“No, Terry gave you a great list to tackle. Let’s go get your keys.”
“Can I talk to you for a second before you do that?” Jay asks.
“Sure. You remember where to find the library, Zee?” She nods and heads into the house. “What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about everything you told me last week. Your idiot ex-boyfriend and the tension with Catherine. I’m glad you told me about it. And it made me wonder …” He trails off.
The contractor’s truck pulls in and stops behind Zee’s. This day is officially in full swing, but I want to know the end of that sentence. “Made you wonder what?”
He looks over at the two men climbing from the truck and shakes his head. “I’ll get out of your way, but if I promise to have real food, would you be up for coming to the cottage for lunch?”
“I can do that.” But my stomach knots. “Is this something about me?”
“No,” he says. “Sorry, should have led with that. It’s about me.”
I nod. “See you at lunch.”
Do I wonder about what he wants to tell me through three Zoom interviews with archivist candidates? Yes. But I do my job somehow, and by the time I’m done scheduling my top two choices for interviews with the panel, it’s lunchtime, and I force myself not to jog to the cottage.
“Hey,” Jay says when he opens to my knock. “Come on in and have a seat on the sofa.”
I give him a questioning look when I notice he has a ring light set up and aimed at a stool set in front of the curtains, but I sit.
“You asked about this backdrop the other day, but I felt dumb explaining it, so I said it was a blackout curtain. It’s not.” He sighs and pulls a knit beanie from his back pocket. “You might as well see this.” With that, he hands me his phone and pulls the beanie on before he slumps into an armchair.
The screen is on TickSnap, a video sharing platform, and it shows Jay, dressed exactly as he is right now. The number of likes climbs in the couple of seconds it takes me to process this.
“Go ahead. Watch it.”
I press play, and Jay in the video starts talking, but it’s not the Jay I’m used to. Jay in the video says, “Someone hit me up with a question about the Third Amendment, and I don’t know, dude. It’s like when you’re playing Minecraft, and the pillager scouting parties come and want to attack you, but you can’t kill them or they’ll attack neighboring villages, and you can’t attack them directly, so then you …”
I listen to him explain the concept of quartering soldiersin a disinterested way, like he’s too bored to invest in the conversation, and yet, less than two minutes later, he’s broken down the need for the Third Amendment succinctly and correctly. Or at least as much as I understand the basic idea of Minecraft. A comment floats up the screen from someone calling themself VidKid saying, “That makes way more sense than the way the sub explained it in class. Thx.”
I look at Jay. “What is this?”
He holds out his hand for his phone and slides it into his shorts pocket before pointing to his beanie. “This is my influencer costume. I have an account called Gaming History where I explain historical events using video game analogies.”
This is not at all what I expected him to tell me when he asked me to come over. “That’s creative. Does it do well?”
He pulls the beanie off his head and shrugs. “I have over a million subscribers to my channel.”
“Whoa. The Sutton only has around 150,000. That’s …”
“Embarrassing,” he says. “It’s embarrassing. My dad convinced me it would help me professionally, and it does, but only as a content creator.”
When he doesn’t continue, I ask, “You don’t like doing it?” It’s a stupid question. If he enjoyed it, he wouldn’t call it embarrassing.
“It pays the bills.”
“Doesn’t your trust fund do that?”
He gives me an amused look. “Martins don’t get their trusts until we’re sixty-five. My fourth great-grandfather set them up like that because he says that’s when people have enough sense to handle being rich. Every Martin after that has agreed and kept the terms.”
“So this is your job?”
“Plus books and speaking fees. I’ve got some good sponsors, and the account is how I get booked for talks and lectures.”
“I don’t think that’s embarrassing.”
