The Ease Is Earned

Chloe Dawn was twenty-two years old and she had a podcast, and the two facts coexisted in her without any of the friction that older people seemed to expect them to produce.

She was the youngest person at the agency by a decade, which everyone mentioned and nobody quite knew what to do with. Officially she was a junior - part hire, part freelance, the org chart had never fully committed - and her actual job was a moving target that on any given day might be styling a shoot, running social, or, as of this week, cohosting the long-form launch of The Food and Beverage Trend Report. The trailer had gone up that morning. The first real episode, the clean-label deep-dive, was live by noon. Her section was the back half, the part where she got to actually have opinions instead of reading the rundown, and her opinions, she was quietly certain, were correct.

She was not going to perform gratitude about it. This was a thing she'd noticed older people wanted from her - a little ritual of I can't believe I get to do this, pinch me, so blessed - and she didn't have it in her, not because she wasn't grateful but because the gratitude and the competence were separate accounts and she didn't see why she had to overdraw one to deposit in the other. She was good at this. She'd done the work to be good at it. The takes were right. People could go verify.

She was sitting on the floor of the styling room with her back against a cabinet, earbuds in, listening to the cut one more time before she let herself stop thinking about it, when Casandra found her.

Casandra Cass was Gen Z too, twenty-eight but young in the bones, a junior strategist who watched everything and said about a tenth of it. The two of them had an alliance the Millennial leads found alternately charming and baffling - a shorthand, a frequency, the ability to communicate an entire opinion about a meeting through one raised eyebrow. Casandra sat down on the floor next to her without being invited, which was the whole basis of the friendship.

"It's good," Casandra said, meaning the episode, having clearly already listened.

"I know."

"You don't sound nervous."

"I'm not." Chloe pulled an earbud out. "Should I be?"

Casandra thought about it, which was the thing about Casandra - she actually thought about it. "No," she decided. "Your section's the best part. Don't tell Mindy I said the visual stuff isn't the best part."

Chloe smiled at the floor. Mindy had been short that morning - clipped, in the way she got maybe twice a year, snapping a correction at the gaffer over a thing that didn't need a snap. Chloe had noticed. Casandra had noticed Chloe noticing. Neither of them had said anything, because that was the other half of the alliance: they catalogued the room, the whole room, the things the Millennials thought they were hiding, and they kept the catalogue to themselves. It was not gossip. Chloe was very clear about that in her own head. Gossip was for people who wanted to use what they saw. Chloe and Casandra just saw, and the seeing was its own quiet pleasure, a way of being twenty-two and twenty-eight in a building run by people in their thirties who kept forgetting that the youngest people in the room were also the most observant.

"She's got something going on," Casandra said now, lightly, like a weather report.

"Yeah." Chloe didn't elaborate. Neither did Casandra. They'd noted it. They would not be elaborating, not even to each other, which was somehow the most loyal thing about the whole arrangement. Here was what the world saw when it looked at her: a twenty-two-year-old with a phone and an internet show, casual, present, maybe a little overconfident. Here was what the world did not see, because she had no intention of showing it: that she had listened to the cut six times, that she'd rewritten her own section twice the night before, that the casualness was not the absence of effort but the result of it. The ease was earned. That was the part you didn't get to see. You just got the ease.

"My takes are right," she said, mostly to herself, and put the earbud back in, and let it play one more time.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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