So why did I feel like absolute shit?
Harold dropped me off at home first. I would have considered this a blessing, except it meant that I was the one who had to say goodbye.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I tried.
Ezra didn’t respond. He’d spent the entire car ride hunched toward the window, sleeping or more likely stewing, and I stepped out of the car, my stomach twisting with unease. The air felt dense, like the sky before a storm.
It didn’t take long for the clouds to burst.
I jolted awake from a four-hour deep sleep to my phone pulsing on my nightstand. My first thought:Mal’s here.My second:Ezra got some sleep in and wants to hash things out.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. What I had instead were forty-three new emails.
This was odd. My Dr. Jojo email wasn’t public; and most inquiries had to go through an intense Denise filter before landingin my inbox. I tapped the first one, with the subject line:Dear Dr.Jojo, from a [email protected], then reared back.
You dumb black bitch. To think that such a good man loved you and you spat in his face. How dare you, you ungrateful whore.
The words hit me like a kick to the chest. I sat up, scrolling through emails and finding litanies ofHow dare you, you evil cuntand racial slurs, rape threats, death threats, and combinations of the three.
Two thoughts occurred to me suddenly: (1)The kid who’d recorded us at the hospital might not have been just a fan, but bona fide paparazzi; and (2)Holy shit, I’ve been doxxed.
Hands shaking, I checked my Instagram. My follower count had exploded—five hundred and forty-five thousand from four hundred and twenty thousand—my notifications a mess. My Instagram was drowned in messages not unlike the ones in my email box. The photo Dahlia and I had taken before Mal’s book event the launching pad:See, it’s definitely her.
“What the hell is going on?” I said out loud. I called out Dahlia’s name to no response, and then sent her a text:When will you be home? Shit is going down and I need you.
Dahlia texted back immediately.Oh my god, oh no. Are you okay? Sorry I didn’t tell you. Picked up an overnight shift in the burbs, are you good?
I was not good; in fact, I was quite certain that I was one more death threat away from a panic attack. But there was no time to communicate that because my phone was ringing again.
It was Denise. Just the person I needed to talk to. I picked up immediately.
“Hello, Dr.Miracle,” she said, sounding pleased as punch. “Just what have you gotten yourself into?”
“I don’t know,” I said around a closing throat.She’s not even that cute,a commenter said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Check your texts,” Denise said.
I did. Denise had sent me a post from Goss, the premier website for all things celebrity drama. The videos were blurry, presented side by side: Me, not even six hours before, wrapped in Ezra’s embrace—from an outside perspective, we looked a lot more intimate than I remembered, my hands clutching his suit jacket from behind, his tucked under my jaw, our faces so close that we could have been kissing. After that, Mal’s signing just days before, me snatching his microphone and declaring him mine. Finally, a video of Mal, with a woman who looked alarmingly liketheLana Porter, smiling shyly and admitting that he was in love.
The title,She Takes Two: Rising Star of ONE TRUE KISS and Knydus Heir Left Heartbroken by Two-Timing Self-Proclaimed Sex Doc,only further outlined how deeply fucked I was.
“For what it’s worth, I think this is great,” Denise said. “It was time we broke you out to a wider audience. Don’t get me wrong, I think the health care community is great, but if we’re thinking big, scandals are sometimes nice. Yesterday, most everyone in Hollywood had no idea who Josephine Boateng was. By the end of this next twenty-four hours, a lot of them will.”
“Me being labeled a harlot who is cheating on their Golden Boy is a good thing?” I said in disbelief. Another email.
You weren’t good enough for him anyway, you ugly slut.
“Not to downplay how you must be feeling right now,” Denise said, meaning she intended to do just that, “but all press is good press.”
“Only if you’re a Kardashian,” I said. My head was spinning. If this had dropped even a day ago, I would have called Ezra. Demanded he clear up the misunderstanding. Make him do what he’d always done: call me his closest friend in the whole world, his sister, go on and on about the importance of platonic love. But what could I tell him now, now that I knew he felt differently? Now that he was hurting?
“Honestly, I think this is a great opportunity,” Denise said. “You’ve been hinting in your more recent posts that you’re open to dating. And now that you are, you’re only going for the crème de la crème. And even then, you still have standards. You aren’t a woman who is easily impressed by money and good looks, and definitely not by a man who’s openly friend-zoned you for the last decade. You want to sample the field, and you’re starting off with this handsome author guy. It’s consistent with the brand, and—”
I felt sick. How long had I been doing this, strategizing ways to turn my most personal thoughts and experiences into content, mining bastardized versions of my trauma for likes and brand deals? Ezra had told me he loved me, and now Denise was telling me I should throw that in his face to rescue myself, and, for a split second, I’d imagined the post. It would be a carousel of photos, the first of me artfully splayed on my couch with my phone tucked between my shoulder and ear, laughing at no one in particular, looking joyful and unbothered in a gifted Ankara lounge set. The next few photos would be screenshots of the hate mail I’d received, blurring only the vowels in the slurs. My caption would allude to the gossip without referencing it directly,instead choosing to focus on the difficulties of being a visibly Black woman in a public arena, of having my personal life out there for others to pick apart as if I hadn’t spent years offering it up on a platter.
It would be perfect. It would invite what Denise would probably call the “best kind of trouble.”
It exhausted me, just thinking of it.
