Get Ready With Me
A short story
I’m so excited to be sharing new short fiction with you again, reader! I’ll aim make this a regular occurrence, and I’ll give paying subscribers a chance to vote on what you see next ;)
I love commissioning original illustrations for the fiction I publish here. This piece by artist Liz Johnson captures the lip gloss-in-the-underworld vibes of “Get Ready With Me.”
Get Ready With Me
I opened up Charlotte’s grid and saw she still hadn’t posted since the announcement, which felt like gloating but then what would my opinion matter to her anymore? In the photo she was all teeth-whitened and looking genuinely excited with tears in her eyes, as if Benny or Benny’s assistant snapped this single candid and not eighty photos in a row where she was making this same face but sitting forward and cheating a little to the left so she’d look optimally thin – thinner than she normally was, which seemed impossible, but it was Charlotte, so she could get there.
I can’t believe that I get to share this dream come true with you today, the caption said. I just signed with Triple-Star Management to start a career in movies and TV! Three star emojis, a crying emoji, and a pink heart.
Like a nihilist, I faved it and un-faved it. Not that she’d care. Does someone as famous as Charlotte care if one of the 581,456 people who’s faved a photo in the twenty minutes since she posted it un-faves it? Does she notice?
I texted Danni: Is it nihilistic to keep staring at Charlotte’s announcement?
Danni was typing, then she wasn’t. I felt stupid. She would probably say I was being stupid, but in a kinder way. Like, You need to just keep your eyes on your own page, babe. You CAN BUILD YOUR COUNT. Then a bicep emoji. If she was annoyed with me, I wouldn’t blame her. I clicked off Charlotte’s page and went back to @_0_thedarkness_0. No new posts since the one explaining the “freedom of nihilism” six days ago.
Slide one, over a picture of Pepe meditating: Did you know that nothing meaning anything is the real definition of freedom?
Slide two, over the photo of Ben Affleck smoking: You are depressed because you desire. You desire because you are human. Humans suffer without reward.
Slide three, over a picture of the Milky Way galaxy: “Meaning” is actually just another word for “attachment.”
The account was still at 158.5k followers. Beyond respectable for a meme account. Which had to mean that it was more than a meme account, and I wasn’t imagining things.
Let’s go sit in a sauna!! Danni texted back.
So she was ignoring my bullshit entirely. Redirecting, as my high school therapist liked to say. I was surprised to feel thankful for it.
Def!!! I wrote back. Could really use it!! Crazy face emoji.
I put my phone face down on the edge of the sink like a middle-aged person trying to do a “digital cleanse” and looked at myself in the mirror. Then I thought about the GRWM video I’d make in this moment. A neutral base, some plum lipliner, a thick brow with a little arch. Instead of talking about how important it is in this political climate to hold your heart close and meditate on your real dreams, I’d say: Can I be vulnerable with you for a second, fam? I haven’t been sleeping much at night. I think we’re all living in a simulation that’s a perfect mirror of a reality we collectively create.
I checked my reflection in both the mirror and my phone. With a little less light, I’d look good enough for selfies but not like I was trying to look good. I put on the pink striped bikini and checked my stomach, the two pounds from Thanksgiving. I checked Charlotte’s post, which now had almost a million likes. She had two new stories, and I didn’t watch either. Instead I checked @_0_thedarkness_0 again. But it was like checking words printed in a book and expecting them to be different.
*
The sauna place was twenty minutes from my apartment, halfway up the mountain. I’d driven there so many times that I got in the car and sort of forgot about myself in time and space until I was standing at check-in, watching Danni get out of her car and check her face in her phone. She noticed me looking and did a few wide-legged skips toward me, flung her arms open and we hugged.
“You look amazing,” Danni said in a higher pitch than normal. She stood back and smiled big and I chose to focus on how delicate her collarbones looked instead of how big her jaw looked. She was right at the edge of pretty. Lose five more pounds and her followers would be sending those worried little heart emojis, and she’d have to make an im ok pls don’t thin-shame <3 video.
I shouldn’t have been annoyed with Danni for not texting me back about Charlotte. I shouldn’t have been annoyed with her for anything. We were too similar: losing collagen by the day, clients of Benny’s, creators of semi-viral content that falls under the wellness-beauty-spiritualism banner. “Think of self-esteem like a closed system,” my first therapist in LA used to say. “You can’t build yourself up by cutting someone else down – the energy you took will just be taken back from you.” I hated how true that was. I hated how ordinary it made my life.
When I first found Danni she was doing storytelling videos about divorcing the guy she met in college. We became friends when I DMed her about my favorite one, I Couldn’t Make Him Do IVF. She thought I’d be a perfect fit for Benny, who told me he liked my “angle,” especially my Crystals Are Our Friends videos, which didn’t surprise me because those were my best performing ones. He said he could easily see me exploding: photoshoots, celebrity sponcon, maybe even an actual product campaign of my own. He asked where I was in terms of follower count and I told him 90.6k, about 50k less than Danni. He smiled and said, “Well, Danni’s mid-career now. She’s what we’d call a working influencer.”
Three years later, I’ve plateaued at 185.3k followers. I’ve netted only three sponsorships, two for different versions of the same face wrap. Danni was still single and never broke 200k. In January, she did a mixed feelings post about her ex’s gender transition that cost her tons of followers; she dropped down to 125k diehards and got shadow banned. Now whenever I Zoom with Benny, I’m the mid-career working influencer, and Danni is someone he tells me to “say hello” to.
“You look gorgeous,” I said. “Benny says hello.”
“Benny can eat shit.” She grabbed my hand. “Let’s go relax. We deserve it.”
At the sauna place everything is either pink or rose gold and “sustainably sourced” and looks just nice enough not to seem cheap while actually being cheap. The Instagram page calls it “woman-owned,” which probably means it’s owned by one woman who got the seed money from her rich dad and then hired a bunch of less wealthy women to look crunchy-pretty while doing her grunt work. The crunchy-pretty women are always barefoot and some have beaded hair but none of them have dreads.
It’s nice to walk from the big sauna to the little sauna to the cold plunge to the steam room while the crunchy-pretty women hand you towels and ask how your night’s going. Sometimes I do a tadasana facing down the side of the mountain and imagine what it would be like to give it all up and become one of these women. I could make my own beeswax lip balm to sell on Facebook marketplace and date without being recognized or feeling humiliated for not being recognized. I could tell people that I didn’t believe in coincidences and that I was “figuring life out.” Instead of putting crystals outside just to post the moonlight-filtered photo with the #witchyhealing #energycharge hashtags, I could actually hold each crystal in my hand and think, This is a small element in a vast cosmic mosaic. I could think, I believe in something bigger than myself.
We started in the barrel-shaped sauna, the one that doesn’t get too hot for our phones. Danni set hers down next to her and tapped the other side of the bench for me to sit. Then she shoulder-hugged me. Her bikini was butter yellow and patterned with super small strawberries.
“Forget about Charlotte,” she said. “Let her be dead to us.”
She said the last part in her Meditate With Me voice.
“Summer.” She said my name so flatly that it could have been Lauren or Sarah. “Can you guess how many times I’ve looked at her account since she started blowing up?”
I shrugged.
“It’s a big number.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Look, I could let this consume me. Or I could just do the higher-vibration thing and be like, you know what? Her makeup tutorials are pretty good.” She laughed, and it sounded throaty and high-pitched, like a cackle. “I like the way she blends beauty, fitness, and finance. It’s practical. She’s pretty. She’s very pretty, and she’s funny, and it makes sense she’ll be in movies someday.”
I looked at my bare feet on the floor of the barrel.
“Summer, I get jealous of you. Like, you realize that, right?”
She sighed and looked out the window in the door of the sauna. Two crunchy-pretty women were out there, folding towels on a rustic pink picnic table and laughing.
“Do you ever think about just being one of them?” I asked.
“What?” Danni looked at me like I’d belched in her ear. “No? I think about being married and not having to work.”
I pulled at a loose thread on the sustainably sourced towel I was sitting on. Danni picked up her phone and scooted halfway off the bench but then got lost checking her notifications. I was a little woozy from dehydration, and it made me bold.
“Did Charlotte ever show you that one meme page?” I watched her type something quickly and furiously, both thumbs flying. “It’s called ‘the darkness,’ or something like that? It was kind of interesting.”
Danni stopped typing and turned to me. Her brows were gathered together like a worried mom’s.
“No, we weren’t that close. What meme page?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Something dumb she showed me at the party.”
Danni harumphed and wedged the door open. Cool air rushed in, stinging my eyes and my throat at the same time.
“Yeah,” she said. “Char’s always been into dumb shit.”
*
When I first signed with Benny, I got invited to all his parties. They were in NorCal, on an island off the coast that we had to take a ferry to get to, one that I’d never even thought of visiting because people always said it was mostly jagged rocks. But there was a part of the island that wasn’t jagged rocks, and Benny’s family owned real estate on it.
“He does us this service,” Charlotte said to me that night. “Like, he’s actually in it for the art, not just, you know, chasing more money.”
I didn’t know Charlotte that well when she said this to me. Really, I’d just met her minutes ago, and she looked like pretty much every other girl there: thigh gap, long hair, baby face. She looked like me, which made it hard not to obsess over all the ways she looked different from me. Whenever someone came by to take our photo, she blew them a perfect pillow-lipped kiss while I tried to relax so I wouldn’t add worry wrinkles to my face.
We were standing on Benny’s family’s dock overlooking the ocean, which stretched between us and a black hole of a cove. Behind us drunk and high people were wandering in and out of Benny’s family’s house and screaming and making plans they’d never follow through on. It seemed like a good thing to be managed by Benny, something I should want, but there were other things I wanted, too. Like people reading my posts all the way through and following me because they liked what I wrote about nature and my life and politics and the human ego in a Buddhist sense instead of how I looked in booty shorts and a racerback. You can’t break the algo with just your insights, babe, Danni told me. You were born looking how you look for a reason.
Charlotte hugged the wooden pillar at the end of the dock and told me about the Nickelodeon show she was on as a kid. She’d played a secondary character, a nerdy girl who tried to feed the journalist main character scoops in the cafeteria lunch room. But now no one really cared about the main character, who’d gotten an abortion and gone to rehab and made some announcement on TikTok about “rededicating her life to Christ.” It was Charlotte they were talking about – Charlotte who was racking up followers on pretty much every platform, who could sing without Autotune and look pretty without Facetune, who was already getting paid $15k for sponsored reels and who Benny said would “be so great on Fallon.”
A short dude with a walk like an injured wrestler came up to us and offered us a plate of rolled-up spliffs. I declined, and he grinned at Charlotte.
“She’s no fun, is she?” he asked her.
She took one of the spliffs and lit it with a marbled pink lighter that had the words TOM FORD gold-embossed on the side. She blew the smoke in the short guy’s face.
“Be gone, Emilio,” she said.
Emilio laughed so hard he wheezed and then turned around and left. It was just us and the ocean and the pier and the dark, dark cove again.
“So you’re one of those confessionalists,” Charlotte said.
Her voice was huskier than before, and her gaze had gotten narrow.
“Like, you mean my Instagram?” I asked.
“Instagram, TikTok – all your accounts.” She blew a cone of smoke from the side of her mouth. “You went to college and read a lot, you rejected your family’s religion, you got into spiritualism. You’ve got a following because you’re smart and pretty.”
“Uh – thank you.”
“It’s just a statement of fact.” She looked down at her feet, which made me look down at them, too: toes painted peach, nail beds moisturized and manicured, pink kitten heels with pink pom-poms. “I watched your first viral video. The one where you explain the Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
I’d made that one fall semester of freshman year, months before lockdown: hair down, walking across campus, making the case for why Americans shouldn’t be so afraid of death. IroniCALLY, our fear of death may ACTUALLY be CAUSing us to DIE SOONER! It looked improvised but I’d scripted it for days, rehearsed it in my dorm room until the sped-up inflections felt natural. I’d read somewhere that the algorithm loved “walking-and-talking” videos; turns out, that was right. I had two million views by the end of the week, and my follower count was blowing up. By the time classes shifted online, I didn’t see the point in staying enrolled.
“The searching-for-meaning thing does really good numbers,” Charlotte said. “Not my niche, but I like to learn – that’s why I’m talking to you right now.”
She gave the spliff to me and I decided to take it and inhale long as a favor to her. But I felt so good after just one hit that I told her it was actually a favor to me, and she told me the weed was cut with ecstasy.
I laughed. She grabbed my hand and we were walking up the pier and then up the hill towards Benny’s family’s house, through the throng of people on the patio belting out an old Lady Gaga song, through the living room where people asked Charlotte if she’d say their favorite line from her Nick show. And then up to Benny, who scratched his beard and opened his big arms wide and said, “Well isn’t it nice to see you two ladies!”
Charlotte tapped my chest with one of her press-ons. “Summer is the only interesting person here,” she said.
Benny looked at her and then at me in a way that confirmed they were sleeping together. Then he clapped me on the shoulder.
“Summer comes highly recommended,” he said.
Charlotte turned to me, tilted her head, and gave me the softest little kiss on the cheek. It made me dizzy. I giggled. Benny caught Charlotte by the wrist and gave her a messy kiss on the crown of her head.
“What I hear you saying,” he said, “is that you want to take Summer to see the front of the house?”
Charlotte’s eyes went wide. She smiled and nodded rapidly, pretending to pant like a puppy.
“Ha!” Benny said, petting her head. “Good call. Good girl!”
Then Charlotte pulled me away and through a couple sets of double doors. I tried to keep pace, but I wasn’t as good at running in heels as she was.
“What was he talking about?” I whispered in her ear when she finally slowed down. “I’ve already seen the front of the house. I saw it when we got here.”
She laughed sitcom-loud. It made me feel awkward.
“Yeah, not this part,” she said.
We walked, slower now, down past the fountain and across the front yard, where the light was dim and couples were kissing half-naked on the grass, and I thought about taking out my phone and texting Danni where I was. Or my parents – even if they were all the way back on the other side of the country and I barely talked to them, it still felt like they should know what was happening, where Charlotte was taking me. But the spliff was so loud in my head that when I pulled out my phone I could barely read the screen.
Charlotte stopped walking and turned to me. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t need to be afraid, if that’s what’s going on for you. You just need to be ready.”
“Ready?”
She nodded, or at least I thought so. The farther we got from the house, the harder it was to see anything. I decided to trust her. She took off her heels and told me to take mine off, too. I did. I let her pull me into the woods at the very edge of Benny’s family’s property. I allowed my legs to go faster when hers went faster; I closed my eyes and let her guide me. I thought of her Nick show, which I used to watch every Tuesday after school. I swear on my dead frog’s heart, she’d say, pushing her fake glasses up her nose.
The ground got softer under my feet, then sandy, which made me open my eyes and see a huge rock face bright and jagged in the moonlight.
“It looks like the end of the world,” I blurted, feeling stupid.
But Charlotte seemed to be taking what I said seriously. She tapped her chin and nodded. “Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it.”
I thought we couldn’t go further but it turned out we could: through a tide pool and then into a split in the rock wall like a tall cave. We were each up to our shins in water, and I started planning the content I’d make about this. Charlotte sang the bridge to “God Is a Woman,” which she said Ariana Grande previewed for her months before Sweetener dropped. It was true about her not needing Autotune at all.
“Take your phone out of your pocket,” she said, moments before the ground dropped and the water rose to our belly buttons.
We took less than ten steps like that, and then she was giggling and pulling me up out of the water and into this little cave-within-the-cave, and there was a man sitting at a desk on top of a shoal. He wore all black and grinned at us over the light of a laptop.
“Char!” he called, and stood up. He was tall like Benny but older, with jowls and folds in his neck.
Charlotte ran to hug him, and their hug lasted a long time. Then she looked back at me. I waved, and the man stepped forward, extending his hand.
“I’m Dave,” he said.
His handshake was a little damp but reassuring. He had big hands, like my uncle who owned a construction company and built my parents’ first house. I wanted to ask him what he was writing on his laptop in this watery cave, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I was actually passed out on the dock, dreaming the whole thing
“I really like Summer,” Charlotte said. “I should show you some of her content.”
Dave smiled and nodded, never moving his eyes from me. Charlotte dropped her heels on the rocks and walked behind his desk, where she started typing on his laptop.
“Were you at the party?” Dave asked me.
I nodded. “How do you get wifi out here?”
Dave chuckled. His laugh was like my uncle’s, too. “I can get wifi in a lot of different places.”
It sounded so reasonable the way he said it. Charlotte made an Ah noise, and I heard the audio of one of my viral videos playing. She paused it.
“Summer watched Sam Makes News when it was airing,” she said. “She was a big fan.”
I didn’t know how Charlotte knew this – I couldn’t remember telling her – but I said that she was right, this was true. Dave’s eyes lit up.
“How cool, how very cool,” Dave said, and joined Charlotte behind the desk.
I watched them watch my videos. I couldn’t bear to join them. Instead I dropped my heels next to Charlotte’s and stared up at the ceiling of the cave. The water danced on the ceiling and I realized it was lit from underneath, like a luxury swimming pool.
“Is this actually a swimming pool?” I asked.
Neither of them looked up to answer me. It wasn’t until they’d watched my second and third-most viral videos that Dave looked up at me.
“Benny’s a very gifted manager,” he said. “We go way back. I’m at one of the streamers now. I’m writing a series about a gifted high school. They’ve ordered three seasons.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, wow, ok.”
Charlotte scrunched up her nose. “Dave’s a really good writer,” she said quickly, looking up at him. “A really deep writer.”
He stepped out from behind the desk, folded his arms and leaned against it, the way my AP English teacher used to.
“My philosophy is that young people can explore the big questions,” he said. “Why are we here, why do we die – stuff like that. Just being young doesn’t make you shallow. Right, Char?”
Char clapped her hands and told him he was right. The water kept glimmering on the ceiling.
“I’m looking for a main cast,” he said. “I’m looking for smart actors.”
I nodded slowly. I understood what he was saying, even if nothing else made sense: this was my dream now. This was what I was wanted, more than anything I’d ever wanted before. The truth of it settled over me like magic, made me feel cosmically special.
“She understands the engagement,” he called to Charlotte, then turned back to me. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve nailed the audition, okay? You just need to give us some notes.”
I felt dizzy and giddy, like I was losing my mind to euphoria. I couldn’t believe how quickly things could change for the better when you were the right person who knew the right people.
“Of course,” I said, in the same chipper voice I used for all my teachers and therapists, for my parents’ pastor and for Benny and for the workout coach I shared with Danni. The voice that meant I’m ready. I was born ready.
Charlotte walked around the front of the desk and play-pushed Dave back so he was sitting next to his laptop, and I watched as he pulled off her shirt and unclasped her bra and said something about how she was a work of art. He was so big and she was so small that it was like watching a giant undress a doll. He took off her pants and her underwear and didn’t take off anything he was wearing, which made him seem even bigger. I willed myself to watch until he was hunched over Charlotte at a weird angle, pulling her close to him with one hand and sliding the other up between her thighs. She was gasping.
“Any notes, Summer?” he asked.
That’s when I ran. I held my phone in the air above me and reminded myself that I was just very high, and at the mouth of the cave I tried calling Danni but I didn’t have service so I tried again when I got to the sand. It went to voicemail so I started leaving her a voice memo, I was running and trying not to pant too hard, I was trying to remember what way we’d come in through the woods, how to get back to Benny’s family’s house. Then Danni started calling me, and I hit the green accept call button and that’s the last thing I remember doing before I heard the sound of my ankle snapping underneath me, caught a dim glimpse of the dead tree I’d tripped over, passed out with my chin in the dirt.
*
I didn’t get invited to any of Benny’s parties after that – not that I’d wanted to go anyway. He did send a condolence card and a fruit basket, which Danni scoffed at when they came to my apartment.
“The real rep would brainstorm with you about good sick bed content,” she said.
She helped me make videos about my injury and my healing journey and how the body keeps the score. She asked me what I remembered about that night and I told her about the woods but not the cave, not Dave. I made it sound like I’d tripped while Charlotte and I were cross-faded and playing a game of hide-and-seek on Benny’s family’s property. Danni said, “Charlotte is a simple bitch who wants to be sixteen forever.” None of the content we made went viral.
After I recovered, Benny started scheduling our Zooms farther and father out. I knew I’d screwed up. I tried to stay thin. I tried to make the face wrap ads as funny and sexy as I could. I tried to be a good sport when other influencers lapped me. My therapist recommended a psychiatrist who prescribed trazodone and Valium for anxiety and insomnia.
When @_0_thedarkness_0 followed me and DMed it’s not too late, I was more excited than creeped out. I followed back without thinking about it: I know, I’m sorry, I’m ready now. I consumed the content religiously, waited for the meme or the message that would tell me when and how to act. I could follow the rules, I wanted them to know. I could be redeemed.
I genuinely believed this in the beginning, but as the years went by and I plateaued, I started just pretending to believe it. I wasn’t a person with a destiny, a future household name. I was a user checking my favorite meme page, faving every single post on its grid.
The last time I checked, my DM was still unread.
