Chapter 71
Dee did not attempt to hide her disgust as the man groaned and stretched his arms overhead, lifting his skin-tight Body Glove swim shirt to reveal a prodigious, pale-white, furry gut. When he saw her looking, he didn’t abruptly drop his arms and yank the shirt down in silent apology and shame, the way a big-bodied woman absolutely would. In fact, once he was done with these “warm-up” moves the shirt remained stuck in a fold of fat and he didn’t do anything to fix it.
Though Dee’s hatred of fatness knew no gender, she was particularly incensed by the way men paraded their obesity like a badge of honor, or a taunt. At the beach they’d look like regular-old middle-aged men from behind, but from the front they’d look eight months pregnant, and they’d strut around shirtless, daring you to react, burning the image into everyone’s eyes.
This wasn’t because these men loved their bodies or had some kind of weird reverse dysmorphia. It was because they knew they ran the world and could do whatever the fuck they wanted and women would just have to look and watch and take it.
I mean, think about movies. There are so many movies where the male lead is downright gross and the woman is a heavenly Victoria’s Secret Angel. This isn’t natural; these women aren’t organically attracted to human hippos. And it’s not because women are deeper and kinder and willing to look past looks — that’s bullshit. It’s because men are writing the movies with themselves in mind, infecting our sense of what is acceptable and attractive, inserting these ideas into our collective consciousness until it seems completely normal that a pockmarked, fuck-face, fatso could land an ethereally beautiful Tinkerbell fairy.
In the meantime, fat women are bullied online, told to kill themselves, treated as the most foul of all beings. And that pissed Dee off. See, she wasn’t all bad. She might publicly hate fat people, but a close look at her dating history would show she loved the softness of a curvy woman in bed. Dee just wasn’t going to admit that out loud.
She was thinking about all of this as she watched the man attempt to bend over and touch his toes, giving her an even more disgusting angle to look at.
“So you say you’ve worked out before?” Dee asked, five minutes before she was set to special-guest coach at the Soho studio.
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” he said, attempting some slow, labored squats. Then he stood up and patted his midsection. “Lotta muscle in here.”
Dee truly thought she might be sick. Men are so disgusting and weak. Even the hot ones. Like Ben, her operations lead. He quit last week, no notice. Said he hadn’t slept in a week, thinking about how they’d left Willa in that bar without any concern for her safety. What if something terrible had happened to her? Blah, blah, blah.
So now he was persona non grata. Just like Willa.
She gave her two-weeks’ notice just the other day, saying she loved the company and all of the opportunities she’d received and the attention Dee had given her and sorry for drinking so much during the New York celebration and maybe it was time to move on.
Yup. If you’re not with me, you’re against me. So good riddance.
After some thought, Dee decided to be charitable and let Willa stay the two weeks, assigning her all the manual labor (learn how to tune up every machine in the studio, then do it), busy work (inventory the merchandise with three different spreadsheet tools, then tear it all up and do it again), and unpleasantness (fail a new coach, any coach of your choosing) that Dee could dream up.
Willa might get her last paycheck, or she might not.
Soon enough, that wasn’t going to be Dee’s problem anymore. Glen Fowler was almost done fundraising through an IPO for his SPAC, which meant the SPAC could soon acquire FitFams in a “de-SPAC transaction” and give the shareholders a warrant with a strike price of 115 percent of the purchase price for each share purchase in the IPO.
Dee wasn’t entirely sure what all of that meant, but her lawyers said it was good. They did warn her that if the SPAC failed to consummate the de-SPAC transaction by the 18-month deadline, the escrowed funds would be returned to the shareholders. These shareholders — heretofore unaware of the specific target of acquisition, though they knew it would be in fitness — also had to approve the de-SPAC transaction, and if too many objected and asked for their investments back, the SPAC would not have enough capital to do the deal.
She felt pretty confident this would all go through without a problem. But sometimes she found herself swatting away anxiety like a gnat near her ear. Her main worry was FitFamsFraud and their campaign to take her down.
To slow their roll and quiet their voices, Dee’s legal team had initiated a number of legal challenges, some egregious, some just annoying, but all having the effect of frightening those little amateurs into thinking they might have something to lose if they kept talking. That helped neuter FitFamsFraud’s efforts, at least for the time being.
Meanwhile, Dee was reluctantly taking the crisis-management firm’s advice and putting on a happy, positive, empowerment-for-all face. She was going to college campuses to give tearful speeches about her backstory, spreading the word about the upcoming debut of her Sirius XM channel, weighing in on the Vice President’s shoe choice as Joy Behar’s temporary substitute on “The View” (which Dee secretly called The Harpy Roundtable), and energetically guest-coaching at numerous studios throughout the FitFams chain. She powered through all of it because she knew she stood to make millions on the deal. With that kind of money, she could relax, maybe buy a huge boat and take Tara and Shelly on a cruise around the world.
So here Dee was, in Soho, forcing herself to listen to this gross dude in a rashguard — seriously, though: who wears a surf shirt to a work out? — talk about how much he could bench and how he believed this class would be a cinch.
“Is that a challenge?” she said, winking, then smiling through gritted teeth.
Because — good PR be damned — Dee never backed down from a challenge. Ben knew that. Willa knew that. And this guy would find out soon enough. He was gonna be toast. Thick, eggy, buttered toast.
She threw up in her mouth a little at the thought.