The Villa by Rachel Hawkins EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Rachel Hawkins
- Language: English
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- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Somewhere around the time she started calling herself “Chess,” I realized I
might actually hate my best friend.
It was the third name she’d given herself in the nearly twenty years I’d
known her. When we’d met in fourth grade, she was just Jessica. Well,
“Jessica C.,” since there was also “Jessica M.,” and “Jessica R.,” and then
one girl who just got to be Jessica, like she’d claimed the name first, and
everyone else just had to fucking deal with it. So I guess it wasn’t a surprise
that by the time we were sophomores, Jessica C. had turned herself into
“JC,” which eventually morphed into “Jaycee.”
That lasted until halfway through college. Sometime between her third
and fourth change of major, she became simply, “Jay,” holding on to that
moniker until ten years ago, right after we both turned twenty-five and
she’d finally broken up with that asshole, Lyle. That’s when Chess was
born.
Chess Chandler.
I can’t deny that it sounds good, and it definitely looks good printed in
giant font on the book I’m currently holding in my lap as I wait for Chess to
meet me for lunch.
She’s late, because she’s always late, even though I’d purposely shown
up fifteen minutes after I’d told her to meet me, hoping to avoid this very
situation. But of course, just as I sat down, I’d gotten a text from her.
Leaving now!
So I was on my second iced tea, and my third piece of bread at this little
café in Asheville, the kind of place I’d thought Jessica—Chess—would
like, waiting for the real Chess while the picture of her splashed across her
book cover beamed back at me.
She’s sitting on the floor in the photo, wearing a white shirt and jeans,
her feet bare, her toenails painted a bright melon, pose casual and smile
bright under the title You Got This!
That’s her thing: the self-help beat. She sort of fell into it when a friend
of ours from college, Stefanie, started a website, some kind of women and
wellness thing that I can’t even remember the name of. Chess started out
doing a little advice feature for the site, and one of her answers,
encouraging a woman to break up with her shitty boyfriend and leave her
shitty job, went viral.
I understood why. The response was classic Chess: breezy and funny,
but also getting to the heart of the matter in a way that was blunt without
being cruel. You know what you have to do here—I mean, you wrote to me,
you’re obviously smart (except where it comes to guys. And jobs. But we
can fix that).
I’d been getting pep talks like this from her for years, after all. Still, I
thought the biggest it would get was a BuzzFeed article called “Twentyseven Reasons We Want to Make This Advice Columnist Our Bestie!!”
But somehow, it just kept growing. Suddenly, her Insta- gram had
thousands, then hundreds of thousands of followers. She stopped writing for
Stefanie’s site and took a job at Salon, then the Cut, and then there was a
book deal. Things My Mama Never Taught Me hit every bestseller list there
is, and before I knew it, Chess was famous.
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