Page 2

Lizzie

Two weeks earlier

There are things I know I should be doing before bed in order to get a “good” night’s sleep.

I should wash and moisturize my face with at least five different products, turn the temperature in my bedroom down to slightly chilly, put all my screened devices in another room to charge.

I should meditate and then engage my husband in some sweet and meaningful conversation about our days. Or maybe the conversation comes first, then the meditation.

I can’t remember.

I should light a candle and write in a journal. I should think about what I’m grateful for.

I should just be.

But I’m not doing any of that. Who actually does any of that?

I’m scrolling Instagram like any normal thirtysomething woman with a dirty face in a too-warm room while my husband reads the news on his phone next to me, sometimes murmuring in disgust, sometimes chuckling for no discernible reason, since absolutely nothing in the news is funny anymore unless you’re a sociopath.

I must have made a noise during my scroll because Peter leans over and places his scruffy chin on my shoulder.

“Are you creeping on that girl you went to college with again?”

“Nope.”

“I see her chickens on your screen.” I tilt the phone away. “And that three-legged goat. Why doesn’t someone shoot that thing?”

“That goat has its very own Instagram account with 1.2 million followers,” I reply, even though I’ve explained this to him before. “Tripod is their own influencer.”

“What’s her name again? Skanky Betsy?”

Back in college we all used to call her Slutty Bex, not Skanky Betsy.

And it was a nickname she fully embraced.

She owned it. I realize that it isn’t politically correct to call someone Slutty anything anymore, but when that person gets their own T-shirt made with the nickname Slutty Bex on it and they wear it on senior day, then I think it’s okay to remember them like that in your own head or, in a moment of weakness when you feel weird about looking at their social media account all the time and even stranger about how your friendship ended terribly, to tell your husband about the nickname Slutty Bex and maybe laugh about it.

I really haven’t talked to her in fifteen years, not since Bex ghosted me after college. It’s funny how a slight like that can still sting so many years later, but it does.

Back then she wasn’t the person she is now, the one I only let myself peek at once or twice a week because her Instagram account infuriates me for no rational reason.

Or maybe it is rational. The issue is that Rebecca Sommers, or rather @BarefootMamaLove, bears absolutely no resemblance to Bex, the woman who once did a forty-five-second keg stand in the basement of Sigma Chi with her top off.

Or the woman who befriended me the first day of college by ordering two pizzas to our shared dorm room and watching Sliding Doors with me because I was too nervous to go out to the frat parties.

I’d never had a single sip of alcohol before and she didn’t make me feel dumb about it.

She bought me some fruity wine coolers and taught me how to handle my booze.

Rebecca Sommers has absolutely no resemblance to the girl who convinced me to pierce my belly button with her even though I had never even pierced my ears.

In her new life, the one I watch on social media, Rebecca now lives in a renovated farmhouse on a ranch somewhere out West where she raises fluffy heritage chickens, cows, sheep, and goats.

No one in her family ever wears shoes but their feet are somehow never dirty.

She makes her own cheese, milks her own milk, and bakes enough bread to feed a small army.

These days she’s very, very blond, not the dishwater-blond variety from college, but like a honeydew-meets-a-gold-doubloon kind of yellow.

It’s a blond that costs money. Bex didn’t have money in college.

Like me she worked in the cafeteria as part of her work-study program.

We were the only ones in our sorority who had actual on-campus jobs.

None of the other girls needed them. Their parents were the type who paid their tuition in full, who bought them off-campus apartments and rented out the rooms to other students because it was a “good investment.”

It was Bex who got me to rush for our sorority because she said it would be “a hilarious social experiment,” and she was probably the reason they let me in.

She charmed all those fancy Tri Delts with her off-color jokes and her ability to score drugs from a townie.

We were a package deal, so they accepted me too.

Bex was also an RA in one of the freshman dorms like I was because it gave her free housing.

It wasn’t cool, but it was cheap. Being lower middle class gave both Bex and me an edge, it made us weirdly chic to the trust fund girls from NYC and LA.

We weren’t exactly charity cases, but we gave the sorority street cred.

We were inseparable back then, and our friend-breakup, if you can even call it that, still has the ability to make me overwhelmingly sad, especially when I’m scrolling social media after one and a half glasses of wine.

I’ve never met Bex’s husband. But it seems like she married up in a big way. I, on the other hand, just got married.

That’s unfair. I married well. I married a man who is funny and tender and a good father and who still thinks I’m interesting after a decade of marriage.

I married a man who knows how to change a tire, find my G-spot, swaddle a baby, make my mom laugh, and do our taxes.

He’s a man who can tell when I’m sick of small talk at a school-parents party and always finds a way to extricate me from a conversation with the head of the PTA. These are not trivial things.

But I also married a man who is now unemployed despite being overeducated at one of the top schools in the world. A man who has never worried about saving or investing. A man who might never work again because he’s too proud to take a job he considers beneath him.

But he’s still a good man. I have to remind myself of that.

And he’s still stupidly handsome as he pushes forty. If I weren’t so tired from work and raising our two small kids, I would happily have sex with him more often than the once every two weeks we seem to be managing these days.

Bex and her husband apparently do it every single day.

I know this because they crafted a reel on Instagram with their pastor (their actual pastor) about how they decided to reignite their sex life for their thirty-fifth birthdays.

They encouraged their followers to participate in the #WhoopieWithYourSchmoopie challenge.

That video got something like eight million views and the comments were uncomfortably supportive and also slightly sad, filled with women who I assumed were complete strangers to Bex bemoaning their lack of a sex drive or their husbands’ affairs or their closeted sexuality.

I gobbled them all up like a grocery-store romance novel, all those secrets spilled onto a small screen.

If I called Peter my “schmoopie” he would likely divorce me.

And rightly so. I would respect him for that.

It would be the correct decision. I made the mistake of showing the whoopie challenge to him, which led to my having to explain how I knew Bex in the first place, which led to his scrolling through her account and then calling me out every time he caught me looking at her or Tripod or her six beautiful kids.

“She seems terrible,” he said the first time I showed him her profile.

I loved him even more for hating her as much as I do now.

That’s one of the best things about Peter.

He hates what I hate and that’s a real turn-on for me.

Some people want to like the same things as another person, but give me a man who also despises work birthday celebrations, loud chewers, and people who talk on wireless headphones in public and I swoon.

Hate is the wrong word when it comes to Bex.

I’m wounded in ways I can’t properly explain.

I miss her and that ache turns into frustration, which turns into disdain.

Her feed riles me up with misplaced envy because there is no way in hell I would ever want to live on a farm with six children.

I want to say that scrolling her Instagram is not some regular thing for me.

But that would be a lie. I swear that I have my own fully functional (mostly) adult life and priorities that do not include her.

I just sometimes get sucked down the rabbit hole and then I feel all the feelings.

Both Peter and I hate influencers, but as magazine editors—or in Peter’s case, a former magazine editor—we have a reason to.

They did sort of help destroy our industry.

I don’t think any of them meant to. In fact, I know they didn’t wake up one morning and get together in one of their beautiful McMansions or rustic off-the-grid cabins or anti-vax communes and say, Oh, I want to kill print journalism and the careers of thousands of reporters, but that’s what happened over the past five years.

I’m still holding on to my managing editor job at the magazine by a wisp.

When Peter got laid off we used our savings to move out of New York and over to the Philly burbs, where our kids could go to public school and my mom could help us with childcare.

Everyone at the magazine is remote now anyway so I only need to be in the office one day a week, if that.

Peter is allegedly working on a novel. I’m trying to keep my job so that we all have health insurance.

I scroll Instagram so often because I’m looking for stories that will keep the magazine relevant, or so I tell myself.