Ah, Doobie Den. Rob’s old dispensary. I hadn’t spent much time there—I’d tried to avoid visiting him on the job. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped, though. Like whenever he forgot his wallet, which was disturbingly frequently.
Now that I had context, I recognized Colton. He was the guy who was always standing slack-jawed behind the glass case of pipes and bowls. Frankly, I was surprised he knew my name.
“Hi,” I said.
“How’s Rob?” Clearly, Colton hadn’t gotten the memo.
“I wouldn’t know. He’s in Peru.”
“Nah, man. He came back a while ago.” He stood there, eyes glazed over, scratching his temple like it hurt him to think.
“No, he’s still very much out of the country.”
Colton shook his head. “Nah, he’s in LA or something. I saw it on Instagram.”
This guy had no idea what he was talking about. Rob had deleted his Instagram before going to the Amazon, as part of the Divine Mother Shakti’s technology ban. Still, he took his phone out of his back pocket to scroll through it, presumably looking for photographic evidence that Rob was, indeed, in Los Angeles. Annoyed as I was, it was also kind of funny to see the confusion on Colton’s face as he searched for an account that no longer existed.
“Yeah, here he is.”
He held his phone out so I could see the screen, which was tiled with square photographs of Rob. Except it was a better version of Rob than I’d known. This Rob had gotten a haircut and shaved off that scraggly chinstrap beard he’d been sporting for the past two years. His right arm was sleeved in brand-new tattoos, and he posed in front of iconic LA landmarks, like the Capitol Records Building and the Hollywood sign, gazing off into the distance, straining to appear introspective.
This Rob looked suspiciously like he was trying to be an Instagram model.
“What the fuck,” I muttered, and something like understanding dawned on Colton’s face.
“Oh, shit.” He lowered his phone, eyes wide and fearful. “You guys broke up, didn’t you?”
The light at the other end of the crosswalk flashed from a red hand to a white stick figure. Colton mumbled a halfhearted, “Sorry,” then ducked his head and bolted across the street. As eager as I was to get home and process this discovery in solitude, I couldn’t lift my feet off the ground. They felt nailed to the sidewalk.
The light flashed red again and cars sped up and flew past, obscuring my already blurry vision. My head ached, straining to wrap itself around this new and bewildering information.
Rob was back in California.
And he was an Instagram model.
Chapter 17
@robmccrory_official.
That was his Instagram name. Not sure why he felt the need to append an “official,” though. I doubt there was anyone trying to impersonate him. He did have a pretty big audience—over fifty thousand followers—but when I scrolled through the accounts, a bunch of them had the same profile picture. Seemed Rob knew how to pay for fake fans, too. And with his parents’ money, he could afford to buy a lot of them.
I couldn’t get over how good he looked, though. He’d started styling his hair and wearing nice (and probably free) clothes, and that permanent paunch he’d had ever since I’d known him was miraculously gone. In fact, he had a six-pack now. Apparently, he’d been doing a lot of crunches in the Amazon. Or maybe that only started once he got to LA. His Instagram account was only a month old, but who knew how long before that he’d been stateside? Whatever he’d done, it was clear he’d turned his life around, at least in the physical sense.
Other than his revamped appearance, it was hard to tell exactly what was going on, because the photos were typical curated Instagram perfection. Rob standing on Santa Monica Pier, modeling sunglasses. Rob hiking Runyon Canyon, modeling quick-dry shorts. Rob with his arm around a hot woman, both of them modeling swimsuits. Everything hashtagged #collab. A narrative crafted explicitly for likes.
Any question of where he was living or why he was in LA was answered as soon as I saw the photo of him lounging beside a sun-drenched infinity pool. The geotag simply said Brentwood, Los Angeles, but I knew he must’ve been at his parents’ house. I’d never been there—I’d never even met his parents—but I’d seen pictures of and heard stories about that house, and specifically that pool. The endless, jobless summers he spent sunbathing there, possibly in that very same lounge chair. The booze-soaked parties he’d thrown in high school when his parents were away on yet another trip. I’d envied his carefree teenage experience, so different from my own.
Looking back on it, I suppose that was part of what had drawn me to him in the first place. After all those years I’d spent stressed-out in the wake of my mother’s death, his blithe attitude was refreshing. Rob came from wealth, a degree of affluence I couldn’t properly wrap my head around, so he wasn’t tainted by those pervasive feelings of uncertainty and doubt, the fear that the rug could be pulled out from under you at any moment. His trust fund was more than a safety net; it was a crutch.
Of course, he couldn’t get all of his money at once. It was doled out in monthly payments—his “stipend,” as he referred to it. The payments were generous, far more than I was making as a GrubGetter. They would’ve been even higher had he chosen to stay in college, but against his parents’ wishes, he’d dropped out of USC in the middle of his sophomore year and settled for a smaller payout so he could move down to PB and bum around aimlessly by the beach.
When I met Rob, he was in the midst of this postadolescent rebellion, rejecting his parents’ posh lifestyle in favor of—as he called it—“slumming it,” which entailed many months of smoking weed and couch surfing in various acquaintances’ beach houses. Then, one night, he and I locked eyes across a crowded Garnet Street bar.
Coincidentally, that was the same night I’d puked in the Jack in the Box parking lot. After I caught my breath and wiped my chin, he took me by the hand and kissed me, despite how horrible I must have tasted. I immediately took him back to my apartment above the garage, and he stayed there for the next three years.
He didn’t need to live in that apartment with me. He could’ve easily afforded to live somewhere nicer, somewhere legal with a full kitchen and a functioning electrical system. There was a part of me that hoped he might eventually decide to upgrade us both to a legit apartment, one I couldn’t qualify for on my own with my shoddy credit score and irregular income. But he liked where we lived. He said it was “cool.” Which, to him, meant it would absolutely horrify his parents.
I really liked having him around, though. A live-in boyfriend made me feel special, like I wasn’t a total failure if I could snag a guy who wanted to share my bed every night. Plus, splitting the bills with him every month allowed me to (finally) start making payments on my student loans. After he moved in, I stayed current on that debt. Until seven months ago, when he abruptly decided our apartment wasn’t “cool” after all and ditched me for the Divine Mother Shakti. Now he was back by his parents’ pool, looking finer than ever, and I was merely a footnote in that poorly planned and best-forgotten phase of his early twenties.