Wow honey your first time on TV since third grade! Good luck! is what she’d messaged me earlier this morning, followed by How is the job search going? It hadn’t even been a week, and already I could feel her maternal worry hovering over my shoulder, which always left me feeling stressed, afraid I’d somehow let her down.
My mom and stepdad’s opinion had always been that the best kind of job was the one that pays well, not the one that fulfilled your soul. Just the fact that I’d pursued a creative career had always made them nervous, and while they tried to keep that anxiety to themselves, I could still vividly recall them both sitting at the kitchen table, teeth clenched, as I described yet another low-paying internship. Maybe they worried like this because I was an only child. But then again, I had a lot of friends who were the only kid in their family, and none of them seemed to feel like they existed just to make their parents happy.
My job at Spayce had checked all the boxes for them, though, and maybe that’s why I’d been comfortable staying put. It paid well. It was steady. Still, if I texted my mom back and told her I was abandoning all my interior design dreams to become an accountant, she’d be thrilled. The practical always won out with her, no matter what, and I hated feeling like I was on my way to disappointing her and also proving her right.
“Well, look, you’re doing this because she said it was a good idea.” Cleo shook her head at Lola, who was wedged into the corner of the couch I was perched on, squinting at her iPhone.
“Lola said you should do it because it’s bullshit that someone can take a photo of you on the subway and make up a story about it like it’s some sort of movie,” said Lola in a chiding tone. She glanced up to glare jokingly in Cleo’s direction.
Cleo nodded. “And to give you control over your own narrative. Get your power back. Which is an avenue I appreciate.”
“I still wish I could just sue the person who posted this,” I said with a resigned sigh.
“Of course you do.” Cleo immediately puffed up into scholar mode. “But you actually have no legal recourse here. As we’ve discussed.”
“Just go out there, set the record straight, say thanks, and drop the mic, Fran,” Lola said, pausing her endless phone-tapping. “In and out, easy-peasy. You’ve got this.”
I exhaled, feeling a little bit more at ease. In the past forty-eight hours, we’d discussed my “rip-cident” at length. That’s what Teen Vogue had called it. I called it mortifying, with no chance of going away anytime soon.
“You’re right. I can do this.” I paced a few steps, as if moving my body could stamp out the nerves.
“You also said you wanted to see Hot Suit in the flesh again,” reminded Cleo, in between bites.
“To say thank you!” I protested. “That’s it.”
“Oh, come on, we all want to see Hot Suit in the flesh,” Cleo said with a smirk. “Look, sometimes the universe does provide, in the form of a hot piece of ass.”
Lola shrugged at me. “Okay, she’s not wrong there.”
I twisted my hands together, wringing my fingers. “Seeing him again seems like a terrible idea now. Especially in front of, I don’t know, a gajillion freakin’ people?”
Cleo’s eyes followed me as I fidgeted around the room—sitting down, standing, unsure of what to do with my body. “You should eat something,” she said.
“What, and barf all over him after I’ve already wiped snot on his shirt?” I said, smoothing my dress, an old standby red sheath purchased at Zara a few years ago. “I’m sure he’d love that.”
There was a knock at the greenroom door, and Eliza, the producer in charge of my segment, strode in, with Priya, the makeup artist who had done my full face an hour earlier, at her side. “Hey, just giving you a ten-minute heads-up,” Eliza said matter-of-factly, as if appearing on TV were the most normal thing in the world. She was one of those people who talked at you but was always busy looking somewhere else. Priya gave me a sweet smile and began dabbing powder across my nose with a giant brush.
“We’ll have the jacket out onstage, to the right of your chair, so you can give it to him when he comes out,” Eliza said, eyeing something on her clipboard.
“And will someone tell me when to, like, hand it to him?” I asked, nervously shifting on my heels. I hadn’t mentioned it to Eliza—or Lola or Cleo for that matter—but I’d slipped a thank-you note inside the front pocket of the jacket. Nothing elaborate, but in case I was unable to clearly express myself on TV, I wanted to make sure I said thank you. Because if I took away the weirdness of this situation, all that remained underneath was gratitude, and—if I was being honest—the lingering memory of his touch, which still sent electric shocks through my body every time I thought about it.