Without saying a word, Kelli grabbed a large glass container with a sticky note that said SWEAR JAR from above the fridge and held it out to Ivy, causing her to fish a twenty out of her wallet and place it into the already crammed container.
Ivy hoped that wasn’t true. She hoped Kelli would have liked her even more when she was a sweet and serene ballet dancer, but she didn’t say it out loud. Instead, she bit her lip. “I’ve gotta run…but I’ll see you in my afternoon Soar Renegade class.”
Kelli nodded as she began packing colored pencils into her brown leather satchel to head off to teach her own classes at the exclusive City and Country private school downtown.
“Of course! I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Great! You’re on my list of VVIPs,” Ivy said.
“Well I would certainly hope so,” Kelli replied in a singsong and sashayed out for her day filled with coloring, listening circles, and nap time.
Ivy reread the email from the SoarBarre management team as she sipped her morning shake—a mixture of whey protein, two cloves of garlic, a raw egg, kefir, mustard greens, collard greens, spinach, and turmeric.
She knew she had no say in the matter, but the classes were already absurdly expensive. Five dollars didn’t mean much to most of her clients, but she couldn’t help but feel they were committing highway robbery. As she swirled the vile mixture around in her glass, daring herself to keep drinking, another email from Ally and Lemon (they almost always emailed as a pair) appeared in her inbox asking her to “pop” into their office before her morning class.
Ally and Lemon, SoarBarre’s cofounders, had met ten years earlier through a shared personal trainer. They were both new moms with a passion for exercise and getting rid of their mummy tummies, and they immediately clicked over a hatred for compostable diapers and the fact that they disliked all of the gyms in New York City.
During a single lunch, on the back of a napkin, they developed the concept for SoarBarre, the most intense indoor workout you could do in just an hour. Lemon had gotten a windfall from a recent divorce, and Ally was so over her job running the New York City office of a small but highly regarded independent film company owned by an obsessive tyrant. With Lemon’s money and Ally’s Hollywood connections they opened their first studio in Tribeca. In the last year alone SoarBarre had opened locations in twelve new cities and grown its revenue from $42 million to $160 million.
· · ·
Ivy wasn’t there for the first eight years of Soar, and she hadn’t known Ally and Lemon before they began working together. Still, she couldn’t help but think, as she sat in front of the two women at their double desk in their sprawling office above the Tribeca studio, that they’d begun to morph into each other. They both wore the same perfectly tailored black blazers over bright yellow SoarBarre T-shirts and custom-made boot-cut Betabrand “yoga to boardroom pants.” Their perfectly tweezed, never waxed, eyebrows arched in exactly the same spot.
“Thanks for coming in,” Lemon said, as Ivy settled herself into an armchair that appeared to be constructed from concrete, just as Ally simultaneously praised her on her last class: “It was so fucking intense. I actually thought I was going to die. It was so perfect. We’re so grateful to have you here.”
“So grateful,” Lemon added. Some days it seemed like Ally and Lemon were holding a secret contest to see who could use more iterations of “grateful” and “gratitude” in a single day.
“Thanks.” Ivy smiled and crossed her legs, bouncing one foot nervously up and down. The two women both leaned across the desk.
“We have a mission for you,” Lemon said. This was a recent phenomenon, Lemon speaking as though she were M in a James Bond movie. Ivy simultaneously thought it was ridiculous and got a small thrill out of it.
“Have you heard about The Workout?”
“Which workout?” Ivy began to rumble off the names of the SoarBarre customized workout classes: “Survivor, Renegade, Rebel, Insurgent, Iconoclast?”
“No, no.” Ally shook her head. “The Workout, being taught by Sara Strong. She’s Kate Wells’s former trainer. She started these new workouts. They pop up in different locations in the city. We’ve been hearing the clients talking about them. Apparently they’re invite only, very hush-hush. Some of our regulars are saying it’s the best workout they’ve ever had. Which is a problem for us.” Ally and Lemon exchanged a meaningful look.
“It is?” Ivy asked.
Ally continued. “Because of course our goal is to be the best workout anyone has ever had.”
“Right, right.”
Ally sat up straighter. “This is a revolution. We’re fighting for no less than the hearts and minds of our citizens.”
Ivy tried to stifle a laugh as she let her boss continue.
“We need to learn more about this Workout. We need to know what we’re dealing with. Is it a real competitor? Is it something we should be seriously worried about?”
“Well, this is the first time I’m hearing about it. I’ve heard Sara Strong’s name. Stupid fucking name if you ask me,” Ivy said and then remembered she was addressing a woman named Lemon. “But I didn’t know she was doing an actual class. What do you need me to do?”
“Some surveillance,” Lemon said, unfazed by Ivy’s comment about the oddity of the name. If your name was Lemon, you’d long ago have convinced yourself that it was socially acceptable and not strange at all. “Ask around, try to snag yourself an invite, take some notes, figure out exactly what we’re dealing with. We’d just be so grateful if you could find out anything at all.”
Ivy felt a tingling sensation creep up her spine. This was exciting. She’d start by taking some of her regulars out after class to grab a broth. She’d start asking the right questions. It wouldn’t be long before she got herself an invite to this Workout. Her clients loved little more than currying favor with her. She’d have this locked up by the end of the week.
“Give me a week,” she said. “I’m on it.”
CHAPTER NINE
www.wikipedia.com/?Echinopsis_lageniformis
Echinopsis lageniformis (syn. Trichocereus bridgesii), Bolivian torch cactus, is a fast-growing columnar cactus from the high deserts of Bolivia. Among the indigenous populations of Bolivia, it is sometimes called achuma or wachuma, although these names are also applied to related species such as Echinopsis pachanoi which are also used for their psychedelic effects…The plant contains a number of psychoactive alkaloids, in particular the well-studied chemical mescaline, which it may contain at levels higher than those of the San Pedro cactus…As with related species, it seems to have a long shamanic tradition of use throughout its native habitat.