Chapter 64
Willa rolled the small capsule between her thumb and forefinger. It was packed tight with a canary-yellow powder, and she’d found it on the floor outside of the supply closet at FitFams.
She fished her reading glasses out of her gym bag and checked for numbers or letters on the oblong shell. Nothing. Maybe it was just one of those personalized vitamins you could order online after taking a quiz about your skin, hair, hopes, dreams, fingernails, and bathroom habits?
She’d been cleaning up at the end of an exhausting day of coaching five classes. Several of her coaches were out sick with the same flu, which made sense, since they were always licking each other’s faces and other body parts at every given opportunity. After five hours of classes, Willa retreated to the supply closet and attempted to take a catnap on a bed of unsold sweatshirts. But her phone kept buzzing.
The first text was from Tara at corporate, claiming that both Willa and Jamie had recently received scathing criticisms from clients. This was confusing, given that all of the reviews on Yelp, ClassPass, and Google were positive, praising Jamie’s intensity and, in one case, rewriting the words of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” to describe Willa’s playlists as more lovely and more temperate than a summer’s day.
When Willa asked Tara for more details, the response was brusque: “That’s all I can tell you for now. Just step up your game. Dee is watching, and she’s not happy.”
Oh for fuck’s sake, Willa thought as she put the phone on her chest and stared up at the discolored particle-board ceiling of the supply closet. What kind of feedback was that? It reminded her of the quarterly reviews at the Ithaca paper, and how she and her friends there would compare their (d)evaluations to see whose was the most petty, vague, and cruel.
The next buzz signaled the arrival of a message to her personal email from a sender she didn’t recognize. The subject line read: “Can you help FitFamsFraud?” In the note, the founder of the activist organization said she’d seen some of Willa’s design work, and would she consider putting together some eye-catching graphics to go with the group’s upcoming posts about the benefits of unionization? And do it pro bono, for the good of the coach and client community?
I do not have the bandwidth to participate in the rebellion right now, Willa thought to herself.
Then Willa saw five unread messages from Pete, all sent during a five-minute period while she was coaching (didn’t he know by now that she couldn’t pick up during class?):
“Can you go to the grocery this afternoon and get some Rice Krispies, red wine, ground beef, and dog biscuits?”
“Hello?”
“ARE YOU THERE”
“HELLO???”
“OK, I guess I’m going to the grocery after work myself.”
The tension at home had become almost unbearable, with Willa feeling like she couldn’t do anything right. She’d tossed out a months-old magazine he hadn’t finished reading. She’d sweated on the car seat and hadn’t warned him about it before he sat down in a suit. She’d left the half-and-half out. She’d forgotten to ask Pete about the big meeting with the President and Dean. She’d packed the ham instead of bologna for Charlie’s lunch. She’d woken Pete when she came in late one Saturday night.
Willa was stuck in an apology loop. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. She woke up feeling sorry. She went to bed feeling sorry. Guilt was her default setting, so much so that she lost all clarity on whether she was actually doing anything wrong.
Once in a while she’d remember that Pete wasn’t an angel in this scenario. Every night, after the hour-long process of putting the boys to bed — stories, multiple hugs for Chicken, water refills, nightmares, James running out of his room to moon his parents — Pete would retreat into his computer or his phone. Willa would watch the light reflect off of his glasses and wonder if he was looking at porn or real estate or real estate porn. Then he’d wordlessly go out on the back deck and smoke.
He knew her so well, so he knew exactly how to hurt her.
Thinking about this while lying on the floor of the FitFams closet, Willa flipped over, buried her face in the pile of sweatshirts, and screamed.
Then she collected herself, stood up, grabbed a bottle of Windex, and pushed open the door of the closet so she could resume cleaning and closing the studio. That’s when she saw the pill.
Under different circumstances — say, if she worked in a bar or a music venue — she might think about swallowing the pill as a way to find out what it was. But a pill found at a fitness studio did not hold the same promise as one found where people went to have fun.
A search on Drugs.com revealed more than 1,400 results for “yellow pill capsule.” All prescription and over-the-counter drugs in the United States are imprinted with a code, the site said. So this pill was likely a vitamin or an energy, herbal, diet, or illicit drug.
Willa looked up Mark Fahey’s cell phone number. They’d met during sophomore year of college and ended up following Phish in a beat-up school bus for part of a summer, selling ganja Goo Balls in the parking lots and spending the money on more weed and tailgate veggie burritos. He was now in pharmacy school, attempting to parlay his expertise about drugs both recreational and medicinal into a legit career. She took a photo of the capsule and texted it to him.
“Any idea what this is?” she asked.
“Let me check on that,” he texted back.
Five minutes later he wrote again: “OK, I think I found it. Don’t take it.”
“What is it?”
“It looks like 2,4-Dinitrophenol, ‘an organic compound with the formula HOC₆H₃(NO₂)₂. It is a yellow, crystalline solid that has a sweet, musty odor. It sublimes, is volatile with steam, and is soluble in most organic solvents as well as aqueous alkaline solutions.’”
Willa sent him an emoji wearing a monocle, followed by a question mark. He knew better than to blind her with science.
“It was originally used as a photographic chemical, a fertilizer, and in the manufacturing of dyes and explosives,” Mark texted. “These days people order it from China on the Internet and use it as a weight-loss pill.”
“Is it legal?”
“Hell, no,” he texted back. “It was banned in the 1930s after being declared unfit for human consumption.”
“How does it work?”
“It can burn fat and carbs and turn energy into heat,” he texted. “But it can also cause muscle spasms, seizures, and multiple organ failure.”
“So you’ll die, but at least you’ll be skinny,” Willa texted.
“Yes,” he texted. “There’s that. But yeah, don’t take it.”
“It’s not mine,” she wrote.
“That’s what they all say,” he texted.
Willa pulled her wallet out of her gym bag, unzipped the coin purse, and dropped the pill inside.