By the Beach, Facing Ruin

 “Can you come over?”

The text across my phone screen lights up faintly within the increasing murkiness of my solitary day. Outside my room window, the city moves at its usual pace.

I look at the phone twice, surprised to hear from that person, who I won’t name since there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of her. Let’s call her Nicole, for convenience.

The surprise comes mostly from barely knowing her. Aside from random texts, I’ve had maybe a half-dozen semi-conversations with her, shouting over blaring DJs at Miami parties full of pretty people connecting over wealth—inherited, newly found, or just potential. We do have a bit of a bond over our common schooling; she went to Lourdes, and I went to Gibbons before we both attended FSU, though we never met along the way.

I feel obligated to attend the parties for my work, which is a YouTube channel you also may know, so I’ll say I’m a travel vlogger, which is true enough, and leave it at that.

Nicole vlogs about beauty products—that whole pastel world that smells like rosewater and commerce—and has nearly triple the number of followers I have, sufficient to fill a large city.

She has sponsorships from enough designers to give her a comfortable lifestyle that includes being a party staple and renting a beautiful ocean-view apartment in a South Beach high-rise. That was our world, or her world, more accurately.

I text her back:

“This is Darren. Did you mean this for me?”

A long pause.

“Yes.” Nothing else.

“OK, should I come over now?”

“Yes.” Again, that’s it.

I Uber over to her place. As the elevator ascends slowly thirty-two floors into the sky, I reflect that I’ve been at her apartment only a couple of times before—once for her five-hundredth podcast celebration, another time when she hit a million followers.

She answers the door almost immediately after I knock. Nicole stands there, about five-five, hair pulled back around her face—her very beautiful, albeit unusual face that shows a mixture of Indian, Irish, and Cuban backgrounds.

She’s wearing thick eyeglasses, which I’ve never seen her wear before and which I find incredibly endearing. They make her look… unfinished. Human.

She’s also not wearing any makeup—a splotch of freckles and some blemishes show.

Nicole sniffles and invites me in. Her eyes are red.

“Are you OK?” I ask slowly as I walk inside.

“No,” she says, “not really.” Her voice is shaky.

I follow her to a couch and sit a comfortable distance apart from her in front of a TV that’s soundlessly running her channel. The sliding glass doors to the balcony are closed. The lights are off, and gloom from imminent mid-afternoon Florida thunderstorms is all that illuminates the room.

The impeccable order that I remember from before is gone. On one side of the coffee table in front of her, a picture frame lies face down by a half-empty bottle of merlot; a silver rosary, still partially coated in dust, sits on the other side.

“What’s wrong?”

She starts crying quietly. “Hector left me. He already took down his pictures of me off all his pages.”

Hector has been her boyfriend for six months. He’s a model, all smirks and smiles, and I suspect him to be incapable of actually caring about anyone but himself. I think this breakup is a good thing for her, even though she does not see it.

“Wow.” I reach over; my fingers touch her delicate shoulder. I keep my fingers on her shoulder.

It strikes me that it is the first time I’ve ever actually touched her since she’s extremely adept at managing physical interaction, avoiding unnecessary brushes, and moving through the noise at parties without making physical contact, all the while being chatty and inviting.

“I’m so sorry.”

“This could ruin me.” Her voice cracks, and the tears start flowing more freely, filling the silence between us.

“I know the kind of guy he is. But him being there helped bring a lot of people to my channel. What’s going to happen if all this ends? No more brand trips. No more sponsorships. No more invitations. I go back to one of those soulless day jobs I used to have.”

She stares at her phone like it is her last beacon of hope in the world and groans.

“It’s already starting to happen,” she says, as if the numbers on her screen are actual weights drowning her deeper. “My numbers are showing the impact.”

I move across the couch closer to her and hesitantly drape my arm around her.

“It’s going to be all right. There’s a ton of people who followed you before he was around,” I say, but I do not fully believe my words.

“Maybe,” she whispers in her barely audible voice. “Maybe that is enough, but is it?”

I want to tell her that it is, but I’m unable. I cannot BS to her with reassurances that may not be true. I cannot lie to her.

Instead, we sit in silence, staring at the Atlantic through the rain, which is coming down in streaks on the windowpanes like her tears.

After a few minutes, the storm engulfs us all around. Then she finally falls asleep on my arm. I feel her steady breathing. The rain continues outside.

I gently take my arm from her and quietly and carefully open the sliding glass door out to the deck and sit in a chair.

The air smells clean. Even with the hazy weather, the panorama is breathtaking—the ocean stretching endlessly before me.

As the rain slows, clouds give way to the sunlight that creeps into the view, suggesting the passing of the storm.

Half an hour later, she calls for me.

I stand up. “I’m out here on the deck,” I say softly.

She steps out and hesitates for a moment. “I thought you might have left.”

“No,” I reply, gesturing towards the horizon. “Just enjoying your view,” I add.

“The ocean, you know, always looks great no matter if you’re up here, in a plane, or standing on the beach.”

Nicole sits in the chair beside mine. Her movements are deliberate and conscious.

“I don’t really come out here too much,” she admits.

We sit quietly again. The silence is punctuated occasionally with faint noises from the city below.

“Why’d you call me? Of all people?” Finally, I ask what’s been weighing on me since I arrived.

She does not answer right away. Her gaze drifts from the horizon to the waves below.

“I don’t know,” she says eventually. “I always felt a connection with you at those parties. Our backgrounds, I guess.”

She pauses before adding softly, “I’m sorry you had to come over.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I say quickly. “I was happy to hear from you. I just hope I helped.”

“You did.” Her voice carries a noticeable sense of relief.

We sit quietly again. Nicole checks her phone six times in about two minutes. She can’t seem to resist looking at her phone screen.

“Are you actually losing followers?” I tentatively ask.

“No,” she responds after a moment. “Just not gaining as many.”

“You know, maybe that’s enough,” I offer gently. “Maybe you only need the ones that follow you for ‘you.’”

She places her phone face down on the small circular table between us. It looks like a small but deliberate act. Then she lets a long breath out.

“I think it’s going to be fine,” I add after a moment’s pause.

“I guess so,” she says, almost like she is actually beginning to believe it herself.

For the first time, she does not pick her phone up. She looks at it for some moments and then stares into the distance, pushing the phone away gently.

And then there it is: she finally allows the smallest hint of a smile.