“I just feel like it might not go over well, if we tweet a Frederick Douglass quote from the FitFams account.”
Dee was climbing a hill on the customized stationary bicycle in her office. “Why?”
Coral, standing in the doorway, perhaps so she could quickly escape if need be, bit her lip and twirled the end of her gold braid. “I mean … we are so white.”
Dee air-stabbed her finger toward Sheldon, who was timing her intervals on his Apple Watch and inputting the data on his rose-gold iPad.
“Yes, we have Sheldon,” Coral said, carefully. “But he’s the only person of color in HQ, and one of the few people of color throughout the company as a whole.”
“And that means I can’t quote Frederick Douglass,” Dee challenged.
“Um, you can?” Coral said, uptalking nervously. “But maybe you shouldn’t? Like, maybe it will come across as though you are comparing our workout to the plight of the slaves?”
Dee stopped pedaling. “You are completely missing the point.”
“Oh, I am?” Cora exhaled, relieved.
Dee read from her phone: “’If there is no struggle, there is no progress.’ I’m not talking about the workout. I’m talking about how I’ve stood up to the people who want to bring me down.”
Coral was silent, then cleared her throat. “So you’re comparing your plight to that of the slaves?”
Dee huffed as she toweled off, dismounted the bike, and grabbed her ankle for a quad stretch. “Fine, fine, fine. What about this one: ‘Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.’”
“Who said that, Demi Lovato?” Sheldon asked.
“No,” Dee said. “Coretta Scott King.”
Coral appeared to think hard about what she was going to say next. “I think this will not be well received. We’re already dealing with a bit of a PR crisis, and I think we want to be very careful to avoid controversy if we don’t want to scare investors away from the SPAC.”
Dee lightning-tapped her screen with her thumbs.
“What are you doing?” Coral asked.
“I just posted the Coretta Scott King quote,” Dee said, then tossed her phone on her desk.
Coral turned on her heel and walked out.
“Can you believe her? So careful, so ‘woke,’” Dee said to Sheldon.
He hadn’t moved from the side of the bike, even though she had. Dee crouched into a squat to stretch her groin and watched his face. He was frozen in place and looked a little bit unwell.
Finally, he said: “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what, track my rides?” Dee asked.
He lay the iPad face-down on her desk and walked out.
Dee, looking like a frog in her squatted position, watched the glass door close quietly behind him, then shrugged and moved into pigeon pose on the exceptionally clean carpet. Sheldon likely wouldn’t have lasted long once the acquisition went through anyway.
Yesterday, Fowler’s SPAC — he’d named it Savior Investment Corp. (Nasdaq ticker: SICU) — sold 50 million investment units at $10 each in the initial public offering, raising $500 million. In its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, SICU said it would focus on acquisitions of high-end businesses in the health, wellness, and fitness spaces.
Dee stood up and went to her computer and clicked on Bloomberg.com. Shares of SICU were up about 50 cents.
She’d been reading more about how SPACs worked — CFO Shelly was of little help — and learned that some SPACs took up to 19 months to find a target and complete negotiations. But that part was already done for this deal. Now that the IPO phase was over, it was time for Fowler to tell the investors their target was FitFams. The shareholders would meet and vote and, if they approved it, the deal would close. Dee’s investors, like Walhickey, would take their cuts. Then she would walk away with millions of dollars.
And walk away she would. Dee was ready to close the chapter of her life that was FitFams. She was tired of the headaches, the haters, and being called a hypocrite. She wanted to work on her autobiography, her lifestyle magazine, her satellite radio channel, her hoodie collaboration with Lululemon, and her next business idea — an idea she believed could stamp out childhood obesity forever.
It was a missed opportunity, the way so many babies were dropped off at YMCA daycare centers while their moms and dads slogged away on the Stairmasters. Dee wanted to flip the script and create BuffBabies, a fitness chain for children as young as four months old.
These wouldn’t be Mommy ‘n’ Me classes, where lazy breeders bench-pressed their drooling bundles of joy. The studio would feature a schedule of sessions designed to keep kids from getting fat. She’d already priced out the Chinese manufacturing of child-sized FitFams weights that could be wrapped around a toddler’s fat cankles. And you know those doorway jumpy-bouncy seats that babies boing up and down in for hours, like idiots? Dee would suspend 10 of those seats from the ceiling, and a coach would take the children through a BuffBabies Bounce class.
Meanwhile, postpartum parents would be on the other side of a soundproofed wall, enjoying yoga, Pilates, barre, meditation, Reiki, myofascial release, CBD treatments, and infrared saunas. All while Dee was far, far away, reaping the financial rewards.
She pictured herself in Italy. Lately she’d been eyeing a pink and white palazzo on the Island of Capri. The 18th-Century property had been built on the ruins of a palace and now had nine bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, a tree-lined garden, a sunbathing terrace, a pool, and access to the sea via a private dock that jutted out between the rocks.
She liked scrolling through the realtor’s wide-angle photos of the villa and imagining that she, Shelly, and Tara were sunning themselves on the blue-and-white chaise lounges, probably topless (because why not). They’d lazily eat an afternoon meal of ravioli capresi, savoring each parmigiano- and caciotta-filled carb-pillow as it melted on their tongues (because why not), and in the evening they would dress in flowy silk to clink cocktails in Piazzetta and dance and drink and sing at the Taverna Anema e Core.
Starting over somewhere so fresh and beautiful and untainted, a place her past could never afford to visit, held immense appeal.
Dee was imagining this, and stretching into tree pose, when her phone buzzed. Annoyed, she took a look: Glen Fowler.
“Hello, Glen,” Dee said. “Good news about the IPO.”
“Don’t come in your pants just yet,” he said.
Ew.
“The shareholders are meeting now,” he said. “It should all go according to plan. Unless you do something to fuck it up.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Oh, come on,” he chortled. “You know you’re getting all kinds of bad press these days. I mean, really, you’re comparing your situation to that of the Blacks? Even I know better than to do that.”
That bloated sack of shit is on Twitter?
He seemed to have read her thoughts.
“I pay people to watch Twitter for me,” he said. “Anyway, stay under the radar. I’ll reach out to you when the shareholder vote is over, and then we’ll close.”
“I look forward to your call,” she said.
But another one would come in first, and it would change everything.
Now I can’t wait for the next chapter!