by Emily Henry
“Doesn’t change the fact that you’re an absolute freak,” he says.
“You love me,” I point out, the tiniest bit defensive.
He loops an arm around my shoulders and looks down at me, another small, contained smile on his full lips. His face is a sieve, only letting out the smallest amount of expression at a time. “I know that,” he says.
I grin up at him. “I love you back.”
He fights the widening of his smile, keeps it small and faint. “I know that too.”
The tequila has me feeling sleepy, lazy, and I let myself lean into him as we start toward the open door. “This was a good trip,” I say.
“Best yet,” he agrees, the cool rain gusting in around us like confetti from a cannon. His arm curls in a little closer, warm and heavy around me, his clean cedarwood smell folding over my shoulders like a cape.
“I haven’t even minded the rain much,” I say as we step into the thick, wet night, all buzzing mosquitoes and palm trees shivering from the distant thunder.
“I’ve preferred it.” Alex lifts his arm from my shoulder to curl over my head, transforming himself into a makeshift human umbrella as we sprint across the flooding road toward our little red rental car. When we reach it, he breaks away and opens my door first—we scored a discount by taking a car without automatic locks or windows—then runs around the hood and hurls himself into the driver’s seat.
Alex flicks the car into gear, the full-tilt AC hissing its arctic blast against our wet clothes as he pulls out of our parking space and turns toward our rental house.
“I just realized,” he says, “we didn’t take any pictures at the bar for your blog.”
I start to laugh, then realize he’s not kidding. “Alex, none of my readers want to see pictures of BAR. They don’t even want to read about BAR.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t think BAR was that bad.”
“You said it smelled like salmonella.”
“Other than that.” He ticks the turn signal on and guides the car down our narrow, palm-tree-lined street.
“Actually, I haven’t really gotten any usable pictures this week.”
Alex frowns and rubs at his eyebrow as he slows toward the gravel driveway ahead.
“Other than the ones you took,” I add quickly. The pictures Alex volunteered to take for my social media are truly terrible. But I love him so much for being willing to take them that I already picked out the least atrocious one and posted it. I’m making one of those awful midword faces, shriek-laughing something at him as he tries—badly—to give me direction, and the storm clouds are visibly forming over me, as if I’m summoning the apocalypse to Sanibel Island myself. But at least you can tell I’m happy in it.
When I look at that photo, I don’t remember what Alex said to me to elicit that face, or what I yelled back at him. But I feel that same rush of warmth I get when I think about any of our past summer trips.
That crush of happiness, that feeling that this is what life’s about: being somewhere beautiful, with someone you love.
I tried to write something about that in the caption, but it was hard to explain.
Usually my posts are all about how to travel on a budget, make the most of the least, but when you’ve got a hundred thousand people following your beach vacation, it’s ideal to show them . . . a beach vacation.
In the past week, we’ve had approximately forty minutes total on the shore of Sanibel Island. The rest has been spent holed up in bars and restaurants, bookstores and vintage shops, plus a whole lot of time in the shabby bungalow we’re renting, eating popcorn and counting lightning streaks. We’ve gotten no tans, seen no tropical fish, done no snorkeling or sunbathing on catamarans, or much of anything aside from falling in and out of sleep on the squashy sofa with a Twilight Zone marathon humming its way into our dreams.
There are places you can see in their full glory, with or without sunshine, but this isn’t one of them.
“Hey,” Alex says as he puts the car in park.
“Hey, what?”
“Let’s take a picture,” he says. “Together.”
“You hate having your picture taken,” I point out. Which has always been weird to me, because on a technical level, Alex is extremely handsome.
“I know,” Alex says, “but it’s dark and I want to remember this.”
“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Let’s take one.”
I reach for my phone, but he already has his out. Only instead of holding it up with the screen facing us so we can see ourselves, he has it flipped around, the regular camera fixed on us rather than the front-facing one. “What are you doing?” I say, reaching for his phone. “That’s what selfie mode’s for, you grandpa.”
“No!” he laughs, jerking it out of reach. “It’s not for your blog— we don’t have to look good. We just have to look like ourselves. If we have it on selfie mode I won’t even want to take one.”
“You need help for your face dysmorphia,” I tell him.
“How many thousands of pictures have I taken for you, Poppy?” he says. “Let’s just do this one how I want to.”
“Okay, fine.” I lean across the console, settling in against his damp chest, his head ducking a little to compensate for our height difference.
“One . . . two—” The flash pops off before he ever gets to three.
“You monster!” I scold.
He flips the phone around to look at the picture and moans. “Noooo,” he says. “I am a monster.”
I choke over a laugh as I study the horrible ghostly blur of our faces: his wet hair sticking out in stringy spikes, mine plastered in frizzy tendrils around my cheeks, everything on us shiny and red from the heat, my eyes fully closed, his squinted and puffy. “How is it possible we’re both so hard to see and so bad-looking simultaneously?”
Laughing, he throws his head back against his headrest. “Okay, I’m deleting it.”
“No!” I fight the phone out of his hand. He grabs hold of it too, but I don’t let go, so we just hold it between us on the console. “That was the point, Alex. To remember this trip how it really was. And to look like ourselves.”
His smile is as small and faint as ever. “Poppy, you don’t look anything like that picture.”
I shake my head. “And you don’t either.”
For a long moment, we’re silent, like there’s nothing else to say now that this has been settled.
“Next year let’s go somewhere cold,” Alex says. “And dry.”
“Okay,” I say, grinning. “We’ll go somewhere cold.”
1
This Summer
POPPY,” SWAPNA SAYS from the head of the dull gray conference table. “What have you got?”
For the benevolent ruler of the Rest + Relaxation empire, Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith could not possibly exude any less of our fine magazine’s two core values.
The last time Swapna rested was probably three years ago, when she was eight and a half months pregnant and on doctor-mandated bed rest. Even then, she spent the whole time video-chatting with the office, her laptop balanced on her belly, so I don’t think there was a ton of relaxation involved. Everything about her is sharp and pointed and smart, from her slicked-back high-fashion bob to her studded Alexander Wang pumps.
Her winged eyeliner could slice through an aluminum can, and her emerald eyes could crush it afterward. In this moment, both are pointed squarely at me. “Poppy? Hello?”
I blink out of my daze and skootch forward in my chair, clearing my throat. This has been happening to me a lot lately. When you have a job where you’re only required to come into the office once a week, it’s not ideal to zone out like a kid in algebra for fifty percent of that time, even less so to do it in front of your equal parts terrifying and inspiring boss.
I study the notepad in front of me. I used to come to the Friday meeting
s with dozens of excitedly scribbled pitches. Ideas for stories about unfamiliar festivals in other countries, locally famous restaurants with colloquial deep-fried desserts, natural phenomena on particular beaches in South America, up-and-coming vineyards in New Zealand—or new trends among the thrill-seeking set and modes of deep relaxation for the spa crowd.
I used to write these notes in a kind of panic, like every experience I hoped to someday have was a living thing growing in my body, stretching branches out to push on my insides, demanding to break out of me. I’d spend three days before pitch meetings in something of a sweaty Google trance, scrolling through image after image of places I’d never been, a feeling something like hunger growling in my gut.
Today, however, I spent ten minutes writing down the names of countries.
Countries, not even cities.
Swapna is looking at me, waiting for me to pitch my next big summer feature for next year, and I’m staring at the word Brazil.
Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world. Brazil is 5.6 percent of the earth’s mass. You cannot write a short, snappy piece about vacationing in Brazil. You have to at least choose a specific region.
I flip the page in my notebook, pretending to study the next one. It’s blank. When my coworker Garrett leans toward me as if to read over my shoulder, I snap it closed. “St. Petersburg,” I say.
Swapna arches an eyebrow, paces along the head of the table. “We did St. Petersburg in our summer issue three years ago. The White Nights celebration, remember?”
“Amsterdam?” Garrett throws out next to me.
“Amsterdam’s a spring city,” Swapna says, vaguely annoyed. “You’re not going to feature Amsterdam and not include the tulips.”
I once heard she’s been to upwards of seventy-five countries and many of those twice.
She pauses, holding her phone in one hand and tapping it against her other palm as she thinks. “Besides, Amsterdam is so . . . trendy.”
It is Swapna’s closely held belief that to be on trend is to be already late to that trend. If she senses the zeitgeist warming to the idea of Toruń, Poland, then Toruń’s off the docket for the next ten years. There’s a literal list pushpinned into a wall by the cubicles (Toruń is not on this list) of Places R+R Will Not Cover. Each entry is in her handwriting and dated, and there’s something of an underground betting pool on when a city will be freed from the List. There’s never so much quiet excitement in the office as those mornings when Swapna marches in, designer laptop bag on her arm, and strides up to the List with a pen already out, ready to cross off one of these banned cities.
Everyone watches with bated breath, wondering which city she’s rescuing from R+R obscurity, and once she’s safely in her office, door shut, whoever’s closest to the List will run up to it, read the scratched-out entry, and turn to whisper the name of the city to everyone in editorial. There’s usually silent celebration.
When Paris was relinquished from the List last fall, someone broke out champagne and Garrett pulled a red beret out of a drawer in his desk, where he’d apparently been hiding it for just such an occasion. He wore it all day, jerking it off his head every time we heard the click and whine of Swapna’s door. He thought he’d gotten away with it too, until she paused beside his desk on her way out for the night and said, “Au revoir, Garrett.”
His face had gone as bright as the beret, and though I didn’t think Swapna had meant it to be anything but funny, he’d never quite recovered his confidence since then.
Having Amsterdam declared “trendy” has his cheeks flushing past beret red straight to beet purple.
Someone else throws out Cozumel. And then there’s a vote for Las Vegas, which Swapna briefly considers. “Vegas could be fun.” She looks right to me. “Poppy, don’t you think Vegas could be fun?”
“It could definitely be fun,” I agree.
“Santorini,” Garrett says in the voice of a cartoon mouse.
“Santorini is lovely, of course,” Swapna says, and Garrett heaves an audible sigh of relief. “But we want something inspired.”
She looks at me again. Pointedly. I know why. She wants me to write the big feature. Because that’s what I came here to do.
My stomach twists. “I’ll keep brainstorming and work something up to pitch you on Monday,” I suggest.
She nods acceptance. Garrett sags in the chair beside me. I know he and his boyfriend are desperate for a free trip to Santorini. As any travel writer would be. As any human person probably would be.
As I definitely should be.
Don’t give up, I want to tell him. If Swapna wants inspiration, she’s not getting it from me.
I haven’t had any of that in a long time.
* * *
• • •
“I THINK YOU should push for Santorini,” Rachel says, swirling her glass of rosé on the mosaic top of the café table. It’s a perfectly summery wine, and because of her platform, we got it for free.
Rachel Krohn: style blogger, French bulldog enthusiast, born-and-bred Upper West Sider (but mercifully not the kind who acts like it’s so adorable that you’re from Ohio, or even that Ohio exists—has anyone even heard of it?), and professional-grade best friend.
Despite having top-of-the-line appliances, Rachel hand-washes all her dishes, because she finds it soothing, and she does so wearing four-inch heels, because she thinks flat shoes are for horseback riding and gardening, and only if you haven’t found any suitable heeled boots.
Rachel was the first friend I made when I moved to New York. She’s a social media “influencer” (read: gets paid to wear specific brands of makeup in pictures at her beautiful marbled vanity), and while I’d never had a friendship with a Fellow Internet Person, it turned out to have its perks (read: neither of us has to feel embarrassed when we ask the other to wait while we stage photos of our sandwiches). And while I might’ve expected not to have much in common with Rachel, it was during our third hangout (at the same wine bar in Dumbo where we’re currently sitting) that she admitted she takes all of her photos for the week on Tuesdays, changing outfits and hair in between stops at different parks and restaurants, then spends the rest of the week writing essays and running social media for a few dog rescues.
She fell into this job by way of being photogenic and having a photogenic life and two very photogenic (if constantly in need of medical attention) dogs.
Whereas I set out to build a social media following as a long game to turn travel into a full-time job. Different paths to the same place. I mean, she’s still on the Upper West Side and I’m on the Lower East Side, but we’re both living advertisements.
I take a mouthful of the sparkling wine and swish it around as I turn over her words. I haven’t been to Santorini, and somewhere in my parents’ overcrowded house, in a Tupperware box full of things that have absolutely nothing in common, there’s a list of dream destinations I made in college, with Santorini near the top. Those clean white lines and great swaths of glittering blue sea were about as far from my cluttered bi-level in Ohio as I could imagine.
“I can’t,” I finally tell her. “Garrett would spontaneously combust if he pitched Santorini and, once I got on board, Swapna approved it for me.”
“I don’t get it,” Rachel says. “How hard can it be to pick a vacation, Pop? It’s not like you’ve been saving your pennies. Pick a place. Go. Then pick another one. That’s what you do.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Rachel waves a hand. “I know, your boss wants an ‘inspired’ vacation. But when you show up somewhere beautiful, with the R+R credit card, inspiration will appear. There is literally no one on earth better equipped to have a magical vacation than a travel journalist with a big-ass media conglomerate’s checkbook. If you can’t have an inspired trip, then how the hell do you expect the rest of the world to?”
I sh
rug, breaking a piece of cheese off of the charcuterie board. “Maybe that’s the point.”
She arches one dark eyebrow. “What’s the point?”
“Exactly!” I say, and she gives me a look of dry disgust.
“Don’t be cute and whimsical,” she says flatly. To Rachel Krohn, cute and whimsical is nearly as bad as trendy is for Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith. Despite the softly hazy aesthetic of Rachel’s hair, makeup, clothes, apartment, and social media, she’s a deeply pragmatic person. For her, life in the public eye is a job like any other, one she’s kept because it pays the bills (at least when it comes to cheese, wine, makeup, clothes, and anything else businesses choose to ship her), not because she relishes the kind of manufactured semifame that comes with the territory. At the end of every month, she does a post with the worst, unedited outtakes from her photo shoots, the caption reading: THIS IS A FEED OF CURATED IMAGERY MEANT TO MAKE YOU PINE FOR A LIFE THAT DOES NOT EXIST. I GET PAID FOR THIS.
Yes, she went to art school.
And somehow, this kind of pseudo performance art has done nothing to curb her popularity. Whenever I’m in town for the last day of the month, I try to schedule a wine date so I can watch her check her notifications and roll her eyes as the new likes and follows pour in. Every once in a while she’ll stifle a shriek and say, “Listen to this! ‘Rachel Krohn is so brave and real. I want her to be my mom.’ I’m telling them they don’t know me, and they still don’t get it!”
She has no patience for rose-colored glasses and even less for melancholy.
“I’m not being cute,” I promise her, “and I’m definitely not being whimsical.”
The arch of her eyebrow deepens. “Are you sure? Because you’re prone to both, babe.”
I roll my eyes. “You just mean I’m short and wear bright colors.”