One day close to the end of June, Alexa locked the door and readied herself for the camera. She surveyed the contents of her closet and consulted her list of what she’d worn in previous videos.
Alexa kept her online outfits in the back of her closet, behind her winter coats, just in case anyone ever came snooping. She selected her Diane Von Furstenberg Julian silk jersey mini wrap dress in Sussex stripe hydrangea; she found that when she wore vertical stripes her viewers took her more seriously. She could tell by the comments. In the bathroom, she employed her hair straightener to tame the curated beachy look she wore at the Cottage and, finally, she used her Tom Ford eye color, which cost eighty-eight dollars at Sephora. Alexa believed this to be a silly amount of money to spend on four shades of eyeshadow, but she also believed in looking the part, and she further believed that when you had money you should spend it on quality items.
She tested the microphone by reciting the first stanza of “The Raven,” which she’d had to memorize in eighth grade and had never forgotten. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” she began.
A knock at the door. She sighed and turned off the camera. Suddenly there came a tapping, she thought. “Yes?”
“Alexa?” Morgan.
“What’s up, Morgs? I’m in the middle of something.”
“Who’s in there?”
“No one’s in here.”
“I thought you were talking to someone.”
Come on, thought Alexa. She just wanted to make her video and get on with her day. “It was just an audiobook,” she said. Alexa had never listened to an audiobook in her life, nor did she plan to.
“Can I come in?”
“No.” Too sharp, but she couldn’t help it.
“Why not?”
“I’m doing something important. Where’s Mom?”
“I don’t know.” Morgan’s voice was plaintive. “She’s not home. She didn’t leave a note.”
“Text her.”
“I did. She didn’t answer yet.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine for a little while.” Alexa couldn’t help the note of exasperation that crept into her voice.
From outside the door came Morgan’s irritated little huff. “Why can’t you be nicer, Alexa? Like you used to be?”
Alexa winced. “I’m nice!” she told the door. “I’m nice all the time.”
“No you’re not. Not anymore.”
The truth was, Alexa hadn’t been all that nice to Morgan lately, really not since Peter died. Morgan’s grief had seemed so separate from her own—in many ways so much cleaner, so much more deserved and allowed, that Alexa felt herself bumping up against it again and again. Unable to help herself.
“I’ll be down in a few,” she added, more softly. Picturing Morgan’s sad little face, hearing her raspy, innocent voice, brought to the forefront an uncomfortable question.
Alexa’s biological father was “no longer in the picture”—a euphemism employed by Alexa’s mother and adopted by Alexa herself, even though she knew that the truth behind those words was darker and more ominous. A raging alcoholic. Incapable of or unwilling to seek rehabilitation. A danger to himself and others. No longer in the picture. Never to be in the picture again.
So Alexa couldn’t help but wonder. If Morgan’s essential goodness came half from Rebecca and half from Peter, where did that leave Alexa? Only half good. Half at the most.
“Give me ten minutes, okay?” She kept most of her videos to under four minutes, because she’d found that that was the sweet spot for holding people’s attention. She always sat in the same chair. She crossed her legs demurely at the ankle, and she aimed the camera so it focused mostly on her face.
“Welcome to Silk Stockings,” she said. “Today we’re going to learn about toxic assets: what they are, and what to do if you find yourself in possession of them.”
She’d been doing Silk Stockings for just about a year now. The seed first sprouted before that, in that dark time after Peter’s death. Those were confusing, unsettling days, when her mother drank a lot of red wine, and Morgan curled up in the living room and reread Harry Potter for the zillionth time. At meals, instead of sitting down and eating something her mother had cooked, as they had in the past, they each foraged in the kitchen and ate standing at the island, or trailed cracker crumbs or shreds of cheese to the television or a corner in which to nurse their melancholy. For her part Alexa found herself watching a lot of YouTube alone in her room.
There were so many videos! And she knew that some of these people were making money from them. She started to pay closer attention. There were videos of people opening boxes and people putting other people to sleep with ASMR whispering; there were people training their dogs and people putting on makeup and taking off makeup and putting makeup on their well-trained dogs and curling hair and straightening hair and baking, sawing, grilling, singing, strumming, arranging, knitting, organizing.
For a while Alexa was intrigued by Hannah Hart, who cooked drunk, but Alexa didn’t like to cook. She definitely didn’t like to cook drunk. (She didn’t even like to eat drunk.) It was around that time that she was taking an Intro to the Stock Market at the high school that she’d chosen as an elective because the teacher, Mr. Bennett, was supposedly an easy grader.
One day she was listening to him talk about bull markets versus bear markets, and idly thinking about how much easier it was to learn from good-looking people, which may be prejudiced or whatever but it was still totally true (Mr. Bennett, for an old person, was not terrible on the eyes), and then it hit her. This could be her entry into YouTube. She could be the pretty girl talking about the stock market.
She made a few videos, explaining terms she’d learned either in class or in Stock Investing for Dummies. Price-to-earnings ratio, bears and bulls, diversification. When she was confident enough in the format, and in her hair, she started posting them to her own channel. Viewers and subscribers followed—more quickly than she’d anticipated. It was sort of embarrassing, how fast and furious they came. Soon she had enough subscribers to apply to the YouTube Partner Program, where advertisers paid to appear on certain channels. She got accepted, and she started earning.
What she made was not insane money by YouTube standards. But it was way more than she made scooping ice cream at the Cottage. It paid for her clothes, which were not cheap, and it allowed her to tuck away a sizable amount each month. For her future.
Not long before Peter died—halfway through Alexa’s junior year—she told him she might want to take a gap year. She thought she might want to live in California for a while. Her class was suffering from collective stress and anxiety; people were having contests about how little sleep they could get by on; it was a particularly long, gray New England winter, where time and time again they opened the door for Bernice to go outside and do her business and they all swore she shook her head and backed away.
Peter didn’t say, You can’t do that. He didn’t say, That’s not in the plan. He said, “Let’s do this. Let’s do your college visits, and you take your standardized tests, and you do your applications. Just to cover your bases. And when the time comes to decide, we’ll have a conversation about it with your mom.”
Alexa didn’t understand how Peter could be so reasonable and so patient all the time. She had only seen him get truly angry twice, once when somebody keyed his car in the North End in Boston while they were all having dinner at Carmelina’s, and in 2018 when the Patriots lost to the Eagles in the Super Bowl.
Then Peter was gone. Poof. She thought that if Peter were here he’d be proud of what she’d built, and somehow his imaginary approval got intertwined with her efforts too. Later, after her fight with Caitlin and Destiny, after months and months of feeling removed from her mother’s and Morgan’s grief, her desire for a new life, a faraway life, got braided in as well. And now here she was, sixteen thousand subscribers strong.
Neither she nor her mother brought up the college visits: nobody had the time or the energy to make them happen. She visited and applied only to Colby, her mother’s alma mater, and to UMass, and got into both. As Silk Stockings gained steam, her interest in college narrowed and narrowed until it was the size of a pinhole. In May she had taken a deep breath, called Colby, and given up her spot. Come September, she would head to Los Angeles, where Silk Stockings would be but the first step in making Alexa Thornhill a brand.
She had a few things to sort out, such as, where would she live in L.A.? How much money did she actually need to get started? When would she tell her mother that she wasn’t going to Colby? She’d confided rather ill-advisedly in Tyler, but she’d sworn him to secrecy. And she’d begun to mention her plans to move to L.A. casually in the occasional video (the one about understanding current market conditions, for example), aware, as any rising YouTuber was, of the possibility of the eyeballs of a talent scout coming to rest on her channel.
She turned off the camera and checked the comments and likes on her last video, about cryptocurrency, one of her more challenging endeavors. A few hundred comments, including the usual: people who liked her dress, people who didn’t like her dress, someone who thought there was too much of a glare coming in through the window, someone who saw fit to bash the person who complained about the glare, and so on and so forth. Not too many people had much to say about the actual content. Never mind: YouTube empires had been founded on less. She scrolled down until her eyes snagged on a comment from jt76. This person had been popping up more and more in the comments, and always had something kind to say.
She thought of jt76 as a he, but of course it could be a lovesick lesbian or a transitioning teenager or a masquerading Mom Squad member. Maybe jt76 wasn’t even kind! Maybe he (or she) was from the SEC and was going to arrest her for some sort of violation she didn’t even know she’d committed.
This time it was: Really succinct explanation, I’ve never really understood this topic before! Thank you for condensing it so well!
At least somebody thought she was good at something. Even if nobody thought she was nice.