You Think It, I'll Say It(41)

Kirsten sees that last night, Lucy, as she usually does, replied to a few dozen tweets sent to her by nobodies, including Nicole in Seattle, who has thirty-one followers, and Tara in Jacksonville, who’s the mom of two awesome boys. (Aren’t we all? Kirsten thinks.) Most of the fans’ tweets say some variation of “You’re so great!” or “It’s my birthday pretty please wish me a happy birthday?!” Most of Lucy’s responses say some variation of “Thank you for the kind words!” or “Happy Birthday!” Kirsten has never tweeted at Lucy; in fact, Kirsten has never tweeted. Her Twitter handle is not her name but “Minneap” plus the last three digits of her zip code, and instead of uploading a photo of herself, she’s kept the generic egg avatar. She has three followers, all of whom appear to be bots.

Through the bathroom door, Kirsten can hear the shower running, and the minute Casey turns it off—by this point, Kirsten is, as she also does daily, reading an article about how smartphones are destroying people’s ability to concentrate—she springs from bed, flicking on light switches in the master bedroom, the hall, and the boys’ rooms. When Casey appears, wet hair combed, completely dressed, and finds Ian still under the covers and Kirsten standing by his bureau, Kirsten frowns and says that both boys seem really tired this morning. Casey nods somberly, even though it’s what Kirsten says every morning. Is Casey clueless, inordinately patient, or both?

At breakfast, Jack, who is six, asks, “Do doctors ever get sick?”

“Of course,” Casey says. “Everyone gets sick.”

While packing the boys’ lunches, Kirsten says to Ian, who is nine, “I’m giving you Oreos again today, but you need to eat your cucumber slices, and if they’re still in your lunch box when you come home, you don’t get Oreos tomorrow.”

She kisses the three of them goodbye, and as soon as the door closes, even before she climbs the stairs, Kirsten knows that she’s going to get herself off using the handheld showerhead. She doesn’t consider getting herself off using the handheld showerhead morally problematic, but it presents two logistical complications, the first of which is that, the more often she does it, the more difficult it is for Casey to bring her to orgasm on the occasions when they’re feeling ambitious enough to have sex. The second complication is that it makes her late for work. If Kirsten leaves the house at 7:45, she has a fifteen-minute drive; if she leaves at or after 7:55, the drive is twice as long. But, seriously, what else is she supposed to do with her Lucy rage?



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Kirsten’s commute is when she really focuses on whether she has the power to destroy Lucy Headrick’s life. Yes, the question hums in the background at other moments, like when Kirsten is at the grocery store and sees a cooking magazine with Lucy on the cover—it’s just so fucking weird how famous Lucy is—but it’s in the car that Kirsten thinks through, in a realistic way, which steps she’d take. She’s figured out where she could leak the news and has narrowed it down to two gossip websites, both based in Manhattan; she’s even found the “Got tips?” link on one. If she met somebody who worked for such a site, and if the person promised she could remain anonymous, it would be tempting. But, living in Minneapolis, Kirsten will never meet anyone who works for a Manhattan gossip website.

Kirsten’s co-worker Frank has volunteered to leak the news for her; indeed, he’s so eager that she fears he might do it without her blessing, except that he knows she knows he pads his expense reports when he travels. And it’s Frank’s joyous loathing of Lucy that reins in Kirsten’s own antipathy. Frank has never met the woman, so what reason does he have to hate her? Because she’s successful? This, in Kirsten’s opinion, isn’t sufficient. Kirsten hates Lucy Headrick because she’s a hypocrite.

In 1994, the summer after their freshman year in college, Kirsten and Lucy were counselors at a camp in northern Minnesota. It was coed, and Kirsten was assigned to the Redbirds cabin, girls age nine, while Lucy was with the Bluejays, age eleven. Back then, Lucy weighed probably twenty-five pounds more than she does now, had very short light brown hair, and had affixed a triangle-shaped rainbow pin to her backpack. The first night, at the counselors’ orientation before the campers arrived, she said, “As a lesbian, one of my goals this summer is to make sure all the kids feel comfortable being who they are.” Kirsten knew a few gay students at her Jesuit college, but not well, and Lucy was the first peer she’d heard use the word lesbian other than as a slur. Although Kirsten took a mild prurient interest in Lucy’s disclosure, she was mostly preoccupied with the hotness of a counselor named Sean, who was very tall and could play “Welcome to the Jungle” on the guitar. Sean never reciprocated Kirsten’s interest; instead, and this felt extra insulting, he soon took up with the other counselor in the Redbirds cabin.

Kirsten became conscious of Lucy’s crush on her without paying much attention to it. Having given the subject a great deal of thought since, Kirsten now believes that she was inattentive partly because of her vague discomfort and partly because she was busy wondering if Sean and Renee would break up and, if they did, how she, Kirsten, would make her move.

Lucy often approached Kirsten, chattily, at all-camp events or when the counselors drank and played cards at night in the mess hall, and, more than once, she tried to initiate deep conversations Kirsten had no interest in. (“Do you believe in soul mates?” or “Do you usually have more regrets about things you’ve done or things you haven’t done?”) When Kirsten and Lucy ran into each other on the fourth-to-last night of camp, on the path behind the arts-and-crafts shed, when they were both drunk, it was maybe not as random or spontaneous as it seemed, at least on Lucy’s part. Kirsten had never kissed a girl, though she’d had sex with one boy in high school and another in college, and she’s wondered if she’d have kissed just about anyone she ran into behind the shed. She was nineteen, it was August, she was drunk, and she felt like taking off her clothes. That it all seemed especially hot with Lucy didn’t strike her then as that meaningful. They hooked up in the dark, on a ratty red couch, in a room that smelled like the kiln and tempera paint. Kirsten was definitely aware of the variables of there being more than one set of boobs smashed together and the peculiarly untroubling absence of an erection, but there were things she heard later about two girls—about how soft the female body was and how good another girl smelled—that seemed to her like nonsense. She and Lucy rolled around a lot, and jammed their fingers up inside each other, and, though both of them had probably swum in the lake that day, neither was freshly showered. There really wasn’t much in the way of softness or fragrant scents about the encounter. What she liked was how close they could be, almost fused, with nothing between them.