Chapter 18
Sitting on a bench in Candler Park, Willa attempted a selfie, and it was not good. Somehow her little upturned nose looked like a honker, her peace fingers looked stupid, her skin tone looked mottled, and those wrinkles between her eyebrows — no amount of ferocious massage or desperate prayer would release them.
She tried on Instagram filters with names like “Baby Boo Boo” and “So Natural,” which put a pacifier in her mouth or made her look like a Bratz doll, respectively. Another, called “Cali Time,” changed Willa into a tanned goddess with ludicrously long lashes, lips the size of couch cushions, and teal eyes.
Willa sighed, knowing she had to come up with something presentable for her third of three mandatory social-media posts tagged with #fitfamsforce this week. She’d done the requisite booty-shaking Boomerang video in front of the studio mirrors, as well as a Superzoom with hearts around a hot, blonde client they all secretly called “The Palomino.”
“That’s the one,” Kevin said over her shoulder, pointing to her screen and a photo of Willa filtered to look like a carrot with a moustache.
“Very funny,” Willa said, clicking off her phone and stowing it in the pocket of her hydration belt. “Let’s go.”
Kevin and Willa tried to run at least six miles once a week, something they’d done since college, where they’d met in the dorms during soccer pre-season and connected over their unabashed love of the show “Melrose Place.” He became her best friend, something their teammates never bought (“Women and men cannot be friends,” Lila, her team’s striker would say. “You and Kevin are definitely banging.”), even though Kevin was obsessively faithful to Dara, his girlfriend from home.
Plus, he wasn’t Willa’s type, all 6’2” and lean, and nice, with curly brown hair that peeked out from under his beat-up baseball hat. No, during college Willa went for David, a fraternity president whose hobbies included drinking five pitchers of beer without sharing, kicking in the windows of parked cars late at night, and beating an underclassman with a broken bedpost for no discernable reason.
Kevin went straight from Ithaca to Emory University School of Law in Atlanta and Dara got a job with Atlanta Architects & Interiors as a designer. In their subsequent nuptials, Willa was a groomswoman and drunkenly but faithfully quoted “The Princess Bride” for her segment of the wedding video (“Mawage is wot bwings us together today. Mawage, that blessed awangement, that dweam wifin a dweam. And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva. So tweasure your wuv.”). After last call at the Swan Coach House open bar, Willa led the way to an unofficial after-party at Lulu’s Bait Shack, then made out with one of Kevin’s cousins before losing her shoes somewhere on Peachtree Street.
Kevin now worked in copyright law at Kilpatrick Stockton and lived in nearby Lake Claire with Dara and their three girls, ages four, six, and nine.
“So how’s the new coaching thing going?” he asked, as they headed up McLendon Avenue.
“I’ve taught my three free classes,” Willa said, trying to match his ridiculously long stride. “The first one was not great. Got a lot of negative feedback.”
Willa wiped her forehead with the sweatband on her wrist. “Honestly, it’s hard not to take it personally when that happens,” she said. “I know FitFams isn’t my business, but I put so much of myself into coaching, and when I don’t get that back from the clients — I don’t know, it almost … hurts, you know?”
Kevin nodded.
“I’ll think to myself, ‘why the hell am I teary-eyed because someone complained? Why am I putting myself through all this for some dumb side hustle?’” Willa said.
“Well, you know why,” Kevin said.
“Because I care?” Willa asked, knowing that was the wrong answer.
Kevin was one of the few friends who knew what happened to Willa when she let herself get stuck inside an infinite loop of negative feedback. He saw glimpses of it in college, like that time she broke down in tears over a grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen of his off-campus house at 3 a.m., certain that David’s words — “you’re not worth the trouble” — were true.
And Kevin saw it more recently, three years ago, when she found herself so overwhelmed by motherhood, and mid-life, and maxed-out meds that she checked herself into a bare-bones psychiatric facility to keep herself safe. She’d never felt more terrified than when they took her shoelaces and the drawstring of her sweatpants and sent her to sit on a vinyl chair in the orange-paneled common room, a place with no books on the shelves, save for a Ted Cruz biography and what Willa thought was a volume of National Geographic magazines but was actually an empty binder.
She and the other residents of Unit C were not allowed outside, unless they wanted to smoke in a courtyard with high walls, or when the bell rang for lunch at 12 p.m. At its sound, Willa and her unit-mates would line up at one reinforced glass door. An orderly would unlock the door and let the patients pass into a small holding area, then lock that door. Then he would unlock the second door and let them out, kind of like dogs in a dog park. They didn’t burst into the fresh air, though; that was against the rules, and they were too lethargic anyway. They shuffled down the path to the cafeteria.
When Pete came to the facility for visiting day, he smiled at her through the glass and waved and knocked, because he thought she could let him in.
“You know you have to take care of yourself,” Kevin said as they ran past a hair salon and turned the corner to Moreland Avenue.
“I know,” Willa said. “I do. I am. Listen, it was only the first class that felt bad. The second and third ones were kind of amazing. I had one client who cried because she was just so … moved. Like I had guided her through something transformative, and she was so happy and grateful, and she couldn’t wait to come back and see me again.”
“Wow,” Kevin said.
“Yeah, and all of my classes for next week are full already,” Willa said.
“Damn, that’s great,” Kevin said as they ran toward Sevananda. “Do you think the machine could handle my raw power?”
Willa snorted. “An NFL player took class with Jen last week and was a quivering mess afterward. I hear John Cena is in town, filming a movie, and has signed up. So yeah, I think FitFams can handle you just fine.”
Kevin laughed as they prepared to cross Moreland to run on the Freedom Parkway Trail. Then his tone turned serious again: “I know you know this, but I’ll say it anyway. Just try not to tie your sense of self to how the people in that studio treat you, bad or good.”
Willa didn’t respond.
Some people know you too well.