The carbon credit ethos! It was rampant, akin to buying indulgences from the Catholic church—a way to do whatever the hell you wanted and still find a way to feel good about it.
“Good foryou.” Emphasis onyou. It was good for Lisa and terrible for pretty much everyone else on the planet.
Chloe came down from her bedroom and announced she was ready. Jane was surprised by how short she was—squat and broad-shouldered, a gymnast’s body. Jane had only seen Chloe on YouTube and Instagram. Filters could do so much these days.
“Hi! I’m Chloe. So sorry to keep you waiting. I didn’t want to horrify you with my mess.”
“No problem. I’m Jane and messes are my job.”
“Take her upstairs and get going, Chlo,” Lisa chided.
“Yes, Mom!” her daughter answered with mock exasperation.
Chloe’s enormous bedroom was decorated in a palette of relentless pinks and mauves. A neon sign spelling out her name, the letters hot pink and glowing, hung on the wall behind the four-poster bed, which was laden with an assortment of carefully arranged frilly pillows. Basic Bitch Central run through a luxe filter.
The joke was that Chloe was very organized, especially for a teenage girl. Her large walk-in closet was meticulously sectioned and sorted, and her bathroom had a row of shelves with bins labeled for her abundant supplies of makeup and beauty products. There was one exclusively for scrunchies. This girl knew her way around a label maker.
“You have a really good organizational framework in place already. I think most of the job is about culling.”
“One hundred percent! Like, I’m always getting this stuff from people who want placements, and I never know what to do with all the product. I feel guilty for keeping it, and then extra guilty for throwing it away. I mean, it’s so wild I get sent all this free stuff.” She giggled, tossed her hair.
Chloe shared her mother’s self-effacing manner. Was it a ploy, or was Chloe genuinely sweet, simply a teenage girl who wanted to be liked? She couldn’t be blamed for basking in the adulation of her anonymous peers all over the country, lonely girls who worshipped this virtual caring confidante, girls who lived in Wichita and longed for a glamorous life in Beverly Hills.
Would Jane have been one of Chloe’s followers if influencers had been around when she was a teenager? She remembered feeling lonely, a bit isolated. Maybe she would have succumbed.
“This is an easy problem to solve, Chloe. Just donate the items you don’t want, and they won’t go to waste.”
“But who would want all this junk?”
Later, while Jane was sorting through sweaters, Chloe typed furiously on her phone, no doubt interacting with her multitudes of followers on Instagram.
“I realize I have too much red, and I’m not sure I even look that good in red,” Chloe said offhandedly, eyes still on her phone.
“Should we cull all of them?”
“Most, not all. Plus, it’s not like we have much sweater weather in LA. And it’s not the palette of my brand, so I don’t know when I’ll wear them, but I like some of them a lot,” she answered, then emitted a loud, exasperated sigh as a reaction to something on her phone. “People can be so, like, annoying.”
Chloe was simultaneously a machine and a teenager.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
Chloe and Jane both turned around, startled. Lisa, who’d arrived soundlessly, stood in the doorway.
“Oh nothing, Momsy, someone on Insta trolling me, saying I’m an ugly cow.”
“You’re beautiful, you know that—fuck ’em, block ’em.”
Jane couldn’t decide if this Momma Bear attitude was genuine or performative.
“I already did,” Chloe reported.
Jane couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to expose themselves that way. Yet, nowadays, it seemed like almost everyone did.
“So, sweetie, I think you should take down your last post,” Lisa said, puckering her lips with concern.
“Really, Mom? Now? Why?”
Jane wondered if she should absent herself. Sometimes people treated her like wallpaper, which was so insulting, but rather than call attention to herself, she embraced the invisibility and busied herself sorting Chloe’s towering stack of red sweaters.
