Chapter 75
A body, covered in a sheet, pushed on a gurney by paramedics who were red-faced and exhausted from the effort of trying to breathe, pump, and shock life into a body that refused to respond.
Dee had imagined this kind of scenario many times before, had even attempted to will it into existence through wishing and manifestation and karmic bargaining. She’d thumbtacked ideas to a mental vision board and made desperate promises to God.
Maybe He’d misheard her. Some of the details were wrong.
“Dee,” Coral said, snapping her fingers. “I need you to look at me.”
Dee, who was sitting still in her office chair for maybe the first time ever, would not take her eyes off the screen.
See, the way she’d pictured it was that the body would not be covered in a sheet. It would be exposed, vulnerable, lying in the dirty gravel, haloed by dust on the driveway outside the house in Little Falls, Minnesota. Dee would kick the body with her hand-me-down Buster Brown sandal and get no response. Then she’d crouch next to it, hugging her sundress around her knees, and take in the sight of his face, frozen in fear, and the blood pooling on the ground behind his head.
“Seriously, Dee,” Coral pleaded. “We have to do damage control.”
The way Dee imagined it, she wouldn’t gently close his eyelids the way they did on TV. She’d talk to the body. “I said ‘no.’ I hid from you. And you kept coming after me,” she’d say. “You took everything from me. You hurt me. But you can’t anymore.”
Then she’d pick a puffy, white dandelion from between the cracks in the driveway.
“I’m thinking maybe we can spin it?” Coral said in her patented uptalk tone. “Like, we’ve said before that this workout is ‘killer?’ Maybe we could play with the meme about, ‘but did you die, tho?’”
Dee still didn’t look at Coral.
“I just … I’ve never had to deal with anything like this, you know? The media is calling — I’ve got voicemails from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Glamour, Women’s Health, and Martha Stewart Living, for some reason— and I don’t know what to tell them,” Coral said, her eyes tearing up. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Dee stayed silent and replayed the video again. Maybe this time it would be more like what she’d imagined?
“Adidas wants nothing to do with us anymore,” Coral said. “Same with Athleta. Sirius XM has called and wants to delay the launch of your station. The book publisher is threatening to cancel your deal.”
Dee’s eyes stayed on the screen. Yeah, see, the body in that video was too small, too thin. You should be able to see the outline of his huge stomach under that sheet.
“Did you see that everyone except me and Shelly has packed up and is gone?” Coral said, her voice starting to shake. “The office is empty out there. I don’t think they’re coming back. And I haven’t seen Tara in weeks.”
Dee replayed the video again.
“OK, I’m gonna go. I can’t be expected to save this sinking ship without your help,” Coral said, stomping out of Dee’s office, grabbing Shelly by the arm, and walking straight to the elevators.
Now Jamie’s parents, in a remote from rural Alabama, were on the screen and crying. Her mother spoke:
“It was FitFams that killed her. We weren’t the best parents, we know that. We thought God would protect her. But then we saw how thin she was getting, and she told us about the terrible pressure she was under at FitFams and how she’d started taking some dangerous diet pill that she’d ordered online. It was yellow, right Chet? What’d she call it? DNP, I think? We knew she was in trouble and tried so hard to help her through prayer. But it wasn’t enough.”
Now a commentator was talking about how FitFams had long ignored calls for better safety procedures in its studios and that critics had warned this kind of disaster could occur.
“Let’s go to Janine. She’s with a former FitFams insider who’s now part of FitFamsFraud, the activist group that tried to get the elite-fitness company to change its ways before disaster could strike.”
“Thanks, Denise. Here with me today is —”
And Dee snapped out of her reverie.
It was Tara.
“—Tara Jenkins, who up until a month ago was the Talent Chief for FitFams. She’s now a personal trainer who co-leads activist organization FitFamsFraud with her life partner and former FitFams coach, Fiona McFenn. Thank you for joining us, Tara.”
Tara no longer worked at FitFams? When did this happen?
“Thank you, Denise. I wish I could be here under better circumstances. My heart aches for Jamie’s family. It is a terrible loss. No one should die at the age of 23, and especially not while working out. This is a tragedy that should have been, could have been, prevented.”
Dee felt her limbs turn to ice.
“Tell us a little bit about what it was like to work at FitFams, and how you think this tragedy could have been avoided.”
“FitFams operated like a cult, and I was swept up in it for a while. Dee Bradley and I were childhood friends. But recently, she changed. I thought we were building community and helping people feel and look good, but that’s not what FitFams was about. It was about money and status and suffering. I was only able to see that after Fiona, my wife, took me through a de-programming protocol.”
“Fascinating.”
“Yeah, I hadn’t realized how damaging FitFams really was. The company upheld society’s unreasonable standards for beauty and fitness and manipulated clients into thinking they had to keep coming to class or they would get fat and be unlovable. FitFams practically encouraged eating disorders. Coaches were pushed and pulled and manipulated into thinking they couldn’t leave. There was elitism and classicism and racism. I’m just glad I escaped.”
Dee’s phone buzzed. Glen Fowler. With a shaky finger she answered the call on speaker but didn’t say anything.
“I knew you’d fuck it up,” he said. “I just knew.”
“Listen,” she scrambled. “Maybe there’s a way to salvage this. Maybe we can —”
“Oh, hell no,” Fowler said. “The shareholders got one look at this story and rejected the de-SPAC transaction. The deal is dead. You’re on your own.”
And then he hung up.
Now a market commentator was on the screen, talking about how FitFams was an untouchable investment now. Private investors were clamoring for payback. Dee would be left with a husk of a company, an asset no one wanted. Her coaches and clients would quit. She’d lose money every day and would likely have to liquidate, sell her personal properties, maybe even declare bankruptcy. It was hard to say just how bad this was going to get. But it was going to get bad.
The streaming video of Jamie’s body on the gurney came up again, and Dee pressed pause.
She again pictured herself next to the body on the ground. She clutched the dandelion in her tiny, tight fist and then blew the spores right into Franklin’s open eyes.
And then, her mind coming to grips with her current reality, Dee did something she hadn’t done since she was that small. She put her head in her hands and she cried.