The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close

laughing. “Seriously,” she continued. “The first time I met him he told me what the President’s favorite snacks were, and what he prefers to eat for lunch. There is something not quite right in that boy’s head.”
    “He makes me feel so stupid,” I confessed. “When I told him I’d worked in magazines, he basically just walked away. Like it was so boring he couldn’t even bother to come up with a response.”
    “Oh, don’t I know it,” she said. “He asked me if I was worried about my brain becoming weak from not working.”
    “Shut up. He did not.”
    “He absolutely did,” she said, nodding. “I believe his exact words were ‘Brains are like muscles.’ ”
    “Ugh. He really is the worst.”
    “I know. I have no idea why Jimmy bothers with him.”
    “I thought the same thing about Matt. There’s no way he can really like someone like that, right?”
    “Stranger things happen,” she said. “At least that poor boyfriend of his got away.”
    I’d already liked Ash, but this conversation confirmed it, made me think that we would be real friends, that I could trust her. “My thoughts exactly,” I said.
    —
    We had a second glass of wine at the pool and then I went home and fell asleep on the couch in the late afternoon. It was the kind of nap where you wake up and have no idea what time or even what day it is. When I opened my eyes, Matt was sitting next to me watching the news and he gave me an amused look as I startled and sat up, confused.
    “I take it your date was a success,” he said.
    I closed my eyes and tried to gather myself, to wake up a little, and then I stretched my arms over my head and said, “It was. It was a huge success.”
    —
    The next day at DCLOVE, I met with Ellie, a lifestyle blogger and one of the founding members of the site. Her section was called “Ellie About Town,” and as far as I could tell it was basically an online diary of the parties and events she went to. There were a lot of selfies involved.
    She’d met me at the elevator, wearing a light blue dress that was tied with pink ribbon bows at the shoulders. Her handshake and greeting were businesslike and short, but as she led me back to her office, she rolled her eyes at the Ping-Pong table that was set up outside. “This place is crazy,” she said, but I could tell she got a kick out of it, how informal and funky it all was, that she imagined DCLOVE to be the new Facebook.
    “We’re sort of a potpourri of information,” Ellie told me. Her pitch sounded well rehearsed. “We cover parties and events but also give great restaurant reviews. We want to be the place where people go for news about the town.”
    “It’s really great,” I said. “It’s entertaining but so informative.”
    I could tell I’d said the right thing as Ellie nodded, looking pleased. “We recently got a new investor and we want to take this site to the next level.” She leaned forward and the bow on her right shoulder came partly undone. “This may have started as a labor of love, but now it’s a business. There’s a need for a site like ours, a hole in the market that we’re filling.”
    At the end of that meeting, Ellie asked me to write four mock posts for the site. “Use your imagination,” she said. On the way out of the office, I passed Miles, who was the first person I’d interviewed with. He was a food blogger who described what he did as “food porn on steroids,” which brought unpleasant images to mind. That day, he was wearing a pocket square and colorful striped socks that were peeking out of his suit pants. He was part of a breed of guys in DC who dressed in colorful prints, aggressive plaids and checks, Vineyard Vines as far as the eye could see. Sometimes you’d see them walking down the street in groups, usually in Georgetown, all wearing the same shirt in slightly different shades of pastel. The effect was alarming and a little comical—it reminded me of how the gay men at
Vanity Fair
would