May was making her third loop around the JetBlue terminal at JFK when the next text from Lauren popped up. Okay, finally made it outside. Pick up 4.
As she passed the third area for passenger pickup, May had no problem spotting Lauren in the crowd, even though she hadn’t seen her in person for nearly four years. There had been plenty of Zoom happy hours, but those were typically conducted with unbrushed hair, makeup-free faces, and the athleisure they had all come to live in for months on end.
Where May felt like she was having trouble readjusting to a world that expected a certain level of aesthetic attention, Lauren was apparently back in full fashion mode. She wore wide-legged peach linen gauchos with a silk paisley wrap blouse and chunky wedge sandals. Her long hair was pulled back sleekly at the nape of her neck, then fluffed into a perfectly round pom-pom. Her giant square sunglasses screamed peak Jackie O. If May tried to pull off Lauren’s look, people would say how nice it was that she was able to get around by herself.
I see you! Pulling up now. May watched as Lauren read the message and then scanned the tangle of cars jockeying for space near the curb. Lauren waved enthusiastically at the sight of Josh’s Subaru.
May hit the hazards and hopped out to help Lauren with her bags. She felt a familiar heat in the pit of her stomach as the gazes of two twenty-something-year-old white women followed her when she moved in to hug Lauren. When the video of May first went viral, she was convinced people were staring at her everywhere she went. Recognizing her. Whispering about her. Judging her. She didn’t leave the apartment for five days straight because she was convinced that her neighbors would shun her in the elevator. And when she finally did, she was grateful to have the N95 mask as an excuse to cover most of her face.
She looked directly at the two women who had been watching her, reminding herself of the times Lauren had tried to comfort her by joking that May shouldn’t worry about being recognized because “most people think you all look alike.” Instead of confronting May, the young women seemed discomforted by her stare.
“Sorry, we were just admiring your whole vibe.” They were talking to Lauren, not her. May was most definitely not a vibe.
“Your hair is amazing,” the second woman added.
“Why, thank you,” Lauren said, primping her hair puff with her fingertips. “Have a good day, y’all.” As she threw her bag in the hatchback of Josh’s car, she whispered under her breath, “At least they didn’t try to touch it. That’s a good way to lose an arm with me.”
May studied Lauren in her periphery as they strapped on their seatbelts. Lauren had arrived at Wildwood as the lead symphony coach during May’s third summer. She was twenty-three years old and had already served as the first-chair violinist in the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. By the end of the first week, the camp rumor mill reported that she played five other instruments, had been identified in grade school as a prodigy, and had composed the score to an entire animated film. By week four, she supposedly had a recording contract with Quincy Jones. That part turned out not to be true, but she did land a two-year artist-in-residence gig at the Music Institute of Chicago when it wasn’t camp season. She was only nine years older than May, but seemed impossibly talented and sophisticated. It wasn’t only that Lauren felt an entire generation apart from May at the time. She seemed like a completely different species.
The age gap felt negligible now. With less than a decade between them, they were basically contemporaries, and though Lauren had landed a job as the director of the Houston Symphony, May knew at an intellectual level that she was impressive in her own right. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother, she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, then did the same at Columbia Law. Until that video blew up online and she was asked to consider resigning, she had been a board member on the state’s Asian American Bar Association. Now she was on her way to becoming a tenured law professor. But when Lauren was around, she felt a little like a nerdy kid again. The same excitement, but also still the same insecurities.
Lauren reached from the passenger seat for a second hug. “Oh, the way I have been looking forward to this. I need this vacation so much.”
“Me too,” May said. “So much. The Canceled Crew, finally together in person.” Weeks into the text thread, May had been the one who entered a name for their group chat: The Spelling Bee Hive. It was a reference to the fact that May had told Lauren and Kelsey about her daily habit of completing all the New York Times puzzles as a distraction from her floating anxieties. Work, politics, her mother, wedding planning—all of it disappeared when she was grinding out a word game.
It turned out that Lauren and Kelsey had gotten hooked on one of the puzzles too, called the Spelling Bee, which involved compiling words from seven letters arranged in the shape of a beehive. The discovery of additional words was rewarded by increasingly complimentary levels of accomplishment: Nice, Great, Amazing, Genius, and, on that special day when the puzzler found every possible word, the elusive Queen Bee. For a dispositional grade-grubber like May, those digitized words of praise were a morning drug. Rather than get stalled at Genius, May, Lauren, and Kelsey conspired to hit Queen Bee every day by comparing word lists.
But The Spelling Bee Hive didn’t capture the true nature of their bond, so May tried out the Don’t Judge Me Hive before Kelsey amended it to Three Despised Bitches and May came back with Three Non Karens. The evolving group-thread name became a game of its own until Lauren weighed in with her own suggestion—The Canceled Crew. Whether it was because the name was a good one or it had come from Lauren really didn’t matter. It was the name that had stuck. It was what had brought them all together again as a trio—three ladies who had gone through the cancel mill.
Canceled. When had that word hit the cultural lexicon?
He got canceled.
Cancel culture.
Shhh, I don’t want to get canceled.
What did it even mean? A human being can’t literally be canceled. You’re either alive or dead, breathing or not. Brain-dead, maybe, but that’s still not canceled. But whatever it meant, it was why Lauren had reached out to May in the wake of that disastrous video. She and Kelsey had already been through it, their lives…what? Not exactly canceled, but transformed. And transformed in a specific way—revealed, and then reduced. Forever altered by the specific mechanism of public scrutiny and judgment. Lauren, because of the affair. Kelsey, because of her husband’s murder. And May, because of a confrontation on a subway platform. Three women, judged and vilified by strangers.
“Canceled, my ass,” Lauren said, reaching for the car stereo to blast Janelle Monáe while she sang along. I’m looking at a thousand versions of myself, and we’re all fine. “We’re going to have the best trip ever.”