mad woman

a story about the white lady influencer industrial complex

Libby sits next to her boyfriend on their sagging mattress in their shitty bedroom as he slowly and excruciatingly dumps her.

“It’s just not working anymore,” Drew says for the third time. This is his party line. Each time he says it, he sounds a little more certain, like a mechanic standing over a picked-apart engine.

Libby stares at a water stain on the far wall. Thirty-five hundred a month for one small bedroom, a Santa Monica zip code, and a ceiling that threatens to cave in.

“Is it someone else?”

The sentence comes out of her, but is not of her. It’s a line from a movie, maybe, or a terrible script. She’s never been dumped before. She’s not sure how to act.

“Yes,” Drew says. “There’s someone else.”

They moved here together three years ago. Libby is twenty-six years old. She and Drew met in college in Vermont. They’ve been together for five years. Her relationship with Drew is the biggest milestone of her life, the only proof that time has passed at all. She works as a content creator for a tech company whose mission is so pointless and abstract that even she forgets it from time to time. She likes to get drunk on the weekends, eating the hours away on some friend’s roof deck while the sun falls below the Pacific.

“It’s someone at work,” Drew says. “Nothing has happened, obviously. But I have feelings for her.”

At that, she finally looks at him.

---

It’s a strange experience, to look at a person you once planned to marry and now wish them a painful and prolonged death. Even stranger when you are, generally, a person who rarely summons the energy or interest to get angry at anything.

As Libby drags her shitty stupid shit out of their shitty stupid apartment — her parents are helpless when confronted with her tears; they’ve already rented her a studio in Mar Vista — she imagines her ex-boyfriend as a flattened and crimson lump of flesh, covered in tire tracks on the 405.

The rage feels nice, if a bit unexpected. Libby feels like she’s been tracing her fingers along a wall in the dark, only to finally come across a light switch.

---

It takes less than a week for Drew to post a photo of himself with the girl he left her for.

Libby’s at work. Her computer monitor is open to some newsletter draft so it looks like she’s working, when instead she’s scrolling through Instagram. She stares at the picture, clicks on the tag, goes to the girl’s profile. Beverly, is her name. Bev, for short.

Libby realizes she’s met Beverly before at one of Drew’s office parties. They’re coworkers. They’ve carpooled to work before. Drew drove her home sometimes. He mentioned this girl once to Libby, their shared taste in music.

This is proof, Libby decides, that Drew cheated on her; that she has been wholly and unequivocally wronged by him.

Libby is scrolling through Beverly’s high school graduation photos when she catches herself, puts her phone down. She’s at her desk, which is not so much a desk as the slab of plastic where she situates herself every day, located in the far corner of an open-air office the size of a college gymnasium. All around her, people like her who went to colleges like hers work at their own slabs of plastic.

Libby walks to the bathroom. She stares at herself in the mirror. She uncaps her lipstick and scrawls a message in cursive over her reflection. She stands back, throws up a peace sign, pouts as she takes a selfie beneath the scrawl.

Fuck you forever

She DMs the photo to Drew.