Chapter 44
Willa sipped her iced coffee and thanked the sweet Lord for the almost-constant sunshine in Atlanta, a rapturous upgrade from the gray weather and Seasonal Affective Disorder that made landfall in September in Ithaca and didn’t lift until May at the earliest. She was on the patio at Percolate, a new coffee shop in the Kirkwood neighborhood, located across the street from a sandwich shop and a community garden that had seen better days.
On her laptop she was checking the numbers for the Atlanta studio and the bookings for the special session scheduled today with Shelly, the CFO and Dee’s co-BFF, who was making a rare appearance to coach in celebration of the studio’s one-month anniversary.
Willa was coaching the class after that. Both were full. Good.
So far she had not received any admonishing emails or texts from corporate about business at the Atlanta studio. Almost every class was full every day, with a wait list, and the coaches were excellent at keeping up with their in-studio duties, social-media requirements, and hairstyles as illustrated in the FitFams bible.
Willa was spending at least one afternoon every weekend in FitFams shirts, hats, and leggings at yoga classes, 10Ks, outdoor bootcamps, and neighborhood festivals. This caused a little bit of consternation at home, given that it meant she was sometimes missing the kids’ soccer games for the sake of sampling IPAs for four hours with her coaches. But it was her job to hand out free-class cards and spread the gospel of FitFams in Atlanta, and it wasn’t her fault that their target market could frequently be found lined up in front of beer trucks.
She checked her watch — 15 minutes to get to the studio, then 20 minutes before Shelly was set to arrive. On the drive, Willa whispered through the routine for her class and made a mental checklist of what she needed to do in order to make sure everything was clean and in place.
When Willa went to unlock the studio, she saw that Shelly was already inside, putting up mylar balloons shaped like the number one and setting out protein bars next to plastic flutes of champagne on the reception desk. On the studio’s chalkboard she’d written “Happy One-Month Anniversary, Atlanta!”
“Wow,” Willa said. “This is so nice!”
Shelly flipped her long, black curls over her shoulder and gave a big smile. “You’ve been doing well,” she said.
“Thanks,” Willa said. Despite the weirdness of the retreat weekend, she still felt a sense of pride for the small corner of the company that she oversaw. She liked that, as Studio Manager, she could insulate her coaches and clients from any corporate bullshit and keep the experience here positive and kind of pure.
Willa helped check in Shelly’s clients and then just listened — the set-up of the studio was such that she couldn’t see into the main area from the desk — and was once again struck by the fact that Shelly’s voice was incredibly similar to Dee’s in tone and timbre. It was oddly calm, even slightly detached (“push”), until she was zeroing in on a client (“pull”) and insisting on more effort, more energy, don’t stop, more, more, more.
“If you take a break, you’re not just letting yourself down,” Shelly told the class. “You’re letting your neighbors down. You’re letting everyone in this room down.”
This wasn’t really Willa’s approach. She asked her clients for their best, but she tried to inspire that by making them feel good and strong. Willa didn’t harangue or shame people for pausing to catch a breath. She saved that for her own interior conversations.
“We’re in the business of getting better,” Shelly said on the mic. “Now please, give me everything you’ve got.”
She then cued up a remix of Coldplay’s “Yellow” that, inexplicably and horrendously, weaved in part of Train’s, “Tell Me.” (Willa and Pete liked to make fun of the “she acts like summer and she walks like rain” lyric by changing it to “she talks like bees and she tastes like trees.”)
Willa walked around the corner to take a peek at the class, and to make sure no one had dropped their towel or needed help with a loose shoe.
“You are holding back. Now is not the time for that,” Shelly said. Then, instead of calling out the next two moves, she mimed them in a way that only experienced clients would understand. The front row — who looked like mirror images of Shelly, with model-thin bodies, cropped tanks, and high ponytails — followed along, seamlessly.
Willa watched as several of the second-row clients’ faces of determination gave way to looks of confusion and, perhaps, envy. This did not feel inclusive. Not at all.
As Shelly’s class was wrapping up, Willa’s clients began to arrive, so she returned to the front desk.
“Oh, wow!” a client named Rebecca marveled. “Champagne! This is so cute! I’m definitely gonna have some of that when class is over.”
“You guys deserve it,” Willa said as she checked Rebecca and the other clients in. “We couldn’t be where we are without you.”
Shelly’s students, red-faced and covered in sweat, poured into the reception area. Their chit-chat and laughter was drowned out when Willa turned up her music and her class began. She imagined the celebration was getting increasingly rowdy as the minutes ticked on.
“3-2-1, you’re done!” Willa yelled out to her clients at the end of the session. Then she turned down the music and handed out sanitizing wipes and fist bumps and words of congratulations.
With their adrenaline still pumping, the clients noisily filtered into the reception area.
Then it got quiet.
Willa stopped her quick clean-up. Something was amiss.
She turned the corner from the studio into the reception area and saw what the clients saw. The champagne, the protein bars, the balloons — they were all gone. Not half-empty and half-eaten and half-deflated. Gone. So was Shelly.
She had celebrated with the people in her class, packed up the party, and peaced out.