by Sadie Hayes
Ted hailed a cab before Adam could put his dropped jaw back in place. He turned to face Lisa, who looked to be in equal shock.
“I need a drink,” Adam said. He turned to find the nearest bar, not caring whether Lisa followed or not, but hoping she would.
9
Dress for Success
It took Amelia several minutes to calm down after Adam dropped her off to go park. He’d driven like a maniac the whole way here; she’d known he was angry, but then when she tried to talk about it he just attacked her. She had to be so guarded now: It felt like everything she did lately made him mad. She checked in with a woman at the front desk and went straight to the bathroom, where she locked herself into a stall, closed the toilet seat lid, and slumped herself on it. She hugged her knees into her chest and buried her face into them, trying to press the tears back into her eye sockets as she counted out ten deep breaths, then another ten, and another. She kept replaying Roger’s words: “Don’t let them see you cry.” It had hardly been two weeks since he’d given her that lesson, and here she was, already about to blow it.
Why had she agreed to do this event? She hated stuff like this, hated the attention. And Adam was right: This was the part he wanted to do. Why hadn’t she just let him? Instead, she’d accepted T.J.’s suggestion unhesitatingly and made the whole thing with Adam worse.
Whether Adam had a right to be upset or not, she felt like she was losing her brother and best friend and couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Her iPhone vibrated and she pulled it out of her pocket. It was a text message from T.J.: “Thinking about you. Smile pretty. Know you’ll be great!!”
Amelia wiped the wetness from her eyes. At least she had T.J. She didn’t want to do this at all, but he’d seemed so anxious when he asked her to do it—“for me,” he’d said—she knew she couldn’t say no. She took one last deep breath. She had to just do it without thinking about it, and once it was over she could go home and be alone. Yes. Just get through this, Amelia, and you can go home and turn on your computer and shut everyone else out.
She walked through a ballroom where photographers were directing confidently smiling young entrepreneurs beneath lighting umbrellas. The room was buzzing with makeup artists and photographers and people with clipboards.
“Amelia!” a familiar voice called out, and Amelia turned to find it. “Amelia, over here!”
Patty! Patty Hawkins was skipping toward her.
Patty grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her into a hug. “Amelia! Where have you been? I was so worried. Come on.” Patty grabbed her by the hand and swept her away without explaining why she was here, and Amelia felt her heart lift. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been so happy to see her freshman roommate.
Patty pulled Amelia into an empty conference room and plopped her into a hairdresser chair that sat before a makeup table littered with beauty tools and a large tri-fold mirror. Patty put her hands on Amelia’s shoulders and took stock of her face. “Now, where do we start?” she said warmly.
Amelia was afraid speaking might make her cry again, but she whispered, “What are you doing here?”
Patty smiled broadly. “T.J. asked me to come. He said you might need some girl support…” She paused. “And, Amelia, I was so proud that you were on Forbes’s Thirty Under Thirty I could hardly stand it. I don’t know that I’ve ever been so proud of anyone ever. And I want you to freakin’ nail this photo shoot and show them all how cool you are.”
Amelia could have hugged her. She took back every critical thought she’d ever had of her freshman roommate: She was an angel, and that was all there was to it.
“That said,” Patty said, and sighed, “you’re going to have to trust me here.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” Amelia said. “I’m in your hands.”
Patty nodded. “Okay. Let’s go, then.”
She slathered a thick cream onto Amelia’s face and neck and produced tweezers she used to pluck out half of Amelia’s eyebrows. Tears streamed down Amelia’s cheeks with the pain.
“Do you seriously endure this pain every day?” Amelia cry-laughed.
“It gets better, I promise. It’s like bikini waxing: You get used to it and it doesn’t hurt so bad.”
“Do you know how screwed-up that sounds?”
“I guess I’d never thought about it until now, but, yes, you have a point.” Patty stopped her plucking for a moment to consider. “But you know what? I also have a point, which is that you do not want to be the entrepreneur known for bushy eyebrows.”
Amelia laughed and conceded.
Patty pulled Amelia’s hair out of its ponytail and grimaced at its tangles as she went to work with a hair dryer and curling iron.
“So what have you been up to?” Amelia asked when she’d regained her composure post-tweezing.
“Honestly?” Patty said excitedly. “I’ve been working on a company of my own.”
Amelia tilted her head and looked at Patty in the mirror. “Really?”
“Yes! And I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s going really well.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called Focus Girls. Basically, I put girls I know who are big shoppers and trendsetters in touch with companies. There are so many companies in the Valley who want to have sorority-girl types as customers, but they don’t know how to reach them or adapt their products to our tastes. So I put the two groups together.”
Amelia turned in the chair. “Patty, that’s a great idea!”
Patty smiled, genuinely pleased by Amelia’s compliment. “Thank you!”
Amelia turned back around, her mouth still agape at her friend’s accomplishment.
“And it’s going well, you said?”
“Totally. I mean, I’m not in Forbes or anything, but I’ve got a hundred girls signed up, and we’ve had like twenty-five clients express interest already. They pay me five hundred dollars per session, and I pay the girls half, so I’m actually making a lot of pocket money. At first I was targeting big companies—you know, marketing departments at the Gap and that sort of thing. But now I’m more gearing toward start-up and VC types in Silicon Valley. Mostly men who don’t have a clue about women.”
“Patty, that’s so cool.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “Now let’s do your makeup.”
Patty came around the chair to face Amelia and opened a makeup bag.
“How’s the sorority?”
“Shush,” Patty reprimanded. “Be still while I do your mascara.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorority’s good but I’m not really doing much this quarter. Honestly, Focus Girls is taking a lot of my time. But I don’t really even notice—I just love it so much, you know? Like I even try not to get that drunk when I go out in case a client calls with an emergency.”
Amelia wanted to ask what kinds of clients had emergency focus-group needs, but Patty was wielding a liquid eyeliner pen perilously close to her eyeball, so she kept quiet.
“Okay, no looking in the mirror yet. I want to get you dressed first and then do a big reveal.”
“Oh, God, Patty, I am not wearing your clothes.” Hair and makeup was one thing, but Amelia was not prepared for skimpy skirts and stilettos.
“Don’t worry,” Patty said as she reached into a Neiman Marcus bag, “I went shopping for you. T.J. told me to put you in a dress, but I said, ‘Amelia Dory in a dress? Never.’”
“Thanks, but why never?”
“Beauty is only beautiful if it’s authentic. You wearing heels is not authentic.”
Patty handed Amelia a stack of clothes folded in tissue paper. Amelia unwrapped the paper to find a slim pair of faded jeans, a loose white t-shirt, and a tailored navy hoodie that was the softest she had ever touched.
“It’s cashmere,” Patty said, handing her a slightly padded lace bra. “Men are going to look at your boobs whether you want them to or not, so you might as well make them pretty. You can’t wear that training bra of yo
urs forever.”
Amelia blushed, comparing the bra she held in her hands to the stained-from-wear one currently on her body.
She caught a glimpse of the price tag on the cashmere hoodie and almost fell out of her chair: $320.00! “Oh my God!” she blurted. Patty reached for it and ripped off the tags. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
“I can’t take this,” Amelia said, pulling her hands from the package in her lap as if afraid to touch it.
“You can and you will,” Patty said. “It’s Focus Girls profit. And I owe you: I never would have started this company if it hadn’t been for your example. So really I owe you a lot more.”
Patty looked at her watch. “Now go get dressed before we miss your shoot.”
Amelia jumped from the chair and went behind a curtain in the corner to change. The jeans fit tight around her hips and the t-shirt felt like butter on her skin. The bra was visible through the t-shirt but Patty insisted that it was the style before handing her a pair of leather ankle boots with gold buckles. “Boots go over jeans,” Patty instructed.
Amelia took a deep breath and emerged. Patty sat in the chair, arms crossed, and smiled. “Perfect.”
She led Amelia to the mirror. “I don’t need to see,” Amelia said, but as she opened her eyes on herself, Amelia felt her heart jump. She couldn’t remember the last time she intentionally looked in a mirror; in fact, she went out of her way to avoid them.
But it wasn’t so bad looking when the reflection looked like this. She turned her face and touched her cheek as if to prove it was really her. She noticed with surprise the length of her legs, the roundness of her butt. She touched her hair, which fell in full curls past her shoulders. She felt like someone else, but felt happy knowing that she wasn’t someone else. This was her: The reflection was what she had become.
She turned to Patty, still sitting satisfied in her seat, and whispered a silent “Thank you.”
“Amelia Dory?” The door swung open and a gruff woman dressed in black with a headset and clipboard barged into the room. “Amelia Dory, we needed you out here ten minutes ago.” The woman looked up from her clipboard and stopped, tilting her head at Amelia, then lifted her eyebrows at Patty as if to say, “Nice work.”
The woman led Amelia and Patty to a platform draped in a sheet against an expansive black backdrop where a photographer waited, flipping through photos on her camera.
“Riley, Miss Dory is ready whenever you are,” the gruff woman said to the photographer, who lifted her eyes and offered Amelia a warm smile.
Amelia wasn’t sure what it was about Riley, but she instinctively liked her. Her dirty-blond hair was thick and long, pulled into a sloppy ponytail; she was tall and athletic-looking; and her smile was warm. She was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans tucked into boots. “Nice look,” she said, acknowledging Amelia’s jeans-in-boots and Amelia blushed as she realized they were wearing the same shoes.
Patty’s phone rang and she looked down at it. “Amelia, I’ve got a client. I gotta run, okay?”
Amelia turned and replied, “Yeah, sure.”
Patty squeezed her hand. “You are beautiful, Amelia. In so many ways.”
“I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you.”
“By keeping your eyebrows plucked. That’s all I ask.” Then she answered the phone and ran out the door.
“Shall we get going?” Riley led Amelia to sit in the center of the platform. “Tilt your head this way,” Riley instructed. “Perfect, just like that. Your chin toward me, please. Now hold it.”
Amelia tried to keep the head position and smile, but ended up giggling and breaking the pose. Riley snapped away, laughing along with her and coaxing, “Good. These are really good shots.”
Amelia tried to think back to the last time she had her photo taken. Of course there were candid pictures taken on iPhones, but she never posed for those, and they, at best, showed up on Instagram, not in Forbes magazine.
Click. Click.
“So you’re the next big thing?” Riley asked as she clicked away.
Amelia blushed and shook her head. “No. I just like programming. And I guess I’m good at it.”
“Please. Clearly you’re good at it. And you enjoy it, which is the important part.”
“Is that how you ended up working for Forbes?” Amelia asked.
“You could say so.” She paused and pushed a piece of hair off Amelia’s forehead, snapping another shot as Amelia smiled for the camera. “After I graduated from college—I went to Stanford, too—I moved down to Los Angeles to be a freelance photographer. I ran into Brandon a few weeks ago—he was an old buddy from college—and he got me the gig at Forbes.”
She sat Amelia on a stool and gently turned her head so that she was looking back over her shoulder. “Here, don’t smile for this one. Look a little serious, like you’re looking back on your past.”
“Who’s Brandon?”
“You haven’t met Brandon? He’s the one who wrote your piece.” She snapped the camera. “Perfect. That’s it. Maybe open your lips just a little. Yep. Great.”
Click. Click. Click.
“I figured he’d interviewed you for it.”
“No. T.J. handled the whole thing. I just showed up for the pictures.”
Click. Click. “Who’s T.J.?”
“T. J. Bristol—our CEO.”
Riley dropped the camera. “T. J. Bristol?”
“Yeah. Do you know him?”
Riley’s face lost all of its color. “We—” she started. “We went to college together,” she said hurriedly, biting her lip, and, just as quickly, resumed the photos.
10
When Text Becomes Subtext
Lisa was almost running to keep up with Adam’s quick pace as she followed him into a dive bar on Market Street. He walked straight to the bar without acknowledging her.
“Jack and Coke,” he demanded, “double.”
“ID, please?” the bartender retorted.
Without missing a beat, Adam pulled out his fake and plopped it on the counter, as if insulted he should be asked.
“Listen, Adam.” She touched his arm to get his attention, and he felt his heart race. “I’m going to take the train.”
“No,” he said too quickly. “I mean, do what you want.”
“I just want to know why you’re talking to my father.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Does he know…?” She scrunched up her forehead. “About us?”
Adam scoffed, “Of course not. We only talk about business.”
“Okay, because I’d really appreciate it if you—”
“I’ll never tell him,” he cut her off, rolling his eyes. “Not like I want him to know, either.” He thought about whether this was true and decided it was.
Adam rapped his fingers on the bar as he waited for the server to return, pretending to ignore Lisa but fiercely conscious of her breath at his side.
Lisa stood for a second glaring at him, and finally said firmly, “I’m going to get a table and order dinner. Join if you want.”
He felt his control deflate as he picked up his drink from the bartender and handed him fifteen dollars. He took a long sip and followed Lisa’s path to the table, where she didn’t look up from the menu as he sat down.
A waitress approached the pair. “I’ll have the chicken club, with avocado, no mayonnaise, and extra mustard,” Lisa announced.
“For you?” the waitress asked, turning to Adam.
“I haven’t had a chance to—” Adam started, then stopped himself. “Just bring me a burger. Everything. Medium rare. And another of these.” He pointed to his drink.
“So I take it you’re still mad at me?”
Adam rolled his head back in disbelief. “Yeah. I’d say so.”
“I told you I was sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t enough.”
“What is?”
“I told you I loved you.”
“It was compli
cated.”
“You’re a liar.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Stop being such a snob.”
“How does that make me a snob?”
“Being ‘worried about me’? It’s putting yourself back in your little better-than-me bucket, looking down on poor Adam with pity, like I’m some child you have to feel sorry for. I don’t need your pity.”
“I don’t pity you, Adam; I’m worried about you. There’s a difference.”
“Like there’s a difference between cheating and being in a ‘complicated’ relationship you haven’t gotten around to getting out of?”
“Are you ever going to let it go?”
Adam stopped and took a sip of his drink, then kept drinking until it was gone. “Where is the waitress?” he snapped.
Lisa was silent. “Listen,” she tried, “maybe it was delusional, but I guess I convinced myself I was doing the right thing. Even when I talked to Amelia about it she—”
“What?” Adam’s face snapped toward her. “What did you say?”
Lisa’s eyes darted, trying to think of what she’d said to elicit such a reaction.
“What do you mean ‘when you talked to Amelia about it’—about what?”
“She caught me and Sundeep on a date when you and I first got together, and I explained the whole situation.”
Adam felt like someone had punched him in the gut. “Why?” he whispered, unable to find any other word.
“I needed to talk to someone. And Amelia knew both of you, so she had context, and she agreed that I needed to tell Sundeep I wasn’t in love with him in my own time. And she’s such a good person, I really value her opinion, I guess.”
Adam couldn’t breathe. Amelia knew? The whole time? When they were in Maui … she knew Lisa was dating Sundeep? She knew and never told him? No, he thought, Amelia is not a good person.
The waitress arrived with their food. Adam took his cocktail and asked for another. The waitress glanced worriedly at Lisa, who shrugged. “It’s all a moot point now, though, I guess. I broke up with Sundeep right after Maui and haven’t seen him since.”