I wanted to say, How can it be assault if I like it? I wanted to make Maren understand somehow what turned me on—to lie there in the dark, waiting, having nothing to do but pretend to be dreaming, taking pleasure from the absence of having to try so hard at anything. I had told Maren that Evan was my boyfriend as if this were the kind of fairy tale where saying the words out loud would make it so. But of course he wasn’t my boyfriend. He was a drug without a reliable connection.
“Hot Pockets?”
They were left over from a binge.
“I’m not sure how old they are,” I said, “but you can have them.”
“Men have been oppressing women for centuries by keeping them from talking to each other. I just think you could help a lot of people. By being open.”
“It’s hard for me to talk about Evan and what we do together.” Don’t cry, I thought. Do not cry. “Because I feel like you’re going to make me feel bad about myself.”
Maren didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know if it’s, like, ‘feminist’ or whatever, but I like that he has power over me. That’s what makes it hot.”
“I believe you.”
“You do?”
“That’s why they call it the cycle of abuse,” Maren said. “That was in something I read online. It isn’t all bad. Some of it feels really good. And then it gets bad again.”
I thought of Evan’s silence, the way he kept me on a leash waiting to hear from him. I remembered his hand under the table at the pitch meeting, finding a hole in my jeans, daring me to say anything. I felt unstable around him. But I still wanted him. Had he tricked me into wanting him? Was that abuse?
The microwave dinged. I stared at the twin Hot Pockets. The yellow cheese oozed out the sides, spreading a greasy lake across the plate. Sauce bubbled through the crusty holes on top.
“That smells really good,” I said.
“Have one.”
“I can’t. It’ll make me sick.”
“No, it won’t,” she said, handing me a fork.
I blew at the halo of steam and took a bite of the hot bland crust and runny cheese and felt the delicious hit of fat, the rush of humiliation.
Maren
Cheryl Strayed was always quoting this Rilke poem that read, “You must change your life,” and that’s what I was going to do.
I didn’t drink all weekend. John made bacon and eggs on Saturday morning, and I held up my ten-dollar coconut water kale celery mango smoothie as evidence of my superiority and newfound devotion to treating my body like a temple. “Looks good on you, babe,” he said, after we had a conversation about how important it is to have a positive mindset. He was reading a book on how to make more money using the law of attraction, and I was reading posts on Richual about how the more closely I followed a plant-based diet, the more I would only crave foods from a plant-based diet. The way celery tasted, it had to be good for you.
At a clothing boutique with an ampersand in the title, I bought one pink dress in a size 14 and another identical dress in a size 12 that I could manifest my body into later. The pink dress had a silk necktie collar that was at once understated and frustratingly complicated to knot—I thought Devin would appreciate it.
After I recorded the video about how I believed women should support other women and that’s why I could no longer be complicit in hiding the fact that Devin was a victim of Evan’s abuse, the messages of support flooded in. I posted the video to Devin’s own account and there were more than a thousand comments already, from the influencers modeling athleisure wear made from recycled iPhone cases who saw Devin as their guru, but also from the endlessly outraged, woke contingent of our users, the feminists who were usually first to pounce on Devin for not sufficiently apologizing for her privilege in every single one of her posts. Her victimhood united our user base. I had cracked the code on what brought all women together. With her phone in hand, I also changed the tagline in Devin’s Richual profile from “Total Boss and Self-Care Addict” to “Total Boss, Survivor.”
We love you, Devin. Stay strong. #BelieveVictims. She was forgiven for her beach towel sin. Even Rachelle Tanaka created a Richual account so she could post a selfie captioned, I forgive you, Devin. Then she posted again twenty minutes later with a coupon code for a VR fitness software pack. @PaleOhHellNo put together a video montage of different Richual users talking about how hard it is to talk about things that are so hard to talk about and gave me a shout-out for modeling what was possible for the loved ones of survivors. @GypseaLee turned the nine-second footage of Devin’s face at the summit into a PSA about how long it can take for a woman to realize that she is a victim.
I’d given Devin what she always wanted: sympathy and attention. We had more user activity in forty-eight hours than we’d had since the election. I knew I could leverage this.
I drank four liters of water and redeemed my twenty-eight-day reboot program from Euphebe that Devin got me for Christmas so I could “lose weight and feel fabulous by resetting” my health “without hunger and deprivation.” In the app store, I found a visualization meditation for detoxifying the liver. John was redecorating his home office (a closet with a chair and a desk that folded down from the wall on a hinge) with newspaper clippings and mantras: “Wealth Matters” and “Money Is Energy.” I told him if he got his novel down to five hundred pages, I would read it.
By Sunday night, I was feeling extremely hydrated and brave.
Here if you want to talk , I texted Devin.
I cleaned our entire bathroom, throwing away old bottles of Avon liquid foundation and autumnal-scented candles, scrubbing the grout between the tiles with unprecedented vigor and attention to detail, and then I took selfies in the freshly Windexed mirror, wearing my BreastNest and a pair of black underwear.
Ghost white stretch marks laid tracks down my outer thighs. My left boob drooped lower than my right. The cellulite on the underside of my upper arms was something I tried not to think about. I had no illusions that my body would transform overnight, or that I would ever be able to wear a crop top in public, but I didn’t see how I was going to change my life if I couldn’t confront reality. I was aging. I was almost thirty-two. Before posting, I zoomed in to be sure none of my pubic hair was showing in the selfie.
This is the first “before” pic I’ve ever posted, I wrote in the caption.
In a way, it’s also an “after.” I’ve been working to build Richual for about two years now and somewhere along the way I stopped taking care of myself. My work wife, my best friend @DevinAvery has helped me see how much farther I still have to go on my self-care journey. Two years ago, I don’t think I ever would have even written the phrase “self-care journey” lol. That’s how much Richual has changed my life.