“That is not what I was thinking.” Libby replayed the part where the Iceman, for lack of a better name, hoisted the girl above the sea of white. “She got lucky.”
“I’ll say.”
“That hefoundher. And they didn’t die.”
Jean waved this off, as if their survival were a footnote. “Guess who the really lucky one is.”
“Um,” Libby said, after a prolonged silence. “I got nothing.”
Jean stuck the phone in Libby’s face. “Say hello to your new best friend.”
“Are you breaking up with me?”
“Fun fact about the errant heiress. ShelovesLillibet.”
Keoki gave a double thumbs-up, which Libby took to mean eithercongratsortrue story.Sometimes when Jean built up a head of steam, the line between fact and sales pitch blurred.
“There’s no way.” Clearly it was up to Libby to be the voice of reason. “How does she even know we exist?”
“For your information, we’re up to like quadruple digits. Followers,” Jean clarified, though what Libby had really been puzzling over was the math.
Were there seriously more than a thousand people readingLove, Lillibet? Or at least scrolling past the pictures and maybe the first sentence of her captions? Jean had pointed out before that more followers would mean the potential for profit, or at least some free merch, but the last thing Libby wanted was to monetize that stupid account. You couldn’t call yourself a fake influencer if you were making real money. Her squeamishness on that front was the number one reason Jean handled all the admin, leaving Libby free to focus on making up words. A closesecond was Libby’s inability to remember passwords (or find the scraps of paper on which she’d jotted them down).
“We had a moment with that post about our day in Waimanalo,” Jean continued, mistaking Libby’s continued silence for disbelief.
“You mean the petting zoo? Where I allegedly donated four dozen imported boar-bristle brushes to groom the animals?”
“What can I say? There’s a sucker born every minute. Also, the algorithm loves baby goats.”
“Because they’re the GOAT.” Keoki held up both palms, a high one for Libby and a low one for Jean.
“To be fair, I also assumed we were being catfished the first time she reached out,” Jean admitted, shaking off the impact of Keoki’s high five. “She was all,Hey, great post, I might have an opportunity for you,and I was like,Sure, bottom feeder, here’s my bank account number.But then all that winter wonderland business went down, and I realized she wasn’t a spammer.”
“Which post was it?” It was a ridiculous thing to care about, but Libby couldn’t help herself.
“The one about foraging for pumice stones and how we should also be conscious of our ‘soul calluses.’ Classic Lillibet. ‘I’m more evolved than you and I never forget to exfoliate.’”
Itwasvintage Lillibet. Pretending to care about deeper things but mostly talking about her beauty routine.
“The important part of this story is that Lillibet’s number one fan did not freeze to death after all, so I was able to reach out.”
“Why?”
“Um, she’s majorly connected and could make all your dreams come true? And we’re not exactly setting the world on fire, career-wise?”
Libby shook her head. “I mean, why is she a fan?”
“Because Lillibet is totally of the moment, aestheticallyandspiritually. Finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Those are exact quotes, by the way. More or less.”
“You mean the Lillibet we invented?”
“Yes!” Jean had either willfully misunderstood Libby’s sarcasm or was too caught up in her own spin cycle to care. “I told you it was destiny.”
“More like drunkenness.” All because a particularly rollicking retirement party had tipped them in leftover wine. There should be a sobriety test before they let you use social media.
Not that the wine was entirely to blame. The prospect of a more creative side hustle than selling ice-cold coconuts to tourists had short-circuited Libby’s sense of caution. Being “Lillibet” let her pretend that waiting tables was a temporary state. Even if the persona was only one-third her, since Keoki came up with the food content and Jean handled the visuals. Still, churning out insufferable captions was a kind of writing.
Jean punched her in the arm. “This is your big break.”
