“Hey, I don’t usually shop here.” He laughed. “But don’t make me feel worse. I have two types of kombucha in this bag right now.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Did you delete it?”
“It’s gone.” He showed her the screen and scrolled backward. The most recent photo was a man she didn’t know with a Post-it stuck to his face. She couldn’t read what it said.
“K.” Emira pulled a string of hair from the gloss on her lips. She gave him a sad I don’t know grin, and said, “K. Bye, then.”
“Okay, yeah, have a good night, take care.” It was clear he hadn’t seen this exit coming, but Emira didn’t care. She walked toward the train while texting Zara, Come over when you’re done.
Emira could take a cab—Mrs. Chamberlan would certainly pay her back—but she didn’t because she never did. She kept the future twenty-dollar bill and took the train to her Kensington apartment. Just after 1 a.m., Zara buzzed from downstairs.
“I can’t handle any of this.” Zara said this from Emira’s toilet seat. Emira wiped her makeup off and locked eyes with her friend in the mirror. “Okay, because like . . .” Zara raised both of her hands up by her face. “Since when is the Running Man considered booty dancing?”
“I don’t know.” Emira removed her lipstick with a washcloth as she spoke. “Also, we all talked about it?” She said this with an apologetic wince. “And everyone there agreed I’m a better dancer than you.”
Zara rolled her eyes.
“It’s not a competition or anything,” Emira tried again. “It’s just that I’m the winner.”
“Girl,” Zara said, “That could have been bad.”
Emira laughed and said, “Z, it’s fine,” but then she put the back of her hand to her mouth and silently started to cry.
Two
Between 2001 and 2004, Alix Chamberlain sent over one hundred letters and received over nine hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. These free products included coffee beans, Luna Bars, makeup samples, scented candles, putty to hang posters on the walls in her dorm room, magazine subscriptions, sunscreens, and face masks—all of which Alix shared with her roommates and the other girls on her floor. While she majored in marketing and minored in finance, Alix did product reviews for a student newspaper during her sophomore and junior years at NYU. In her senior year, she quit the newspaper to become a beauty intern at a tiny publication, but she didn’t stop sending letters. On thick, textured stationery and with dreamy cursive handwriting, Alix asked nicely for the things she wanted, and it became a rare occurrence when she didn’t receive them.
Over the next four years, Alix wrote letters to Ray-Ban, Conan O’Brien, Scholastic, Keurig, Lululemon, the W Hotel, Smartwater, and hundreds more. For the most part she sent requests accompanied by affirmation and praise, but there were often tactful complaints and suggestions for improvement. Alix had a knack for taking high-quality photos of the free merchandise she often received, and she posted these items and the letters that prompted them onto her blog. It was a project she’d started on a whim, but it gained her a small Internet following. Around this time, she met Peter Chamberlain.
Alix met Peter in a bar at age twenty-five, and if she were honest about it, she’d admit that she thought he was much taller until he stood up at the end of their conversation. But in addition to her height he matched her personality. Peter did all these enchanting things that were fancy but not showy, like put mint in his water and privately tip thirty percent. What Alix immediately liked best about Peter was that he treated her side project like an actual job. Alix had a self-deprecating way of describing her letters: “Well, I . . . I write letters and reviews and I have this blog . . . but it’s tiny, it’s not a big thing at all.” Peter told her to try that again, but this time, to pretend like it was. Peter was a journalist-turned-newscaster who was raised in upstate New York. He was eight years older than Alix, he didn’t think it was strange to wear makeup on camera, and he firmly believed in building your brand. When Alix married Peter at age twenty-eight, the party favors, her shoes, and the white wine at her wedding were all items she’d received free of charge from hand-writing gorgeous letters and promising glowing reviews. On a honeymoon in Santorini, Peter helped her write each rave.
Alix worked in student recruitment at Hunter College when a friend—a high school English teacher at Columbia Grammar and Prep—asked her to give a cover-letter-writing workshop to one of her classes. One of the attending students was seventeen-year-old Lucie, a senior with unrealistically white teeth, light pink hair, and an Instagram following of 36K. Three months after the workshop, Lucie posted a picture to her account featuring the cover letter and essay she’d drafted with Alix on top of acceptance letters from UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, Fordham, and Emerson. I owe all of my acceptances to Alix, she said in her caption. Honestly never would have applied to half these schools if she hadn’t made my application so bomb. #allyouhavetodoisask #writealetter #LetHer. Lucie’s post received more than 1,700 likes, and, seemingly overnight, Alix Chamberlain became a brand. Her propensity for receiving free merchandise quickly turned into a philosophy about women speaking up and taking communication back to basics. In the middle of the night, Alix changed her Instagram bio to #LetHerSpeak. Peter suggested she do a rebrand of her website, and to not forget him once she became famous.
During the year she turned twenty-nine, Alix quit her job at Hunter College. She held cover letter and interview-prep workshops at halfway houses, leadership retreats, sorority houses, and career-night events. Students signed up for her sessions at college-recruitment fairs and her inbox became loaded with Thank you!s, and I got in!s. Alix was also contacted by a high-end paperie to help design a new line of office stationery geared toward women in the workplace. The paper was ivory, the pens dark blue, and Alix made her second print debut since NYU, this time in Teen Vogue magazine. It didn’t hurt that Alix’s large blue eyes and surprisingly long legs were extremely editorial. The picture on her new website under About Alix showed her sitting and laughing at the edge of an office desk, two stacks of letters in overflowing mail bins at her feet, and her thick, sand-colored hair gathered on top of her head in a charming, exhausted heap.
Peter believed in her; he always had. And the impact of her work was palpable in the gracious testimonials her new interns organized and photographed for her blog, but Alix was often shocked at the generous trust that organizations placed in her capacity. Alix was asked to speak on panels next to small-business owners on topics like “Hospitality in the Workplace” and “Designing Leaders for Creative Change.” She participated in feminist podcasts that discussed sustainable workplace cultures for women in tech and engineering. And once, Alix spoke at a workshop titled “Making the First Move” as two hundred single women drank champagne out of clear plastic cups inside a lecture hall. Alix loved writing letters and thought she was good at it, but it was consistently the confidence and excitement of the people around her that made the ideology of LetHer Speak bloom.