The Throwback List Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Lily Anderson

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion Avenue, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion Avenue, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.

  Designed by Torborg Davern

  Cover illustration © 2021 by Em Roberts

  Cover design by Marci Senders

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934796

  ISBN 978-1-368-05202-3

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One: Palo Alto, California—Jo

  Two: Autumn

  Three: Bianca

  Four: Jo

  Five: Bianca

  Six: Jo

  Seven: Autumn

  Eight: Bianca

  Nine: Autumn

  Ten: Jo

  Eleven: Bianca

  Twelve: Autumn

  Thirteen: Jo

  Fourteen: Autumn

  Fifteen: Bianca

  Sixteen: Jo

  Seventeen: Bianca

  Eighteen: Autumn

  Nineteen: Jo

  Twenty: Autumn

  Twenty-One: Bianca

  Twenty-Two: Jo

  Twenty-Three: Autumn

  Twenty-Four: One Month Later—Bianca

  The Acknowledgments List

  About the Author

  For everyone who didn’t have a home to go back to.

  I see you. I am you.

  What is life but a series of inspired follies?

  The difficulty is to find them to do.

  Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.

  FROM PYGMALION,

  BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  Jo Freeman stepped off the elevator with “Lose Control” stuck in her head. That morning’s exercise coach—Salvador of Confident Kickboxing—put a song on the playlist for every heavy bag in the room, and Jo had found herself hitting in the Missy Elliott zone.

  “Take your anthem with you into the world today! Use your big-bitch energy!” Salvador called after them as the class split up to go to their various Silicon Valley desk jobs.

  Normally Jo left her buy-in at the door, discarding all the silly mantras and platitudes inside her gym du jour. But today, she could feel the “Lose Control” beat keeping her hips loose as she took long strides past the reception desk at Quandt Corporation’s Palo Alto headquarters.

  Work, wait. Work work work wait, Jo’s heartbeat chanted in time with the music in her head.

  If she was still thinking about kickboxing two hours after taking off her gloves, Salvador deserved five stars and a tip. She slipped her phone out of her tote and popped open the Gym Class app.

  Once Jo got the promotion that she’d spent the last five years strategizing for, Confident Kickboxing could become her regular gym. As grateful as she was for the free subscription to Gym Class—a Q-Co work perk—she was getting tired of being an exercise vagabond. Lurking in six a.m. classes with strangers. Never knowing where the parking was.

  When she finally got to update her business cards to say Director of Digital Strategy, she was going to buy that loft downtown—a huge upgrade from the college-kid-infested apartment building she’d lived in since she was one of the students—and then she was going to buy an annual pass to a gym. She could even get gym buddies. It’d been a minute since she’d had nonwork friends.

  “Johanna?” College Kevin called after her as she passed him on her way to her cube. He skittered around the standing desk of shame that Jo herself had spent eight months chained to when she had been Q-Co’s Stanford intern. Back in the day, the standing desk of shame had also come with a heavy phone headset that made Jo look like she was taking drive-thru orders. College Kevin wore AirPods all day that may or may not have been playing music.

  Jo glanced slightly past Kevin’s head toward Gia’s office. Behind the glass partition, her friend-slash-mentor was sitting barefoot on top of her desk, the receiver of her office landline tucked under her chin as she gesticulated wildly with one hand and cut a Starbucks Pink Drink with diet Red Bull in the other.

  “Is Gia talking to…the other guys?” Jo asked College Kevin, knowing he wasn’t allowed to tell her. Even Gia, a girl who’d once been fired as a pharmaceutical rep for being “too fun,” hadn’t officially spilled the beans on the rumored merger. But Jo had worked for the Q long enough to know when change was in the air. And Gia working her ass off at nine a.m. was a big change. Client relations usually didn’t start until lunch.

  College Kevin squirmed. “Devo wants to see you.”

  Work work work, wait.

  “Great,” Jo said. She gave him a smile that he couldn’t see with his eyes focused on the toes of his shoes. “I’m on my way.”

  Her phone trembled in her hands as she pulled up the interoffice messenger.

  TODAY’S THE DAY!! she shot off to Gia, whose mouse clicked twice before the read receipt came through.

  Gia sent back a thumbs-up, then noticed Jo through the glass and waved. Jo mimed walking toward Devo’s office with a giddy Oh my God, can you believe today’s the day smile. In return, she got a distracted IRL thumbs-up. Gia’s eyes looked tired. Or possibly just lacking concealer. Jo felt bad for even noticing—there was too much pressure for women in the office to adhere to a problematically narrow beauty standard; she herself was guilty of daily flat-iron on top of her Brazilian blowout just to keep her natural 3C curls straight and glossy. Meanwhile College Kevin’s hair was unbrushed.

  After work, she comforted herself, I’ll invite Gia out for celebratory drinks and I’ll let her vent about all the secret merger stress. We’ll finally be equals.

  Without Gia, Jo would never have considered a career in social media. She’d never been a Do it for the ’gram type of person. But Gia—a Portlander who had moved six hundred miles to avoid getting sucked into her family business—had seen Jo’s résumé back in her standing-desk days and spotted their similarities.

  If you’ve spent your whole life giving your parents’ business free promo, you have more job experience than anyone else your age, she’d told Intern!Jo. Just do the job you’re already trained for.

  And that job was digital public relations. Jo switched her major from English to communications, took a summer intensive in photography so her student loans would cover a camera and Photoshop, and she offered to run Q-Co’s Facebook from the standing desk. She tripled their followers and got a forty-hours-a-week and a job title: social media coordinator.

  Now twenty-six-year-old Jo was on step three of the four-step career plan she and Gia had mapped out:

  0. Internship (unpaid foot in the door)

  1. Social Media Coordinator

  2. Social Media Manager

  3. Content Strategist and Influencer Relations Manager

  4. Director of Digital Strategy by thirty

  All it had cost her were her weeknights and her social life—both largely disposable since most of her college friends left town for grad school or love or cheaper rent. It had been a few months since she’d dusted off her dating apps, and she hadn’t been home to see her parents in ages. But it would all be worth it when she became the first Black woman on the management team.

  A biracial, bisexual girl-boss in Silicon Valley? Gia would say to hype Jo up when she got discouraged. You know that is 30 Under 30 bait! The second you get promoted, I will call my Forbes contact.

  Jo wasn’t in it for the 30 Under 30 lists—although she wouldn’t mind having something cool t
o post about while everyone back home was getting married or having babies. She just wanted to reap what she’d sown. After five years of planting all of her hard work into Q-Co and their fancy fitness trackers, she was ready to harvest a real life for herself.

  It was only what she deserved. She did more than talk the talk; she even wore the product. Today: a small silver ring on her index finger tracked her mounting heartbeat as she strode into the boss’s office.

  Devo—Devon Quandt Jr., operations manager and son of the founder—had a small water feature built into the longest wall of his office so that it was eternally raining on his mounted classics degree. The noise made Jo want to stuff erasers in her ears. It was expensive and wasteful water torture.

  Devo himself was expensive and wasteful, sitting sideways in his ergonomic office chair.

  No one else on the first floor had an ergonomic chair. But no one else’s dad had successfully opened three start-ups and left them the last one to babysit.

  “I see you, Johanna,” Devo sang throatily, like a cartoon frog. “I see you.”

  “Pretty sure that Sweeney Todd isn’t workplace appropriate, Devo,” Jo said. She sat in the non-ergo chair across from him. “That song is about a stalker and a pedophile.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a theater buff,” Devo said, twirling in his chair before resting his elbows on his desk.

  “I’m a woman of the world,” Jo said. Devo didn’t care that her childhood best friend had been a theater geek. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Right!” Devo clapped his hand on his desk, momentarily focused on something other than humming stray bits of Sondheim. “I’m gonna need you to sign a little NDA, ’kay?”

  Jo made herself smile with all of her teeth as he pulled a tablet seemingly from thin air and spun it to face her. A stylus was pressed into her hand while she read through the company’s most basic nondisclosure agreement. There were no dollar signs or Welcome to your new life! notes of congratulation mixed in among the legalese.

  She signed it and forced herself to sit back again. “What’s up?”

  “Well…” Devo leaned forward into the space Jo had vacated. “You may have heard some rumors…” He trailed off, waiting for her to jump in.

  “Devo,” Jo said, knuckles cracking as she made fists in her lap. “Don’t make me guess. Please. I don’t like guessing.”

  “Fine,” he said, sulking, shoulders falling down to the desktop. “It’s all true. We’re being acquired by HeartChart. They’re moving us to their office in the city. I say us, but I mean…Well, I don’t mean you.”

  Jo stared at him. Her brain was doing its damnedest to hold on to the words, but she couldn’t quite make herself believe them enough to stick. For a moment, she couldn’t help but imagine everyone lined up in the school gym, Challenge Day style. Everyone who has a job step forward. The air left her lungs like it’d been punched out.

  “You aren’t—” Jo shook her head and coughed a laugh. “That can’t be how you’d fire someone, right?”

  Devo’s lips pulled back into a yikes face.

  This was why Gia hadn’t smiled at her. If Jo had really been getting promoted today, Gia would have known first and Gia had a terrible poker face.

  “You can’t fire me,” she said, entering bargaining as quickly as possible. Quandt Corporation simply couldn’t run without her. The higher-ups still needed her help with the new copier, and College Kevin was useless with technology bigger than a phone. “I have spent every weeknight for two years cycling through seven social media accounts! Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok! All the stupid new ones that no one uses! I had us on Mastodon! I write the copy! I take the pictures! I got us viral movement on a picture of a fucking nose ring! Our accounts are my babies. I watch them morning, noon, and night.”

  “But that’s it, Jo,” Devo said, sitting up again and twisting his chair from side to side. “They aren’t our accounts anymore. They’re HeartChart’s. Well, they’re no one’s. We’ll be starting all-new campaigns when we relaunch, so take screenshots of your babies before they go off to boarding school or whatever—I’m sorry, I really wasn’t following the baby metaphor. Do you think you just stare at babies all day or…Never mind.”

  He had her sign a termination form and gave her a boiled-chicken handshake. Jo didn’t wipe her palm on her slacks out of a habitual politeness. But by the time she made it to the door—crushed under the weight of a new, shittier reality—she was ready to throw politeness out a window. This was the last time she would ever be in this office, on this floor, in front of this skid mark of nepotism….

  Devo said, “Oh, wait, Jo—”

  Optimism flicked on like a light switch in her chest, making her pause. She turned back, brows high and hopeful. “Yeah?”

  “Your Gym Class subscription is a company perk, so it’ll expire after you check out with HR, ’kay?”

  Sandy Point, Oregon

  TWO MONTHS LATER.

  Rock bottom smelled like the briny dumpster that was the ocean.

  Jo’s childhood bedroom was childhood small, about the same size as the office she’d cleaned out back in Palo Alto. The walls, small rug, and bedding on the teeny-tiny twin mattress were all hot pink and charcoal gray. The combination might have seemed like haute couture to tweenage Johanna—at the time she also envisioned her prom dress and wedding in the same color scheme—but it made her adult eyes want to bleed.

  Home sweet home.

  It took three rounds of wrestling to get the cork out of what Jo had decided to refer to as her first bottle of wine, a surprisingly decent Malbec. Especially considering it was also the only Malbec at Fred Meyer. Jo had doubted department-store wine, and she was being proven wrong.

  Finally, a single win for Jo Freeman. Woo.

  Sitting on the edge of her tiny bed, she dusted sand off her feet. Her entire hometown was covered in a fine eponymous dust of windblown sand, and the inside of the Freeman house was absolutely no exception.

  Jo couldn’t believe she was back in a town that didn’t even have sidewalks.

  Separated from Portland by two hours of forest, Sandy Point, Oregon, was the town people stopped in when they got winded on the way to see the Goonies house in Astoria or where they went to walk off all the ice cream and cheese they ate in Tillamook. It wasn’t as quaint a seaside as Seaside, and it was too far north to have any of the famous sand dunes.

  Sandy Point only existed because of a roadside attraction that had closed a hundred years ago. The Waterfront Cove resort had been torn down and replaced with a subdivision of McMansions that towered over the otherwise modest neighborhoods. With four thousand residents, it was too populated to be considered cute-small yet remained too small to be convenient. There was one post office, one grocery store, and a boardwalk instead of a downtown. The only doubles were nautical bars and empty vacation rentals.

  Cloudy moonlight made the dry-erase-board wall at the head of her twin bed gleam. Arced across the white acrylic were the words Welcome Home, Jojo!!! in huge letters. She wiped them away with the back of her arm, impatient to start a list of things to dive for in the garage. So far, only the boxes marked Wardrobe had made it upstairs.

  Comforter, she wrote. She looked around the room critically. On the other side of the window, the ocean droned on. Noise machine.

  It felt good to list. Like complaining to a friend after a long hard day.

  Essential oil diffuse—

  Overused after a decade of neglect, the marker promptly expired. Jo pitched it aside and reached over to the desk. The single drawer rattled open. Inside were all the ingredients to conjure her teenage self: gel pens, Post-its, digital camera cords, a gunky lip-gloss tube, and a slim journal with a wraparound vintage map of the world as its cover.

  The inside cover had Jo’s unchanged handwriting: If lost, please return to Johanna Jordan Freeman, 22 South Jetty Avenue, Sandy Point, Oregon.

  She flipped to the first page. The left-hand margin was
studded with scraps, evidence of ripped-out pages. The lists inside the world journal had been too important to be anything short of perfect. These were Jo’s original road maps.

  Jo Freeman’s Battle Plan to GTFO of Sandy Point FOREVER

  Take eight AP classes

  Take extension courses at Ocean Park Community College

  Become president of the honor society

  Become editor-in-chief of the Sandy Point High yearbook

  Get into Stanford

  Check check check, she thought. All tasks she had accomplished almost a decade ago.

  Except for becoming president of the honor society. Jo had only wanted that because her ex-girlfriend Wren had held the office when she was a senior at Point High; Jo’s campaign had been a brief reason for them to talk again while Wren was away at college. Once Jo had lost the race to Bianca Boria, she and Wren had lapsed into a forever silence.

  She took the journal back to her bed, squishing herself against the window and drawing long pulls from the Malbec bottle. A month ago, this list would have immediately gone up on all of her social media under the hashtag #DopeSinceDayOne. Proof that she had accomplished everything she’d ever dreamed of.

  But she hadn’t, really. Because all she ever wanted was to stay gone.

  She closed her eyes and tipped another gulp of wine into her mouth. Wiping away an errant drop, she bounced the back of her head against the whiteboard wall.

  After her layoff, she had spent over a month scrambling to find work. Calling all of her contacts. Haunting job sites instead of sleeping.

  But no one needed a social media director. Or even a slightly overqualified marketing assistant. She could temp or she could leave California. Neither would pay the bills that had started to pile up. After PG&E sent their final notice with her service shut-off date, she broke down and called her mom.

  “Mom.” Jo had hated how weak she sounded. It would have been easier if she could have started on equal footing and called her mom Deb. Instead, she felt herself de-age, confessing in a brittle, babyish voice, “Mom, I got laid off.”