Love at First Like

by Hannah Orenstein

  “What about laying off Jess?” Liv suggests.

  Sophie and I both make faces.

  “She’s Helen’s family, we can’t do that,” I remind her.

  Sophie hesitates. “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Ditching Helen’s family is off-limits. Neither of us would be here without Helen’s influence in the first place.”

  “But you have your own family to think about, too,” Liv points out.

  “I know that! I know that,” I say. “Come on, though. Jess was already laid off once. I can’t do that to her again. That would be so depressing and sad.”

  “Yeah, but it’s nothing personal,” Sophie argues. “It’s business. Jess would understand that—and if she doesn’t, that’s not your problem.”

  “We don’t even pay her that much,” I protest.

  “Well, come on, Eliza,” Sophie says. “She makes twenty-two dollars an hour. That’s not nothing.”

  I wince. She’s right. But Jess is great at what she does, and it wouldn’t be fair to cut her job just yet. There are a lot of corners I’d be willing to cut to save money: moving in with a roommate; boosting our prices; eating and drinking at home more often instead of going out. But leaving Jess behind isn’t one of them.

  “Look,” I say. I flatten my palm against the island and speak as calmly as I can to Sophie’s back. “We have six whole months to decide. Give me six months. I can make this work.”

  She turns around to face me. Her jaw is set. “It has to.”

  • Chapter 6 •

  We have the happiest, smuggest, most self-satisfied customer in our store, and Jess is about to burst his bubble. I’m perched at the counter answering questions and engaging with comments from users on Instagram, which can take upward of an hour every day. But I can’t help but watch Jess handle him. This guy, a wiry, bearded dude in a plaid flannel, thinks he’s brilliant because he snuck one of his girlfriend’s rings out of her jewelry box and insists that he needs a ring the same size.

  “Which finger does she wear that on?” she asks patiently.

  He balks. “It’s a ring. It’s her ring size.”

  “Every finger is a slightly different size,” she explains. “Unless she wears this on her left ring finger, you can’t guarantee that an engagement ring sized off this one is going to fit.”

  This is actually a pretty common mistake. When we first opened the shop, I was surprised by how many guys—smart guys, guys with complicated jobs, doctors even—did not realize that fingers vary in size. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so frustrating.

  While Jess walks the guy through his various options (figure out which finger she wears this on; bring home a ring sizer and measure the right finger; buy any ring and have it sized properly after the proposal—at great expense), my phone vibrates with alert after alert. There’s a flood of Instagram notifications, and I scroll to figure out where they came from. A sudden spike like this is never random. Sure enough, I figure out that it’s from the Elle piece published online ten minutes ago.

  I skim it breathlessly, not daring to relax until I’ve finished, just in case I said anything terribly dumb or Taylor picked up on the fact that I’m kind of a fraud. But it’s good. I’m relieved. Taylor notes that I’m newly engaged but won’t name my fiancé, although she praises that as a feminist move designed to keep the spotlight on my professional accomplishments. The piece’s primary focus is on my journey to entrepreneurship, and frankly, Taylor makes me sound like a rock star. I certainly look like a rock star in those silver stiletto booties. It’s better than I could have dreamed. I share the piece on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  When I’ve come back to earth, it appears that the guy has given up.

  “I don’t know,” he says morosely. “I just don’t know which of her fingers this fits on.”

  “You could always ask her,” Jess suggests.

  She’s good with customers—better than either Sophie and I will ever be. She’s endlessly patient, naturally friendly, and has a sixth sense that tells her when to push a sale and when to stand back.

  He looks appalled. “But then it won’t be a surprise!”

  I know the stats. Among straight couples, nearly 90 percent of men propose with an engagement ring, and less than half of them consult their girlfriends about the decision. I’m not knocking my job, but it makes no sense to me to send a typically clueless man into a jewelry store to pick out the most expensive accessory a woman will ever own—one that she’ll hopefully wear for the rest of her life. I don’t think anything about an engagement ring should be a surprise. I certainly wouldn’t want to be surprised. But then again, I’m the girl who picked out her own hulking diamond without a man in sight.

  The guy mutters that he’ll “figure it out on his own” and leaves.

  “Ugh,” Jess says, once the door has swung shut.

  “You did the best you could,” I point out. “He wasn’t in a position to buy right now.”

  “True.” She sighs. “His fiancé will surely have fun with a lifetime of him.”

  Jess never fails to make me laugh. I show her the elle.com story.

  “God, I miss this,” she says, scrolling to examine the photos.

  In her past life, before she landed at Brooklyn Jewels, Jess styled the accessories on photo shoots exactly like this one. It was her job to select the jewelry and the shoes—well, to assist the woman who selected the jewelry and shoes. From what she’s told me, the job mostly entailed packing and unpacking boxes of accessories sent in from publicists all over the city and praying that nothing got lost in the process. I think that’s why she’s so diligent and organized here.

  “The booties are amazing.” She sighs. “Gianvito Rossi?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit.

  She zooms in to read the credits. “Gianvito Rossi,” she confirms.

  Her eye is good. She’s told me how thankful she is for this job, but I know her ultimate dream was always to work as a stylist for fashion magazines. With print publications like Glamour and Seventeen gone, and the rest of the industry on red alert, that dream seems less and less likely.

  “The interview is great,” Jess says finally, once she’s finished reading it. “It positions us at the next major, hot jewelry brand. So legit.”

  If only she knew how precarious our position is right now.

  “Yeah, hmm,” I say, taking my phone back and abruptly changing the subject.

  Soon another customer comes in. She’s probably in her early twenties, with teal eyeliner flicked out in a flawless cat eye and two neat French braids.

  “Hi, how can I help you?” Jess asks as she looks up from the glass case, a smile frozen on her face.

  “Hi,” the girl says. “I was just looking. I’m single. I mean, seriously, just looking.”

  “Enjoy. Let me know if you have any questions.”

  The girl peers into every case, inching toward me across the shop.

  “You’re Eliza, right?” she asks.

  “I am.”

  Her gaze darts to my hand. I’m not wearing the ring. I move my hand to my hip so she stops staring.

  “Can I get a selfie?” she asks shyly. “I love your Instagram.”

  I feel like I’m watching myself from outside my own body as I make my way around the counter and stand a few inches from her. She wraps an arm around me, bounces up on her tiptoes and juts out her chin to look closer to my height, and extends her phone in front of us. Click. Nobody’s ever asked me for a selfie before.

  She spends nearly half an hour lingering by the case of our least expensive pieces. She goes live on Instagram while she selects her favorites and gingerly tries them on. Ultimately, she chooses a delicate rose gold bangle after triple-checking the price. As Jess wraps it up in white tissue paper, the customer tells me softly that it’s her present to herself after her boyfriend broke up with her last month.

  “Trust me, it’s less complicated to have jewelry than to have men,” I tell her.
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  Jess laughs. Last I heard, she’s been regularly hooking up with the same guy for three months, afraid to tell him that she wants more.

  My phone buzzes again. It’s like a pot of gold today: when I check my notifications, I see a slew from the customer who just left, followed by plenty of praise for the elle.com story and a resulting flood of new followers, two sales from the e-commerce shop, and plenty of emails. There’s one I have to read twice in order to fully comprehend it.

  Nora Mizrahi, a publicist, explains that she represents a variety of luxury event spaces, including the Wythe Hotel, a bougie hotel in my neighborhood with a killer rooftop bar and uninterrupted views of the entire Manhattan skyline. I’ve been there for birthday parties and happy hours. The hotel apparently hosts weddings, too. And if I’m reading this email right—which I think I am—Nora says they’ve had an unexpected cancellation for a wedding this October and would be able to accommodate my wedding on the Wythe rooftop entirely free of charge. There’s a minor catch, as there always is: I would have to promote the hotel heavily on social media and in interviews. I read the email a third time, just to be sure that I am not hallucinating, but Nora’s words seem to gel together. She’s offering me a free wedding. I know that at 100,000 followers, I qualify as an influencer to a degree. If I wanted to, I could probably get free clothes, free makeup, free dinners. But a free wedding? I can’t wrap my mind around it.

  I have never been a careful person. I still have childhood scars on both knees from flinging myself down the hill outside our house on my first bicycle sans training wheels. In college, I was the first one in line for another round of tequila shots. Even now, I’m running a jewelry business when I know millennials are supposedly “killing” the diamond industry. It’s not that I don’t care about facing consequences. Trust me, I do. But the upside—the adrenaline rush that comes with taking a risk, the reward that stems from making a bold decision—will always win out in my mind. Your life doesn’t move forward if you sit at home saying no.

  So before I have a chance to fully consider the ramifications of Nora’s offer, I say yes, thank you, and hit Send. She emails back instantly to ask if I’m free for a phone call now to work out the details. Within the hour, we’ve hammered out the arrangement on the phone, she’s emailed over the contract, and I’ve returned it with my signature. It’s good to move quickly; I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll back out. I post a smiling selfie on Instagram and announce in the caption that I’ve just locked in my dream wedding venue for October nineteenth. Thirty seconds later, I refresh the photo, and there are a dozen commenters celebrating my news. My wedding is exactly six months from tomorrow. All I have to do now is find the groom.

  “So I have really great news and, uh, less than ideal news,” Carmen tells me an hour later. “Which do you want first?”

  This week’s happy hour is at Le Boudoir, the Marie Antoinette–themed bar in Brooklyn Heights. We enter through the secret bookshelf in the restaurant above, on street level, and descend into a lounge with red velvet couches and a bust of the queen herself that serves as a tap. We both order a drink called the Guillotine, made with mezcal and honey.

  “Hit me with the good news,” I say, taking a slurp of the cocktail.

  She straightens up to reach the fullest extent of her five-foot, two-inch height and brushes her hair off her shoulders.

  “It’s a lot,” she warns me.

  “I can handle it,” I say.

  Her eyes are bright and her lips are pressed together, like she can barely contain a secret. She pauses, as if recognizing that by saying her news out loud, it’ll suddenly become real.

  “I think I want to launch my own company,” she says.

  I can’t help it—my hands zoom across the table to clutch hers. I nearly knock over our drinks in the process.

  “Tell me! What’s your idea?”

  She takes a deep breath. “I’m happy at my job, I really am. But I miss working in skincare,” she explains. I can tell—Carmen can happily spend a hot Friday night testing out face masks and researching the active ingredients in her moisturizer. “And working at a relatively new company these past few months has taught me so much. It’s energized me.”

  “So . . .” I prompt, waving my hands. “Your idea. Spill. I wanna hear.”

  She grins. “Okay, but you have to be honest about what you think. I trust you.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “It’s a skincare app. You upload a close-up selfie and it instantly analyzes your skin type. From there, it sends you a box of products every month that’s tailored to your skin’s needs. You refresh the photo every season as your skin changes.”

  There’s a hint of fear in her eyes, and I want to envelop her in the biggest hug. Because I get it, how terrifying it is to put your idea out there into the world. It seems audacious to think that you could have a valid business plan when there are, what, thousands or millions of new companies popping up every year?

  “Carmen. I love it. That’s so incredibly cool. And skincare is hot right now!”

  She nods. Her eyes glow. “You think I have a chance?”

  “I know you do.”

  She sighs with relief and slumps back into her booth. When Sophie and I launched Brooklyn Jewels, she was supportive, but made it clear that starting her own business was not her jam; she said she’d rather do excellent work for a company and collect a steady paycheck. I never thought she’d strike out on her own.

  “I have a lot of questions for you about this whole process,” she warns. “You know, raising money, the logistics of it all, when to quit my day job. But . . . those will come in time. Maybe over email, when alcohol isn’t so involved.”

  “You know I’m here for you,” I say.

  I raise my glass to hers and give her a toast. I’m so proud of her, my perfect, beautiful, brilliant friend.

  “So, do you want the bad news?” she asks, wincing.

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Just as a preface, I want to let you know that what I did is totally against Tinder’s policies and I could probably get fired, so please never tell a soul.”

  I laugh. “My lips are sealed.”

  “That was really Mary-Kate and Ashley’s best movie,” she muses.

  “Right?!”

  She mimes crushing the soda can against her forehead, like they do in the movie, but I call her out.

  “Hey. You’re stalling. What’s the news?”

  “I hacked into Tinder’s database to look up that guy you went out with, Blake,” she says, wincing. “He’s actively swiping and messaging like . . . a dozen girls a day. And setting up dates.”

  “So? We went on one date,” I say.

  “Yeah, but that was before you set a wedding date six months away,” Carmen says.

  I had texted her about the free wedding the moment it happened. Now, the intensity of her words makes me sigh with stress.

  “All I’m saying,” she continues, “is that if you want him for your ruse, or fake wedding, or whatever it is, you probably want to jump on that before he gets too involved with someone else.”

  I know I didn’t feel the most chemistry when we went out in Central Park, but it still stings that he picked up on that and actively decided against pursuing anything with me. I hadn’t fully considered the significance of it until just now—hello, I was just a little busy dealing with an impending rent hike and my sister—but it’s true. Blake didn’t text me after our picnic date.

  It’s not that I want Blake to be The One. I don’t. It wasn’t love at first sight—he’s a perfectly nice guy whose handsome looks will serve me well on Instagram, though the spark isn’t quite there. But now that I have the clock ticking on an October wedding, I don’t have the luxury of being choosy. Chemistry can build over time, can’t it? My dad first spotted my mom during a freshman seminar at the University of Maine; they didn’t wind up on their first date until the end of their senior year, when Mom says Dad finally grew up.
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  Carmen’s news makes an idea click: if I’m giving up any semblance of a normal personal life for the sake of my company, it has to be for the right person. Blake makes sense. If we were together, we’d be a power couple: me in fine jewelry, him in luxury watches. I can practically see the New York Times’s Vows column in print now. I need to find a way to catch Blake’s interest—for good.

  • Chapter 7 •

  I hop on the subway to Blake’s neighborhood first and figure out what the hell I’m about to do second. Cocktails with Carmen jolted me into action. As the 4 train whizzes toward the Upper East Side, my frantic impulses cool into a semblance of a plan. I want to knock on Blake’s door and ask him to be my fake Instagram fiancé, but even I realize that’s fairly bonkers for a large variety of reasons—namely, we’ve only been out once, it’s a preposterous request, and also, I don’t know his address. Instead, I shoot him a text to ask if he’s free.

  “Hey, are you around tonight? I happen to be in the neighborhood,” I write.

  I waver between adding a smiling emoticon and not. I add it. It looks desperate. I delete it and press send.

  A torturous thirteen minutes crawl by. I refresh my Instagram, ignore the urge to pick at my cuticles, loudly sigh at the manspreader sitting across from me. I start a sudoku game on my phone and abandon it halfway through. I check to see if my text actually went through—of course it did.

  And then, miraculously, Blake texts back.

  “Yeah, just got home. What’s up?”

  I try not to worry about where he just got home from. A date? I wait precisely three minutes before typing a response so I don’t appear too eager. It’s important that I play this right. I get one shot at Blake.

  “Can I come over? There’s something I need to say to you,” I text.

  He writes back faster this time. “Sure,” he says. He gives me his address.

  The rest of the subway ride is a blur: I pop an Altoid, check my reflection in my phone, use the tweezers in my purse to remove a stray eyebrow hair, take my birth control when my regular alarm goes off at 9 p.m. I try not to dwell on the nerves sprawling across my gut.