The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy.

And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little captions about how the products inspired her.

Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out, but since it was an ad there was no real way to smell the person and judge for yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated, hated most of all.

I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrater? This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies!

“Everything ok?” asked Jillian.

“Yeah, what?”

“Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were ok and everything.”

“Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan.

“It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?”

“What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan.

How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy? What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of 20-year-olds, particularly when this was the time in life when things were even more acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?

She copied and pasted Carrie’s bio into an email to Randy and bolded the part about not understanding pain. The subject line was “see?” and the message was, “A little callous, don’t you think?”

Randy had been about to email Carrie about helping with a new contract when he got the email.

“Hey, guess what?” said Jillian.

“Huh,” said Megan. She’d closed the internet and was going to do some work and not think about things for the next few hours.

“I think I found a good place to get a dog.”

“I thought you didn’t have the money right now,” said Megan.

“Weeelll,” said Jillian. “But I really want one. I really feel like this is the right time in my life.”

“Ok. I guess I just didn’t get my first dog until I was in high school because my parents had to pay off their student loans first, so I think of your forties as the time to get a dog,” said Megan.