Page 3 of Fan Favorite

Edie felt dizzy as she crawled toward the TV. Starring in a glossy montage of extreme sports and white-savior philanthropy was her high school boyfriend. It seemed strange that Ryan kept calling him Bennett Charles when his name was Charlie Bennett. And he was nothing like she remembered—her Charlie was shy and nervous and chewed his nails and read fantasy novels and wore weird clothes and was sort of chunky and splotchy all over. But this—this was an unbelievably grown-up,Us Weeklycover version of Charlie. There he was on Edie’s TV, skiing off the top of a mountain, hanging from a rock face by one hand, kayaking down a waterfall, photographing children in Nepal with prayer flags flapping against temple walls, playing an acoustic guitar for tribespeople in Africa, and, with his eyes closed and a beatific expression on his gorgeous face,taking an outdoor shower?

Edie, rising to her knees, was suddenly self-conscious. She adjusted the elastic of her giant underpants, which despite their ample coverage had ridden into her butt crack.

“—activist, adventurer, entrepreneur, amateur photographer, musician, wow, this guy does it all!” Ryan continued. “Bennett, after scandal rockedThe Key’s incoming suitor, Wyatt Cash, it looked like this season might be canceled. But then your popular Instagram @Sherpa4U came out of nowhere and landed you the job! Are you ready to find love on this epic ten-week journey?”

Wait,WHAT?

Edie’s eyes went huge, and she put her hand over her mouth.

Charlie Bennett aw-shucks smiled, just a humble everyman with an active CrossFit membership. “Listen, Ryan, I’ve rappelled into active volcanoes, summited the world’s tallest peaks,even ridden a yak across the Nepalese tundra to deliver life-saving medicine to victims of the Tibetan diaspora. And still, nothing’s prepared me for this! Being onThe Keyis by far the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but I know”—he looked directly into the camera, and Edie felt her stomach flip—“I’m going to find my soulmate on this adventure. And that I’ll give her the Key to My Heart. Forever.”

Their eyes met. He smiled, revealing that one crooked tooth she’d always adored, and suddenly Edie understood that their connection transcended space and time and knew, with absolute certainty, that Charlie Bennett was, and had always been, her One True Love.

“Holy shit.” She sat down hard in the puddle of rosé. “Fuck.”

3

Edie paced the living room with zero chill, wildly scrolling every article the internet would give her about the new season ofThe Key.

WILLTHE KEY’S BENNETT CHARLES FIND THE ONE?

The People.com headline screamed over a photo of a sexily smirking Charlie Bennett offering the camera a golden key from the palm of his hand. Edie texted her best friend LaurenALERT ALERTwith a link to the article, suddenly stone-cold sober and losing her mind over how in the hell Charlie Bennett—Charlie Bennett!—could be the star of the biggest reality show in America.

It was just sobizarre. Of course, Edie knew all aboutThe Keyand the Wyatt Cash scandal. She’d been watchingThe Keyfor what, a decade?The Keywas America’s most beloved dating show, the only one that really, truly believed in love. Onelucky suitor romancing a group of incredibly gorgeous potential love interests in a palatial California mansion. Romantic dates, first kisses straight out of a fairy tale, tear-filled eliminations, incredible around-the-world travel locations, all leading up to one epic proposal. And the suitors were always—always!—chosen from the previous season’s cast. Charlie Bennett had never been onThe Key, of that she was certain. Wait—Seacrest had said something about Instagram.

Edie opened the app, her heart beating fast. First of all, Bennett Charles’s account wasverified, which was only forcelebrities, which made no sense, because if Charlie Bennett was acelebrity, why was Edie just hearing about it now? 400,000+ followers! Edie suddenly felt lightheaded and grasped for the couch, which of course she missed, landing, once again, in the rosé.

“Shit!” she yelped.

Nacho Bell Grande yowled and fled for the kitchen.

Edie scrolled and scrolled through @Sherpa4U’s fantasy-inducing grid, trying to piece together a narrative that would explain how over the past seventeen years, her sweet, nerdy Charlie Bennett had transformed into this snowboarding, paragliding,Key-suitor hunk with the bio “Live the adventure, share the love.” But his Instagram was only five years old and bore no trace of the Charlie Bennett she once knew. Like Athena bursting fully formed from Zeus’s skull, one day Bennett Charles just appeared, topless and grinning, on Instagram. And,damn, he was toplessa lot. In between feats of extreme sport, vistas worthy of travel magazines, food porn, and shots posing with Vitaminwater near rock formations (#ad #sponsored) was a half-nude Bennett Charles, a lotus tattoo on his forearm on full display and drool-worthy abs glistening in the sunlight.

Edie swallowed hard. Typically, she found a display of body-ody-ody sort of silly and self-indulgent, but suddenly all she wanted to do for the rest of her life was glissando herfingertips down Charlie Bennett’s torso. After a particularly jarring photo of Charlie standing on a mountain top in hiking boots and a lime-green Borat-style mankini—chest and abs and hips and goddamn those divots on the sides of his ass—Edie, dumbfounded by Charlie’s inconceivable glow-up, foolishly opened her own grid, as if there she would find answers.

Suddenly the selfie she’d taken yesterday with the caption “‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’—Winston Churchill” seemed not only maudlin and desperate, but also unbelievably pedestrian. There were also a lot of pics of Nacho that she’d thought were totally cute, but now looked more cat-lady tragic. Last week she’d posted a photo of her Moleskine planner and a cup of coffee that she’d Clarendon-filtered for the gods. She’d thought it looked like something out of Reese Witherspoon’s feed. But now Edie was horrified to realize that she was not, in fact, Reese Witherspoon; she was just a regular person with nothing better to share than this picture of a coffee and her planner artfully lit on the kitchen table. It had seventeen likes. And then, of course, there were the pictures of Brian and Cayden that she’d wanted to delete and should’ve deleted, but that were too painful to delete—like erasing them entirely would mean erasing those five months of her life, like they had never happened at all. Those pictures were proof that she wasn’t crazy for believing him when he’d said he loved her.

Edie pulled her shirt over her face in shame.

A brief investigation intoThe Key’s cast further underscored Edie’s general failings. Not enough gorgeous friends. Not enough bleached-blond hair. Not enough glam portraits of herself smiling, laughing, pouting. Not enough smirking selfies, travelogues, or exercise photos that showed off her hot bod in matching sports bras and leggings. Edie clambered over the moving boxes and ran to the foyer for a good, hard look at herself in her full-length mirror.

Her dark blond hair shot every which way, and suddenly, her T-shirt’sBRUNCH SO HARDslogan seemed like a really stupid thing to wear on one’s chest. Upon inspection, her underwear was unbelievably large and of the blood moon variety, even though she’d finished her period last week. She’d worn it because, typically, the mental image of a man tearing it off was a good deterrent against casual sex. Now this seemed less like a sensible plan (which clearly she was prepared to abandon) and more like another reason, among a myriad of reasons, why Edie Pepper was still single.

Edie turned sideways and lifted her shirt to inspect her belly, sucking it in and sticking it out. Not great. And why were her tits suddenly falling into her armpits?! She looked over her shoulder to examine her wine-covered ass, picking up her cheeks one by one and then dropping them. She stood on her tiptoes to see if that perked them up. It did not. Gah! Back rolls! Over the past few years, Edie had noticed herself developing an adult woman breeding body, but she didn’t think of herself as fat, more like…Midwestern healthy. Hearty enough to survive a long, cold winter. But it occurred to her now that all her friends skipped the breadbasket and the women at her office ate lonely forkfuls of field greens at their desks, maybe with a touch of tuna, and went to places called “barre” and “SoulCycle” after work. Most of them were already married.

Edie leaned closer to the mirror. Her nose wasn’t too big, so there was that. Her eyes were gray and that was… fine? At any rate, it was her smile that she’d always thought captured her inner whimsy. Edie tossed her hair back and smiled her most beautiful smile, and a shock of previously undetected wrinkles exploded across her face. She stumbled back, dazed and wondering,Should I be using a cream for that?She grabbed a pair of tweezers from her purse and started yanking at her eyebrowswildly. For the love of God, what was growing out of her chin? Edie angled her head around for a better look and eventually plucked a black whisker, at least half an inch long, from her jaw. She laid down on the floor and sent Lauren another text:WHERE ARE YOU, THIS IS A CRISIS, I NEED YOU.

It took Edie a moment to decide what to do next, but finally she got up and scoured the entire apartment for a box labeled “Old Shit.” She found it in the bathroom and dug around until she found her senior yearbook under a binder ofSweet Valley Highfan fiction she’d written when she was twelve. She was definitely going to need more wine, so she paused in the kitchen to dump a glug of rosé into her mug before settling back on the couch with the yearbook. Edie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to picture Charlie Bennett, but all she could see now was Bennett Charles. The wine and cognitive dissonance were too much—she felt like she was going crazy, like she couldn’t trust her own memories or what was real. Edie took a deep breath and opened the yearbook to the Bs, and there he was, CHARLES BENNETT, sandwiched between Carly Bateman and Daniel Benson.

Looking at his senior portrait, Edie felt a rush of the purest, warmest love. He had a bowl cut of brown curls, and his face was plump and shaped like a potato. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that were too small for his features, and his expression was blank, except for the tiniest purse to his lips that exposed an earnest but unsuccessful imitation of cool. He was wearing a suit, which Edie had forgotten and found extra endearing because he looked so young and silly. Under his name was his senior quote:

“Home is behind you, the world is ahead.”

—J. R. R. Tolkien

Edie clutched her heart. Suddenly it seemed impossible that life could’ve continued all these years without him. They met when they were five. The Bennetts lived just a couple of blocks away from the Peppers, in a classic midcentury with, according to her mother, Alice Pepper, “inexcusable landscaping.” As the president of the Wilmette Garden Club, Alice attempted to thwart the budding friendship on horticultural principle alone. “What sort of people don’t edge their lawns, Edith?” she’d said, brows raised. “The very least they can do is hire someone.”

But there was something about Charlie that Edie always liked. He was guileless and sweet, and despite Alice’s oft-repeated disapproval over a close friendshipwith a boy, Edie and Charlie quickly became fixtures in each other’s backyards, kitchens, and basements. Charlie never complained when Edie and Lauren gave him makeovers and poked him hard in the eye with a mascara wand. He could always be relied upon to make Monopoly trades that improved Edie’s or Lauren’s position and diminished his own. He lovedTroop Beverly HillsandDon’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Deadalmost as much as they did. And even as time went on and they got older and their interests diverged—Charlie: fantasy novels and Dungeons & Dragons; Edie: boy bands and, well,boys—their friendship had always remained. They were bound by shared history and an unwavering commitment to life as indoor kids. They weren’t sports people; they were marching band people. They weren’t pool-party-this-weekend-at-Maddy-Morrison’s-manse people; they were drama club people. They walked through high school like this—just as friends!—until one particularly miserable summer day, right before senior year, when everything changed.

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