“That’s cool?” he said, and tried tickling under my arms.
“Stop,” I snapped. “Don’t. Tiny houses? Seriously?”
“Here we go,” he said.
“They’re upper-middle-class mobile homes.” I couldn’t remember where I read that online, but it came out of my mouth like I was an internet recycling machine.
“I’ve known Oscar since second grade. What’s the big deal?”
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
For a second, we were both frozen. I waited for him to exhale, say, That’s too bad, and offer to drive me home. I wondered how many abortions were paid for with Venmo. I was already planning how I would turn this moment in my life into content: “The Best Worst Time I Had Being Impregnated by Jesus’s Doppelgänger,” “Seven Misconceptions About the Class Politics of Tiny Living,” “To Celebrate Our First Female President I’m Having a Baby and She Fucking Better Be a Girl.”
Then Adam started singing, “Baby, baby, where did our love go?” in his rough, funny voice, wrapping his legs and arms around me in a trap, and that’s when I decided I could make this work. All I had to do was work harder than anyone else. If Richual succeeded, a piece of that was mine.
Maren
On our first night in the country, I slept for fourteen hours. Our apartment building in Brooklyn was in the LaGuardia flight path, which added another layer of noise to the normal cacophony of street traffic, sirens, and drunk proclamations of “But, baby, I love you!” when the bars closed at four. We usually slept to the sound of a white noise app on my phone that cost $9.99 for unlimited hairdryer or vacuum cleaner, forest at dusk or womb.
John was already working at the kitchen island. “You slept through the birds,” he said.
“What birds?”
Without raising his eyes from his MacBook, he gestured at the French doors that led to the deck off the kitchen.
I went out barefoot in the cold damp morning. Aside from one weekend in Miami, when we rented bikes to ride along the beach and then I got a phone call to say our servers had crashed because a post about live bee sting acupuncture for depression got too much traffic after an influential MD criticized us on Twitter for “risky mental health quackery,” John and I hadn’t been on vacation in years. I knew I was unbelievably lucky to stay here. I was hashtag blessed. I watched as a dark bird flew, squawking angrily, from the top of one distant tree to a spruce right in front of me. A second bird followed, either in pursuit or out of habit. When the branch where they perched stopped bouncing, I saw the birds weren’t black but midnight blue, with an iridescent sheen like an oil spill across their backs.
“Five in the morning,” John told me, and then did his impression of their sound, a repetitive grating call. Nothing like birdsong.
“Poor baby,” I said, kissing his head, which smelled like the herbal tonic rinse I got him to thicken his hair.
We still hadn’t talked about what I posted on Twitter. Not really. Maybe if I had actually asked him, he would have said that joking about taking down a member of the oligarchy was the least I could do and welcome me to the #resistance. While John licked his wounds over Bernie’s loss and what-could-have-been, I (according to him) devoted my every waking hour to building a community of self-absorbed narcissists whose definition of political action was serving as brand ambassadors for the first-ever pubic hair conditioner designed for all gender identities that costs sixty-nine dollars an ounce.
That wasn’t totally fair.
There were really two communities of Richual users. Dewy-skinned, Glossier-Boy-Browed, chaturanga-toned young women used the platform to sell access to their “lifestyles” in the form of exclusive ayahuasca ceremonies (millennial pink puke buckets provided) or wine and cannabis pairings in Napa. Some of the most popular posts on the app were of white twentysomethings vaping on yachts or soaking in claw-foot tubs of sparkly lavender potion. Hashtag sorryiwaslateididntwanttocome. These women were digital performance artists; they performed their rituals for other women to aspire to. They meditated for the photo opp: the beautiful shaft of sunlight at the picturesque silent retreat in the Berkshires. Their cosmic smoothie bowls, garnished with chia seeds and dragon fruit balls, elevated nutrition to an art form.
These were Devin’s users. Her #RichualSisters. She journeyed with them to the ashram in Calabasas where you hike sixteen miles on one thousand calories a day. If there was a yoga class with goats in the Hudson Valley, Devin would bring her mat. She served as liaison between the influencers and our advertising partners, and there was no one more naturally suited to this role than Devin, whether posing with a glass of low-cal rosé at the launch party for a sweat-proof cream eyeshadow you could wear to spin class, or in culottes against a step-and-repeat at a premiere for a documentary about sustainable food trucks.
I paid more attention to the users who would never appear on a magazine cover. I found a post tagged #selfcare that showed a remote control, a box of Papa John’s, and the hand of a white user whose knuckles were scraped from bulimia. Some women shared pictures of their weekly pill organizers or their sobriety coins. @ManicBiracialPixie posted a selfie of getting a sleeve tattoo of stargazer lilies to cover up her self-harm scars. If I was jolted by any of the posts I found, it was only because I’d been culturally hypnotized to think of wellness as a rich, white, skinny, able-bodied woman nursing a green juice.
When I compared metrics between the aspirational posts and the posts that were the most vulnerable, I found that the influencers received more comments, but they were mostly from strangers they didn’t follow back, while the posts by women that described assault, abuse, mental illness, disability, or addiction received less engagement overall but from a tighter subset of users, who all commented on each other’s content.
I knew the formula for hitting the user engagement jackpot. A hot white influencer had to confess: her life wasn’t really as perfect as it seemed. She was broken, too. Her fans thought they knew her so well? They didn’t know the burden of secret shame she carried. With the right Brené Brown quote below a #nofilter shot of candid vulnerability—maybe a baggy sweater but no pants, hair falling over the eyes—she could share a story that made her followers feel like they had private access to a side she never showed her friends and family. That’s what the internet enabled: the illusion of intimacy. There was a fine line between authenticity and TMI, and the Richual queen bees knew just how much to reveal and conceal of their trauma to keep their followers thirsty.
* * *
...
After breakfast, John and I went outside and tramped through the damp muck. I wanted him to tell me that everything was going to be okay, that I was smart and capable and I would figure a way out of this. I wanted a pep talk from A League of Their Own, an off-the-cuff recitation of a Mary Oliver poem, or at least thirty seconds of meaningful eye contact in a grove of trees, him putting my hands in his coat pockets to keep them warm.