“Stahp, stahp, that’s crazy talk. No one has ever been able to do that in the history of ever,” I say. I sure as shit haven’t paid off mine.
Reflexively, I check our views. More than one thousand in the first minute. It’ll tick higher—exponentially higher. Trouble is that the ad revenue on the views doesn’t go that far.
Unless you break out big time.
And the chances of that are slim, so it’s lucky I learned how to juggle because it’s likely I’ll be doing that with two jobs for a long time.
That evening, I walk into the pipsqueak apartment I used to share with my sister, my eyes drifting briefly to a five-by-seven picture on the coffee table in the living room—a framed photograph of Cadillac Ranch on Route 66. My chest tightens as I remember taking that picture two years ago, and I look away, focusing on clicking the door closed behind me.
My couch pillows call out to me, but I resist their siren song. Instead, I drop my messenger bag onto a metal chair at my kitchen table and perform my presto-chango routine.
Voila.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m freshened up and decked out all in black—the makeup artist’s unofficial dress code. After a quick jaunt across the city to a luxury hotel in Union Square, I spend the next hour in the penthouse suite painting the faces of a quartet of eighteen-year-old girls from the city’s fanciest private school.
“Oh my God, we look so good for prom. You’re straight fire with a makeup brush,” a gal named Bexley coos at me.
“It’s easy when I have such a good canvas,” I say. I mean, hello, perfect dewy teenage skin.
Makeup is fun, but I figured I’d be done with these freelance gigs by age thirty. That by now, the show would cover all my bills and then some. Dreams are hard to catch, though, no matter how tenaciously you chase them.
I swipe some glittery blush on Tilly, and she declares I “slayed it.” I know what she means, though I don’t try to adopt their lingo, since . . . not cool.
Once I’m done, I thank the girls then pack up, checking the time as the elevator sweeps me to the lobby.
If I scurry two blocks over to California Street, I can catch the bus back to my place before the new murder mystery premiers on Hulu at nine. I’ll text Katie and Jo. See if they want to do a watch party. We can place bets on twists. Yup, some friends, a glass of wine, a pair of soft PJ pants, and a chance to escape with my girls into a twisty, zany story are just what the doctor ordered.
But as I turn the corner, the blue bus trundles away.
Ugh.
My shoulders sag, and I trudge all the way to the covered stop, the makeup bag digging into my hip. As I wait for the next bus, I idle away the minutes on my phone, rewatching today’s episode—particularly the moments after I bit into the veggie burger.
I did not imagine it—when Nolan watched me lick my lips, his dreamy eyes did darken.
A tingle swoops down my chest, but I squash it down.
Cool it, Nancy. You’re not in charge.
2
Make Yourself Decent, Jaybird
Nolan
* * *
It’s weird sometimes, the pervasive idea that you can do anything. Be anything.
Can you, though? Most careers require a little thing called talent to get started.
Check. We’ve got that.
Then, there’s potential. Sure, we’re swimming in it, the way our viewer and subscriber numbers keep beautifully rising.
But leaving aside skill and opportunity, the hard reality is that you can do anything, but you can’t keep doing it if your “anything” isn’t making enough money.
Emerson and I are horseshoe close. The dice roll we made on a fun, flirty food-judging show where we also offer food-shopping tips is nipping at the heels of success.
But the show needs to take off really fucking soon because I’m running out of time to pay the piper.
I walk home from the coffee shop that evening, my legs eat up the sidewalk, and my mind flashes frenetically forward three months to that date—the looming day when an unexpected debt comes due.
Surprise! The joke was on me, and now the thought of my dirty little secret IOU is making me walk faster and driving me to work harder on the show all the time.
If I don’t, I’ll have to fight the millions of foodie wannabes for a job as a line cook. Maybe a sous chef if I’m lucky.
I shudder. Restaurant life is not for me. Been there, done that, have the scars from it. Not to mention it’s fuck-all hard to afford your own place on the pay—last time I worked that gig, I had three roommates in an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment with bad plumbing.
As the chichi Pacific Heights neighborhood comes into view, I cycle through possible next steps to skyrocket How to Eat a Banana into the stratosphere.