Chapter 2
What is it they say, about how you should never meet your heroes?
That thought didn’t cross Willa’s mind as she awkwardly excused herself from Dee’s orbit in the restaurant and headed across the street. The woman was in charge of a $150-million fitness company with 55 locations in the United States and plans to open at least one new studio every month. World domination was not off the table. So give the woman a break, Willa reasoned. Dee Bradley was entitled to be less than luminous now and again.
Willa squeezed past the four workers who were crowding the doorway to the studio, dealing with some loose wires. Three other workers were installing the huge plate-glass window that faced the street. Inside, pallets of fiberglass insulation were piled in a corner and the lights didn’t seem to be working. There was no toilet in the bathroom. Ten of the studio’s 20 machines were still unassembled and in boxes.
The studio was supposed to open in a week.
Two months before, Willa had been the first Atlanta coach contacted by FitFams Talent Chief Tara Jenkins, which both surprised and secretly thrilled Willa. It wasn’t like she trained Madonna or was a brand ambassador with her image emblazoned above a rack of overpriced sports bras at Lululemon. Willa was a 40-year-old mother of two grade-school boys who was known for making fitness clients at the city’s B-list studios laugh and maybe throw up. Her classes were usually full, but she’d also had the pleasure of teaching indoor cycling to a lone, 60-year-old man who never broke eye contact while also refusing to follow any of her cues.
“We offer an incredible opportunity for fitness instructors to take their coaching to the next level, to learn amazing skills and techniques and help people become strong, healthy, and happy,” Tara had said in the email, sent from her office at corporate HQ in New York.
OK, so far Willa was on board. But then: “Six weeks of training will cost you just $2,000. And then we will ask you to coach a minimum of four days a week.”
Willa had, of course, paid for certifications before, but they were more in the range of $300 for one day of lessons and quizzes in a hotel conference room. Those certifications were transferable from company to company, studio to studio. FitFams’ machine and workout were incredibly unique, using a souped-up Stairmaster (though Willa would learn that word was never to be spoken; Dee had been sued by the company), ankle and wrist weights, and moves like “the Bellydancer” and “Chewing Gum.”
The skills Willa would learn in her six-week, $2,000 training would be useful nowhere else.
This sounded a little like indentured servitude, and outside the realm of financial possibility for a fitness coach who — between freelance graphic design, hardcore mom-ing, and workouts of her own — couldn’t teach more than two classes per week. So, with some disappointment, Willa said no.
Some weeks later, Tara reached out by phone. FitFams had managed to hire three coaches in Atlanta but needed one more. Would Willa please reconsider?
Willa nearly batted her eyelashes and cooed, who me? Their desire to hire her was like a balm for the nagging insecurity she’d felt since she was a kid, when her dad tossed her B-average report card into the kitchen junk drawer while proudly displaying her stepsister’s A marks on the refrigerator. (“Don’t get so excited,” he’d said, when Willa announced she’d been early-accepted to Ithaca College. “Sometimes they take unqualified students as an experiment.”)
Tara explained that FitFams would waive the training fee, truncate the training time, and allow Willa to teach as few classes a week as she wanted to. So Willa said yes, and she meant it. In the fitness-coaching world, instructors would routinely disappear from one studio and pop up at another just days later, only to return to the original spot the next year. But not Willa. She stayed in a relationship with her bar-fighting college boyfriend two years too long, and she stuck with a job designing bond-market newsletters targeted to asshole traders even after her boss repeatedly hung up on her and lectured her about typeface (“You sure love Helvetica,” he’d say, then let out that passive-aggressive, slimy giggle that made her skin crawl.) Nobody could call Willa a quitter.
And that’s how she ended up in FitFams’ new Atlanta studio on a Saturday afternoon, fist-bumping Tara — never a handshake with her, only a fist-bump — just seven days before it was set to open its doors.
Tara, like Dee, was known for her hair, which was blue, short in the back, and covered one eye. She was also known for rejecting the typical FitFams uniform of crop tops and leggings, instead favoring fashionably torn-up tanks and low-slung joggers. She was a real athlete, a nationally ranked long-jumper who went looking for other career options after she was injured by an errant javelin.
At Tara’s elbow was the new Atlanta studio manager, Jem Philips, a beautiful bird-like and bookish-looking yoga instructor with blunt blonde bangs and the requisite flat abs. She took a bite of a jumbo Snickers bar and passed Willa the four-pound, spiral-bound instructor’s guide.
Tara put her hand on Willa’s shoulder. “This will be your Bible,” she said, gravely. “It will teach you everything you need to know about the workout, yes, but also about who we are. About who you are. About who they are. About who they want to be. About who they should be. You will teach them that when the ‘outside person’ looks better, the ‘inside person’ gets better. You will learn to be an endless source of energy. Clients will wonder whether you’re on cocaine, and that will be a sign that you’re doing things right. You will give everything to them. Everything. And in return, they will want you, or want to be you. That’s the FitFams Way.”
Willa let out a snort, then tried to shove it back into her nose when she saw that Tara was absolutely not joking.
Tara took her hand off Willa’s shoulder and shot a glance at Jem, then returned her focus to Willa. “OK, so I know I said we’d meet for about two hours today to go over the basics of the machine, but yeah, I gotta be somewhere. You take some time to review the manual. Jem — let’s go.”
Jem grabbed her bag and skittered after Tara.
So Willa was alone, holding the thick book, listening to the workers clang and bang in a studio that looked nothing like the FitFams she’d seen online. Those studios had a Restoration Hardware-meets-Canyon Ranch look, with pale wood on the walls, perfectly fluffed pillows on the reception bench, and lighting gels that cast the whole space in a flattering, warm pink. She’d watched a video of a class in New York that showed how, to signal the start time, the impossibly hot instructor shut off the house lights and called out, “It’s time to change your lives, bitches!” Then he turned on the pink neon that snaked around the perimeter, transforming the space from Taos spa to Ibiza nightclub. It looked exclusive, special, exciting.
Willa wondered whether this space could possibly become all of that in just one week. Could she learn every move in this manual? Could she — in her life of logo drawing, Target overspending, toilet plunging, shoe tying, carpool driving, husband handling, and squeezing in a run or a spin class — find enough energy as if to appear she were on coke? Did she even want to do that?
Had she made a mistake?
And then the plate-glass window tipped over, crashing into the studio and all over the floor.