Despite having top-of-the-line appliances, Rachel hand-washes all her dishes, because she finds it soothing, and she does so wearing four-inch heels, because she thinks flat shoes are for horseback riding and gardening, and only if you haven’t found any suitable heeled boots.
Rachel was the first friend I made when I moved to New York. She’s a social media “influencer” (read: gets paid to wear specific brands of makeup in pictures at her beautiful marbled vanity), and while I’d never had a friendship with a Fellow Internet Person, it turned out to have its perks (read: neither of us has to feel embarrassed when we ask the other to wait while we stage photos of our sandwiches). And while I might’ve expected not to have much in common with Rachel, it was during our third hangout (at the same wine bar in Dumbo where we’re currently sitting) that she admitted she takes all of her photos for the week on Tuesdays, changing outfits and hair in between stops at different parks and restaurants, then spends the rest of the week writing essays and running social media for a few dog rescues.
She fell into this job by way of being photogenic and having a photogenic life and two very photogenic (if constantly in need of medical attention) dogs.
Whereas I set out to build a social media following as a long game to turn travel into a full-time job. Different paths to the same place. I mean, she’s still on the Upper West Side and I’m on the Lower East Side, but we’re both living advertisements.
I take a mouthful of the sparkling wine and swish it around as I turn over her words. I haven’t been to Santorini, and somewhere in my parents’ overcrowded house, in a Tupperware box full of things that have absolutely nothing in common, there’s a list of dream destinations I made in college, with Santorini near the top. Those clean white lines and great swaths of glittering blue sea were about as far from my cluttered bi-level in Ohio as I could imagine.
“I can’t,” I finally tell her. “Garrett would spontaneously combust if he pitched Santorini and, once I got on board, Swapna approved it for me.”
“I don’t get it,” Rachel says. “How hard can it be to pick a vacation, Pop? It’s not like you’ve been saving your pennies. Pick a place. Go. Then pick another one. That’s what you do.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Rachel waves a hand. “I know, your boss wants an ‘inspired’ vacation. But when you show up somewhere beautiful, with the R+R credit card, inspiration will appear. There is literally no one on earth better equipped to have a magical vacation than a travel journalist with a big-ass media conglomerate’s checkbook. If you can’t have an inspired trip, then how the hell do you expect the rest of the world to?”
I shrug, breaking a piece of cheese off of the charcuterie board. “Maybe that’s the point.”
She arches one dark eyebrow. “What’s the point?”
“Exactly!” I say, and she gives me a look of dry disgust.
“Don’t be cute and whimsical,” she says flatly. To Rachel Krohn, cute and whimsical is nearly as bad as trendy is for Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith. Despite the softly hazy aesthetic of Rachel’s hair, makeup, clothes, apartment, and social media, she’s a deeply pragmatic person. For her, life in the public eye is a job like any other, one she’s kept because it pays the bills (at least when it comes to cheese, wine, makeup, clothes, and anything else businesses choose to ship her), not because she relishes the kind of manufactured semifame that comes with the territory. At the end of every month, she does a post with the worst, unedited outtakes from her photo shoots, the caption reading: THIS IS A FEED OF CURATED IMAGERY MEANT TO MAKE YOU PINE FOR A LIFE THAT DOES NOT EXIST. I GET PAID FOR THIS.
Yes, she went to art school.
And somehow, this kind of pseudo performance art has done nothing to curb her popularity. Whenever I’m in town for the last day of the month, I try to schedule a wine date so I can watch her check her notifications and roll her eyes as the new likes and follows pour in. Every once in a while she’ll stifle a shriek and say, “Listen to this! ‘Rachel Krohn is so brave and real. I want her to be my mom.’ I’m telling them they don’t know me, and they still don’t get it!”
She has no patience for rose-colored glasses and even less for melancholy.
“I’m not being cute,” I promise her, “and I’m definitely not being whimsical.”
The arch of her eyebrow deepens. “Are you sure? Because you’re prone to both, babe.”
I roll my eyes. “You just mean I’m short and wear bright colors.”
“No, you’re tiny,” she corrects me, “and wear loud patterns. Your style is, like, 1960s Parisian bread maker’s daughter bicycling through her village at dawn, shouting Bonjour, le monde whilst doling out baguettes.”
“Anyway,” I say, pulling us back on track, “what I mean is, what’s the point of taking this ridiculously expensive vacation, then writing all about it for the forty-two people in the world who can afford the time and money to re-create it?”
Her brows settle into a flat line as she thinks. “Well, first of all, I don’t assume most people use R+R articles as an itinerary, Pop. You give them a hundred places to check out, and they choose three. And secondly, people want to see idyllic vacations in vacation magazines. They buy them to daydream, not to plan.” Even as she’s being Pragmatic Rachel, cynical Art School Rachel is creeping in, giving her words an edge. Art School Rachel is something of an old man screaming at the sky, a stepdad at the dinner table, saying, “Why don’t you unplug for a while, kids?” while holding out a bowl to collect everyone’s phones.
I love Art School Rachel and her Principles,
