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Lauren’s voice matched her appearance: rich, sharp, and deliberate. Rail thin in skinny jeans, a silk tank, a hunter-green blazer, and sky-high mules, Lauren looked every inch the moneyed Yale grad Bea had Insta-stalked earlier that day. Her glossy auburn hair was thick and straight, her skin creamy and freckled, her hazel eyes vividly alert—it was instantly apparent to Bea that this was a woman who missed nothing.
    “Lauren, hey.” Bea smiled, instinctively patting down her own wild waves (made more ungovernable by her universal insistence on driving with the top down on her clunky vintage Saab convertible, which was avocado green and affectionately nicknamed Kermit the Car).
    “So you’re early to everything too?” Lauren asked as they got seated at a table overlooking the pool and the sprawling Hollywood hills beyond. “Not the way people roll in this city.”
    “Not usually,” Bea admitted, “but traffic was nonexistent. I love L.A. from Christmas to Sundance.”
    “Oh God, same!” Lauren laughed. “The only thing better is Coachella—it’s like every asshole in the city gets raptured and you can park wherever you want. Hey!” She turned to the waitress Bea hadn’t seen approach. “Can we get some chips and guac, and maybe some of those good off-menu summer rolls? And I put in an order for two French 75s with the bartender—are those coming?”
    “Yep! Let me grab them for you.”
    “Great.”
    Lauren handed their unopened menus to the waitress, who bounced off without bothering to engage with Bea at all. Bea turned to Lauren, her suspicion rising.
    “So you know my favorite drink?” Bea asked.
    “Bea, I think you’re going to find I know an unnerving amount about you.”
    “And why is that?” Bea asked, unable to quash her curiosity. A delicious smile spread across Lauren’s face.
    “What would you say,” she said slowly, turning the words over in her mouth, “if I told you that you’re my pick to be the next Main Squeeze?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “French 75s!” The waitress was back, depositing their drinks. Lauren lifted hers to clink glasses with Bea, but Bea couldn’t think, let alone move.
    “Okay,” Lauren said gently, “I’m seeing now that maybe I should have worked up to that a little better. But fuck, Bea, isn’t this exciting? You’re going to change the face of reality television.”
    “So …” Bea’s throat felt dry. “You’re saying …”
    Lauren put down her drink and leaned in. “I’m saying, I want you to be the next star of
Main Squeeze
. I want to handpick twenty-five men to compete for your attention, and I want you to get engaged to one of them on television. I want to transform the way America sees plus-size women. I want to explode your career and change your life.”
    At this, Bea burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but just—
why
?”
    A busboy dropped off their appetizers, and Lauren helped herself to some guac, as if this were a totally normal drinks meeting and not the most absurd conversation Bea had ever had.
    “Bea, your piece was absolutely spot-on. Everything you said about the way the show totally ignores women who don’t subscribe to one specific hyperfeminine beauty standard, about how we systematically erase every kind of diversity. The guys who used to run the show, the guys I worked for? They
hated
you. And you know what? I fucking hated them. I hated how smug and callous they were about women, how they think we’re such idiots that we’ll swallow their garbage version of Cinderella year after year, that we can’t possibly want more for ourselves—or expect more of the men we fall in love with. Beauty queen, wife, mother. As if that’s the totality of everything we could ever want to be.”
    “So it’s true you staged a coup?” Bea asked. Lauren leaned back in her chair, a satisfied smirk twitching on her lips.
    “I wouldn’t say ‘coup.’”
    “What would you say?”
    “I’d say that I’ve been