Sweet Virginia (Out of Line collection)

by Caroline Kepnes

  There is no 555. He—it—was just a bot they built to test Shelby. And she failed.

  But she’s focused now. She has a job as a pastry assistant in a bakery, and a bakery is a good place to be when you’re trying to forget the people from your past. It’s a scientific fact that your brain is better at making memories when you don’t take pictures. Your brain holds on harder. It smells good in a bakery. Scents help form new memories, and that’s why all W2s work in flower shops and bakeries. This isn’t prison. No one’s out to punish you. They’re just trying to help you. You need all the help you can get, and ovens are hot. You have to watch out. Be in the moment.

  There is no Wi-Fi, no internet. If Shelby tries to leave this mountain town, she will die. It’s right there on the signs by the electric fences that surround the perimeter of Winter’s Bottom: WALKING PAST THE RED LINE WILL LEAD TO YOUR DEATH. HAVE A GREAT DAY!

  No one is sure where they are. Wisconsin? Russia? Some of the women in the bakery speculate based on the weather patterns, the birds. But Michigan bangs her spatula on the counter. “Who cares? We’re here. The end! Right, Virginia?”

  Alice was right. Shelby does go by Virginia, and Michigan is Shelby’s best friend. Michigan had three kids back home and she was a lawyer. Her kids were all struggling in different ways—one was overweight, one was a vandal, one was a bed wetter—and Michigan is glib. “I guess they saw my Google search history, and I’m guessing they saw that I didn’t call the therapists I googled, but hell, my husband was out of work for five years. He could have called.”

  Michigan is still bitter, and Shelby’s aware that the friendship is toxic. Sometimes Shelby really does feel like Candace Cameron Bure, having shed her career ambitions and discovered baking. She believes in the program, and she likes her cottage and her job, but when Michigan starts venting, Shelby loses her faith, and soon she’s venting, outraged. She misses her husband, her child. Michigan softens, as if this is what she needs, for Shelby to be the one venting. She promises Shelby that it gets easier. “You don’t forget your husband or your kids, but you do adjust to the distance. And it’s good that we can’t see pictures, we can’t know. I mean, that’s part of how we got here, right? Remember those college nights, when you could wreck your life, and there was no camera to catch you, no internet to judge you? Well, that’s not the world now. They saw us, Shelby. And they see us now, so you gotta buck up.”

  Michigan is right. The women have different lives, backgrounds, but most of them are over forty. They were multitaskers, hypocrites, constantly pining away for the good old days before social media on their social media accounts. Tsk, tsk. They turned down job offers in small towns because they just couldn’t give up their urban lifestyles. They broke up with “perfectly good men” because they didn’t “need” to get married in order to feel complete. They are anti-Hallmark women whether hampered by student loans or blowing trust fund money on ski trips. W2s come from all walks of life: lesbian, straight, bisexual, asexual. The common thread is a failure at W1 behavior. Shelby relates to these women. They forgot to send birthday cards. They applied mascara while they were behind the wheel. They didn’t get juiced up about bridal showers, and they didn’t know how to bake or knit. While Shelby was a sucker for Hallmark movies, some of these women were more susceptible to Law & Order marathons or Tinder. They’re not vicious. They’re just prone to solitude. A little cold. The married ones were cheating or thinking about cheating, and the single ones were posting articles from The Cut featuring quotes from Oprah and Jennifer Aniston about their decision to not have kids.

  Alice blows a whistle. “Ladies,” she says. “Let’s focus on the cookie order.”

  Alice is Shelby’s Keeper, and Shelby is an overachiever by nature. It feels good to purse her lips and focus on the task at hand, the enormous metal bowl of cookie dough. She gets her clean hands dirty and digs in, scooping the dough, shaping each lump into a ball, and setting each ball on the tray. Shelby isn’t here to make friends. She hasn’t told any of the women about her Hallmark theory, that the women in those movies were dough, but she enjoys the narrative clarity. Now she is the baker, the rolling pin, and the dough isn’t symbolic. It’s just dough.

  Alice measures Shelby’s cookies one by one. “Good,” she says. “They’re correctly spaced and the size is consistent.”

  “Thank you.”

  Shelby isn’t brainwashed. And in some ways, her life isn’t different. At home, she was trapped in her “office,” and now she is trapped in the bakery in the Bottom, but there is no more lying. She doesn’t have a cell phone. She doesn’t have internet. She doesn’t know what’s going on with Rajid and Henry and Mommy, but she isn’t worried. They did well without her, and Alice is right. Shelby was subconsciously preparing for this moment, avoiding responsibility in her own home with her own family.

  Alice smiles at Shelby, and it always feels good to please a teacher, an authority figure. “Well,” Alice says. “You’ve earned a reward, Shelby. Why not get out there and enjoy the weather before it turns on us?”

  Shelby thanks Alice, and she zips up her coat and hides her smile from the other women. It’s late November, and leaves are falling on the sidewalks of the Bottom. Shelby won’t be spending Christmas with her family, but Christmas is a thing you can feel. There are W2s stringing white lights through the trees, replacing Thanksgiving-themed cornucopias with inflatable Santas, reindeer.

  Shelby takes the long way home. She loves the quaint side streets, the safety. There are no men in the Bottom. And in this way, it isn’t like living in a Hallmark movie. Shelby doesn’t know if she’ll ever see Rajid again. They do say you can phase up, become a W1 and return to society, but will she? It’s strange, she feels just as married now as she did at home, and even if 555 did come around the corner and smile at her with brand-new veneers, she wouldn’t be interested. Not anymore. She wouldn’t do that to Rajid. They are watching. And it feels good to know that they’re watching, even if it shouldn’t.

  Alice is right. Days like this, crisp and orange, they won’t last forever, so Shelby takes a path to an apple orchard. She doesn’t even really like apples. She’s never been apple picking. She’s sensitive—her nose is running—and she remembers a weekend in college when Rajid surprised her by booking a trip to some farm town in the Berkshires.

  “But what would we do?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Farm things. Go for walks . . . pick apples . . .”

  She laughed in his face. God, she loved him back then. “Rajid,” she said. “We don’t need to ‘do’ stuff. And we don’t even like apples.”

  “I thought you’d wanna go away. I thought girls liked . . . Are you mad?”

  “No,” she said. She knew him so well. She knew where to put her hands, how to love him. “Honey, I’m not that girl who needs a boyfriend to be whisking her away to the country, you know?” And he did know. He kissed her. “And this is why I love you, Rajid. We’re the same that way, you know? You don’t know how to change a tire, and I don’t know how to bake a pie. Let’s just be us, you know?”

  He did know. They were equals, and they spent that weekend in bed ordering takeout and half watching movies, making love. They didn’t know anything. They didn’t know that they wouldn’t have the Baba for so many years, that by the time they did have the Baba, they’d both have become so good at being selfish that the Baba would be beautiful and perfect, yes, but also like a smoke alarm chirping somewhere in the house.

  She hesitates by the fence that surrounds the orchard. She doesn’t need to get any closer. Apple picking is for couples, for families, and those movies really did brainwash her, didn’t they? She never wanted to go apple picking, maybe if Rajid were here, but he isn’t.

  On the way home, she is sneezing. She’s coming down with a cold and she doesn’t have tissues. A W1 would have tissues. Mommy always did. She walks into her cottage, and it’s a pigsty. She should clean if she ever wants to phase up. But she’s sick.
She’s tired. She’ll fail inspection tomorrow. She fails a lot, especially when she doesn’t know she’s being tested, like earlier this week when she visited a neighbor who just had a baby. Shelby didn’t get excited when she held the little girl. She was too jealous.

  And they know she was jealous because they monitor your heart rate. They have to. It’s for the sake of the country.

  She hears a noise at the door. It’s her report card:

  Self-care: F

  Home care: D

  Work performance: A

  Who is she kidding? She’s the same old Shelby, and they’re kind of like Rajid. They know what’s wrong with her. She’s proficient in the bakery—she always did love to work—but she’s not baking at home. She has dust mites, and she keeps the windows closed, because they pump the air out there with pumpkin spice. She loathes that smell. Alice warned her to come around, to retrain her body. She remembers something she read in a meme about how all flowers lean toward the sun except for the ones that don’t need the sun, and she collapses onto her mangy sofa and turns on a Hallmark movie. There’s Candace, shiny and pure as ever, frustrated that she has to move to some Podunk town in Alaska and wearing the wrong shoes, the thin sweater.

  Shelby has the movie memorized, and her sinuses are closing up, so she goes to the kitchen and finds her neti pot. She was so surprised when Alice gave it to her.

  “How did you know about me and this neti pot? Did you bug my house?”

  “Well, no, Virginia. You did. You had the Hive.”

  “Right,” Shelby said, remembering that day in Best Buy, the day they bought the Hive. “I was pretty far along, eight months, I think. Rajid wanted a Hive, but I was paranoid about the technology, the idea of outsiders eavesdropping, having access to everything we said, everything we watched. He said I sounded like my mother, which, of course, made me pick up the box and put it in the cart.”

  “See, Virginia. You do have W1 tendencies. This is good news, it is.”

  Shelby wasn’t in a place to feel good, so she stayed in the memory. “We got in line, and I told Rajid that it felt sexist that Amazon called it Alexa, you know, same way Apple has Siri. Why not Alex or Tom or Silas? So Rajid said they probably chose Alexa because women are notoriously nosy, and I said that makes no sense if you think about Big Brother, and he bent over, you know, like he was talking to the baby inside of me. And he said, ‘I wanna warn you, Baba. Mommy is a little crazy sometimes.’”

  Alice just sighed. “Virginia,” she said, “wash that neti pot out before you use it.”

  Shelby mutes Christmas Under Wraps.

  These movies don’t do it for her anymore, and it’s cruel of them to give her a TV with nothing but Hallmark. She understands the logic. She spent her time at home escaping from her family, hiding in those cutesy movies instead of confronting Rajid about her frustrations, discussing the Crock-Pot with Mommy. Now there is no one to hide from, and the Hallmark movies have lost their allure, their purpose. It’s a smart move on their part. Tell someone they can eat Twinkies every day, all day, and within a few days, they don’t like Twinkies anymore. Shelby is restless tonight. Sick but not tired. She carries the neti pot to her crafting table and picks up a hammer. It’s magic. It’s horror. One smash and the neti pot she held on to for twenty years isn’t a neti pot anymore. It’s pieces of porcelain.

  She glances at the TV, where Candace marvels at the snow, and she is better than Candace. She is growing alone. She doesn’t need to be egged on by some cardboard man. She plugs in a glue gun. She chops away at the porcelain chunks and she separates the pink bits from the white bits and the work is calming, like baking cookies. She glues the bits onto a piece of driftwood, and she has no plan. She’s not a crafter by nature. But now she sees that she did have a plan. She’s making a heart, racing against the movie, against Candace. Her fingers are sticky, and the heart is messy. A fourth grade boy could probably do better. But she finishes before the movie is over and she loves her stupid little heart and she wants to make more hearts. She washes her hands, and her imagination runs into Hallmark land. The movie is about her: Sweet Virginia: The Heartist. She sets her heart on the mantel, and there she is in the mirror, smiling with shiny hair and rosy cheeks. There’s no denying it. Winter’s Bottom agrees with her.

  She flops onto the couch and turns off the TV and gazes at her heart. Soon she’s sleepy, a little high on the glue. She feels someone in the cottage with her. It’s Rajid. He puts his hands on her shoulders and he whistles at her stupid little heart. Not bad, Baba. His hands feel so good. They ground her.

  In the morning, Alice is waiting for her outside the bakery. “Congratulations, Virginia,” she says. “You aced self-care last night.”

  Shelby reads the report. The neti pot wasn’t a gift. It was a test. They wanted Shelby to realize that she was difficult to live with, possessive, excluding her husband from so many parts of her life, even things as meaningless as a neti pot. She doesn’t want them to be right, but they’re convincing. She reads the report, and she can’t deny it anymore. She didn’t know how to love him, how to love anyone. She didn’t ask him to go to couples therapy and she didn’t reciprocate with Baba enough. She played the part of a possessive control freak, but she wasn’t a good caregiver. Caring isn’t controlling. She never disinfected the neti pot, and her love was shallow. Inadequate. Shelby’s cheeks are hot.

  Alice reaches for the report card. “You have to focus on the future. You did it. You broke the neti pot. You created something new, a symbol of love. You keep this up and you will phase up, Shelby. And you do have to phase up, because that’s the only way you get out to see your son. Do you understand, Shelby?”

  Alice is standing now, looking down on Shelby, hopeful. “Well, Virginia, are you ready to go to work?”

  She needed to hear her name, and she flashes a Candace Cameron Bure smile. Shelby will become Sweet Virginia so that she can go home to Virginia and go back to being Shelby, as if being Shelby isn’t what led to her being here in the first place. Halfway through her shift, she thinks about Rajid and the Baba, and she loses control of her hands. A lump of cookie dough falls on the floor. Mommy would call it poison. Raw eggs can give you salmonella! Mommy never let her lick the spoon or the bowl when Shelby was little, even though everyone knows that raw cookie dough is delicious. Shelby picks up the ball of dough and pops it in her mouth. She is slovenly, still. Did they see? Do they know? Blood rushes to her cheeks, and then it stops. They don’t matter in the end. No matter what they call her, she is the woman who never did crack “Modern Love,” the woman who killed her dog. She can prep a hundred thousand cookies in this kitchen, but she’ll always feel most connected to herself like this, hunkered down in hiding, picking the raw cookie dough out of her teeth. She’s no different than she was at home, waiting for the big idea to strike, waiting for Santa Claus to intervene and send her somewhere special, somewhere like this.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2018 Courtney Dowling Pugliese

  Caroline Kepnes is the New York Times bestselling author of You, the basis for the hit Netflix series; its sequel, Hidden Bodies; and Providence. Caroline was also a pop culture contributor for Entertainment Weekly before moving to Los Angeles, where she wrote episodes of 7th Heaven and The Secret Life of the American Teenager.