This is my home now, and I don’t want to leave it. I love it up here.
When Belle leaves, I pull up the trail cameras, watching to make sure she gets back to her car. Then, I watch the taillightsdisappearing into the distance for as long as I can until they blink out into nothing.
CHAPTER 23
LOLA
“Lola Kennedy! The woman of the hour!”
When I walk into the Ecotra office, the first person to greet me is the head of marketing and influencer relations, Tamara, who takes my hand and shakes it vigorously. She’s a tall woman with bronze skin and long, shining hair. She looks like the kind of person who dry cleans all her clothes and has a seventeen-step skin care routine that she never misses. I’m somehow in awe of her and jealous of her, all at once.
“We are so glad you’re considering our offer,” she says, ushering me through the lobby and toward the elevators. After pressing the button, she gestures to a counter and mini bar behind us, saying, “Would you like something to drink? Green tea? Kombucha?”
“Water would be great.” I smile weakly, feeling already overwhelmed by the size and grandeur of it all.
The walls are staggeringly tall, and the side of the building that faces the street is all windows, letting in natural light along with the blinding rays bouncing off car windows, the red ofbrake lights, and the green and yellow from the stop light at the intersection.
And every other surface is completely and totally covered in plants. Vines that wrap and slither up and down, potted flowers, and succulents. Each of them in a sleek white container, held in a sleek white shelving system on the wall.
Faintly, I can hear the hum of an automatic sprinkler misting over all of them.
“Here you are,” Tamara says, offering me a box of water in compostable material. Her heels click against the floor as we step into the elevator and ride it up to the top floor. I struggle with the tab on the water and start to sweat under my nice blouse.
Tamara chats with me amiably as we walk together, and seconds later she’s pushing open an immaculate glass door to a conference room, flashing me a perfectly white smile.
“Everyone, this is Lola Kennedy, the winner of the Ecotra influencer competition.” Turning to me, she says, “We’ve all seen your video and are thrilled to have you here today.”
Rapid-fire, she introduces the other people there, including the social media team, other marketing and PR people. Every person in the room sports shiny hair, perfect makeup, and outfits that are both professional and cute. There are a number of interns who all look young enough to make me feel woozy and remind me of my own relative age.
I’m freshly thirty, which means I’m lucky to be getting an offer like thisat all. Most influencers at my age are transitioning into being mommy bloggers or heading that way soon if they don’t want to lose their audience.
The thought of that, of transforming myself to keep people’s eyes on me, makes a spindle of anxiety roll up through my stomach.
“I have to say, your video made us all tear up a bit,” Tamara says, gesturing to the image on the projector, which is, embarrassingly, a still image of me wrestling with the string lights for my glamping set-up.
That feels like it was a million years ago now. When I look at the girl in the video, it doesn’t even seem like me.
“Yeah, we loved the message,” says the PR person, whose name I’ve already forgotten.
This morning, before the meeting, Maisie forced me to do hot yoga and took me out to get a facial and an iced matcha, to help me get my mojo back.
I’m not quite sure it’s working.
“… would be a spot on the Pike Place Pod, where they’ll talk to you about your adventures around Seattle. We think it would be fitting to have the trip start right here. Then you’ll skip off to a few lesser-known U.S. destinations — Des Moines, Iowa; Galveston, Texas; Little Rock, Arkansas. This will be all about meeting the locals and showing off trips people — especially outside the U.S. — might not even consider taking. After that, a brief layover to our sister office in Philadelphia, then off to Europe.”
I blink at the screen, which no longer shows the still of my video and now has a cute, well-designed slide show that’s slowly but surely showing everywhere this adventure would take me.
And it’s not that I wouldn’t, at some point, like to see these places. It’s just the break-neck pace of the thing. It makes my chest feel tight.
“I know that’s a lot of information,” Tamara says, when the presentation is finished, handing me a thick, glossy packet. “Take some time to think it over.”
“Thank you,” I say, taking my boxed water with me on the way out.
“I can’t believeyou got to meet Tamara! That’s so cool!”
Abbie sits in the chair across from me. After our conversation at the networking even went so well, we’d made plans to meet up for coffee. That was before I made the video that would eventually go viral, and before I essentially won the Ecotra contest right out from under her.
“I feel bad,” I mutter, picking at the croissant on my plate. “I just— well, it should have been really amazing, right? But I felt like I was kind of numb the whole time. And they were throwing so much information at me.”
