreed I’m a better dancer than you.”

  Zara rolled her eyes.

  “It’s not a competition or anything,” Emira tried again. “It’s just that I’m the winner.”

  “Girl,” Zara said, “That could have been bad.”

  Emira laughed and said, “Z, it’s fine,” but then she put the back of her hand to her mouth and silently started to cry.

  Two

  Between 2001 and 2004, Alix Chamberlain sent over one hundred letters and received over nine hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. These free products included coffee beans, Luna Bars, makeup samples, scented candles, putty to hang posters on the walls in her dorm room, magazine subscriptions, sunscreens, and face masks—all of which Alix shared with her roommates and the other girls on her floor. While she majored in marketing and minored in finance, Alix did product reviews for a student newspaper during her sophomore and junior years at NYU. In her senior year, she quit the newspaper to become a beauty intern at a tiny publication, but she didn’t stop sending letters. On thick, textured stationery and with dreamy cursive handwriting, Alix asked nicely for the things she wanted, and it became a rare occurrence when she didn’t receive them.

  Over the next four years, Alix wrote letters to Ray-Ban, Conan O’Brien, Scholastic, Keurig, Lululemon, the W Hotel, Smartwater, and hundreds more. For the most part she sent requests accompanied by affirmation and praise, but there were often tactful complaints and suggestions for improvement. Alix had a knack for taking high-quality photos of the free merchandise she often received, and she posted these items and the letters that prompted them onto her blog. It was a project she’d started on a whim, but it gained her a small Internet following. Around this time, she met Peter Chamberlain.

  Alix met Peter in a bar at age twenty-five, and if she were honest about it, she’d admit that she thought he was much taller until he stood up at the end of their conversation. But in addition to her height he matched her personality. Peter did all these enchanting things that were fancy but not showy, like put mint in his water and privately tip thirty percent. What Alix immediately liked best about Peter was that he treated her side project like an actual job. Alix had a self-deprecating way of describing her letters: “Well, I . . . I write letters and reviews and I have this blog . . . but it’s tiny, it’s not a big thing at all.” Peter told her to try that again, but this time, to pretend like it was. Peter was a journalist-turned-newscaster who was raised in upstate New York. He was eight years older than Alix, he didn’t think it was strange to wear makeup on camera, and he firmly believed in building your brand. When Alix married Peter at age twenty-eight, the party favors, her shoes, and the white wine at her wedding were all items she�
�d received free of charge from hand-writing gorgeous letters and promising glowing reviews. On a honeymoon in Santorini, Peter helped her write each rave.

  Alix worked in student recruitment at Hunter College when a friend—a high school English teacher at Columbia Grammar and Prep—asked her to give a cover-letter-writing workshop to one of her classes. One of the attending students was seventeen-year-old Lucie, a senior with unrealistically white teeth, light pink hair, and an Instagram following of 36K. Three months after the workshop, Lucie posted a picture to her account featuring the cover letter and essay she’d drafted with Alix on top of acceptance letters from UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, Fordham, and Emerson. I owe all of my acceptances to Alix, she said in her caption. Honestly never would have applied to half these schools if she hadn’t made my application so bomb. #allyouhavetodoisask #writealetter #LetHer. Lucie’s post received more than 1,700 likes, and, seemingly overnight, Alix Chamberlain became a brand. Her propensity for receiving free merchandise quickly turned into a philosophy about women speaking up and taking communication back to basics. In the middle of the night, Alix changed her Instagram bio to #LetHerSpeak. Peter suggested she do a rebrand of her website, and to not forget him once she became famous.

  During the year she turned twenty-nine, Alix quit her job at Hunter College. She held cover letter and interview-prep workshops at halfway houses, leadership retreats, sorority houses, and career-night events. Students signed up for her sessions at college-recruitment fairs and her inbox became loaded with Thank you!s, and I got in!s. Alix was also contacted by a high-end paperie to help design a new line of office stationery geared toward women in the workplace. The paper was ivory, the pens dark blue, and Alix made her second print debut since NYU, this time in Teen Vogue magazine. It didn’t hurt that Alix’s large blue eyes and surprisingly long legs were extremely editorial. The picture on her new website under About Alix showed her sitting and laughing at the edge of an office desk, two stacks of letters in overflowing mail bins at her feet, and her thick, sand-colored hair gathered on top of her head in a charming, exhausted heap.