Chapter 77
Willa was naked inside a cold bathroom, a stranger’s hands on her backside, pulling apart her cheeks and looking between them.
The stranger next inspected Willa’s armpits and checked the webbing between her toes, then ran fingers through the length of her hair and peered into her mouth and ears.
“OK, you can put these back on now,” the stranger said, handing Willa her jeans. “The shirt is fine, and the bra too, since there’s no underwire.”
“Yep, I’m an old pro,” Willa said. “Maybe the third time’s the charm?”
The stranger didn’t laugh.
“So, we just got back the results of your tox screen,” she said. “Let’s see — we’ve got Buspar, Abilify, psilocybin, marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol.”
“I thought I’d go out with a bang.”
Nothing. Is this mic on?
“We’ll get you stabilized on your anti-depressants, and we’ll also give you something to help you sleep while you’re here. Breakfast is at 8 a.m. and if you don’t go then you don’t get any. Lunch is …”
Willa tuned out the rest of the orderly’s speech, remembering it almost verbatim from the two times she’d checked herself into this psychiatric facility. It felt like a gigantic, disgusting, embarrassing failure to be here again. But she’d had no choice this go-round. Willa had woken up here, lashed to a bed in a hospital gown and slip-free socks until she was lucid enough to go through the intake process.
“Which unit will I be on?” Willa asked.
“Unit C,” the orderly said.
“Ah yes, my favorite.”
The orderly looked up from her iPad. “Is this a joke to you?”
Willa would have felt a wave of shame if she wasn’t already drowning in it.
“My life is kind of a joke right now,” Willa said, her eyes tearing up.
The orderly looked at her with a blank expression. “You’ll be OK.”
OK. OK. OK. Jamie was not OK. Willa flashed back to the FitFams studio, to the sight of the body on the floor, so thin, so young, so still, so not OK. The paramedics loading her on to the gurney, covering her with a sheet. The police. The cameras outside. Where had they come from? Surely this was all just a bad trip from the mushrooms. Right? Right?
The cops talked to her, then told her to go home, but instead she stumbled for a few blocks before sitting down on a dirty bench. Her phone started vibrating. Not the three-buzz pattern.
It was a call from Dee. For a millisecond Willa felt chosen. It was an involuntary reaction. Then she snapped back.
“Hello?” Willa said, barely recognizing her own voice.
“What did you do?” Dee seethed.
Willa stammered. “What … what … what did I do? I didn’t —”
“You let someone die in my studio?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it!” Willa cried out, glad the cops weren’t anywhere nearby anymore. “I wasn’t even there.”
“You were supposed to be there. You’re the goddamn manager.”
“It was my last day. I … I thought they had things under control,” Willa said, now blubbering. “How could I have known this would happen?”
“Oh, I don’t know, by opening your motherfucking eyeballs? To see how thin that girl had gotten? You never saw her do anything that raised red flags?”
Willa felt as if the yellow pill in her wallet was now emitting a white, hot light.
“That studio was your responsibility,” Dee spat. “And now you’ve killed someone.”
A gun went off inside Willa’s brain. Fight or flight. Fight or flight.
Fight.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You’re blaming me? I’m not the one who did this,” Willa yelled. “You are the one who did this. You created a company that roped vulnerable people in with promises of health and happiness and then, instead of making these people strong, you made them feel fragile. You shattered them and their self-esteem into tiny pieces. You made them think they were incomplete, ugly, fat, disgusting, unloved, and unlovable. You made them believe they couldn’t live without you, without FitFams, without this workout.”
Willa’s hand squeezed the phone.
“You made me feel that way. Like I was worthless, like I could never be enough, like I had to keep pushing myself and the coaches and the clients and the numbers,” Willa said. “You’ve ruined so many lives. People are broken, maybe forever. I told you guys about Jamie and you said I could not engage with her about her health. You forbade me. And now she’s dead.”
Willa gulped air between sobs.
Then Dee spoke again, and this time her own breathing was ragged: “This was my whole life, you know. I put everything into this company, into this brand, into being Dee Bradley, #Girlboss Extraordinaire. Do you have any idea how much pressure I’m always under? How I feel like I’m always running for my life?”
Willa was shocked into silence. What was happening here?
“You have no idea what I’ve been through, what I’ve survived,” Dee hissed. “Yeah, you’ve heard the stories. But you’ve only heard what I wanted you to hear. And you loved it. You loved my sob story, my rags-to-riches tale. I gave that to you, along with a workout that changed your body and your life. I gave you a job, a career, a community. I gave you hope that maybe there was something more to your life than wiping a kid’s ass or designing boring websites for boring people. You were basic, and I showed you how it felt to be extraordinary. To change lives.”
Willa’s phone was wet with tears.
Dee continued: “You swallowed me and FitFams whole. You put aside your family and your principles and you chose me. Nobody made you do it. You wanted to be part of my world. You wanted this.”
Willa couldn’t speak because she realized Dee was right.
“And now we both suffer the consequences,” Dee said, and hung up.
Willa sobbed on the bench, then pulled a tiny baggie of white powder from her crossbody bag, stuck a specially-cut straw into it, and snorted. Then she stood up and stumbled down the sidewalk, heading nowhere.
Somewhere along the way she fell to the ground and everything went dark.