#spent literally all day at the mall with my husband walking around before we saw monkey man

[chaoticsoft]

i love my new hell divers shirt!!!!!!!!! 💛🖤

[cafedanslanuit]

chapter guide | prev. chapter | next chapter

✖   —   chapter summary: Now that Zeke has explained what truly happened with Yelena, all your troubles have finally ended. Except that now you need to start avoiding Porco. However, things change once you overhear a conversation in the woman's bathroom.

✖   —   pairing: porco/reader & zeke/reader

✖   —   chapter tags/warnings: college au, descriptions of panic attacks, lots of self-doubt, gaslighting, hurt/comfort, fluff, referenced cheating. 

✖   —   a/n: i have posted the playlist that goes with this series! click here to check this post <3

chapter three: me and my husband

Porco looked at his cellphone, an ill sensation filling up his stomach as he read over and over your last messages. For the past few days, he had been trying to reach out to you but he had been rejected every time.

He knew something wrong was going on the moment you said you couldn’t make it to his lacrosse game. Ever since you became friends, you hadn’t missed a single game. He had once seen you finishing an essay on your phone and sending it while you were sitting on the bleachers, excited for the game to begin. He had seen you falling asleep on his shoulder during a party after a game, too tired from studying for a test that you took earlier.

Porco sighed. He wished he could find any other reason to explain your behaviour but the only one that came to his mind was his late night confession to you. He shouldn’t have told you he loved you. Now you were avoiding him and his feelings and he was scared he had lost your friendship completely.

He put the phone on his back pocket and grabbed his keys, heading to the parking lot. After getting into his car, he turned on the radio and drove out of the campus, entering the main highway of the city. He wasn’t sure where he was heading to, but all he knew is that he wanted to stop thinking about you, the moment he thought you had shared and the dry messages that followed.

He had really fucked it up.

…

 Sitting on your faculty’s corridor floor, you looked over at the texts Porco had been sending you the past week. It physically pained you to be so curt with someone that meant so much to you. Porco had always been there for you, even in the times you had told him you really didn’t need him. He cared when you got sick, when you were sad and also when you wanted company to crash a party on campus. You two had been inseparable since the day you met and he was already acquaintances with Annie and Armin due to all the time he had spent at your place.

This was the right thing to do, you told yourself one more time, closing your Instagram. You were taking the right decision. Porco had fallen in love with you and then had tried to make you think your boyfriend had cheated on you. If Zeke hadn’t pointed that out for you, you probably wouldn’t have noticed until it was too late. Truly, you were lucky Zeke had been understanding about the whole situation and had forgiven you for not trusting in him.

Porco wasn’t a bad person. You knew in your heart he wasn’t. But you had been wrong to trust he had your best interest in his mind.

That’s what didn’t make sense. Why had Porco, sweet and caring Porco had suddenly decided to put you against Zeke only just because he had caught feelings for you? The Porco you knew wouldn’t have done that. If he truly only wanted to drive you away from Zeke, he would have let you kiss him the night he spent with you. He would have taken the opportunity, right? So, why didn’t he?

Your head started hurting.

Your thumb ghosted over Porco’s contact on your phone, wondering whether to call him or not. You missed him dearly and knew that if you asked him to be honest, he would. There were countless moments in the past where he had been honest with you, from the time he confessed to accidentally stepping on your foundation powder and the time he opened up about his father’s death.

He’ll say anything to make you doubt your relationship with me.

Zeke’s voice resonated in your ears and you bit your tongue. He was right. You needed to remember Porco was trying to put you against your boyfriend.

Before you could think of a counterargument, you shot a quick text to Zeke. Yes. A day with your boyfriend would help you keep your mind busy.

“wanna hang out later? <3”

You watched intently, a small smile on your face as the three dots twinkled on your screen. Zeke’s answer came a few seconds later.

“Can’t. Exam tomorrow :(“

He then sent you a picture of a couple of books over a table that you recognized as the university’s library. He also had the tumbler you had given him a couple of months ago, filled with straight black coffee if you had to take a guess.

“:(( okaaaay, good luck on your exam, love u!”

“<3”

You put your phone away and sighed. You missed Zeke too. The few days after you had confronted him about the time you thought you saw Yelena and him kissing, he had showered you with love. You had spent the weekend at his place wearing nothing but an old t-shirt of his and making love several times a day. You snuggled to him on the couch as he watched an old documentary and playfully took the cigar from his lips and took a puff yourself. ‘Ladies like you shouldn’t smoke,’ he had said playfully as he took it back from your lips and then pressed a kiss on your temple.

Nevertheless, the short honeymoon phase after you made up had come to an end. You knew it was going to happen, but now your body and heart were craving more of him and his classes were taking all his time. If it wasn’t an exam it was a group project or a study session and even if you knew seniors had it way harder than you, you missed him. Missed his beard scratching your neck, his strong cologne and his deep chuckle whenever you managed to make him smile.

Maybe you could walk around the mall. You still had some birthday money and you could treat yourself a little. Maybe a new body cream or a pair of cute underwear from Victoria Secret to surprise your boyfriend after he was done with his classes. Yes, a shopping trip was exactly what you needed to stop thinking so much. Smiling, you walked to the bathroom of your faculty, just a quick detour to freshen up before you got into your car. 

You looked at yourself in the mirror and took out your lipstick, fixing it carefully.

“I fucking hate her.”

You turned around as you saw three girls entering the bathroom. They stood by your side, none of them seeming to notice your presence. One of them fixing her hair, another was looking down at her phone, eyebrows knitted together and mumbling more and more curses and the last one just leaned against the bathroom stalls, arms crossed against her chest as she watched the other two.

“We did tell you she wasn’t meant to be trusted,” she reminded the girl with the phone. When she raised her head, you recognized her as Pieck, one of Porco’s close friends, who you had seen around at a lot of parties and on many of his Instagram photos.

“How is that helping me?” Pieck asked icily.

“I’m just saying, Yelena is shady. Telling you all that crap about only being able to open up with you— and for what? For her to post photo after photo of her fuckboy?” the girl in front of the mirror said. “Like, nobody needs to know you’re getting it at the library, why post about it? Literally, nobody cares.”

“She’s not worth it,” the other girl interjected. 

“She really isn’t, babe. And Zeke isn’t even that hot,” her friend continued with a mocking laugh. “The one that looks like a clown is her, not you. Just let it go.”

“He truly is a bad case of the monkey face,” Pieck agreed with a snort. “Men like that are what keep me a lesbian.”

“Hi Pieck,” you greeted her. For the first time, Pieck looked your way and widened her eyes, recognizing you in an instant.

“Hey,” she said in an apologetic voice. “I— I’m sorry. Shouldn’t have said that.”

You faked a chuckle. “It’s okay. I just wanted to say you shouldn’t worry about them, Yelena is—”

“Yeah, yeah, we both shouldn’t worry. You’re probably trying to move on and ignore them too,” Pieck sighed and then pursed her lips in discomfort. “But I know you were Zeke’s girlfriend for a while, it’s normal you don’t want to hear about who he’s fucking now—”

“Zeke and I are still together,” you interrupted her.

Pieck’s face fell at your words. She looked at her friends, who were also looking at each other with an indecipherable expression. Your furrowed your eyebrows, confused as to why they were sharing those glances. Why would they think you weren’t with Zeke? Sure, you hadn’t posted photos with him lately but that didn’t mean you weren’t together anymore.

“I’ll catch up with you in a bit,” Pieck said softly to her friends. They nodded and said they would be by the cafeteria before leaving. Once they went away, Pieck closed the bathroom door and walked to you again.

“Why— why would you think we’re not together?” you insisted, your voice trembling more than you would have wanted.

“Yelena and Zeke are fucking,” she sentenced in a soft voice. You shook your head.

“I know that’s what it looks like but Yelena likes women,” you said. “You— I mean you guys were dating or something, right? You know she’s a lesbian, she’s just pretending to have something with Zeke so her parents back off for a while.”

Pieck’s silence was deafening.

“Right?” you pushed. “It’s cool because she’s a lesbian and—”

“Yelena is bisexual.”

You paused, blinking as you tried to understand. After a few seconds, you shook your head.

“She’s not.”

“The reason we’re not dating anymore is because I saw her fucking Zeke at a party,” she explained.

“No,” you said, and shook your head once more. “No, because if it happened at a party then someone would have seen them. Someone would have noticed, there would have been rumours, I would have  known . Pieck, someone would have told me, Reiner, Marcel, Porco—”

“They weren’t there. Almost everyone was a senior.”

“Then you! You would have told me,” you cried. “You’re telling me you saw my boyfriend fucking someone else and didn’t tell me!? Pieck—!”

“I thought you weren’t together anymore!” she defended herself. “What was I supposed to think when every single one of his friends at that shitty apartment knew he was fucking her in the bedroom and they all acted like it was a normal thing to do? I see all these photos of both of them and…” she continued, shaking her phone. “Of course I think he’s not with you anymore! Yelena is uploading pictures as she rests her legs on his lap, about their movie dates at his place and you want me to think she has a girlfriend!?”

Tears started falling from your eyes as she spoke. You sniffled, trying to compose yourself but you could feel every muscle of your body shaking.

“Does Porco know?” you asked in a whisper.

“Porco?”

“I know you two are best friends since high school. You— you had to tell him. If this was real, if this happened, you had to tell Porco,” you reasoned. “So tell me, Pieck, does Porco know?” you insisted, raising your voice, hating the way it cracked at the end.

Pieck shook her head. “I told him Yelena cheated on me, didn’t tell him with who.”

“Why?”

“Because he told me not to date Yelena, said she wasn’t a good person. I didn’t want to prove Porco right, you know him,” Pieck said with a small shrug.

You nodded idly, your eyes lost. No. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t— even if it did. It did make sense but it  couldn’t make sense. Because if Pieck was right, if Yelena and Zeke were—

No.

“Give me a date,” you whispered.

“What?”

“When was this?”

“I don’t— Two weeks ago?”

“I need to know the exact date, Pieck.”

“Girl, I don’t remember exactly, I—”

“Give me a date, Pieck!” you sobbed, raising your voice. She sighed and nodded, taking out her phone.

You watched as Pieck went through her messages with Yelena, scrolling up as she tried to remember the date. Your breath was hitching, inhaling more than you were exhaling but you didn’t care. You wanted to know when it was. Pieck was going to tell you it happened on a date where he was with you. She was going to say it happened one of the nights you and Zeke stayed the weekend at his place and then you would know she’s lying. Yes, that was going to happen. She would tumble over her own lie and this nightmare would be over.

“March 31st,” Pieck murmured. “I kept texting her, asking where she was before I went to look for her,” she reminisced, before showing you her phone.

.

.

                                                            00:36

. 

                                                                                           lena where are u

                                                                                                            ?????

                                          why are my friends saying you’re with zeke rn

                                                                                         yelena answer me

                                                                                    fuck u i’m going there

                                                            01:19

 .

                                                FUCK YOU YELENA YOURE THE WORST

                                                                  PIECE OF SHIT IVE EVER MET

                                                                            REALLY???? ZEKE?????

                                                                           HOPE YOU GET HERPES

                                                                                 I FUCKING HATE YOU

babe, i’m sorry

can we talk?

.

. 

A bitter taste crept inside your mouth as you took out your phone and went through yours and Zeke’s messages, looking desperately for the date. It was the weekend you spent together. It had to be. The memories of Zeke’s kitchen calendar that said April were lying to you. It had to be March. Or maybe he changed the calendar because he was with you on March 31st.

You scrolled up until March and went to read the messages exchanged on that day.

.

.

                                                            07:23

.

Good morning! I know it’s really early

But I want to see you today <3

Meet me at the tennis court?

                                                                                  sure, i’ll take an uber :)

.

.

Silent sobs escaped your mouth as your phone started shaking in your trembling hands. Pieck whispered apologies and you wanted nothing more than to tell her to shut up, that it wasn’t her fault, that she wasn’t the one that swore she wanted to marry you and then went to fuck someone else at a party, not caring if he was seen or not.

But it wasn’t true. Zeke said it was just a ruse, that Yelena just wanted to hide her queerness, that they were just good friends. He said so. Pieck had to be lying, she had to be. She was just messing with you, lying to see how much you could believe her. Because Zeke wouldn’t do that, you were the one he trusted, you were the one he was going to marry, you—

Pieck was still holding her phone in front of you.

With the very same date.

And Yelena admitting her crime.

But it couldn't be right. There had to be a mistake because Zeke loved you. He loved you and he had told you about his family, he had taken you to meet his grandparents, he promised he hadn’t kissed Yelena that night, he—

Had he not kissed her?

Was it only a movie night?

…

No, it hadn’t.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Pieck’s voice sounded far, your lips parted as you tried to gasp for air. You lifted your head and saw her lips moving but you couldn’t hear any sound but your heart beating out of your chest. Tingles started creeping on your fingers and without you being able to do anything to prevent it, you dropped your phone on the bathroom floor.

Why didn’t it make a sound?

Why were your fingers numb?

You lifted your head and Pieck was gone. Dismissing her sudden disappearance, you crouched down and picked your phone. You winced at the huge crack on your screen and slid your finger several times over it until you could press on Zeke’s contact and call him.

As his phone rang, you pressed your back on the wall, slowly sinking until you were sitting on the floor.

“Baby, I told you I was studying for this test, I can’t—”

“I know about you and Yelena,” you said in a broken voice. You heard him let out an annoyed sigh on the other line.

“Didn’t we talk about this already? I told you she’s not—”

“I know about the party. The day we played baseball and— that same night you went to a party and fucked her,” you sobbed. You wiped the tears on your face with the back of your hand. “Zeke, tell me it’s a lie, tell me you didn’t do this, please,  please  tell me you didn’t really fuck Yelena,” you begged. “Please.”

“You know what? Get some help. Like, psychological help. This isn’t normal.”

The silence after Zeke hung up choked you. Your chest rose up and down as you sobbed uncontrollably. Your brain was screaming. Loudly. ‘Make it stop,’ you told yourself. ‘Get it together. Make it stop.’

Make it stop.

                         Make it stop.

                                                 Make it stop.

                                                                         Make it stop.

                                                                                                 Make it stop.

 It’s a lie.

                                                                                                  Make it stop.

He lied to you.

                                                                                                              Stop.

He fucked her.

                                                                                                 Please, stop.

He lied.

                                                                                              I can’t breathe.

.

.

                                             Inhale.

                                                                            Exhale.

                                            Inhale.

                                                                            Exhale.

                                            Inhale.

                                                            Inhale. 

                                                            Inhale. 

                                                            Inhale.

.

.

…

When you woke up, Porco was there.

Your head felt heavy as you tried to sit up, rubbing your eyes. A quick look around let you know you were in your apartment but you weren’t sure as to  how , or why your friend was there, his phone on his lap and his eyes looking at you filled with worry.

He whispered your name as if his voice could hurt you. “How are you feeling?”

“What are you doing here?” you asked groggily. You noticed your throat was hurting as well. “What hour is it?” you mumbled as you palmed your jean pockets looking for your phone. You found it hidden between two pillows and pressed the power button, trying to see if you had any unread messages.

None.

“Pieck called me,” Porco explained. “And it’s eight and a half.”

Pieck. Pieck with her friends in the bathroom, Pieck with the text messages. Everything came back to you in a second and you couldn’t help but wince at the way your head hurt.

“How are you feeling?” he insisted. You took a deep breath. The small movement made you realize how much the muscles of your back were hurting along with your arms. You licked your lips, hating how dry they felt against your tongue.

“I broke my phone.”

Porco furrowed his eyebrows. “What?”

“I— I dropped it. There’s a crack on the screen.”

He nodded slowly and looked down at his shoes, his forearms resting on his knees. You could almost listen to his loud thoughts, one coming after another inside his head. Porco sighed and turned his head back to you.

“Want me to get it fixed? Marcel knows a guy, I’m sure he can get it done by tomorrow.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s working just fine,” you said, passing your thumb over the crack. “No need to change it.”

Porco watched your eyes get lost on the dark screen and tightened his lips. He had the urge to throw your phone out of your window, make you understand you had to leave it, that it wasn’t good for you, that you didn’t need it, that you didn’t need  him —

Instead, he nodded.

“What happened?” you asked.

Porco paused, deliberating his words before speaking. “Pieck called and told me what you guys talked about and that… you didn’t take it well. She said you were crying and— that you had a panic attack, so she left the bathroom to look for help. She found Armin and he was the one that helped you regain your breath. Once you settle down, he called Annie to tell her what happened and she picked you up. When I got here you were already asleep on the couch, Annie said it was okay if I waited here.”

“I… don’t remember much,” you confessed with a grimace. “I don’t remember Armin helping me out. I— I do remember what Pieck and I talked about, though. Wish I could forget it instead,” you snorted. 

“Wanna talk about it?”

You shook your head.  Ouch . Why did every muscle of your body hurt so much?

“Wanna watch some shitty reality TV?” he offered. He didn’t miss the way a small smile appeared on your face.

In a matter of minutes, Porco had gone into your room and brought your laptop, and started looking for the show on Netflix. He put your laptop on his thighs and let you crawl by his side, your head resting against his shoulder.

“Wish they had Ink Master,” you sighed, as the intro of Netflix’s newest reality show played on your screen.

“We both know Netflix doesn’t have good shows.”

You snorted. “Black Mirror is good.”

“And yet we’re watching The Circle,” Porco teased you.

“Weren’t you the one that binged Season 1 on one night and then asked me to do the same so you could rant?” you reminded him with a playful tone.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied nonchalantly, making you chuckle.

What followed next was a comfortable silence. One episode went by and Porco made no attempts to stop it from automatically playing the second episode. You snuggled closer, the fabric of his green jacket feeling nice against your cheek. How long had it been since you felt so much peace with someone else by your side?

In any other situation, you would be commenting on it, pressing pause just to bitch and rant about the contestants or make quick runs to the kitchen. But Porco was sitting still, his eyes fixed on the screen and his arms crossed in front of his chest. He was trying to comfort you the best way he could, knowing any words would fail, he aimed to create a safe space for you and not force you to behave normally when you both knew better than to completely ignore what had happened earlier.

Right. Zeke.

You felt your eyes watering and bit the inside of your cheek to prevent them from falling down. Focusing on your breath, you inhaled and exhaled rhythmically until the knot in your throat seemed to loosen up. Your feelings towards Zeke were confusing, a part of you wanting to run, look for him and demand an explanation. Another part of you wanted to face with, punch his stupid little face until you got tired and leave him on the floor. And another, maybe a bigger part of you wanted him to cradle you in his strong arms, kiss your temple and scratch your skin with his beard as he whispered sweet nothings to you.

You swallowed. Maybe Zeke was right. Maybe you did need psychological help.

Could you trust his words if he were to provide another explanation? Could you ever trust in him again? Most of all, could you trust yourself? Many voices had different opinions inside your head, yet they all agreed on something.

You were miserable.

“Every time I’m not with him, I’m anxious,” you mumbled, the words leaving your mouth before you thought them over. Porco moved his hand to pause the show, but you gestured to him not to. “And when he’s with me…” you continued, “I feel like I’m drowning.”

Your voice cracked at the end. Porco’s hand twitched, not sure what to do next. Should he hold you, put an arm around your shoulder to comfort you? Should he not move a muscle until you were done? Should he offer a word of comfort? He turned his head to you and noticed tears were silently streaming down your face.

“If Zeke was in front of me right now and told me Pieck lied her ass off, even after all the proof she showed me today… I would believe him. I would,” you sobbed. “And I hate myself so much for it. I’m so tired of this, I’m so tired of loving him, Pock.”

Porco’s hand cupped your head, his fingers gently caressing your hair. You snuggled closer to him, his perfume soothing the pain inside your heart and his gentle gesture comforting you. That was the magic Porco had. You knew he wasn’t always good with his words and most of the time he preferred to show rather than tell and boy, did he do a spectacular good job at showing you how much he cared.

He was there. Even after you had been ignoring him for over two weeks, he was here with his green jacket and his earthy-scented perfume ready to hold you if you needed him. And you did. You could never think of a moment where you wouldn’t want him to be there with you. 

You wiped your face with the back of your hand and reluctantly pulled away from his touch, turning on your seat so you were facing him. You paused your show and put a strand of your hair behind your ear.

“Thank you,” you said, biting down your bottom lip. “For being here and waiting until I woke up. I— I’ve been such a bad friend to you,” you sighed. “I’m so sorry, I just—”

Porco shook his head. “No. I’m sorry for what I said the night I stayed here.”

“No, you don’t need to— I mean— I wasn’t mad about it,” you fumbled with your words, feeling your cheeks heat up.

“I don’t know,” Porco shrugged. “Felt like I made you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t,” you assured him. “Thank you for staying with me that night. I really didn’t want to be alone.”

“I just— Can I say something else? Promise this is the last time I talk about it.” You nodded. “I didn’t love you the first time I met you,” he blurted, shrugging. “I mean, it’s not like I saw you and caught feelings— first time I saw you you were drunk off your ass at Reiner’s party. I was your friend first. Still am, nothing will change that. And honestly? I wouldn’t be surprised if my feelings went away,” he chuckled. “Who knows. Might finally meet someone else and fall for them.”

“Yeah, maybe you’ll meet someone,” you agreed with a strained smile.

“Whatever happens, know that before anything else, I’m your friend,” Porco said, golden eyes setting on yours. “And that will never change. You’re stuck with me.”

“And you’re stuck with me.”

“See any other reason why I’m watching a shitty reality show on a Tuesday night?”

At this, you hit Porco with one of the pillows, square on his face. You couldn’t help but laugh at his stunned face.

“You’re  so  fucked,” he said, putting the laptop on the coffee table in front of him.

You took this as a sign to run, the ache in your muscles forgotten at the back of your head as you tried to dodge the pillows Porco was throwing at you. Your legs weren’t weak anymore, as you quickly jumped to avoid the furniture and picked up one of the pillows to throw it back at him. Your heart was no longer aching, but jumping as you cackled when Porco tripped and fell. Even if your eyes were watering again, this time was due to the excessive laughter. And yes, your breath was hitching but it was thanks to Porco chasing you around the living room.

You let yourself fall on the floor next to Porco, the coldness of the floor soothing your skin as he dramatically held his knee against his chest like an injured soccer player. You turned your head to him, smiling at his antics as he filled your heart with happiness once  more.

Maybe that had been his power all along.

[oikawasbread]

Oooo how abt prompt #18, akaashi x reader? Fluff please 🥰

  hi darlinggg!! yes ofc ! I hope you like it; it came out way longer than I wanted.

18.Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

 AKAASHI KEIJI x READER – IT COULD BE OUR THING – crack & fluff

¬ present day ¬

 Y/N’S POV :         “I. Am. Going. To. Kill. This. Man.”       “Y/n, I understand, but please calm down!!”

¬ about 3 days ago ¬

       “Darling, it’s alright. Calm down. It’s just a 3 days trip with the boys.. you know how much they struggled planning this whole thing.. and it’s Kuroo and Bokuto we’re talking about.’’       “Alright.. you’re right on this one. But please, Keiji. You better not be late at your own wedding.”       “It’s a promise.”   ¬ present day ¬

  BOKUTO’S POV :         “SHE IS GOING TO KILL US ALLLLLLL!!!!!”      “BOKUTO SHUT UP!! WE ARE GOING TO FIND HIM, DON’T LOSE HOPE BRO.”

     “Not trying to make you lose hope but his location isn’t on.”       “Say sike right now Kenma.”       “I can’t say it, Kuroo.”       The car was under the most awkward silence ever. No one had no idea of what should they do or say.         “I am sorry for your loss, man.” Seijoh’s ex captain says, sarcastically wiping a tear off his eye.

       “What the hell are you even doing here Oikawa, were we even friends in highschool?” says Bokuto, not even bothering looking at him.

      “Yeah Oikawa, honestly Bokuto has a point.”       “But Iwa-chan! You weren’t friends with them either!!”       “Yeah but they like me.” Everyone nods.       “Well if you must know, I’m friends with Daichi! And since I’m a part of the ex pretty captains & pretty setters squad, of course I am here.”       “Pretty squad what now? Have you spent too much time with your fan girls??” Kuroo replies slightly annoyed but amused at the same time.       “EVERYONE SHUT THE HELL UP! WHERE IS AKAASHI BECAUSE WE CAN’T GO TO HIS WEDDING WITHOUT HIM. Y/N WILL KILL EACH ONE OF US.”       “Dude, we are still hungover, stop shouting.. We are literally in the same car.”       “I agree with you, Oikawa.”      “WA- What??? What is Ushiwaka even doing here ???? Since WHEN! Who had the audacity??”

     “I remember being a part of the beautiful captains squad as well, Oikawa.”       “It’s PRETTY, boke. Not beautiful. And you’re not a part of it.”      “GUYS PLEASE SHUT UP ! SUGA TURN AROUND WE’RE GONNA SEARCH FOR AKAASHI!!”       “Your wish is my command, Daichi!!” *zzzzz..*      “Eye sorry to bother but do we have something to eat-“      “Ewww Tobio-CHAN! Who had the audac-“ Everyone : Oikawa shut up.   ¬ a few hours later.¬        The boys arrived at the building where they knew they saw Akaashi the last time, which was a well-known strip club. Everyone was pissing themselves. If they caught Akaashi cheating on Y/n, it was over for everyone, mostly for the future groom.      Finding Akaashi was a lot harder than they expected ; firstly because you needed a VIP Pass, which none of them didn’t had, and secondly because everyone was still hungover and the building was huge so they were most likely to be late and ,very soon, dead by Y/n’s hand.

     “I’d say : Let’s split up!”      “ Kuroo.. what if someone else gets lost?”      “No, Tooru. Think about it : would you rather be killed by Y/n or just be careful to not get lost?”      “Alright, everyone, let’s split up. Since I am the captai-“      “ You are… what now?” Ushijima’s face literally made everyone burst out laughing; the man was so emotionless.      “Sorry, I forgot. Almost everyone in here is a captain. But guess who isn’t!! IT’S YOU TOBIO!!”      “Yeah, but where is the vending machine?”      “Anyways, hear me out useless captains. I go with Kuroo, Oikawa you go with Tobio. Iwaizumi takes Bokuto and -wait where is Wakatoshi??”       Everyone remains silent and the panic is starting to catch up with them. Oikawa was the only one smiling proudly, but immediately looks disappointed as soon as he sees the club’s doors opening.      Wakatoshi comes back outside after sneaking in, carrying Akaashi’s motionless body. As soon as he got closer, the boys gasped in terror.

      “WHAT THE HELL AKAASHII???? HOW DID U MANAGE TO HAVE A BABY IN 3 DAYS!!!!!!! THAT BABY BETTER BE Y/N’S!!”       “Bro shut up, why are you even yelling, the security will notice us.”       “Oh shit you’re right, sorry.”       “Well let’s go to the mall.” Oikawa says smiling at the camera and gesturing towards Akaashi’s still motionless body.        “All right. I will drive, indeed.” Wakatoshi says confused.        “Guys are y’all making a.. tiktok.. right. now. ????”         “Yeah Bokuto. Without you, now shut up lemme post it.”         “O-oh.. Alright:( .”         “DAMN NO OIKAWA WAIT DON’T POST---“         “Sorry Daichi, ugly faces don’t get to make an appearance on my account.”         Tobio bursts out laughing, holding himself by his stomach just like Kuroo taught him.

         “Holy shit Oikawa. I may be your junior but you still are dumb as a brick!!!!”          “Tobio-chan do you want me to slap the audacity out of you like I never got the chance in-. Oh shit wait I have a comment under my tiktok.”          Oikawa’s jaw drops and everyone has the most judgy glare, stabbing him with their eyes.           “ Why didn’t y’all tell me Y/n was following me on tiktok??? I wouldn’t have posted it!!”           “What did she say??” asks Suga, patting Oikawa on his head to make him feel less guilty.           “Uhh..Bring Akaashi home, alive, or me and the girls will burn you, volleyball idiots. Right, fucking, now.”            “Bro let’s hurry, I can’t let my man Akaashi getting divorced right before he gets married.”

           “Alright, bye Wakatoshi gotta blast!”            “Oikawa, I am indeed coming with you, all.”            “BOKUTO WAIT!!! WHAT ABOUT THE BABY???”             “Move it, Kuroo, he has enough place in the car.”             “Dude do you even have a brain? You can’t just steal someone’s baby!”              “Shut up Mr. Flatass, of course I can. Watch me.”            “EXCUSE ME!! I AM TRULY SORRY!!” The woman runs towards them and stops in  front of Kuroo, who was holding her baby, to catch her breath.            “Thank you so much for finding my son! I can’t thank you enough!”

¬      Great. Now the boys finally arrived at the wedding, with an alive and perfectly fine Akaashi, but with some really really sleepy hungover friends of his. Everyone was probably in the church, since the yard was empty. Akaashi already knew that he screwed up; Y/n’s dad would probably beat him up and her mom would step on his throat. Bokuto gives him a thumbs up and the boys are encouraging him to go inside.      As soon as the the doors opened, everyone had the attention on the man who was late at his own wedding. He was walking down the aisle, not even bothering to be ashamed of everyone’s judgeful looks, because Y/n was in front of him; wearing the most beautiful yet simple dress, blushing, but trying to look mad. He took a minute to look around and process everything, and he realised that this was the big day of his life : him and Y/n would start a marriage, and soon a family. But he was late, making her wait and probably think that he’s backing down.

      Y/n didn’t fail to notice the sudden change of expression on Akaashi’s face, so she cups his cheek with one of her hands, giving him a reassuring smile.       “Weren’t you the one who was supposed to wait for me at the aisle?”       He smiles, scratching the back of his head. How could she not be mad? Did Y/n really trust him THAT much?       “Don’t worry, Keiji. This could be our thing, you know… Imagine our children’s faces when we tell them how our wedding went.”       That was it. Now the man was a blushing mess. Children? He couldn’t wait for that.       Everyone was listening at the conversation that was happening; but no one was annoyed or bored; they were enjoying young love.

     “Y/n… I am truly sorry. But.. I had to take care of the boys.. and there was this baby at the strip club, I have no idea.. Things got crazy and I was taking care of that kid because no one seemed to care. Don’t worry, I didn’t let Bokuto-san to give him Tequila shots. But i-“

     She giggles and everyone looks at them amused by the whole situation.        “Don’t worry, darling. I told you, it’s our thing from now on. But don’t make me wait for you everytime..”        He sighs in relief. Akaashi couldn’t be more happier now, that he was finally here, crossing destinies with the love of his life.        “And how could I even get mad at you after you took care of a baby? Who knows what could’ve happen to him if you weren’t there?” she was brightly smiling, but as soon as she looked in the boys’ direction, she had the most scary look in her eyes. Y/n was clearly aiming at the fact that she’s going to have a discussion with them.         And so, the wedding went on; they continued the ceremony and went to the after party.        ¬         “Oh my god, Bokuto.. you have my condoleances.”

        “Thank you, Kuroo.. I really appreciate it. He was a great wing man, a great friend, a-“         “I still am, Bokuto-san. I’m not dead...But you guys are going to be the best uncles.” he giggles,  not even being surprised by his friends’ conversation. Akaashi sat down, next to his two best friends.          “Honestly, today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. And if I think of it, I’ll be the luckiest man even tomorrow, and the day after, until I’ll no longer be here.”    “Are you drunk, Akaashi? Or is this really how marriage feels?”     “Kuroo.. this isn’t about the marriage. And no, I’m not.” he says with the most unbothered expression ever. “It’s about the person you’re spending your life with; I could be her husband, the father of her kids, or just her boyfriend; the marriage itself won’t change anything. I mean, yeah.. you will feel like the relationship touched the next level; but it’s about Y/n. I’ve dreamed about this day since we were at the beginning of our relationship; and I can’t wait to live my whole life with her by my side.”

      “Damn.. that sounds beautiful.But I can’t wait to tell  your kids how their father was late at his wedding and made their mother wait.” Bokuto couldn’t stop laughing now.       Kuroo joined him and they were laughing like crazy, hitting Akaashi in his shoulder playfully. Three best friends, gazing at the stars on such a beautiful day. He couldn’t ask for more : Y/n was finally his wife and his high school best friends were there with him, too.

       “ You know what can’t I wait for, guys?” Akaashi asks looking down, smiling, but not wanting Kuroo and Bokuto to see him.       The two look at him, a little scared, because he wasn’t laughing anymore; they suddenly stopped their laugh session and waiting impatiently for him to speak.

      “I can’t wait to sit here, again, at your wedding. We could make it our thing, as well.”

ugh i still have second thoughts about posting this, but anyways! I hope it was.. decent?

[lifeinliminality]

BC/AD

I want to tell this story. I think it is important to tell, especially in this moment—when collectively we are straining against the changes wrought by a global pandemic.

Maybe I should start by saying that sometimes stories are something you’ve been working on in your life for years. You’ve crafted and cultivated it. Nurtured and pruned it to your liking. But this story was thrust upon me. This story began in an instant and I could do nothing but see it play out, catch up to its lightning speed pace, and hold on for dear life.

This story began on January 13, 2018 at approximately 11:30pm. It began with a sleeping child on a gurney in a hospital emergency room with his worried parents and a hesitant ER doctor.

While holding my sleeping child, I was given the worst news you could imagine: “He has blasts in his blood. When a child has these blasts it points to leukemia or lymphoma. We’ll be admitting your son tonight.” Cancer. Six letters that spell something life changing.

I remember a teacher once describing the difference between B.C. and A.D. when referring to dates in a history book. When I was a child, I used to think about it as “Before Christ” and “After Death” (meaning Christ’s death). I always thought it was such a strange and monumental way to mark time. Now, it doesn’t seem so strange. Our lives are literally divided into B.C., “Before Cancer” and A.D. “After Diagnosis.” But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For all we knew, our son was a healthy and happy almost three year old. He was a younger brother and would soon become a big brother—just two months prior to this night we had discovered we were pregnant with our third child. He liked Paw Patrol and playing soccer and other sports. An old soul from birth, our middle child both impressed and challenged my husband and I with his iron-strong will.

He had gotten a cold shortly before Christmas. But unlike before, he didn’t bounce back to his normal effervescent self. He got pale, was emotional, lost his appetite and after we spent the night of January 12th up every hour with him moaning, my husband decided to take him to the pediatric urgent care. I had to go to work that afternoon. I run a community wide children’s program in Montclair, New Jersey. My husband said he’d take both boys to the urgent care if he still wasn’t better after his afternoon nap. I met them there that evening after the event, in time to hold my son down while they fished around for a vein from which to draw blood. I hate getting blood drawn. When I was a child, I’d had to be held down because my younger brother was sick and they wanted to make sure I was okay. It traumatized me. But more than having my blood drawn, I hated having to be the one holding my child down for this. Little did I know that this would become a routine part of our existence.

While I waited with our middle son for the blood results, the other two hit up Smashburger in the strip mall next door. It was dinner time now and we were anticipating a rush once we left the urgent care to get our kids fed and ready for bed. Instead, the doctor came in and asked if there was someone local who could take care of our older son while we went to the pediatric emergency room. She was very specific: take him to [redacted for privacy]; no, you cannot go home and eat dinner with your children first. And don’t Google anything. I remember how strange that comment was—mostly because I didn’t even know what I would Google. She hadn’t told us anything about the blood results, only that we needed to go immediately to the Pediatric ER and that she’d called ahead.

We called our pastor, and his wife came over to stay with my oldest until my sister could get out to us from Long Island City.

My husband and I spent the 20-minute car ride to the emergency room trying to distract our two year old with his favorite song at the time: I’m Still Standing from the movie SING! An Elton John classic. It instantly became our mantra in the days ahead.

So there we were, the ER doctor just left the room after dropping the cancer bombshell us. I instantly started weeping, as did my husband. It was completely surreal. An orderly came in to wheel us up to the fifth floor of the hospital. We gathered our things. I was on the gurney with our still sleeping boy. It was after midnight now. January 14th. I don’t think I fully processed that leukemia was cancer until I saw the sign “Pediatric Hematology/Oncology” painted over the door we entered on the fifth floor. It was a waking nightmare.

We were 23 days in the hospital after his initial diagnosis. The first few days were a whirl of tests, surgeries and a steady rotation of doctors, nurses, and specialists. There was paperwork to sign: releasing the doctors and hospital of liability if something happened to our child when he was under sedation for a port placement, spinal tap, and chemo infusions. There was a social worker, a nutritionist, and a flurry of texts from family members and friends as we slowly put the word out.

Around day seven we got another bombshell—type 1 diabetes. Yep. We got a “two-fer.” So not only were we learning all we could about acute lymphoblastic leukemia and fielding calls, texts, and emails from family, friends, and friends of friends who knew someone with leukemia, but we were learning how to take blood glucose readings through “finger sticks,” calculate insulin to carbohydrate ratios, and give manual insulin injections to our son. Our son lost 9 pounds—which on a tiny toddler body renders a child gaunt. He started to associate finger sticks and shots with eating, so naturally, he stopped wanting to eat. They had to put an NG tube in—a tube that goes up the nose, down the back of the throat and esophagus directly into the stomach, so that we could give him Pediasure if he didn’t eat. He caught a cold somewhere around week two, which meant isolating him to his hospital room. He rarely smiled, he mostly slept and cried about taking the few oral medications he had to take daily. By the time of discharge, he could barely walk. His muscles had atrophied from being in bed for so long. Our once very active child couldn’t even climb the stairs at home or get up from a sitting position without assistance.

The day after we were discharged we were right back in the outpatient clinic at the hospital wrapping up the first of five cycles of what is called Frontline Treatment. Each cycle, outside of that first month is 60 days. But it isn’t necessarily a straight 60 days through. Continuing treatment is tied to how a child’s blood counts (red and white blood cells, platelets, and immune cells) are doing. If they are too low, they won’t continue treatment. If they are dangerously low, you’ll be spending a full day in the clinic getting a blood or platelet transfusion. Some cycles require weekly visits to clinic, some daily. Some cycles had four day hospital admittances. It was a tsunami of information and so many appointments to keep track of, along with his diabetic appointments and my OB appointments. And when we weren’t at clinic we were at home. Our son could no longer be in his daycare. We had to forego his friends’ birthday parties and play dates. It took our boy 11 months to finish Frontline Treatment.

The isolation felt overpowering at times. The parts of life we had to give up, the ways we had to change our routines to protect his fragile immune system. We were in survival mode and mostly just trying to get through each day. He hit remission in May 2018. But while he had no detectable cancer cells in his blood, it didn’t mean there weren’t any—and we would have to complete three more years of treatment.

Fast forward to March 2020. Our son has been in what is called “long-term maintenance” for a little over two years (meaning 14 months more until we are off of treatment). He’s been thriving: back at school, managing his meds well, his endocrinology team has been very happy with how we’ve managed his diabetes amidst chemotherapy and steroid treatments . . .

We’d been increasingly worried about what we were hearing in the news about a novel virus: COVID-19. We pulled our middle child out of school a couple of days before the state stepped in and mandated stay in place orders. Suddenly, the whole world was navigating a BC/AD moment: Before Coronavirus/After Disease. Everyone’s lives were instantly changed; families were having to adjust their routines for a huge unknown. Gloves and masks and disinfectant: a norm in our lives for two years now, were becoming household staples.

During our son’s frontline treatment we did not have to follow recent practices to the extreme, but since the stay in place orders, so many of our friends and family have been reaching out. “So this is what this was like.” Yes. Yes, this is a lot like what we have navigated since our son was diagnosed with leukemia. It’s hard, right?

It is hard. And the collective grief that we are all processing as a result of losing jobs, daily routines, a sense of control, and even loved ones can be overwhelming at times. But always, always amidst the darkness, there is light. There is joy and gratitude that can be cultivated and expressed. There are acts of selflessness and generosity to be witnessed and to perform. This is the “brutiful” gift of a situation like this. And really, this is an opportunity to pause and take stock of what is essential to our human existence and to a life well lived.

Nobody asked for this. Nobody wants it. But we find ourselves in the midst of it anyway. What we do and how we hold space in this time is what will matter moving forward. It will be part of our story. That is all I can offer you. In these BC/AD moments, there isn’t a simple solution or even a lot of answers. But I do know this, we will make it through. Life moving forward will not be the same. It can’t be. But we will find our new normal. My hope? That the new normal will mean that we seek and cultivate community more. That we realize we have all been helped by others and that we NEED others to make it through this life. That we have more generosity and compassion for one another because we are more aware that we’ve all been through some shit. Selah.

[spearywritesstuff]

The Haunting of the Hilltop Mall

This is what I’m currently working on (well, the first 8 pages anyway). I’m having trouble sticking the end, but it’ll happen. It’s currently sitting at 25 pages. Anyway...

Summary: A case draws Sam, Dean, and a now human Castiel to the seemingly haunted Hilltop Mall. To gain greater access to the mall and to make a few extra bucks, the boys take over a small massage studio in the mall. They do their best to solve the case, while learning some new things about Castiel. For one thing, he’s good at massage, and for another he’s often naked. Dean is troubled.

Dean laid all stretched out on the massage table that was one of four such tables in the newly re-opened Hilltop Massage Studio. It was a small shop tucked away in the corner of the Hilltop Mall. The mall had a lot of foot traffic, and business might end up being good in time, not that that was a goal. They were here because the Hilltop Mall was haunted, like super haunted.

Cas wandered back into the shop and took a seat on the massage table next to Dean’s. “Sam back yet?”

Dean said, “You see him?”

Cas actually looked around, like he thought he might have missed Sam or something. There was literally nowhere that Sam could hide in their little shop. Well, maybe he could have hidden in the back office, but none of them ever spent time back there. It wasn’t air conditioned. “Get any customers?”

“No, didn’t expect to either.” Dean grumbled and rolled into a sitting position.

“Perhaps if you didn’t look as if you’d died on one of our massage tables, people would want to come in.”

“Fuck off. This is dumb. I mean of all the ways to get access to the mall after hours, this is just,” Dean paused as if he were really searching for the right word. Instead, he just went with repetition. “Dumb.”

“It is, and I believe you suggested it.” Cas got up then and started tidying up the already tidy front counter.

“I was joking.”

Cas rolled his eyes and said, “Guess next time you’ll be more careful when you joke. Sam was looking for any solution, and you just toss out there that we can take over the massage parlor, and I can start pulling my weight around here.”

Cas actually looked irritated. Dean felt a little bad about the last bit, but the part about taking over a massage parlor was damn funny, and he had no regrets where that was concerned. “Look, you do plenty. That was a joke. This though,” Dean waved his hands around. “This is not what I meant at all.”

“Sam explained what you meant. It wasn’t funny.”

Dean looked away a moment and said, “He did huh?”

“Yeah, I’m not sure why you thought I needed to work in a massage parlor, but Sam said that he’d be able to explain that to me. Unfortunately you came back from the breakfast run this morning, and I never got the explanation.”

Dean felt himself choking on literally nothing. Cas looked concerned. “That was a joke too. Sam won’t explain it right, so you should just let it go.” Dean started moving toward the entryway. Better to maybe stand outside of the business, try to draw people in. He glanced back at Cas who was absolutely staring at him. Yeah, here is safe. No fucking up shit out here. No explaining jokes out here either.

Of course Cas came out to stand at his side. “Should I approach people and ask them if they’d like a massage?”

“Do you even have a clue how to do that?” Dean asked.

“I have gotten much better at conversing with strangers. Sam said so at least.”

Dean ran a hand back up through his hair and leaned into the doorway. “Not what I meant.” He glanced at Cas then started surveying the crowds that were not coming through their section of the mall. “I meant, have you ever given someone a massage before?”

“I have.” Dean looked shocked. “It has been a very long time. I’m likely rusty.”

Dean absolutely did not let his mind wander over the idea of Cas running his hands all over someone. Shit. It bothered him a little that he no longer had a valid reason to offer to personally train Cas in the fine art of massage. “Well, okay then.” He was speaking just to fill the silence.

Cas was looking at him. He looked like he found Dean amusing. “Have you ever given someone a massage before?”

Dean answered quickly, “Well, yeah, lots of times. I mean, I’m no pro or anything, but I don’t get any complaints.”

“Now there’s a strong endorsement,” Sam said as he walked up from the other side.

Dean chose to ignore the comment and asked, “So you find anything?”

“The archives down at City Hall didn’t have the old documents on this land either. Pretty much everything is just, ‘empty land’ and then ‘mall.’ It’s like this place has never been anything before.”

Cas said, “Well, we know that isn’t true.”

“Yeah, we’re missing something, or someone is hiding something,” Dean agreed.

“Was thinking.” Sam moved past them into the shop. “If you two don’t mind keeping up appearances here for a bit longer, I’d like to take the sensor into the delivery bays around the building.”

“Have at it.” Dean came in and plopped down into one of the over stuffed chairs. “Cas and I got this.”

“Yeah, enjoy all of the honest wage earning.” Sam headed out. The place grew quiet again. Cas went back to the entryway to stare out at the rest of the mall.

Dean stared at him. It’s what they did. If they could just earn money from prolonged staring, they’d be wealthy men, well, a wealthy man and an ex-angel. Dean assumed Cas didn’t think of himself as a man yet, despite the fact that he chose to fall. It was strange to think about. Dean thought about it quite often too. Why give all of that up? It wasn’t that Dean didn’t get part of it all. Angels were dicks after all, but the power that came with being an angel had to be better than what he had now. It just didn’t make sense, and Dean wasn’t sure how to broach the subject without sounding like an ass.

Dean wondered how long they’d have to pretend at this whole small business venture. Cas wasn’t wrong; it was partly his idea, but really it started with Sam. He found the case, and it was clearly their sort of thing, odd smells, flickering lights, cold drafts, dead bodies. They tried investigating it in their usual FBI garb, only to find that they were late to the party. Some feds were already in town, asking questions and digging through the morgue. They didn’t want to deal with any of that, so Sam suggested just being a bunch of mallrats for a week. They hung out in the food court, talked to people, and mostly kept their eyes open for any other weird stuff. Nothing came of it.

Then the next pair of deaths happened. There were delivery tunnels running under one side of the mall. One of the business owners was down there, then he wasn’t. The security footage was grainy and cut out at the end, but it showed the guy glowing, then blowing up. They wouldn’t have gotten access to that if it hadn’t been for Cas cozying up to one of the security guards. She was cute and bubbly and way too young for him, in Dean’s opinion.

Hell, everyone’s too young for Cas. Dean let his eyes roam back to Cas, who was still leaning into the entryway. So, they were no closer to figuring out what was going on, and they were starting to get weird looks from people when they tried to strike up conversations. They also needed to have regular access to the mall after hours. You couldn’t get that without owning one of the shops, so a plan hatched when Dean made his little joke.

In his defence, he wouldn’t have joked if another death wouldn’t have occurred, this time in the massage studio. They saw this one happen. They took care of the mess. And when they started skulking around the now abandoned massage studio, people started needing a reason. Sam claimed that he was an employee, and that they were taking over for the prior owner. Somehow, people bought it. Now here they were. Sam had to take it one step farther though. He suggested that they actually work at the place, make some real money while they investigate. Dean couldn’t see the harm in that, but it didn’t really sound doable. Cas liked the plan though, so who was he to complain?

Dean’s thoughts were interrupted by Cas moving his arm up to the topmost portion of the entryway frame, and that move pulled his shirt up just a little. A thin patch of tan skin peeked out of the space. When did he get sun there? As if that was the most important question. Dean licked his lips and kept on staring. He was gonna do this all day it seemed. Then Cas brought his arm down and looked suddenly professional. “Hello,” Cas said to someone that Dean couldn’t see from where he was sitting.

Dean could hear a woman’s voice and what sounded like an army of children. Cas was motioning into the shop. Dean stood up. A woman moved into the space, attractive, blonde with three kids fastened to her via backpack leashes. “I don’t think this’ll work. I don’t know what I was thinking. They were just so calm at home, and my back was killing me.”

“You don’t need to worry. As luck would have it, we are having a bit of a slow spell here. Dean will watch your little angels. He’s good at that. Don’t worry.” Cas looked at Dean and gave him a wink. Dean blanched. When did he start doing that?

Dean moved forward and stood in front of the lady and her kids. He came down to a squat. “Well, hello there little princesses.” They stopped tugging on the leashes and generally bouncing around to look at Dean. There was something to the way a kid will assess an adult. Dean turned up his smile, but made sure to keep it genuine. “Tell me your names.”

All at once they said, “SarahJanePenny.”

Dean pointed at each one and said, “So, Sarah, Jane, and Penny.” He held out his hand to each to shake and said, “I’m Dean. Nice to meet you all.”

The woman said, “Oh thank God they like you.” She started pulling off the leashes from her arm to hand to Dean. “I volunteered to watch them. My sister has been doing the A+ mom thing, and I thought she deserved a small weekend away with her husband. Turns out I’m not good at this.”

Cas laughed and said, “Kids are a handful,” as if he knew about childrearing. “Come right on over here and Dean will try to be entertaining.” Dean scowled at him a little. I’m totally entertaining. Then he remembered that Cas couldn’t hear his thoughts or prayers or whatever this was.

Cas lead the woman to the massage table at the back. Dean pulled some stacks of paper out from behind the counter and said, “So, you all want to draw some pictures?”

The girls each seemed to consider his suggestion. One of the girls, Penny, Dean thought, said, “We want to build a fort like Cara makes when she babysits us.”

Dean considered this a moment. “I’m not sure we have the necessary equipment for a quality fort.” He looked around the shop and started considering his options.They had a ton of those foldable screens. The prior owner seemed to be interested in giving the place some sort of zen vibe. There were little red strips of cloth under the register and the place was tidy and calm. The girls were starting to move about a bit with restless energy.

“You just need pillows,” Sarah said.

Dean hummed in consideration and then smiled down at them. “I think we have a few in the back. Maybe some old boxes too. Wanna come see?” The girls started jumping up and down excitedly. Dean gave them a conspiratorial wink, and then raised a finger to his lips to encourage quiet. “We don’t want to be too loud while Cas works on your aunt’s sore back.”

“She slept on it wrong. That happens to my dad sometimes,” Sarah said.

Dean lead them into the back of the shop where a door lead to a room that was used for both storage and an office. He propped the door open and saw that they had plenty of boxes to work with. “You think we could make it work with just boxes?”

The girls seemed interested. Dean cast a glance back at Cas, who was already working on the woman’s back. He was really digging into her shoulder area. Dean wondered if she knew she was gonna get a deep tissue massage. Not my problem. He moved over to the pile of boxes and started pulling them out to the larger central area. “How big should we make it?” Jane asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean said. “You tell me.” Dean smiled and started stacking the smaller boxes into an approximation of a wall. “How about, you three build your fort on that side of the room, and I’ll build my fort across from you. At the end, we’ll try to knock over each other’s walls with some paper cannon balls or something.”

The girls looked surprised. There was something rather cute about the way that they seemed to go through the same emotions at the same time. Must be the triplet thing. The girls started working on their wall building with zeal, and Dean began his own. He figured they’d have maybe 30 minutes total. Most people didn’t get much longer than that at a mall.

—-

They got more than 30 minutes. In fact, they got just over an hour before Dean noticed their audience. They’d been firing off little paper ball missiles at each other’s walls. Sam came back and got dragged into the effort. The girls pulled him into their team. Likely thought he was one of them with his long hair. Dean’s wall was holding up until Sam scooped up one of the girls so she could fire down missiles on him from above. They were loud and happy. Dean surrendered under a fierce storm of paper rain.The office was a disaster. Dean looked toward the door and saw Cas and the woman hovering there.

“You all should market yourselves to long suffering moms. Daycare and a massage, who could ask for anything more?” She smiled.

Sam laughed and moved over toward the door. “Pretty sure we don’t have the licensing for that.”

They all moved back out into the main shop. Cas took over the counter to ring up the massage. They hadn’t done a bit of business before, so Dean wondered how this was going to work. Cas said, “Well, that’ll be sixty.” The woman looked surprised, and Dean couldn’t tell if it was the good kind of surprised or not.

“You sure?” Her tone was all doubtful.

“I believe so.” Cas looked toward Dean for a little help, but Dean didn’t do a thing.

The woman pulled out her wallet and a crisp hundred. She slid it across the counter. “Don’t need the change.” She gathered the girls and started to head out. “I might regret saying this, but you all need to charge more. That was the best massage I’ve ever had.”

Cas beamed a little. “Thanks for that. You have a nice day.” He gave her a little wave. The girls bounded out in her wake. Sam leaned into the counter. “Best massage she ever had,” Cas repeated.

“Yeah, don’t get all full of yourself, buddy.” Dean roamed on over to the massage table and laid down.

“At least he works,” Sam said.

“I worked plenty hard. You see how happy those kids were?”

“Yeah, they really perked up when I showed up.” Sam reached over to a nearby chair and snatched a pillow. He threw it at Dean, who caught it before it hit his face.

“So tell us what you found,” Cas interrupted.

“Got some noise down in the south corridor, but I didn’t see any reason for it.” Sam ran a hand back through his hair. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do short of burning the whole place to the ground and salting the earth in our wake. It just doesn’t seem like we’ve got a damn thing to go on.”

“So, I guess we’re gonna be here a bit longer then?” Cas said.

“Looks like it,” Sam said.

—-

The week passed then another. And by the third week they’d developed routines. In the evenings they roamed through the delivery tunnels, and in the daytime they took turns “working.” They still weren’t busy, by any stretch, but they were bringing in some money. And word seemed to be getting out about them.

Sunday’s were their slow days. Dean would sleep in, and Sam would do the breakfast run before he’d head in to run the place solo. Cas thought he needed to start jogging, so Sundays were his day for that. On their first Sunday, he came in from his jog before Sam had gotten back with breakfast. Sweat glistened off of him. The motel that they were sharing wasn’t much. It had two beds and a pull-out. They took turns with the pull-out to save their backs. Dean was still in his bed. Cas pulled his shirt off and tossed it onto the pull-out.

“Hey, don’t put that there. You’ll get it all sweaty and gross,” Dean said.

Cas scowled at him. “My bed, my sweat.”

“Our room. Be considerate. Put your sweaty clothes in the bathroom.”

Cas scooped up the shirt still scowling. He took a step toward the bathroom, then he tossed it right at Dean’s face. “Oh, I forgot you have morning reflexes.” Dean didn’t catch the shirt. It slapped him full in the face with all of it’s sweaty glory.

Dean threw it back at him. “Asshole.”

“Well that was fun.” Cas took the shirt to the bathroom and hung it up on the back of the door. “You should go running with me, then you won’t be so…” He waved a hand around as if that was enough of a sentence ender.

“Yeah, no. Pass.” Dean got up out of the bed and started rummaging around for the day’s clothes. Cas started striping out of the rest of his clothes while still not being in the bathroom. Dean tipped back his head and let out a groan of absolute frustration. “Damn it Cas.”

“What?” Cas just looked at him, like he couldn’t understand a damn thing about him.

“What do you mean, what?” Dean pointed at the bathroom.

“I don’t get why you make such a big deal out of it. Your clothes are literally everywhere.”

“My clothes are clean. Also, you are hella naked. Sam’s gonna get back and open that door to a whole lotta Cas.”

Cas raised an eyebrow and asked, “So you want me to preserve Sam’s dignity or something? He’s seen me naked before. He really doesn’t care.”

Dean just rolled his eyes again. “Anyone walking by in that parking lot is gonna see your bare ass.” And because Dean was losing this battle, and because Cas was still very naked he added, “Think of the children Cas.”

“You’re an idiot.” Cas picked up his clothes from off the floor where he had tossed them. He’s bending over. Damnit. He moved off to the bathroom. “Don’t think I don’t know what this is really about.”

He closed the door before Dean could say anything back. So Dean raised his voice. “What is this really about? Enlighten me.” He moved closer to the bathroom door and leaned against the wall next to it. He could hear Cas laugh on the other side of the door.

Cas yanked the door open and now they were right up in each other’s faces. Cas was still naked, because why would that change? Dean was telling himself repeatedly, Eyes up, focus. Dean sucked in a breath to steel his resolve, and that likely looked bad in hindsight, because Cas, that little fucker, rolled up his lip into a shit eating grin. Cas took a step closer. Dean’s gaze dropped, shit. He got the full vision, and he was not handling it. He wanted to handle it. Damnit. He made sure to focus again on Cas’ face. Cas was still grinning at him. He moved even closer to Dean. He practically had his chest all pressed up against Dean. And if Dean really minded he’d just take a giant step to the side, but he didn’t; oh no he so didn’t. He just stood there swallowing down all of his stupid words and worries and waited for Cas to do or say anything.

“You like looking at me.” Cas’ words weren’t what he expected, and he certainly didn’t expect them to roll over him like they did. His tone was low and graveled out in that way that was so Cas. It was comforting and at the same time it could be terrifying. Dean felt his heart beating all erratically. Is this what a heart attack feels like? Am I dying? He wondered if he was supposed to say something, offer up a denial or something. He just opted to stand there like an idiot. His eyes betrayed him again and took in a swooping view of Cockstiel. Boner Town was on full display and Dean was in fact dying.

“I,” Dean choked out that one word then realized he had nothing.

Cas crowded up against him. He jabbed at Dean’s chest with his finger to punctuate each word. “You, Like, Looking, At, Me.” He stayed where he was, and Dean didn’t move. He could still feel Cas’ finger on his chest. Cas leaned into Dean’s ear. He spoke into the space, all low and rough. “I don’t mind.” He moved away from Dean then and went back into the bathroom, gently closing the door between them.

What the hell was that? Dean focused on his breathing. He knew what that was. He didn’t know what to do about it though. Well shit.

[uni-yuto]

saudade

✿  pairing: woo seok x reader (female)

✿  word count: 1593

✿  genre: highschool!wooseok | angst?/fluff?

a/n: my first attempt at a sadder theme? not sure about the ending. regardless, hope you enjoy! request for more :) [bro this has literally been sitting in my drafts for who knows how long]

saudade: [noun]

a nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; ‘’the love that remains’’

lack of sleep was evident in her eyes, her hair pulled together by an old elastic hair tie. her clothes smelt of salty tears and gym class odours. she barely even had a hint of light shining in her room, save for her alarm clock that flashed the time in a dark red. she knew it was pitiful she had her times of disconnection between herself and the world. often times she was bright and outgoing, but she would return to this persona she couldn’t quite control.

it had been three years, two years since she last saw his face. she remembered fondly the memories and times of laughter that came with that face. the times when they laid under the stars in his backyard together, the times he would drag her out of her home to loiter in the mall. they were teens experiencing their definition of love. no one to bother them, to get in the way.

obviously, that had changed when he disappeared, leaving nothing but a letter of his condolences. no reason to why he left, his parents not even giving her any hope. she came to the conclusion that he wasn’t coming back, and spent evenings on end finishing the ice cream stash waiting at the back of the freezer. for months she had shut anyone and everyone out, leading people to believe she had something wrong with her. lack of communication furthered that belief until she came to the revelation that she had to get her life together. her first love wasn’t going to ruin that for her.

so she did so, however, she had her instances of reverting to her older self. she never told anyone the reason why she even acted like that in the first place and explained that her partner had gone abroad. it was quite surprising they believed her, and she lived her life on that lie.

sometimes she would find herself strolling around their town, ending up in the places the pair would spend time together. she would always feel her heart warm with excitement, then fade when the realisation that he wasn’t beside her came about.

she still loved him, regardless of any denials she made to herself. it was too hard to let go of him, despite how easy it was for him to let go of her.

her parents weren’t the slightest worried about their daughter, something that was both a blessing and a curse. she enjoyed that fact they didn’t realise she left the home after dark to stroll around the neighbourhood, only to come back 4 hours before school started. she enjoyed that they didn’t realise that her grades slipped before she got her life back somewhat together but she hated the fact they didn’t care. maybe it was because she locked them out of her love life, shielding her tall boyfriend whenever she had him over.

so when one day they announced that they were moving to Seoul from their present home, she was purely against the idea. the fact that she wouldn’t be able to visit their memories daily upset her, but she couldn’t support herself. she didn’t even have a job yet, and she still had a year before she could graduate. even then, she’d need to apply for post-secondary because she didn’t have the slightest idea of where she wanted to go in life. 

the only plan she had was to run away with him, but that was thrown out the window years ago.

so she complied, packing her things into a moving truck and setting off to their new home, passing by the town square before venturing out of the city.

“you’ll love it here! we even enrolled you in that nice school, you know, the ones where all those upcoming idol kids go to!” her mother exclaimed, helping her husband bring in the boxes. (y/n) on the other hand simply dragged her luggage up the stairs to her new room, at least it had a nice view.

she was starting school the next day, and she wasn’t excited at all. obviously, she could be a rebellious teen, skip the first day of class, but she knew she couldn’t. instead, she found herself grabbing her wallet. “i’m just going to go explore the new mall” she told her parents as she left the new home.

suddenly she found herself feeling a bit happier as she walked into a nice hair salon. she realised maybe getting a new haircut would make her a bit happier, maybe she was doing this for herself, or maybe it was for him. either way, she knew she needed a fresh start.

after hearing her mother call after her in the car, she quickly made her way into the new school, holding her books and papers like a somewhat typical school student. she wasn’t so much afraid, but shy at the new faces she would have to get used to. she avoided the gazes of others, pushing the door to the entrance and heading down what she assumed was the right hallway to the office. 

unfortunately for her, she was entering the school midway into the semester. there was now 6 months of the remaining year. while she didn’t have to restart straight from the beginning, she needed to take some night school courses because of it.

she hurried to her first class, finding herself at the front of the class holding a slip out for the homeroom teacher. while his demeanour did not scream friendly, his soft eye smile made up for it.

she tried appearing happy for her mother’s sake, wearing a friendly smile on her features as she introduced herself briefly. where she came from, what she hopes to do, and so on.

“hopefully you’ll adjust easily. i’ll see if I can have someone be your buddy to help you get used to the school” he suggested, gesturing to an open desk. she felt the eyes of interested students, a few already over the fact they had a new student. she didn’t mind that, she really didn’t want to notice so much on her first day, especially since she didn’t want to relive the new student cliche.

“Mr. Jung, late again are we?” she heard the teacher call out. she didn’t dare glancing upward, placing her books on her desk and opening her books. after the class started, she only looked up at the board, trying to catch up. at least, her desk mate helped her with getting the notes.

his point of view.

maybe it was the hair, but she never changed in beauty. I didn’t realise at first, but I knew it was her. I thought it was imagination, but it was really here, sitting a few desks away from my own. I wasn’t even told about a new student, my seatmate gesturing her while commenting ‘she’s pretty but shy’

she wasn’t shy, at least from when I last saw her. she was an old soul trapped in a younger body, loud and never shy when it came to her unique laughter. what was she doing here? she had a future in our old town, why move here? for me to feel the guilt of leaving her slowly return back to me?

I doubt she would ever forgive me, the way I disappeared with the wind, so pathetic I could say goodbye face to face. maybe if things were different, I would’ve been able to stay. 

there is a sense of regret, I still do feel it. even after time has passed, I still longed for a life with her by my side. I chose a chance at fame over an average life with her. would it be even considered average when it’s with her?

I want to make things right, I need to. it’s been too long.

(y/n) quickly gathered her things as she heard the bell ring, she needed all the time she needed in order to get to her next class. she hurried out the door, yelping as she was held back by a hand gripping her wrist.

“it’s been a while (y/n)” he called. the female winced as she let out a deep sigh. she shook her thoughts away as she hummed in response, “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong person” she stated, trying to get out of his grasp.

“you realise that even after all these years I can still recognise you” he kept his hold on her wrist, afraid to let her go. 

“I wish I could say the same, you’re not the same wooseok from back home” she spat out bitterly, “if you don’t mind, I’m running late for my next class”

he brought the female close to his chest, wrapping her in a large hug as he rested his chin on the crown of her head. she didn’t say a word, her hands gripping onto his long arms.

“I’ve been waiting so long to do this. Please don’t let this end” he whispered lowly, ignoring the stares of the other students who were passing by this exchange. 

“As long as you don’t run away” she replied softly, her hand squeezing onto the fabric of his school blazer. she let a tear drop onto his pressed shirt, making the male soften at the feeling as a few more tears followed.

maybe it’s been too long, but it feels like it’s only been two minutes since I’ve held you this close. and hopefully, it’s the last time I stand against the world without you.

[cosmosogler]

man, i don’t want to write anything... i’m tired. i will write anyway.

i had a dream about being surrounded by people but being, sort of, for some unexplained reason, unable to communicate with them. like, i could talk and they might have heard me, there’s no reason they wouldn’t have, but they didn’t respond to anything i did. we were in a mall and the floor was glass. toward the end of the dream there was a blizzard and the glass had cracked. i tread carefully, but it never broke. 

right at the very end, someone asked me a question, and as i opened my mouth to respond i woke up because my alarm went off. i was so incredibly frustrated for about half a second and then i couldn’t remember what i had wanted to say any more.

oh! there were also zombies. and undead, but they were different from zombies. i had come to the mall to do something about them but i got sidetracked and then people stopped paying attention to me. that’s how i got there.

it was really complicated, but i don’t remember what exactly was happening. i was trying to bring the dead back to life? but the zombies were beyond help and converting the undead into the FOR REAL dead. i spent a lot of time in a garden shed and under a concrete ledge.

dreams aside, i woke up and got ready for the day and then sat at the computer for a little bit. i think i was checking tumblr? i was so hunched over the dang desk that i may as well have been laying on it.

then we went to gramma’s! before we left dad was being super passive aggressive and i’m not sure why. it was really confusing and also annoying. mom ended up leaving without him and taking us to gramma’s. i put on some music and didn’t think about it too much.

the easter celebration was good. i totally wrecked my cousins at batman dice. the score was 1 to 2 to 3 to 16. and i visited with gramma and her friends and neighbors a lot. apparently dad’s mom barbara was also supposed to attend but she wasn’t feeling well. dad showed up eventually and brought the batman dice game with him. after that it was lunchtime. i gorged myself on my aunt’s salsa and tried to also eat fruit and chips and potato salad and an apple cinnamon cookie... i got so sick i passed out on the couch. grampa woke me up to get me to go lay on his bed instead. it was a little warmer in there and i felt the room spin around me while i dozed. i heard my name one point and i think it was mom telling a dumb story about me, but i felt my muscles tense up for a few seconds anyway. an hour later my brother came to get me and i rolled on my back and my whole abdomen just throbbed and every single heartbeat was a wave of nausea.

i felt junky the whole way home but i tried to count the number of songs i listened to while we were on the highway and that helped. when we got inside i hung out with the dogs a while. i tried to brush some of the mats out of diogi’s fur but wiley and eve were suddenly very interested in standing directly on top of my lap and tipping diogi over. my brother and i fed them, and then after i coaxed eve into eating her food they were outside for a bit. and then i came upstairs until i got a little hungry. i went downstairs to reheat some rice from my family’s previous burrito adventure and had a tiny cup. dad left to go take barbara to the hospital. she spends a lot of time there. 

i mean, i don’t doubt that she is sick and needs to go. but... there are a lot of ways she could make this, easier and less expensive for my family? like one time she slipped and fell and hit her head on the bathroom door. she called our house in the evening and thought it was morning, so we went to check on her. 

if she’d had, say, one of those life alert things or a check-in plan now that she’s living alone she wouldn’t have been laying there for almost a day. and i think this inability to take care of herself is part of what led her to the decision to kill her dog, DESPITE THE FACT THAT WE WERE WILLING TO AND HAD PREVIOUSLY TAKEN CARE OF THE DOG WHEN SHE DIDN’T WANT TO/COULDN’T, AND ALSO THAT HE WAS NOT THAT OLD YET. HE WAS 2 YEARS OLDER THAN EVE, BUT HE IS A TOY POODLE. HE LIVES LONGER THAN 14 YEARS. THEY CAN BE REASONABLY EXPECTED TO LIVE TO 16-18.

like yeah, i’m sorry your husband died and you aren’t putting your life back together. i’m sorry you both suffered an addiction to nicotine that led to the disease grandpa developed. but when we are forced to take you to the hospital because you have no system in place to get yourself anywhere or alert people when you are not doing well, you don’t even take the doctor’s advice, and you refuse to stay in rehab because they don’t let you smoke when you’re hooked up to an oxygen machine! you had a heart attack and you walked out of the hospital a few days later when they wouldn’t let you smoke!!! you stole grandpa’s pain killers while he was alive! you tried to sell your house despite EVERYONE telling you that was a bad idea for many, many reasons!!! you ditched all your furniture in preparation for selling the house anyway and tHEN CHANGED YOUR MIND. you killed your dog and changed your mind the next day so you got a cat, AND THEN YOU DITCHED THE CAT A FEW WEEKS LATER. and then you got ANOTHER cat, and then moved to minnesota or wherever WHERE YOUR FAMILY ASKED YOU NOT TO BRING A CAT AND YOU BROUGHT IT ANYWAY, and then moved back a few months later because you didn’t like paying rent!!!!!!!!!!

i’m sorry life is hard. i’m sorry that bad ideas seem like good ideas to you??? but you’re hurting literally everyone you come into contact with. you’re not even nice to dad when he comes to do your chores for you. you’re just a jackass and you smoke when he’s in the house even though you know the smell makes him sick. and the new cat is too terrified to ever come out from under the bed.

i hate barbara. not as much as i hate craig, because she doesn’t seem aware of what she’s doing, but god it’s hard.

i did put on some bug spray before i went outside this evening. it helped. tomorrow i gotta go to the mental health hospital place. i am afraid that i am not sick enough for their help. because i am too sick to NOT get their help. but i might not be sick enough for them to give me a spot on their roster. like some kind of hellish middle ground.

do i play up my anxiety? would that be lying? am i really not that bad? maybe i should downplay it. but then i’m less likely to get help... am i not depressed/anxious enough because i know i need help? usually with depression it’s like “ohh it COULD be worse, i must not be bad enough for real help.” i know, the cognitive dissonance is making my head explode too.

being evaluated is horrible. what if they happen to catch me on a good day and get the wrong idea? what if they catch me on a bad day and i’m not good enough? standardized tests, medical evaluations, people watching when i say “hey look at this!” they’re just clouds, sammie.

my legs are miserably itchy. i can’t sit comfortably with the itching cream on. the texture of the chair’s fabric against my calves is irritating. the wood of the desk rubs my thighs wrong. my feet are rough and catch on fabric like velcro and they never seem to sit at quite the right angle. my back hurts. my stomach hurts. the skin on my fingers and knuckles is splitting because i wash my hands too much and don’t drink quite enough water. and my body is always telling me i need to go to the bathroom but when i try to go i can’t because there is nothing there. i just went 20 minutes ago. and if my eyes water for any reason something in them gets really dry and it burns and hurts. 

it doesn’t even help when i’m, like, outside and not on the computer. my abdomen starts really hurting when i’m out on walks and it only fades, doesn’t go away. my eyes hurt when the sun’s up. i’m tired all the time. eating is usually awful. the lawn is wet and muddy on my feet and i immediately get bug bites. nothing on my body is healing properly.

i’m just... really frustrated tonight. i saw my sister at the easter party. i asked if her childhood stomachaches ever went away. she said no, and it still usually hurts when she eats. i don’t know how she functions if it’s anything like this. no wonder she never wants to do anything and gets irritable if she can’t eat what she wants.

i’m afraid it’ll never go away. no one can even figure out what’s wrong. i’m not any more anxious than i was while i could go to school. the only thing i could think of with the doctor was that it was years of general anxiety that built up this problem. at least with depression there’s literally a chemical reaction happening in your head that can be changed with medication. but like, they can’t even find an ulcer or anything. there’s just... nothing wrong.

[liveyourlifemeraki-blog]

I’ll Be Home

Title: I’ll Be Home

Characters: Sam Winchester x Reader, Dean Winchester, Santa Claus

Word Count: 2,370

Warnings: Little angsty as per usual but really this is just pure fluff

Summary: This was supposed to be the first Christmas that you and Sam spent together, but after Sam is called away on a hunt he’ll do anything to get back to you.

A/N: Welp guys, this is my first time writing Sam! Dean is honestly my comfort zone, but when I heard this song I couldn’t get Sam out of my head so I hope you all enjoy it!:) This was written for @winchester-writes SPN Christmas Song Challenge! (Yes, yes, I know it’s a little late but you can never have too much Christmas, right?;) The song I chose was Meghan Trainor’s I’ll Be Home, and the object I picked was a ribbon, Once again, I hope you all like it! As I did last time, I’ll be tagging a few writers down below the cut. Just let me know if you want me to stop tagging you, or if you want to be tagged in future fics!

“Dean better hurry up,” Sam muttered, checking his watch as he leaned against the wall of the near empty food court in the mall, his eyes glancing back up from the gleam of the metal and surveying the scene in front of him.

There were a few shoppers still mingling about, their arms laden with boxes of all shapes, sizes, and colors, their conversations bubbly and joyous, the words rising and falling in pitch with excitement. A small boy was licking a blue lollypop, the coloring getting all over his cheeks and hands and turning them blue too. There was a young mother, softly cooing at her small baby as she rocked the girl back and forth, the woman’s eyes lighting up when she saw the figure of her husband walking out of one of the many stores, his hand clasping that of another little girl who was skipping with excitement about what was in the bag that he was carrying in his other hand.

Sam’s heart gave a little lurch at the way the woman looked at her husband and he looked away before he could see them interact any more than he already had. It made the hole that was in his heart hurt a little more than it had before; the dull throbbing sharpening into a stabbing pain before it edged away into the gentle pull and push of the discomfort again.

Sam Winchester missed you. Anyone with eyes could see that.

This was supposed to have been the first Christmas that he would actually get to spend with you, the promise of being together having been spoken between the two of you months before. He had planned everything out; from the way he was going to wrap your present to how you were going to decorate the tree to what kind of cookies you were going to bake for Santa on Christmas Eve.

All of that, however, had been torn from his mind when his brother had called from five hundred miles away, the older Winchester having tackled a case that was far too big for him to do alone. So, Sam had packed up his bags, given you a kiss goodbye, and had flown to the town that he didn’t know the name of to help Dean with a monster that he couldn’t quite seem to picture the face of.

The pair had killed off the monster quickly; the team that the brothers made being one that was hard for any monster to kick its way through. But there was the aftermath to take care of. They had to make sure that there weren’t more monsters in the area. They had to make sure that everyone was safe before they could skip town.

Before Sam could come back home to you.

All of this was what was running through Sam’s mind as a man in the red suit approached him, his blue eyes twinkling with something more than just joy and the smile on his face filled with something more than just contentment.

“Mind if I stand by you?” he asked, his voice deep and kind, forcing Sam’s mind back to the present place and not at home in the living room with you.

“Not at all,” Sam replied with a kind smile, moving so that there was a little more space on the wall for this man to stand. “So…You’re Santa,” he couldn't help but laugh quietly, looking back over at the fur trimmed suit and hat that belonged to the classic Claus himself.

“That I am,” the man chuckled along, his white beard obscuring some of his face. “And you’re a man who’s missing someone very much.”

Sam stopped laughing at this remark, confusion clouding his eyes as he started at this man in front of him, tilting his head slightly. “How did you-”

“When you get old like me you learn a few things about love and longing,” Santa replied and Sam realized what he had seen in this man’s eyes besides joy. It was wisdom.

“Who’s the girl?” Santa asked him, a kind smile on his face as he leaned back against the wall, pulling a pipe somewhere from a pocket and starting to smoke it.

“I-uh-don’t think you should be-” Sam started again, quickly glancing at the sign behind the man’s head that clearly read, “No Smoking.”

“Oh, come on,” Santa laughed, taking another breath in. “All of the children that would be here to see me have long gone to bed. Besides, what are they going to do? Fire me?” At this Santa laughed, his belly shaking exactly like Sam had imagined it to in the old story books. “I work one day a year, and that day is over. There’s nothing they can do. Now come on,” he pressed, leaning closer to Sam as if the pair were sharing a secret. “Who’s the girl?”

“(Y/N),” he found himself saying before he could even register the fact that your name had slipped past his lips. “And she’s…amazing,” he finally finished breathlessly, not even sure how to describe you himself. You were so beautiful; but not only that, you were funny. You were funny and kind and sweet and you could always make Sam feel better and you just felt like home.

“She sounds amazing,” Santa said, and Sam felt the heat rise to his cheeks as he realized he had said all of that out loud. “What are you doing around here for? Go home. Go back to her.”

“I can’t. I-”

“Go home,” Santa said again, the same kind smile on his face as it always was. “Here,” he added, rummaging around in his pockets, pulling out a small white box with a scarlet ribbon tied around it. “Give this to her when you see her,” he said, placing the box in Sam’s hand.

“I-” Sam started to say, but was cut off when he heard Dean call his name. He turned around and glanced at his brother, but when he turned back the old man in the red suit was gone; even the smoke that had been floating in the air had disappeared along with him.

“Who were you talking to, Sammy?” Dean asked, his hands in his pockets as he walked up to his brother, looking around at the empty food court.

“Uh…No one,” Sam mumbled to himself, looking down at the box with the scarlet ribbon and slipping it into his pocket. “What took you so long, man?” he asked, turning back to Dean.

Dean just smirked and held out a piece of paper, his eyes shining in the light.

“What’s that?” Sam asked him, glancing from the paper to his brother, his brows drawn down in confusion.

“Just take it,” Dean replied, shoving the paper into Sam’s hands.

Sam started at Dean a moment longer before flipping the paper over, the stark black lettering informing him that he was supposed to be boarding a flight back home within the hour. “What-”

“Merry Christmas, Sammy,” Dean said, a genuine smile gracing his features. “I can wrap up here no problem. Go home. Get back to her.”

Sam had just stayed frozen for a moment before embracing his brother, a whispered, “Merry Christmas,” slipping through his lips before he dashed out of the mall and hailed a taxi, his leg bouncing up and down and willing the driver to go faster than he was.

Pulling up to the airport, he dashed inside, seeming to fly past the people in thick winter coats and tall, sturdy boots.

"Flight twenty-two," he said breathlessly when he got to the boarding location, slapping his ticket down on the desk.

The woman that was working there looked down at Sam's ticket and then back up to him, her eyes apologetic. "I'm sorry, sir; but there's a snowstorm that's coming in. There's really bad wind outside and the pilot isn't sure he can fly in this weather. Your flight may be delayed a while."

"What?" Sam asked, shaking his head as he frantically looked to the window, the crystallized flakes falling down faster than they had been beforehand. "No, no. You don't understand," Sam said, turning back toward the woman. "I need to get home. I need to get on this flight."

"We're doing the best we can, sir," the woman said, her shoulders slumping slightly at the tone of Sam's voice. "I'm sorry, but we want to keep you safe."

Sam stopped momentarily, looking at the defeat in this woman's eyes. She had probably been yelled at a minimum of a dozen times because of this flight, people being so caught up in their own frustrations and plans that they didn't even notice they were lashing out on her. So, making a conscious effort not to be one of those jerks, Sam swallowed thickly and gave her a small smile. "It's okay," he said, trying to make her feel better. "Thank you for everything you're doing."

Those few simple words seemed to make her day, her eyes lighting up and the smile on her face becoming so much more genuine than it had been before. "Merry Christmas," she called as Sam walked over to sit on one of the hard plastic chairs and wait for news about his flight.

"Merry Christmas," he responded, sitting down and pulling out the little white box, running his fingers over the edges. Maybe he'd finally figure out what was in there by the time he got back to you.

A total of about four hours later, Sam was boarding a flight back home and with another hour added on top of that he was soon in a taxi, your address flying off of his lips. Once again it seemed like the taxi driver couldn't go fast enough; Sam having to literally bite his tongue in an effort to keep him from telling the nice man to speed.

Once he got to your house he shoved a wad of rolled up dollar bills into the man's hand, telling him to keep the change as he bolted from the car. Running up the steps he pounded on your door, his breath puffing out in little white clouds in front of him. The seconds seemed like ages as he waited for you to appear at the door and when you finally did, your hair tousled and your eyes sleepy, Sam swept you off of your feet, holding you tighter than he ever had before.

"Sam!" you exclaimed, all sleepiness gone as you wrapped your arms around his neck, your feet a solid foot above the snowy ground as he spun you around, making you laugh out of joy. "What are you doing back?!"

"Santa and Dean and-" Sam couldn't even finish his sentences, deciding instead to just put you on the ground and lean down, planting a kiss on your lips, his cheeks rosy from the cold and joy and excitement all at once.

"I promised I'd be home, didn't I?" he asked, looking down at you after you two had broken apart, your grin never seeming to leave your face for a second. "I have so many weird stories to tell you about Santa Claus and Dean but I just really missed you," he finished, wrapping you up in a hug on your front porch, the snowflakes falling gently around both of you.

"I missed you so much more," you responded, the stories he had to tell you the last things on your mind, your arms wrapping around him equally as tightly. He smelled like he always did, and he was warm and comfortable and you finally felt like it was Christmas with him here.

"I got you something," he whispered in your ear, giving you a small kiss as he pulled away, keeping one of his hands intertwined with yours. Pulling out the box that had been on his person since earlier that evening, he handed it to you, your eyes full of wonder as you took it.

"What's this?" you asked as you looked at the little white package that was now sitting in your hand, the edges of the scarlet ribbon seeming to sparkle just as much as the snow did with the starlight being cast on it.

"A present," Sam responded playfully, giving your hand a small squeeze. "Open it."

The second you took your other hand out of Sam's you missed his warmth, but your fingers carefully undid the ribbon, thinking it was the most beautiful thing you had ever seen. Without a word, Sam took it from you and stepped behind you, tying it in your hair. As you lifted the lid to the box any words that you had been thinking before died in your throat, for what was before you was more beautiful than anything you had seen.

It was a silver necklace; the tiny links intertwined perfectly together as the chain wound down to the small snowflake pendant that hung at the bottom. The snowflake had six points on it, the entire charm being made up of pure, white diamonds.

"Sam," you said, your voice breathless as you started in awe at the piece of jewelry. "This must have cost a fortune. How did you-"

"I got it for free," he told you honestly, taking it out of the box and unclasping it, putting it gently around your neck and fastening it in the back; turning you around and surveying the way it fell below your collarbone. "The perfect gift for the perfect girl; wrapped with all of the love and care in the world," he said with a twinkle in his eyes and a small smile on his face. He was definitely going to be writing a thank you letter to Santa later, but for now, he just wanted to enjoy the moment with you.

"Merry Christmas, (Y/N)," he said, his smile only growing as he clasped both of your hands in his, the joy on his face incomparable to anything you had seen before. Stepping forward, he let out a content breath and placed a chaste kiss on your forehead. Sam Winchester was finally home for Christmas; because anywhere you were? That was home to him.

Tagging: @gnarlytricksbro @waywardlullabies @ellen-reincarnated1967 @percywinchester27 @impalaimagining @jpadjackles @impalapossible @writingbeautifulmen @emmysthougts @deathtonormalcy56 @kasimagine

[itsfinancethings]

Margaret Keane, CEO of Synchrony—a company that financed $140 billion in purchases for American shoppers last year, via a range of credit card programs—has lived all sides of the debt equation. When she was 10, growing up as one of six kids in Queens, her father, a police officer, developed a costly and ultimately fatal illness that she says left her family burdened with thousands in medical bills. “We were getting calls to shut the electric off,” she says. “I don’t think you could ever forget that.”

She put herself through college working as a debt collector, earning $5.50 an hour, making 90 calls a day, while a student at St. John’s University. She excelled and ended up in the management training program at Citibank before rising to run Synchrony, where she now presides over an army of employees approving loans, and also collecting them when borrowers fall behind.

The ability of consumers to keep paying their bills will play an outsized role in the post-pandemic recovery. So far, Keane is not seeing a spike in delinquencies one might expect given the plunge in economic activity, though the stimulus is clearly aiding those bill payments. “The consumer is definitely hanging in there,” she says.

Keane, 60, recently joined TIME for a video conversation on the mindset of the American consumer, the impact of small business health on any recovery, and what corporations need to do to help address systemic racism in society.

Subscribe to The Leadership Brief by clicking here.

(This interview with Synchrony CEO Margaret Keane has been condensed and edited for clarity)

Your company was founded in 1932, another time of great financial distress, to help people buy appliances on credit. Now there are tens of million of Americans out of work. What parallels do you see?

What’s interesting about our company is the culture and the roots of how we came about was really during a time of crisis. And honestly, back in the day, when you think back, I know it doesn’t feel innovative now, but actually lending people money was a big deal.

What products were being sold?

Back in the ’30s, people would literally go to their local corner appliance store and pay weekly to get the appliance. You can imagine people weren’t working and GE wanted to sell appliances. So they came up with this idea, ‘Okay, how do we finance appliances?’ And that’s how the company started—GE wanted to sell appliances. Appliances were still relatively new for them. Having that at home was a big deal. It allowed the average American to have access to those kinds of luxuries back then.

How concerned are you about the health of the American consumer right now?

Coming into the crisis the consumer was very strong. People were paying their bills. Right now, we are not seeing real change to our performance on delinquencies. There’s two big unknowns. The first unknown is there’s been a lot of stimulus for people. I’m sure you’ve read, people put a lot more in savings.

Savings are at a record rate, right?

Record high, and then a second piece is people are paying their bills. Now the question is, is it the stimulus that’s helping them pay their bills, tax returns? What’s interesting to me is that consumers are being conservative. They’re being thoughtful about how they’re using their dollars. So what we need to do is say, ‘Okay, what happens when the stimulus stops? And then when the stimulus stops, how many people actually get back to work?’ That’s really the piece that’s a little uncertain right now.

With your partnerships with so many big retailers such as Lowe’s, Sam Clubs and the newly announced Verizon card, you have a lot of insights into consumer behavior. What are people buying now?

There’s a lot being spent around the home, home improvement. You can’t find plants now.There’s a lot being spent around the home, home improvement. You can’t find plants now. You can’t find vessels to plant in. Furniture obviously dropped, but didn’t drop completely. People are still buying online. What we did see though is that the ticket size was smaller because you didn’t have a sales person saying, ‘Oh, if you’re going to buy that chair, you might want to think about this table.”

Anything else?

Bikes. Fishing rods. All outdoor stuff now is kind of hard to get. I was just talking to someone who said you can’t find kayaks right now. People have just said I’m not going to take vacation. So I’m going to have vacation at home. And then there are people who say, ‘Okay, I really want to make my house more of my vacation.’

I’ve heard you mention that all of these Zoom calls are going to drive demand for another service that you finance.

We have our health care business, CareCredit. We do a lot with plastic surgeons. And I joked that the plastic surgery business is going to take off. And sure enough, it has taken off now that things have reopened.

Is that true? Do you think that’s driven by Zoom?

I use myself as an example. I’m looking at my face every day and there’s some things I should be getting. [LAUGHTER]. One of our employees, their wife is a nurse in a plastic surgery center, and she told her husband that she saw 32 patients in one day. It’s the most she’s ever seen in her entire career.

What economic indicators do you monitor to tell how consumers are feeling financially?

We look at things like are people paying less than their minimum payment? Are payment levels holding? And honestly, all of that’s holding. So that’s a sign for us that right now, the consumer is definitely hanging in there.

Purchase volume is the number of times people use their credit card?

Yeah, these are purchases on our card. Our cards across our merchant and retail and health care networks. When we started the pandemic, it started out, in March we were down 26%. It moved down to about 31% [in the first half of April.] And it’s now down 10% (in late May.)

TIME for Learning partnered with Columbia Business School to offer a series of online, on-demand classes on topics like effective leadership, negotiation and customer-centric marketing. To sign up or learn more, click here.

How are brick and mortar retail stores going to come out of this?

We have been over-retailed for a long time. There was a retail transformation happening even before COVID. And there were a number of retailers that were struggling. What the COVID experience has done is accelerate that transformation. And we’re seeing more bankruptcies and reductions in retail. We’re seeing, obviously, more and more people buy online than ever before. But people still like to go to a mall and get out and see things and touch things.

I know your view is that some of the problems in retail went beyond competition from e-commerce, right?

Online is not the only driver of why retail has had its troubles in opening. I think there were some fundamental challenges underneath. Too many stores. No investment in the stores themselves. Lack of inventory. I was in a store before this whole thing happened and, honestly, I had to really search to find someone to pay for something. You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, why am I even here?’

What is your biggest concern about the economy?

I’ve been through many crises before where we’ve modeled a lot of things out. We tend to model unemployment. I don’t think we’ll be at this 40 million unemployment number. I think the real concern that I have when I think of employment is more around the small business constituents here. And how many of them actually survive, right? I think the real question is how many people survive in the small business segment, and then what does that do to unemployment?

Subscribe to The Leadership Brief by clicking here.

And what are your models showing right now?

It will be a double-digit unemployment number we think going into 2021.

What’s your favorite letter these days to describe the expected shape of the recovery?

I think it’s going to be somewhat of a U, but it’s going to be a little elongated It’s going to be a little slower coming up.

How important are small businesses to the American economy overall?

We need a robust small business community here to make our economy in the U.S. work. Studies show they employ the most people. They keep our communities strong. As a country, small business is the heart of who we are. [On June 17, after the interview was conducted, Synchrony committed $5 million to support small business; $2 million of that amount is directed to minority and women owned businesses in underserved communities.]

And people still value the connection with local businesses.

I live in a little town here [In Connecticut] and I walk down my Main Street, and I keep saying ‘I love that store, I hope they’re going to be back. And that store, I hope they’re going to be back. The restaurants, I hope they’re going to be back.’ These are real businesses with real expenses that have been shut for quite awhile.

The majority of your 17,000 employees work in call centers. How is that going in the pandemic?

We moved the entire company to home. That’s much easier said than done because we literally had to give everyone the technology. We had to create a whole logistics process. We put those packets, if you will, together: Their work-at-home technology. And then they’d come into our call centers, pick it up. We had like a whole process. We have some funny stories of people driving in the middle of the night to meet the FedEx guy to get the headsets because they weren’t going to make it in the morning.

What’s in that kit?

It’s a laptop, it’s a camera, it’s headsets, it’s speakers. A mouse. But in addition to that, we had to work with them and make sure their network could handle it, too. There was a lot of back-and-forth on just getting them set up in the right environment at home.

That sounds expensive. What did that cost?

I have no idea how much we spent. I know it was a lot. But I didn’t even ask. If we weren’t in a pandemic, we would have had our 55 meetings before we got to the decision of, Okay, we’re going to move everybody home. Then we would have done the budget. Then we would have said, well, whatever. We didn’t do any of that. We moved.

When you were a debt collector back in the day, did you have a good spiel? Did you go off script?

Look, I always try to tell people, what you do learn in collecting is there are people that have real tragedies and really are trying to pay and they’re lawful. And there are those people who are trying to beat the system. And I think the trick of a collector is figuring out who those other people are, and just making sure you have empathy for the people that have hit something.

Did you have a good nose for the people that are trying to beat the system?

You don’t have it at the beginning. But then you do. I went into it with a very rose-colored kind of glass thing, And then you’re like, ‘Okay, now I realize what people are talking about.’ It’s the repeat offender that gets you.

How is your workforce doing, mental-health wise?

You know the whole work-at-home is a good thing, but it puts a lot of stress, particularly for women who are trying to home-school.If you asked our staff out in the field, they’re saying this is the biggest challenge we’re facing right now is a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression. You know the whole work-at-home is a good thing, but it puts a lot of stress, particularly for women who are trying to home-school.

How do you respond to that?

We were working on mental health before COVID because it’s been very clear to me that we have a very stressed environment in our work right now. And there’s a lot of people who need extra support. So we were actually piloting some things in our call center, where some wellness coaches that were actually there at the site. So we now just transformed that to wellness through telemedicine. And we’ve expanded to offer free consultation with psychologists.

What has been your response to the outpouring of support to address systemic racism in society?

I have to as a leader recognize that we have some real work to do in society and the country. And we’re part of that. What can we do internally?

I didn’t want this to be like a check mark, like, We sent the note out. We all said ‘We’re sad.’ And then move on. This is a pivotal moment in our country that Synchrony can play a role inside its company, and then we’ve got to think about what we do outside the company. [On June 25, Synchrony announced a $5 million donation to organizations supporting social justice and equity.]

So corporations should be involved in this solution?

There’s no way we’re going to solve this, because there’s so many things that need to be solved, without corporations stepping up, engaging in our communities, and engaging with government. I think it’s all about how we lift everybody up through this. There’s how do we hire more diverse people in our company? How do we give more people of diversity, no matter what diversity, the opportunity inside our company? And we’ve been working on a lot of this. And we were very focused coming into this year on Black and Hispanic leadership. And particularly Black … because we don’t have enough. We’re doing a lot of soul-searching because we could pat ourselves, great places to work. We get all these awards. We’re great. But like let’s look at the numbers on some of these things and how we make a difference. We have to double down on all this right now.

KEANE’S FAVORITES

BUSINESS BOOK: I like leadership books. I loved Hamilton. I loved the Grant book. I love historical novels of people who have led. I’m very into those types of figures because look, they made a lot of very difficult decisions to bring our country together both times.

AUTHOR: I’m a big Nelson DeMille fan. I actually like his older stuff better because they’re so good

APP: Twitter. I use it to really stay abreast of what’s happening.

TIME MANAGEMENT TIP: I never go to sleep with an unread email. It’s zero every night.

PREFERRED STRESS RELIEF METHOD: In the middle of the day, I try to make an hour of time for myself to go take a walk outside. Just getting outside has a whole different feeling. And it’s funny because it’s not like I did that in my office. I would work all day, but for some reason I just need to get up, get out, clear my mind, and come back a little refreshed.

(Miss this week’s The Leadership Brief? This interview above was delivered to the inbox of Leadership Brief subscribers on Sunday morning, June 28; to receive emails of conversations with the world’s top CEO’s and business decision makers, click here. The Leadership Brief will not be published over the Fourth of July weekend. The next weekly edition will hit your inbox July 12.)

[newstechreviews]

Margaret Keane, CEO of Synchrony—a company that financed $140 billion in purchases for American shoppers last year, via a range of credit card programs—has lived all sides of the debt equation. When she was 10, growing up as one of six kids in Queens, her father, a police officer, developed a costly and ultimately fatal illness that she says left her family burdened with thousands in medical bills. “We were getting calls to shut the electric off,” she says. “I don’t think you could ever forget that.”

She put herself through college working as a debt collector, earning $5.50 an hour, making 90 calls a day, while a student at St. John’s University. She excelled and ended up in the management training program at Citibank before rising to run Synchrony, where she now presides over an army of employees approving loans, and also collecting them when borrowers fall behind.

The ability of consumers to keep paying their bills will play an outsized role in the post-pandemic recovery. So far, Keane is not seeing a spike in delinquencies one might expect given the plunge in economic activity, though the stimulus is clearly aiding those bill payments. “The consumer is definitely hanging in there,” she says.

Keane, 60, recently joined TIME for a video conversation on the mindset of the American consumer, the impact of small business health on any recovery, and what corporations need to do to help address systemic racism in society.

Subscribe to The Leadership Brief by clicking here.

(This interview with Synchrony CEO Margaret Keane has been condensed and edited for clarity)

Your company was founded in 1932, another time of great financial distress, to help people buy appliances on credit. Now there are tens of million of Americans out of work. What parallels do you see?

What’s interesting about our company is the culture and the roots of how we came about was really during a time of crisis. And honestly, back in the day, when you think back, I know it doesn’t feel innovative now, but actually lending people money was a big deal.

What products were being sold?

Back in the ’30s, people would literally go to their local corner appliance store and pay weekly to get the appliance. You can imagine people weren’t working and GE wanted to sell appliances. So they came up with this idea, ‘Okay, how do we finance appliances?’ And that’s how the company started—GE wanted to sell appliances. Appliances were still relatively new for them. Having that at home was a big deal. It allowed the average American to have access to those kinds of luxuries back then.

How concerned are you about the health of the American consumer right now?

Coming into the crisis the consumer was very strong. People were paying their bills. Right now, we are not seeing real change to our performance on delinquencies. There’s two big unknowns. The first unknown is there’s been a lot of stimulus for people. I’m sure you’ve read, people put a lot more in savings.

Savings are at a record rate, right?

Record high, and then a second piece is people are paying their bills. Now the question is, is it the stimulus that’s helping them pay their bills, tax returns? What’s interesting to me is that consumers are being conservative. They’re being thoughtful about how they’re using their dollars. So what we need to do is say, ‘Okay, what happens when the stimulus stops? And then when the stimulus stops, how many people actually get back to work?’ That’s really the piece that’s a little uncertain right now.

With your partnerships with so many big retailers such as Lowe’s, Sam Clubs and the newly announced Verizon card, you have a lot of insights into consumer behavior. What are people buying now?

There’s a lot being spent around the home, home improvement. You can’t find plants now.There’s a lot being spent around the home, home improvement. You can’t find plants now. You can’t find vessels to plant in. Furniture obviously dropped, but didn’t drop completely. People are still buying online. What we did see though is that the ticket size was smaller because you didn’t have a sales person saying, ‘Oh, if you’re going to buy that chair, you might want to think about this table.”

Anything else?

Bikes. Fishing rods. All outdoor stuff now is kind of hard to get. I was just talking to someone who said you can’t find kayaks right now. People have just said I’m not going to take vacation. So I’m going to have vacation at home. And then there are people who say, ‘Okay, I really want to make my house more of my vacation.’

I’ve heard you mention that all of these Zoom calls are going to drive demand for another service that you finance.

We have our health care business, CareCredit. We do a lot with plastic surgeons. And I joked that the plastic surgery business is going to take off. And sure enough, it has taken off now that things have reopened.

Is that true? Do you think that’s driven by Zoom?

I use myself as an example. I’m looking at my face every day and there’s some things I should be getting. [LAUGHTER]. One of our employees, their wife is a nurse in a plastic surgery center, and she told her husband that she saw 32 patients in one day. It’s the most she’s ever seen in her entire career.

What economic indicators do you monitor to tell how consumers are feeling financially?

We look at things like are people paying less than their minimum payment? Are payment levels holding? And honestly, all of that’s holding. So that’s a sign for us that right now, the consumer is definitely hanging in there.

Purchase volume is the number of times people use their credit card?

Yeah, these are purchases on our card. Our cards across our merchant and retail and health care networks. When we started the pandemic, it started out, in March we were down 26%. It moved down to about 31% [in the first half of April.] And it’s down 10% in late May.

TIME for Learning partnered with Columbia Business School to offer a series of online, on-demand classes on topics like effective leadership, negotiation and customer-centric marketing. To sign up or learn more, click here.

How are brick and mortar retail stores going to come out of this?

We have been over-retailed for a long time. There was a retail transformation happening even before COVID. And there were a number of retailers that were struggling. What the COVID experience has done is accelerate that transformation. And we’re seeing more bankruptcies and reductions in retail. We’re seeing, obviously, more and more people buy online than ever before. But people still like to go to a mall and get out and see things and touch things.

I know your view is that some of the problems in retail went beyond competition from e-commerce, right?

Online is not the only driver of why retail has had its troubles in opening. I think there were some fundamental challenges underneath. Too many stores. No investment in the stores themselves. Lack of inventory. I was in a store before this whole thing happened and, honestly, I had to really search to find someone to pay for something. You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, why am I even here?’

What is your biggest concern about the economy?

I’ve been through many crises before where we’ve modeled a lot of things out. We tend to model unemployment. I don’t think we’ll be at this 40 million unemployment number. I think the real concern that I have when I think of employment is more around the small business constituents here. And how many of them actually survive, right? I think the real question is how many people survive in the small business segment, and then what does that do to unemployment?

Subscribe to The Leadership Brief by clicking here.

And what are your models showing right now?

It will be a double-digit unemployment number we think going into 2021.

What’s your favorite letter these days to describe the expected shape of the recovery?

I think it’s going to be somewhat of a U, but it’s going to be a little elongated It’s going to be a little slower coming up.

How important are small businesses to the American economy overall?

We need a robust small business community here to make our economy in the U.S. work. Studies show they employ the most people. They keep our communities strong. As a country, small business is the heart of who we are. [On June 17, after the interview was conducted, Synchrony committed $5 million to support small business; $2 million of that amount is directed to minority and women owned businesses in underserved communities.]

And people still value the connection with local businesses.

I live in a little town here [In Connecticut] and I walk down my Main Street, and I keep saying ‘I love that store, I hope they’re going to be back. And that store, I hope they’re going to be back. The restaurants, I hope they’re going to be back.’ These are real businesses with real expenses that have been shut for quite awhile.

The majority of your 17,000 employees work in call centers. How is that going in the pandemic?

We moved the entire company to home. That’s much easier said than done because we literally had to give everyone the technology. We had to create a whole logistics process. We put those packets, if you will, together: Their work-at-home technology. And then they’d come into our call centers, pick it up. We had like a whole process. We have some funny stories of people driving in the middle of the night to meet the FedEx guy to get the headsets because they weren’t going to make it in the morning.

What’s in that kit?

It’s a laptop, it’s a camera, it’s headsets, it’s speakers. A mouse. But in addition to that, we had to work with them and make sure their network could handle it, too. There was a lot of back-and-forth on just getting them set up in the right environment at home.

That sounds expensive. What did that cost?

I have no idea how much we spent. I know it was a lot. But I didn’t even ask. If we weren’t in a pandemic, we would have had our 55 meetings before we got to the decision of, Okay, we’re going to move everybody home. Then we would have done the budget. Then we would have said, well, whatever. We didn’t do any of that. We moved.

When you were a debt collector back in the day, did you have a good spiel? Did you go off script?

Look, I always try to tell people, what you do learn in collecting is there are people that have real tragedies and really are trying to pay and they’re lawful. And there are those people who are trying to beat the system. And I think the trick of a collector is figuring out who those other people are, and just making sure you have empathy for the people that have hit something.

Did you have a good nose for the people that are trying to beat the system?

You don’t have it at the beginning. But then you do. I went into it with a very rose-colored kind of glass thing, And then you’re like, ‘Okay, now I realize what people are talking about.’ It’s the repeat offender that gets you.

How is your workforce doing, mental-health wise?

You know the whole work-at-home is a good thing, but it puts a lot of stress, particularly for women who are trying to home-school.If you asked our staff out in the field, they’re saying this is the biggest challenge we’re facing right now is a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression. You know the whole work-at-home is a good thing, but it puts a lot of stress, particularly for women who are trying to home-school.

How do you respond to that?

We were working on mental health before COVID because it’s been very clear to me that we have a very stressed environment in our work right now. And there’s a lot of people who need extra support. So we were actually piloting some things in our call center, where some wellness coaches that were actually there at the site. So we now just transformed that to wellness through telemedicine. And we’ve expanded to offer free consultation with psychologists.

What has been your response to the outpouring of support to address systemic racism in society?

I have to as a leader recognize that we have some real work to do in society and the country. And we’re part of that. What can we do internally?

I didn’t want this to be like a check mark, like, We sent the note out. We all said ‘We’re sad.’ And then move on. This is a pivotal moment in our country that Synchrony can play a role inside its company, and then we’ve got to think about what we do outside the company. [On June 25, Synchrony announced a $5 million donation to organizations supporting social justice and equity.]

So corporations should be involved in this solution?

There’s no way we’re going to solve this, because there’s so many things that need to be solved, without corporations stepping up, engaging in our communities, and engaging with government. I think it’s all about how we lift everybody up through this. There’s how do we hire more diverse people in our company? How do we give more people of diversity, no matter what diversity, the opportunity inside our company? And we’ve been working on a lot of this. And we were very focused coming into this year on Black and Hispanic leadership. And particularly Black … because we don’t have enough. We’re doing a lot of soul-searching because we could pat ourselves, great places to work. We get all these awards. We’re great. But like let’s look at the numbers on some of these things and how we make a difference. We have to double down on all this right now.

KEANE’S FAVORITES

BUSINESS BOOK: I like leadership books. I loved Hamilton. I loved the Grant book. I love historical novels of people who have led. I’m very into those types of figures because look, they made a lot of very difficult decisions to bring our country together both times.

AUTHOR: I’m a big Nelson DeMille fan. I actually like his older stuff better because they’re so good

APP: Twitter. I use it to really stay abreast of what’s happening.

TIME MANAGEMENT TIP: I never go to sleep with an unread email. It’s zero every night.

PREFERRED STRESS RELIEF METHOD: In the middle of the day, I try to make an hour of time for myself to go take a walk outside. Just getting outside has a whole different feeling. And it’s funny because it’s not like I did that in my office. I would work all day, but for some reason I just need to get up, get out, clear my mind, and come back a little refreshed.

(Miss this week’s The Leadership Brief? This interview above was delivered to the inbox of Leadership Brief subscribers on Sunday morning, June 28; to receive emails of conversations with the world’s top CEO’s and business decision makers, click here. The Leadership Brief will not be published over the Fourth of July weekend. The next weekly edition will hit your inbox July 12.)

[filosofablogger]

I try not to do this often, but today I am reduxing a Jolly Monday from back in July 2017.  The reason?  I spent all my funny and good humour yesterday afternoon on the World Laughter Day post, and it has not yet replenished!  Plus, Jolly stayed over with Joyful last night and hasn’t managed to drag himself home yet to help.  Next week, I promise an all-new Jolly Monday, but meanwhile, this was one of my better ones, I thought.

Once again we face the daunting task of a new week … 7 days, 168 hours … and we do so with a smile, right folks?  We … wha … who said “No”?  Yes, we shall, now sit down and smile!  Now, I usually bake cinnamon rolls or some such treat for our Monday morning, but today I have decided to keep our treat gluten-free for a couple of readers who didn’t eat the cinnamon rolls, so …

gluten-free apple

So, let us move on, for I know that some of you have jobs to go to and cannot lollygag around here all day.

Electrifying speech by father of the bride …

“It was a beautiful wedding,” said the mother of the bride.  The wedding, held in the family’s apple orchard in Lower Woodstock, New Brunswick, had gone off without a hitch and now it was time for some celebrating.  The father of the bride, JP Nadeau, had just begun his toast with, “You know, Adam, you are one lucky guy …”, when out of the blue (literally) came a bolt of lightning (again, literally).

“As soon as I said that, my daughter’s eyes – she was looking at me – just popped right out. Because all of a sudden there was this lightning flash that hit right behind me. The electricity went through the wire, because I was holding a microphone. I saw lightning in my hand. I was really freaked out. I had the microphone and the shock jumped into the sound system and my hand just lit up and I saw the spark. And I’m looking at my hand and it’s all flared up … It was like I was holding a lightning bolt in my hand, it was amazing. I felt the current go right through me, but it was my hand I was worried about, because I’m a piano man. I want to keep playing. I don’t care if I die. I want to keep playing.”

After determining the only damage was a small scorch mark on his thumb, Nadeau continued his toast, only to be interrupted yet again by the people in the sound booth who were frantically yelling at him to bring back the microphone he was holding. He calmly walked over to the sound booth to hand them the microphone as the wedding guests looked on, stunned. “They thought I was going to drop dead.”

Nonetheless, the party resumed, albeit under a tent, for the lightning bolt was, predictably, followed by wind and rain.  It is said that a good time was had by all, and JP Nadeau is well aware that son-in-law Adam was not the only ‘lucky guy’ that day!

Not Candid Camera …

Imagine that you go to the ATM, conduct your business, and in lieu of a receipt, this is what comes through the slot …

Most people at this point would be looking around for a hidden camera.  Many took it as a joke and simply drove off.  But finally, after three hours and who knows how many notes, somebody flagged down police Officer Richard Olden.  The officer was also inclined to brush it off as a prank, but as he approached the ATM he could hear a faint voice.

What happened?  A repairman was called to the ATM in a bank under construction to repair a door lock.  Leaving his cell phone in his truck, he entered the ATM and with a sinking feeling, heard the door close behind him.  Oopsie.  So he began writing notes.  I wonder just how many such notes he had to write before finally somebody took it seriously? Lucky he didn’t leave his pen and notepad in the truck with his cellphone!

Hubby storage …

Most of us leave our hubbies or significant others home when we go to the mall.  (Actually, I HATE malls and as it happens, in my family the girls leave ME home, for which I am thankful.)  Malls and men mostly do not mix.  But every now and then, one gets stuck taking hubby who, being totally bored, exhibits eye-rolling and deep sighs, not-so-furtive glances at his watch, and occasional foot-tapping.  By this time, it seems just simpler to leave than to continue whatever shopping we set out to do.  But a mall in China may have hit on a brilliant solution for both wife and hubby … hubby storage pods!!!

“According to The Paper, the Global Harbour mall in Shanghai has erected a number of glass pods for wives to leave any disgruntled husbands that don’t want to be dragged around the shops.

Inside each individual pod is a chair, monitor, computer and gamepad, and men can sit and play retro 1990s games. Currently, the service is free, but staff told the newspaper that in future months, users will be able to scan a QR code and pay a small sum for the service using their mobile phones.” – BBC, 14 July 2017

I think it is a pretty good idea that may catch on, but … I can picture many a wife finishing her shopping and going home, accidentally (or not) forgetting hubby back at the mall!

More avocado art …

Remember a few weeks ago when I posted the above picture of an avocado that had been intricately carved into a thing of beauty?  Well now comes this …

The story is that Jan Campbell was preparing an avocado for lunch one day when she was struck by the beauty of the pit inside. After weeks of pondering its potential (people really have time to spend weeks pondering an avocado pit???), a deeply pigmented surface scratch inspired her to carve away its layers until a beautiful piece of art appeared.

Ever since that day, the Irish artisan has been turning avocado pits (or ‘stones,’ as she calls them) into tiny, intricately detailed figurines inspired by Celtic folklore. She carves the tranquil faces of forest spirits, the flowing hair of ancient goddesses, and even a handful of wild mushrooms now and then.

Though I mock, I must admit that this is actually pretty, and will certainly last longer than the carving done from the fruit itself.  Yes, the avocado is technically a fruit, and even more specifically, a single-seeded berry. Who knew?

You can view more of Jan’s carvings , but I warn you … the one pictured above goes for €111.00, or about $127 USD, so don’t become too attached!

Friends …

Kathryn Ryckman of Boerne, Texas posted two videos of friends, Maizey, a 10-year-old Labrador Retriever, and Bailey, a horse of unknown age.  The two are long-time friends, as you will see in these two short clips:

Let us wrap it up with a few more of those funny signs …

174 km is about 108 miles … very helpful in case of emergency!

Sorry folks, I just couldn’t resist …

Okay, folks … I am sorry to tell you this, but it is that time, once again.  Awwww …. don’t look so sad … be thankful that at least you are not having to don coats, hats and gloves to go out and shovel the drive … well, except for my friends in Australia, where it is now winter.  I hope everyone has a wonderful week … try not to let things get you down this week … remember that there is always something, usually many things to be thankful for.  Keep smiling, and keep sharing the smiles … keep safe and have a great week!

  And On This Jolly Monday, Ye Shall …. SMILE!!! I try not to do this often, but today I am reduxing a Jolly Monday from back in July 2017. 

[riichardwilson]

By Listening to Her Customers, This Entrepreneur Found a Larger Audience — And a Greater Mission

Michelle Kennedy launched the Peanut app to help moms. But now, the app is out to help all women.

March 4, 2020 15+ min read

This story appears in the March 2020 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Michelle Kennedy arrived at lunch, nervous about the conversation she was about to have with her best friend. It was 2016, and Kennedy had just made a big career decision. She was going to leave her job as a tech exec and launch a new app for moms. It was exciting — a new adventure, a massive market, a lot of potential upside.

But the downside was this: Her best friend, BBC journalist Sophie Sulehria, had been struggling for years to have a baby. In fact, at the time, Sulehria had just completed her third failed round of in vitro fertilization, and it was taking a toll on her mental health. Kennedy didn’t want to add to the burden.

“It was a very bad time. My husband and I were really suffering,” says Sulehria. “When Michelle said she had something to tell me, I thought, Oh God; she’s having another baby! But she told me about the business, and she was so worried: ‘I don’t want to be your best friend who’s not only got a kid but also has a mum business — I don’t want to alienate you.’ ”

Related: 6 Reasons Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs

But Sulehria was supportive. She knew the business was a fantastic idea, even though her exclusion from its target audience was killing her. So she asked Kennedy for a favor, as a friend and as a hopeful mom. This would be the earliest feedback Kennedy would receive as an entrepreneur, and although she wouldn’t know it yet, it would set the tone for how she would build her business — by listening to, and quickly responding to, the needs of the community it serves.

“I said, ‘Promise me one thing: When this app becomes successful, create a piece of it for people like me, a place where women having fertility issues can find support and friendship and discussions and information, because wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ ” Sulehria recalls. “And Michelle literally looked at me that day and said, ‘I promise.’ ”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Today, Kennedy’s company is called Peanut, and it has a million users and $9.8 million in funding. But back in 2013, before Peanut was even a twinkle in its founder’s eye, Kennedy was a rising star in the dating app world. She was deputy CEO of a European dating network called Badoo, and she also had a role in launching the brand Bumble, which would go on to become one of the industry’s major players.

Kennedy’s life was changing. Her personal dating days were behind her. She’d just given birth to her son, Finlay, and didn’t have many girlfriends with kids in her hometown of London. She wanted to find some like-minded women at a similar stage of life, but all she could find were archaic message boards and Facebook groups.

“The products available to me were all, quite frankly, crap,” Kennedy says. “Nothing represented me as a mother.” At the same time, she was watching a flood of utility-based applications enter the market — new ways to order food or pick up your dry cleaning — and felt that a huge opportunity was being overlooked. 

“Women are 50 percent of the population the last time I checked, and motherhood, in some way, will touch everyone’s life,” she says. “But no one is touching this space?” 

She came up with an idea for a networking app for moms and called it Peanut, after her nickname for her baby bump when she was pregnant. But she didn’t feel ready to take the leap — until three years later. “There were just signals in the market,” she says. “People were starting to talk about motherhood differently because we’d started to talk about womanhood differently, and it just felt like the right time.” In 2016, she began ideating in earnest, brought three trusted team members on board, and got to work. 

Peanut set out to embody the voice of modern, millennial motherhood. The team wanted it to function as a friend — one who understands that being a mom is a big part of a woman’s identity, but it’s not her entire identity. They spent a lot of time defining its voice. Users, for example, would be addressed as “Mama,” which tracks in both the United Kingdom and the United States and has a playful edge.

In February 2017, just a few months after she shared her plans with best friend Sulehria, Kennedy brought Peanut into the world, launching in the U.K. and the U.S. A simple beta version allowed women to create a profile, swipe to explore other women’s profiles — like on a dating app — and chat. 

The reaction was instantaneous. Thanks to some earlier-than-planned press coverage from the London Evening Standard, thousands of women flooded the beta offering, and Kennedy had fast validation. But the new users also revealed a vulnerability. Much like with dating apps, where happy couples no longer need the app, women were ditching Peanut once they’d made a new friend. “And why wouldn’t they?” Kennedy says. “You don’t need to make a new girlfriend every day — and in that case, you maybe don’t need to continue using Peanut.” 

Related: Debunking Three Myths About Women in Tech

This was a problem in need of solving. And as it turns out, users were already proposing a solution. “A lot of our users were saying, ‘Wait; how do I ask all the women on here a question? How do I share this article with all the women in my neighborhood?’ ” Kennedy says. “We had always planned to build community-based features, but our users let us know that we’d have to build them a lot quicker than planned.”

So the team hustled to launch community-wide message boards (called Peanut Pages) and group chats (Peanut Groups). Kennedy and her team thought they knew exactly how women would use these features; they expected to see chatter around the usual early-­motherhood pain points, like getting babies to sleep or working through pregnancy discomfort. But they got something much different. 

“Women were sharing about really intimate stuff: relationships, love, sex, work, money, housing, social issues,” says Kennedy, whose team kept an eye on developing conversations via a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring of message boards. “We had to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why are these conversations happening on Peanut?’ And it’s because they just aren’t happening anywhere else — you’re not going to post on a local Yahoo message board about postpartum sex or frustrations with your partner. This has to exist in a private network.” 

While some popular topics did prove to be playful (“boobs and books”), the majority had a more solemn tone — and one in particular was being discussed at a surprisingly high volume. 

“So many women were talking about trying and struggling to conceive baby number two,” says Kennedy. “Maybe they were going through IVF, or had just suffered a loss, or found they were facing infertility, or had been diagnosed with endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. Whatever it was, there was so much conversation.” 

Kennedy immediately thought of her best friend, Sulehria. She knew the facts were brutal: One in eight women will be affected by fertility issues, and one in six will experience a miscarriage. She also knew that the emotional burden was vast. “The most poignant thing Soph ever said to me was, ‘You know, I could use someone other than you to talk to,’ ” Kennedy says. “So now here we are with Peanut, and if all these women are talking about their struggles to conceive baby two or three, what about the women who haven’t had a baby at all?”

Kennedy planned to serve this audience someday; after all, she’d made a promise to her friend. But she thought it would be a long time from now, and a small part of a much larger pie. Now, by following her users’ lead, she realized she had it wrong. She needed to fulfill this promise fast — and the opportunity could be very big.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Women who struggle with fertility issues have already given their community a name: It’s TTC, for “trying to conceive.” Across the internet, there’s evidence of these women craving connection. Search #TTC on Instagram and you’ll find 1.4 million posts; #TTCcommunity has more than half a million posts; #TTCaftermiscarriage has nearly 82,000. 

But those makeshift communities, as the Peanut team saw it, weren’t working. “These women are making use of existing social networks, but they’re not finding a real community,” says Hannah Hastings, Peanut’s head of growth and brand marketing agency. “Instagram is a public space. If you choose to have a private profile, discovery is limited. So you’re either sharing personal information publicly or cut off. It doesn’t solve the need.” 

Sulehria backed that up. She found no comfort in the major social media networks, and in-person support groups were too far from where she lived. “Plus, the face-to-face thing is so daunting — to walk into a room and say, ‘Hi; I’m having this mental health problem,’ ” she says. “I just wanted something I could look at and engage with while I was lying in bed.” 

Peanut had identified a problem worth solving, but the team knew it couldn’t just create some new message boards called TTC and invite their users in. The psychological struggles facing the TTC community are significant and nuanced, and the internet can quickly become an emotional minefield. 

“There are articles and articles out there saying, ‘If you’re going through [infertility], just get off Facebook,’ ” says Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Because the moment someone inevitably drops an ultrasound photo on there, it’s like…Oh my God. Women feel bombarded by this day in, day out. People stop going to the mall, restaurants, family events. So in a digital space, they want to feel safe. Anyone who’s trying to be inclusive to an audience of people who are trying to conceive has to be übersensitive.”

Keeping these sensitivities in mind, Kennedy decided to shield the TTC community from the rest of the app. Peanut TTC would function almost like a separate platform and have its own onboarding process. That way, TTC users wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon conversations from happy new moms (though they could opt in to see everything else if they wanted).

After that, the Peanut team had to dive into the nuances of the TTC world, and they leaned heavily on Sulehria as a guiding voice and gut check. Kennedy also asked Sulehria to connect her with other women who’d been struggling to conceive and may be willing to share their experience. Slowly but surely, a small but mighty focus group helped her build this new product with care. 

Related: How 2 Entrepreneurs Built a Membership Community for Working Moms

The team learned, as an example, that there are plenty of tensions within the TTC community that Peanut would have to contend with. “A woman who’s been trying for five months and a woman who’s been trying for five years are in very different positions,” Kennedy says. “To put them in one bucket? That’s not the experience we want to give users.”

Kennedy had started to see evidence of this earlier. On Peanut, where some women had created fertility-related message boards, there was a lot of debate about which posts belonged. “A woman who had become pregnant posted an image of her positive pee stick, which can be really triggering for other women,” she says. “We’d get notifications and reports, and we’d also see our users say to each other, ‘Hey, maybe you should take it down, or post it somewhere else.’ ” 

So in Peanut TTC, the company created UX solutions for those sensitivities. Blurred filters can be applied to potentially sensitive content (flagged by the creator or other users), and women will have to opt in to see those messages or images. The team developed proprietary artificial intelligence, which monitors group discussions and flags any comments that may not suit the brand’s ethos. “If a user is writing a comment and we detect an element of negativity, the app will say, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that? Peanut is a place of supportive conversation,’ ” explains Hastings.

In November 2019, after nine months in development, the company launched Peanut TTC. The community grew quickly, and user engagement skyrocketed — 60 percent above Peanut’s typical engagement.

It’s a good start, but Kennedy knows there’s a lot still left to do. She wants Peanut to expand its sensitivity features, improve how it matches women with relevant groups, and create room for TTC women to celebrate their pregnancies. And, more important, she also wants to keep following this line of thinking — watching how people use her product, and reacting with new solutions. She’s already seeing many options: Women are using the app to talk about raising teenagers, fighting chronic health conditions, sex after the age of 50, and more.

“Women have all these different life stages,” Kennedy says. “We can be the product that helps you find other women like you at every stage.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Peanut is still in that early stage of a tech company’s life, when user growth is prioritized over profit. Which is to say: The app is free to use and makes no money. But Kennedy is building a monetization strategy based on premium products or in-app purchases. Imagine a user paying a small fee for direct access to a respected doctor, or an expert who can quickly and personally respond to a health-related question. 

Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s not. Maybe women will be interested in using it, but not so interested in paying for it. Either way, Kennedy believes she’ll find her answer, so long as she keeps engaging and listening to her users. 

To do that, her team is hustling to repeat the success of TTC with other communities. Later in 2020, for example, they’ll roll out Peanut Meno, for women approaching and going through menopause. 

They also go beyond just monitoring conversations on the app. Peanut formally recruited some of its most engaged users to serve as MVPs — Most Valuable Peanuts. The brand ambassador program rewards some users with a tote bag or a sweatshirt when they share the app with other women. Other MVPs do more structured work, like distribute flyers at local coffee shops or the library, or organize a group meetup. The tasks are paid (“If I’d pay someone else to do the job, why wouldn’t I pay my user?” Kennedy says) and selected at the leisure of the user; some women have earned up to $500 in a month.

In Kennedy’s eyes, it’s a small expense to elevate the insights of Peanut’s most tuned-in community members. Her 1,500 current MVPs are, indeed, incredibly valuable. “They’re the women creating our product,” she says. “We look at the data, listen, engage, and implement. We get feedback, iterate, and do it again. And when we don’t get it right, we have 1,500 women ready to tell us how to fix it. And those 1,500 women know, because they have direct access to our million women, engaging with them, organically and naturally, day after day.” 

Related: Why Investing in Women-Led Startups Is the Smart Move

Kennedy calls this a “constant user feedback loop,” and perhaps nobody better embodies that than an MVP named Tricia Bowden. She’s a former marketing agency exec who, in 2017, moved back to New York after spending a year on the West Coast. She had a 1-year-old son and was new to life as a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of the friends she’d returned home to weren’t yet mothers. “I Googled ‘Meeting mom friends’ and came across Peanut,” Bowden says. She joined, started lining up playdates, and before too long had a reliable network of friends close by.

Her passion for the brand grew fast, and Bowden soon became one of Peanut’s most valuable MVPs, and one of the loud voices pushing Peanut to expand to the “Meno” community sooner than later. Kennedy was impressed and gave her a promotion: In January, Bowden started a full-time gig as Peanut’s head of strategic growth and partnerships for the New York market, where the company will build out an office later this year. 

Bowden’s first order of business is to optimize and scale the existing MVP program, rolling it out on a hyperlocal, local, and national level — which is to say, Bowden basically became the feedback loop. She’s a user who helped shape Peanut, who then joined Peanut, who is now helping Peanut find and attract more people like her, who, of course, will then go on to shape Peanut anew.  

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/by-listening-to-her-customers-this-entrepreneur-found-a-larger-audience-and-a-greater-mission/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/611675537099849728

[laurelkrugerr]

By Listening to Her Customers, This Entrepreneur Found a Larger Audience — And a Greater Mission

Michelle Kennedy launched the Peanut app to help moms. But now, the app is out to help all women.

March 4, 2020 15+ min read

This story appears in the March 2020 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Michelle Kennedy arrived at lunch, nervous about the conversation she was about to have with her best friend. It was 2016, and Kennedy had just made a big career decision. She was going to leave her job as a tech exec and launch a new app for moms. It was exciting — a new adventure, a massive market, a lot of potential upside.

But the downside was this: Her best friend, BBC journalist Sophie Sulehria, had been struggling for years to have a baby. In fact, at the time, Sulehria had just completed her third failed round of in vitro fertilization, and it was taking a toll on her mental health. Kennedy didn’t want to add to the burden.

“It was a very bad time. My husband and I were really suffering,” says Sulehria. “When Michelle said she had something to tell me, I thought, Oh God; she’s having another baby! But she told me about the business, and she was so worried: ‘I don’t want to be your best friend who’s not only got a kid but also has a mum business — I don’t want to alienate you.’ ”

Related: 6 Reasons Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs

But Sulehria was supportive. She knew the business was a fantastic idea, even though her exclusion from its target audience was killing her. So she asked Kennedy for a favor, as a friend and as a hopeful mom. This would be the earliest feedback Kennedy would receive as an entrepreneur, and although she wouldn’t know it yet, it would set the tone for how she would build her business — by listening to, and quickly responding to, the needs of the community it serves.

“I said, ‘Promise me one thing: When this app becomes successful, create a piece of it for people like me, a place where women having fertility issues can find support and friendship and discussions and information, because wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ ” Sulehria recalls. “And Michelle literally looked at me that day and said, ‘I promise.’ ”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Today, Kennedy’s company is called Peanut, and it has a million users and $9.8 million in funding. But back in 2013, before Peanut was even a twinkle in its founder’s eye, Kennedy was a rising star in the dating app world. She was deputy CEO of a European dating network called Badoo, and she also had a role in launching the brand Bumble, which would go on to become one of the industry’s major players.

Kennedy’s life was changing. Her personal dating days were behind her. She’d just given birth to her son, Finlay, and didn’t have many girlfriends with kids in her hometown of London. She wanted to find some like-minded women at a similar stage of life, but all she could find were archaic message boards and Facebook groups.

“The products available to me were all, quite frankly, crap,” Kennedy says. “Nothing represented me as a mother.” At the same time, she was watching a flood of utility-based applications enter the market — new ways to order food or pick up your dry cleaning — and felt that a huge opportunity was being overlooked. 

“Women are 50 percent of the population the last time I checked, and motherhood, in some way, will touch everyone’s life,” she says. “But no one is touching this space?” 

She came up with an idea for a networking app for moms and called it Peanut, after her nickname for her baby bump when she was pregnant. But she didn’t feel ready to take the leap — until three years later. “There were just signals in the market,” she says. “People were starting to talk about motherhood differently because we’d started to talk about womanhood differently, and it just felt like the right time.” In 2016, she began ideating in earnest, brought three trusted team members on board, and got to work. 

Peanut set out to embody the voice of modern, millennial motherhood. The team wanted it to function as a friend — one who understands that being a mom is a big part of a woman’s identity, but it’s not her entire identity. They spent a lot of time defining its voice. Users, for example, would be addressed as “Mama,” which tracks in both the United Kingdom and the United States and has a playful edge.

In February 2017, just a few months after she shared her plans with best friend Sulehria, Kennedy brought Peanut into the world, launching in the U.K. and the U.S. A simple beta version allowed women to create a profile, swipe to explore other women’s profiles — like on a dating app — and chat. 

The reaction was instantaneous. Thanks to some earlier-than-planned press coverage from the London Evening Standard, thousands of women flooded the beta offering, and Kennedy had fast validation. But the new users also revealed a vulnerability. Much like with dating apps, where happy couples no longer need the app, women were ditching Peanut once they’d made a new friend. “And why wouldn’t they?” Kennedy says. “You don’t need to make a new girlfriend every day — and in that case, you maybe don’t need to continue using Peanut.” 

Related: Debunking Three Myths About Women in Tech

This was a problem in need of solving. And as it turns out, users were already proposing a solution. “A lot of our users were saying, ‘Wait; how do I ask all the women on here a question? How do I share this article with all the women in my neighborhood?’ ” Kennedy says. “We had always planned to build community-based features, but our users let us know that we’d have to build them a lot quicker than planned.”

So the team hustled to launch community-wide message boards (called Peanut Pages) and group chats (Peanut Groups). Kennedy and her team thought they knew exactly how women would use these features; they expected to see chatter around the usual early-­motherhood pain points, like getting babies to sleep or working through pregnancy discomfort. But they got something much different. 

“Women were sharing about really intimate stuff: relationships, love, sex, work, money, housing, social issues,” says Kennedy, whose team kept an eye on developing conversations via a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring of message boards. “We had to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why are these conversations happening on Peanut?’ And it’s because they just aren’t happening anywhere else — you’re not going to post on a local Yahoo message board about postpartum sex or frustrations with your partner. This has to exist in a private network.” 

While some popular topics did prove to be playful (“boobs and books”), the majority had a more solemn tone — and one in particular was being discussed at a surprisingly high volume. 

“So many women were talking about trying and struggling to conceive baby number two,” says Kennedy. “Maybe they were going through IVF, or had just suffered a loss, or found they were facing infertility, or had been diagnosed with endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. Whatever it was, there was so much conversation.” 

Kennedy immediately thought of her best friend, Sulehria. She knew the facts were brutal: One in eight women will be affected by fertility issues, and one in six will experience a miscarriage. She also knew that the emotional burden was vast. “The most poignant thing Soph ever said to me was, ‘You know, I could use someone other than you to talk to,’ ” Kennedy says. “So now here we are with Peanut, and if all these women are talking about their struggles to conceive baby two or three, what about the women who haven’t had a baby at all?”

Kennedy planned to serve this audience someday; after all, she’d made a promise to her friend. But she thought it would be a long time from now, and a small part of a much larger pie. Now, by following her users’ lead, she realized she had it wrong. She needed to fulfill this promise fast — and the opportunity could be very big.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Women who struggle with fertility issues have already given their community a name: It’s TTC, for “trying to conceive.” Across the internet, there’s evidence of these women craving connection. Search #TTC on Instagram and you’ll find 1.4 million posts; #TTCcommunity has more than half a million posts; #TTCaftermiscarriage has nearly 82,000. 

But those makeshift communities, as the Peanut team saw it, weren’t working. “These women are making use of existing social networks, but they’re not finding a real community,” says Hannah Hastings, Peanut’s head of growth and brand marketing agency. “Instagram is a public space. If you choose to have a private profile, discovery is limited. So you’re either sharing personal information publicly or cut off. It doesn’t solve the need.” 

Sulehria backed that up. She found no comfort in the major social media networks, and in-person support groups were too far from where she lived. “Plus, the face-to-face thing is so daunting — to walk into a room and say, ‘Hi; I’m having this mental health problem,’ ” she says. “I just wanted something I could look at and engage with while I was lying in bed.” 

Peanut had identified a problem worth solving, but the team knew it couldn’t just create some new message boards called TTC and invite their users in. The psychological struggles facing the TTC community are significant and nuanced, and the internet can quickly become an emotional minefield. 

“There are articles and articles out there saying, ‘If you’re going through [infertility], just get off Facebook,’ ” says Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Because the moment someone inevitably drops an ultrasound photo on there, it’s like…Oh my God. Women feel bombarded by this day in, day out. People stop going to the mall, restaurants, family events. So in a digital space, they want to feel safe. Anyone who’s trying to be inclusive to an audience of people who are trying to conceive has to be übersensitive.”

Keeping these sensitivities in mind, Kennedy decided to shield the TTC community from the rest of the app. Peanut TTC would function almost like a separate platform and have its own onboarding process. That way, TTC users wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon conversations from happy new moms (though they could opt in to see everything else if they wanted).

After that, the Peanut team had to dive into the nuances of the TTC world, and they leaned heavily on Sulehria as a guiding voice and gut check. Kennedy also asked Sulehria to connect her with other women who’d been struggling to conceive and may be willing to share their experience. Slowly but surely, a small but mighty focus group helped her build this new product with care. 

Related: How 2 Entrepreneurs Built a Membership Community for Working Moms

The team learned, as an example, that there are plenty of tensions within the TTC community that Peanut would have to contend with. “A woman who’s been trying for five months and a woman who’s been trying for five years are in very different positions,” Kennedy says. “To put them in one bucket? That’s not the experience we want to give users.”

Kennedy had started to see evidence of this earlier. On Peanut, where some women had created fertility-related message boards, there was a lot of debate about which posts belonged. “A woman who had become pregnant posted an image of her positive pee stick, which can be really triggering for other women,” she says. “We’d get notifications and reports, and we’d also see our users say to each other, ‘Hey, maybe you should take it down, or post it somewhere else.’ ” 

So in Peanut TTC, the company created UX solutions for those sensitivities. Blurred filters can be applied to potentially sensitive content (flagged by the creator or other users), and women will have to opt in to see those messages or images. The team developed proprietary artificial intelligence, which monitors group discussions and flags any comments that may not suit the brand’s ethos. “If a user is writing a comment and we detect an element of negativity, the app will say, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that? Peanut is a place of supportive conversation,’ ” explains Hastings.

In November 2019, after nine months in development, the company launched Peanut TTC. The community grew quickly, and user engagement skyrocketed — 60 percent above Peanut’s typical engagement.

It’s a good start, but Kennedy knows there’s a lot still left to do. She wants Peanut to expand its sensitivity features, improve how it matches women with relevant groups, and create room for TTC women to celebrate their pregnancies. And, more important, she also wants to keep following this line of thinking — watching how people use her product, and reacting with new solutions. She’s already seeing many options: Women are using the app to talk about raising teenagers, fighting chronic health conditions, sex after the age of 50, and more.

“Women have all these different life stages,” Kennedy says. “We can be the product that helps you find other women like you at every stage.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Peanut is still in that early stage of a tech company’s life, when user growth is prioritized over profit. Which is to say: The app is free to use and makes no money. But Kennedy is building a monetization strategy based on premium products or in-app purchases. Imagine a user paying a small fee for direct access to a respected doctor, or an expert who can quickly and personally respond to a health-related question. 

Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s not. Maybe women will be interested in using it, but not so interested in paying for it. Either way, Kennedy believes she’ll find her answer, so long as she keeps engaging and listening to her users. 

To do that, her team is hustling to repeat the success of TTC with other communities. Later in 2020, for example, they’ll roll out Peanut Meno, for women approaching and going through menopause. 

They also go beyond just monitoring conversations on the app. Peanut formally recruited some of its most engaged users to serve as MVPs — Most Valuable Peanuts. The brand ambassador program rewards some users with a tote bag or a sweatshirt when they share the app with other women. Other MVPs do more structured work, like distribute flyers at local coffee shops or the library, or organize a group meetup. The tasks are paid (“If I’d pay someone else to do the job, why wouldn’t I pay my user?” Kennedy says) and selected at the leisure of the user; some women have earned up to $500 in a month.

In Kennedy’s eyes, it’s a small expense to elevate the insights of Peanut’s most tuned-in community members. Her 1,500 current MVPs are, indeed, incredibly valuable. “They’re the women creating our product,” she says. “We look at the data, listen, engage, and implement. We get feedback, iterate, and do it again. And when we don’t get it right, we have 1,500 women ready to tell us how to fix it. And those 1,500 women know, because they have direct access to our million women, engaging with them, organically and naturally, day after day.” 

Related: Why Investing in Women-Led Startups Is the Smart Move

Kennedy calls this a “constant user feedback loop,” and perhaps nobody better embodies that than an MVP named Tricia Bowden. She’s a former marketing agency exec who, in 2017, moved back to New York after spending a year on the West Coast. She had a 1-year-old son and was new to life as a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of the friends she’d returned home to weren’t yet mothers. “I Googled ‘Meeting mom friends’ and came across Peanut,” Bowden says. She joined, started lining up playdates, and before too long had a reliable network of friends close by.

Her passion for the brand grew fast, and Bowden soon became one of Peanut’s most valuable MVPs, and one of the loud voices pushing Peanut to expand to the “Meno” community sooner than later. Kennedy was impressed and gave her a promotion: In January, Bowden started a full-time gig as Peanut’s head of strategic growth and partnerships for the New York market, where the company will build out an office later this year. 

Bowden’s first order of business is to optimize and scale the existing MVP program, rolling it out on a hyperlocal, local, and national level — which is to say, Bowden basically became the feedback loop. She’s a user who helped shape Peanut, who then joined Peanut, who is now helping Peanut find and attract more people like her, who, of course, will then go on to shape Peanut anew.  

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/by-listening-to-her-customers-this-entrepreneur-found-a-larger-audience-and-a-greater-mission/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/by-listening-to-her-customers-this.html

[scpie]

By Listening to Her Customers, This Entrepreneur Found a Larger Audience — And a Greater Mission

Michelle Kennedy launched the Peanut app to help moms. But now, the app is out to help all women.

March 4, 2020 15+ min read

This story appears in the March 2020 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Michelle Kennedy arrived at lunch, nervous about the conversation she was about to have with her best friend. It was 2016, and Kennedy had just made a big career decision. She was going to leave her job as a tech exec and launch a new app for moms. It was exciting — a new adventure, a massive market, a lot of potential upside.

But the downside was this: Her best friend, BBC journalist Sophie Sulehria, had been struggling for years to have a baby. In fact, at the time, Sulehria had just completed her third failed round of in vitro fertilization, and it was taking a toll on her mental health. Kennedy didn’t want to add to the burden.

“It was a very bad time. My husband and I were really suffering,” says Sulehria. “When Michelle said she had something to tell me, I thought, Oh God; she’s having another baby! But she told me about the business, and she was so worried: ‘I don’t want to be your best friend who’s not only got a kid but also has a mum business — I don’t want to alienate you.’ ”

Related: 6 Reasons Moms Make the Best Entrepreneurs

But Sulehria was supportive. She knew the business was a fantastic idea, even though her exclusion from its target audience was killing her. So she asked Kennedy for a favor, as a friend and as a hopeful mom. This would be the earliest feedback Kennedy would receive as an entrepreneur, and although she wouldn’t know it yet, it would set the tone for how she would build her business — by listening to, and quickly responding to, the needs of the community it serves.

“I said, ‘Promise me one thing: When this app becomes successful, create a piece of it for people like me, a place where women having fertility issues can find support and friendship and discussions and information, because wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ ” Sulehria recalls. “And Michelle literally looked at me that day and said, ‘I promise.’ ”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Today, Kennedy’s company is called Peanut, and it has a million users and $9.8 million in funding. But back in 2013, before Peanut was even a twinkle in its founder’s eye, Kennedy was a rising star in the dating app world. She was deputy CEO of a European dating network called Badoo, and she also had a role in launching the brand Bumble, which would go on to become one of the industry’s major players.

Kennedy’s life was changing. Her personal dating days were behind her. She’d just given birth to her son, Finlay, and didn’t have many girlfriends with kids in her hometown of London. She wanted to find some like-minded women at a similar stage of life, but all she could find were archaic message boards and Facebook groups.

“The products available to me were all, quite frankly, crap,” Kennedy says. “Nothing represented me as a mother.” At the same time, she was watching a flood of utility-based applications enter the market — new ways to order food or pick up your dry cleaning — and felt that a huge opportunity was being overlooked. 

“Women are 50 percent of the population the last time I checked, and motherhood, in some way, will touch everyone’s life,” she says. “But no one is touching this space?” 

She came up with an idea for a networking app for moms and called it Peanut, after her nickname for her baby bump when she was pregnant. But she didn’t feel ready to take the leap — until three years later. “There were just signals in the market,” she says. “People were starting to talk about motherhood differently because we’d started to talk about womanhood differently, and it just felt like the right time.” In 2016, she began ideating in earnest, brought three trusted team members on board, and got to work. 

Peanut set out to embody the voice of modern, millennial motherhood. The team wanted it to function as a friend — one who understands that being a mom is a big part of a woman’s identity, but it’s not her entire identity. They spent a lot of time defining its voice. Users, for example, would be addressed as “Mama,” which tracks in both the United Kingdom and the United States and has a playful edge.

In February 2017, just a few months after she shared her plans with best friend Sulehria, Kennedy brought Peanut into the world, launching in the U.K. and the U.S. A simple beta version allowed women to create a profile, swipe to explore other women’s profiles — like on a dating app — and chat. 

The reaction was instantaneous. Thanks to some earlier-than-planned press coverage from the London Evening Standard, thousands of women flooded the beta offering, and Kennedy had fast validation. But the new users also revealed a vulnerability. Much like with dating apps, where happy couples no longer need the app, women were ditching Peanut once they’d made a new friend. “And why wouldn’t they?” Kennedy says. “You don’t need to make a new girlfriend every day — and in that case, you maybe don’t need to continue using Peanut.” 

Related: Debunking Three Myths About Women in Tech

This was a problem in need of solving. And as it turns out, users were already proposing a solution. “A lot of our users were saying, ‘Wait; how do I ask all the women on here a question? How do I share this article with all the women in my neighborhood?’ ” Kennedy says. “We had always planned to build community-based features, but our users let us know that we’d have to build them a lot quicker than planned.”

So the team hustled to launch community-wide message boards (called Peanut Pages) and group chats (Peanut Groups). Kennedy and her team thought they knew exactly how women would use these features; they expected to see chatter around the usual early-­motherhood pain points, like getting babies to sleep or working through pregnancy discomfort. But they got something much different. 

“Women were sharing about really intimate stuff: relationships, love, sex, work, money, housing, social issues,” says Kennedy, whose team kept an eye on developing conversations via a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring of message boards. “We had to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Why are these conversations happening on Peanut?’ And it’s because they just aren’t happening anywhere else — you’re not going to post on a local Yahoo message board about postpartum sex or frustrations with your partner. This has to exist in a private network.” 

While some popular topics did prove to be playful (“boobs and books”), the majority had a more solemn tone — and one in particular was being discussed at a surprisingly high volume. 

“So many women were talking about trying and struggling to conceive baby number two,” says Kennedy. “Maybe they were going through IVF, or had just suffered a loss, or found they were facing infertility, or had been diagnosed with endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. Whatever it was, there was so much conversation.” 

Kennedy immediately thought of her best friend, Sulehria. She knew the facts were brutal: One in eight women will be affected by fertility issues, and one in six will experience a miscarriage. She also knew that the emotional burden was vast. “The most poignant thing Soph ever said to me was, ‘You know, I could use someone other than you to talk to,’ ” Kennedy says. “So now here we are with Peanut, and if all these women are talking about their struggles to conceive baby two or three, what about the women who haven’t had a baby at all?”

Kennedy planned to serve this audience someday; after all, she’d made a promise to her friend. But she thought it would be a long time from now, and a small part of a much larger pie. Now, by following her users’ lead, she realized she had it wrong. She needed to fulfill this promise fast — and the opportunity could be very big.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Women who struggle with fertility issues have already given their community a name: It’s TTC, for “trying to conceive.” Across the internet, there’s evidence of these women craving connection. Search #TTC on Instagram and you’ll find 1.4 million posts; #TTCcommunity has more than half a million posts; #TTCaftermiscarriage has nearly 82,000. 

But those makeshift communities, as the Peanut team saw it, weren’t working. “These women are making use of existing social networks, but they’re not finding a real community,” says Hannah Hastings, Peanut’s head of growth and brand marketing agency. “Instagram is a public space. If you choose to have a private profile, discovery is limited. So you’re either sharing personal information publicly or cut off. It doesn’t solve the need.” 

Sulehria backed that up. She found no comfort in the major social media networks, and in-person support groups were too far from where she lived. “Plus, the face-to-face thing is so daunting — to walk into a room and say, ‘Hi; I’m having this mental health problem,’ ” she says. “I just wanted something I could look at and engage with while I was lying in bed.” 

Peanut had identified a problem worth solving, but the team knew it couldn’t just create some new message boards called TTC and invite their users in. The psychological struggles facing the TTC community are significant and nuanced, and the internet can quickly become an emotional minefield. 

“There are articles and articles out there saying, ‘If you’re going through [infertility], just get off Facebook,’ ” says Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Because the moment someone inevitably drops an ultrasound photo on there, it’s like…Oh my God. Women feel bombarded by this day in, day out. People stop going to the mall, restaurants, family events. So in a digital space, they want to feel safe. Anyone who’s trying to be inclusive to an audience of people who are trying to conceive has to be übersensitive.”

Keeping these sensitivities in mind, Kennedy decided to shield the TTC community from the rest of the app. Peanut TTC would function almost like a separate platform and have its own onboarding process. That way, TTC users wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon conversations from happy new moms (though they could opt in to see everything else if they wanted).

After that, the Peanut team had to dive into the nuances of the TTC world, and they leaned heavily on Sulehria as a guiding voice and gut check. Kennedy also asked Sulehria to connect her with other women who’d been struggling to conceive and may be willing to share their experience. Slowly but surely, a small but mighty focus group helped her build this new product with care. 

Related: How 2 Entrepreneurs Built a Membership Community for Working Moms

The team learned, as an example, that there are plenty of tensions within the TTC community that Peanut would have to contend with. “A woman who’s been trying for five months and a woman who’s been trying for five years are in very different positions,” Kennedy says. “To put them in one bucket? That’s not the experience we want to give users.”

Kennedy had started to see evidence of this earlier. On Peanut, where some women had created fertility-related message boards, there was a lot of debate about which posts belonged. “A woman who had become pregnant posted an image of her positive pee stick, which can be really triggering for other women,” she says. “We’d get notifications and reports, and we’d also see our users say to each other, ‘Hey, maybe you should take it down, or post it somewhere else.’ ” 

So in Peanut TTC, the company created UX solutions for those sensitivities. Blurred filters can be applied to potentially sensitive content (flagged by the creator or other users), and women will have to opt in to see those messages or images. The team developed proprietary artificial intelligence, which monitors group discussions and flags any comments that may not suit the brand’s ethos. “If a user is writing a comment and we detect an element of negativity, the app will say, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that? Peanut is a place of supportive conversation,’ ” explains Hastings.

In November 2019, after nine months in development, the company launched Peanut TTC. The community grew quickly, and user engagement skyrocketed — 60 percent above Peanut’s typical engagement.

It’s a good start, but Kennedy knows there’s a lot still left to do. She wants Peanut to expand its sensitivity features, improve how it matches women with relevant groups, and create room for TTC women to celebrate their pregnancies. And, more important, she also wants to keep following this line of thinking — watching how people use her product, and reacting with new solutions. She’s already seeing many options: Women are using the app to talk about raising teenagers, fighting chronic health conditions, sex after the age of 50, and more.

“Women have all these different life stages,” Kennedy says. “We can be the product that helps you find other women like you at every stage.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Peanut App

Peanut is still in that early stage of a tech company’s life, when user growth is prioritized over profit. Which is to say: The app is free to use and makes no money. But Kennedy is building a monetization strategy based on premium products or in-app purchases. Imagine a user paying a small fee for direct access to a respected doctor, or an expert who can quickly and personally respond to a health-related question. 

Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s not. Maybe women will be interested in using it, but not so interested in paying for it. Either way, Kennedy believes she’ll find her answer, so long as she keeps engaging and listening to her users. 

To do that, her team is hustling to repeat the success of TTC with other communities. Later in 2020, for example, they’ll roll out Peanut Meno, for women approaching and going through menopause. 

They also go beyond just monitoring conversations on the app. Peanut formally recruited some of its most engaged users to serve as MVPs — Most Valuable Peanuts. The brand ambassador program rewards some users with a tote bag or a sweatshirt when they share the app with other women. Other MVPs do more structured work, like distribute flyers at local coffee shops or the library, or organize a group meetup. The tasks are paid (“If I’d pay someone else to do the job, why wouldn’t I pay my user?” Kennedy says) and selected at the leisure of the user; some women have earned up to $500 in a month.

In Kennedy’s eyes, it’s a small expense to elevate the insights of Peanut’s most tuned-in community members. Her 1,500 current MVPs are, indeed, incredibly valuable. “They’re the women creating our product,” she says. “We look at the data, listen, engage, and implement. We get feedback, iterate, and do it again. And when we don’t get it right, we have 1,500 women ready to tell us how to fix it. And those 1,500 women know, because they have direct access to our million women, engaging with them, organically and naturally, day after day.” 

Related: Why Investing in Women-Led Startups Is the Smart Move

Kennedy calls this a “constant user feedback loop,” and perhaps nobody better embodies that than an MVP named Tricia Bowden. She’s a former marketing agency exec who, in 2017, moved back to New York after spending a year on the West Coast. She had a 1-year-old son and was new to life as a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of the friends she’d returned home to weren’t yet mothers. “I Googled ‘Meeting mom friends’ and came across Peanut,” Bowden says. She joined, started lining up playdates, and before too long had a reliable network of friends close by.

Her passion for the brand grew fast, and Bowden soon became one of Peanut’s most valuable MVPs, and one of the loud voices pushing Peanut to expand to the “Meno” community sooner than later. Kennedy was impressed and gave her a promotion: In January, Bowden started a full-time gig as Peanut’s head of strategic growth and partnerships for the New York market, where the company will build out an office later this year. 

Bowden’s first order of business is to optimize and scale the existing MVP program, rolling it out on a hyperlocal, local, and national level — which is to say, Bowden basically became the feedback loop. She’s a user who helped shape Peanut, who then joined Peanut, who is now helping Peanut find and attract more people like her, who, of course, will then go on to shape Peanut anew.  

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/by-listening-to-her-customers-this-entrepreneur-found-a-larger-audience-and-a-greater-mission/

[prep74mike]

Farewell, my lovely

When I compare

What I have lost with what I have gained, 

What I have missed with what attained, 

Little room do I find for pride

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In June 1974 I graduated from high school. Growing up as a young boy and all thru school I had been an always enthusiastic and sometimes very capable athlete. I had spent my senior year as a starting offensive guard on our championship football team in the fall and played soccer on our spring soccer team.

By June, I was playing soccer in the college summer league and preparing for the upcoming Fall college club soccer

season. During this glorious first summer of my young manhood, my days were simple: get up and work from 8-4 (I was a painters helper....aka grunt) go home and change into my shorts and spikes, pick up my girlfriend and goto the soccer complex to play in one of five games a week.

After our games, my friends and I and our girlfriends would go down to the river to drink beer, listen to BTO, skip rocks and run up and down the rocky banks.

In fact, most of my life was spent on my feet, running, kicking and trying to out throw, out hit and out run other boys (and sometimes some athletic girls).

40 years later, on a warm summer August day, I was painting a friend's house as a favor. Again I had BTO playing on my radio.

I was alone, painting and grooving in the morning sun. Birds chirped along with me. I had recently retired from full time work and life was good.

For some unknown reason, I stepped off my ladder into thin air and onto the hard concrete patio 4 feet below. I fell hard. My nose broke and bled, I scratched my hands and bare legs. I was covered in my own blood. I also noticed that my left foot had a deep gash. It didn't look too bad tho so I washed and bandaged it and then kind of ignored it. Two weeks later I was in the hospital and was very sick. I had a raging fever and was sick to my stomach. My foot had become seriously infected .

After a week in intensive care, I was told that they couldn't save it. They would have to amputate my leg, just below my left knee.

I was stunned.

Long ago, Raymond Chandler wrote a crime thriller called " Farewell, My Lovely". It is a pulp detective story about love and deception and in the end, loss and redemption.

It is a melancholy and sad story written in the noir style popular in that era.

It follows of course, the fictional LA private detective Phillip Marlow. In this story Marlow loses something very valuable but in the end finds something greater and in fact more important. I loved reading this and of course watching Robert Mitchum play it in the movie. It always reminds me that while some things can be lost, all is never lost.

When one loses a body part it takes away something else. Something not physical but mental. It takes away ones sense of completeness.

Thus, although my stump didn't really hurt too much, I still felt wierd. Something was literally missing.

The loss was sometimes overwhelming.

I would reach for my foot, it wasn't there.

I tried to hop and fell.

I woke up one night, got out of bed and stepped into nothing.

I used a wheelchair and a walker and crutches.

Then I got an expensive fake leg and soon learned how to walk again.

At fist, I hobbled around like an ancient pirate on the bridge of his rickety ship. Then I got pretty good at it. Although I now walk slightly funny, with long pants on, no one can tell that I am missing a leg.

I know however.

Did I feel like half a man after my amputation? No, but maybe 3/4 of one.

To be sure, the person I had been was gone. I was no longer him. Poof.

I am kinda embarrassed to say it, but I cried alot after my amputation. I am not sure why or what it meant. I guess that sometimes I just missed my old self. I liked him. He was cool and tough and fast.

I knew that I would never again run and jump and play in pure physical joy.

After more than 60 years, I was now an old man who walks kinda funny.

That's the loss, to be sure.

However, in time I realized that, like Longfellow's poem, and Chandler's story, I actually gained more than I lost.

That gain is more important to me and quite remarkable really.

It started in the hospital where my daughter Shannon, her husband Chad, my son Bill and my brother Pat all sat with me before my surgery and then waited for me to come back out. (Son Jack was still in school).

I could see in their faces that they too were in pain and that they loved me.

After I was discharged from the hospital, they packed me up and sent me to recover at Shannon's house.

My loss helped me grow closer to my kids, Bill and Shannon and Jack. They helped me in ways I can't even describe. They nursed me and took me out to eat and went to movies with me. They told me how much I meant to them in so many different ways. I adore and enjoy them.

I grew closer to my grandkids, Taylor and Sophia and young Mikey. They ignored my disability and showed me how to laugh and play and pretend.

My brother Pat and I became best friends again after many years apart. I, in fact, moved a block away from him and now see him every day.

My sister Mary prayed for me and took me to church to ask for divine healing. She cried and asked God and God listened.

My older brother Greg went with me for coffee and walks in the mall.

I made new, close friends and when I healed I moved to a new place, 300 miles away, after a lifetime in Spokane.

When added up then, the tally has me way ahead of the game.

Every day now ends the same. At bedtime, I carefully take off my Prosthetic leg and set it aside. I clean my stump and carefully stand on my one leg to put on my PJs. This is the time of my day when I most feel disabled. Nothing can hide my sagging pajama leg. If I had to leave the house fast I would be in big trouble.

To help in case of an emergency, I keep a walker by my bed.

I typically fight sleep for an hour or so. I think of my family and friends and old girlfriends. I wonder what they would say if they saw me now?

I then fall into a deep sleep.

And I dream.

When I dream I always have my leg. I dream of running and jumping and sometimes a simple thing like taking a shower.

One recurring dream I have is from that long ago summer of 1963. JFK is still President. In a couple of months, the Dodgers will sweep the Yankees to become Champions of baseball.

Bonanza is in living color.

In my dream it is a long, warm, summer evening and the neighborhood sounds surround my dad and I as we stand on the side of our house and play catch. (We love baseball and have our old mitts and a well worn ball.)

Sprinklers woosh in the air.

Cars can be heard speeding only blocks away on busy Sprague Ave.

Dogs are plentiful and bark at each other while they play.

The buzz of a small plane comes from above.

My sister Mary can be heard organizing a group game of kick the can. 5 year old brother Pat is on the porch crying. Brother Greg is playing his latest Elvis record.

Plop....plop...plop goes the ball hitting our mitts. Dad's smiling face glistens with a touch of summertime sweat. He is in pure joy, playing catch with his adoring son.

Looking at dad, I think of Koufax and Mays and Mantle. Hero's for sure but none bigger than the handsome man patiently throwing me the ball.

In my dream, as we play, I envision what the future will hold for me: It will be hours playing in fields of glory and schoolboy battle. It will be games where I can run and jump and hit. I know that cheerleaders will yell my name and fans will cheer my teams.

I know that no matter what, my kids will be pretty and my dogs jolly. My life will be good. I will go to college and wear a suit to work.

Evenings will be warm and light and thier breezes soft.

My sun will always shine.

They can never cut that away from me.

Plop....plop.....plop.

[koreaboundfan]

Busan

So I had to just go to Busan. I have seen dramas filmed in and about Busan and it was on my bucket list. I am really glad I went this whole weekend! It was a bit of an ordeal for comfortable Americans, like myself, to have to manage all the buses, trains, walking, etc. I walked to my bus stop 1132 and took that to Taereung where I caught Line 6 just for one stop to Seokgye, got off and walked a lot to Line 1 and took that to Seoul station. That’s were I walked a lot more and got to the KTX station up on top and bought my ticket to Busan. I walked to the gates where everyone who was waiting was sitting on these pretty bleachers to see what gate their train would be at. Just fyi - it only shows the gates to go to for trains departing about 30-40 minutes into the future. Ten minutes of waiting I see gate 8 and its a mad dash down two flights of stairs. The seats were luxurious and comfy. I was able to have free internet for most of the ride as provided by KTX as long as we weren’t in a tunnel. 

South Korea is full of hills, small mountains, and deep green trees and bushes. I guess I was really amazed at all the beautiful forestation and mountains with full cities in the valleys. I highly recommend you take the train south at least once to see it. I can only imagine what it looks like in the fall! 

Getting off the KTX train was an adventure as you had to go out the main doors and down about 4 flights of stairs to get to the metro lines. There I was a bit confused as route 1004 was actually train 7. Thanks to two beautiful young Korean ladies who walked up to me and asked if I needed help, I made it to the right train. Then off the train and about 4 blocks of walking I was about where I needed to be. Thanks to public internet, I could use my map with great accuracy to find my hotel down this alley type street. In SK, there are stores, restaurants, you name it, tucked away on literally every nook and cranny of street space. Basically there is no ‘backdoor; or backside to a store. There are TWO stores for every single building, unless it’s a rich store who owns both the front and the back. :) 

After checking into my hotel with the owner and her cute 12 year old daughter, I was shown the Korean way of using your key. It goes into a slot in your mini hallway to turn on all your room electricity. When you leave with the key, everything goes off to save the bill. Next are the slippers you have to use as you are not allowed to use street shoes in any home or hotel room. I then had to use the bathroom so bad after all the train/bus riding and walking. This is where I saw and used my first real Korean shower.  See, this country does not have bathtubs, only showers with no shower curtain and a drain in the center. You can take a shower, brush your teeth in the sink all while soaping up! For those reading who have watched the K-dramas, or dramas from China or Thailand, will know exactly what I am talking about. I will post pics later in my blog so be sure to look for those! 

With wet hair I walked back a few blocks to ‘The Hyundai” department store where I was told they had everything and a food court. Well, it’s like a Korean Macy’s just full of helpful people giving you cups of tea, little cookies and trying to get you to buy some expensive item. Thanks to google translate I was able to determine that they did not sell any type of hair products for covering the roots of your hair. I did manage to  get suckered into buying ‘White Musk’ violet version that older and quite attractive, Gong Yoo endorsed. It smells delicious, and like Korea on the trains - cute Korean women dressed to the 9′s, and smelling good. 

Desperate for a root touch up, I walked into a salon two doors from my hotel. Again Papago translator to the rescue and we determined that Korea does not sell this product. So with that I thank the Chinese government for tossing out my can of gray root cover up and decided to let these nice folks give me a $40 hair dye cover-up. Wow! They matched my hair color exactly, shampooed my hair (even though I just did it lol), got a head massage, water/tea and little dumpling, and good conversation with the family.  They stayed open late just for me to get this done too. They wouldn’t take a tip, which is just like Korea - no tips for anything. 

Dinner, heck I hadn’t had lunch either! So I walked again, about 3 blocks across from the big street and found this chicken place. I had the famous chicken and beer thing everyone says you have to have here. It was good and I was given a fork and tongs to pull the meat off the bone. There will be none of this eating with your fingers here! There is a little bucket already lined with a bag for your bones along with a pack of wet wipes on the table. I had half regular and half of the soy sauce wings and lost my sense of all flavor. Soy sauce crunchy fried chicken is the bomb - they know how to do this chicken thing RIGHT! Served with cut small radishes, along with Korean mustard and more sauce. I went ahead and asked for the famous Korean beer - at only .50 cents why not? It was good, and a perfect match to the chicken.  I was happy sitting alone but the 5 Korean college kids invited me to their table saying “no one should be alone”. They were nice, one kid had applied to SM and was hoping to be an idol even though he was 19. He sang a bit for us and his friends gave him a hard time.  I had been secretly enjoying their banter and laughter from my table. One student had a contagious laugh that was just awesome. I thanked them for their company and walked back to my motel even though they insisted on walking me. 

I was asked to coffee in the morning from a language friend here in Busan. I said yes and agreed to 9:30am since he was teaching the junior high kids at church. On Sunday morning he calls me and said he was already out front 30 minutes early! Way to panic a tired American who probably shouldn’t have drank beer the night before since I’m not a regular alcohol consumer. The coffee and company was nice even though my new friend had to leave and apologized for not be able to show me around Busan. 

I said goodbye and went back into my hotel to grab a bite of breakfast. I gave the rest of my wings to the other owner, who gratefully accepted them for his lunch. I just didn’t want to walk around all day with the chicken and have to pitch it later from the warmth of my backpack. Breakfast was good but the best was being able to try on the Hanbok, traditional Korean clothes, and get a picture. 

I walked in and out of shops, not actually finding what I wanted so I decided it was time to catch a bus to the beach. Gwangali Beach was beautiful, 75 degrees and a little cloudy with a generous breeze! After all the previous sweating and melting, it was a welcomed relief for this lady. I spent about 45 minutes down at the beach and then started to walk around the shops. I found BBQ - the chicken place endorsed by BTS for the crispy friend chicken with pure coconut in the breading. I asked for a half order and waited for this chicken, sitting at a side table watching all the people walking to the beach. 

The chicken arrived, same utensils as the previous night. looking just like the picture on the door and the menu. I was in love at first bite! IT was just as crunchy as the commercials and had a little spice to it that I cannot identify. All I know is that it was good and I sat there talking briefly to the husband and wife who owned this restaurant. Both in their 60′s, the husband delivers food on his scooter. The wife knew she had an internet order for delivery by the bell that rang. I watched as she would get up and go check the order and start cooking a new order. Oh Korean chicken I love you and will miss you so much when I have to leave. 

Next I walked around at the shops but still did not find what I wanted to get for my kiddos. So, it was time to go get on a long bus ride to Seomyeon, the shopping district. I managed to get dropped on the opposite side of Lotte, the largest store and mall in Busan. Problem is how to get across the street as their were no walkways across this 6 lane main street. I decided to try the train station entrance since there was also on the other side. Guess what?  The entire train station below was crammed with underground shops! Such a steady stream of shoppers and commuters that you could barely make it across the way. I finally made it to the Lotte entrance and entered. Immediately I could tell this was a huge store - larger than the Hyundai Store. I would compare it to Von Maur on crack. I went up and explored all 6 floors and yet not one Kpop item anywhere to be found. I did find something called the ‘Main Event’ area where people were clamoring for items just put out at 60-90% off regular price. I watched as people bent over and squeezed in between other shoppers in a display that resembled a Blue Light Special back in the days of K-Mart. Only this was like a BLS on steroids selling Cabbage Patch Dolls for $5 instead of $35 like they were back in the day, lol. There were equal amounts of men and women fighting for the items and I was entertained just watching it all. What really amazed me were the male salesmen in the cosmetic area. One they were dressed better than me, second the smelled better than me, and third their makeup was flawless. Men both old and teenagers were all over the counters looking at moisturizer with sunblock in it, foundation to cover imperfections, and tinted lip gloss with yet more sunblock in it. Let’s face it, Korean men take good care of themselves physically and mentally. They are good with their masculinity, and were skin products to protect their skin. Why is skin care only limited to women in the rest of the world? ?Just why? Spiritually, more Korean men attend church than American men per percentage of population. So for the guys back home who want to call these guys ‘feminine’ or ‘gay; - it won’t bother these Korean men at all. They are very secure in their lives, are healthy, take care of their bodies in and out, and wear pink teddy bears embroidered on their $200 shirts. They also have a flock of women following after them as well...

Well, after the fiasco of shopping frenzied budget minded folks I was ready to get closer to the station while also window shopping along the way. I finally made it to buy my ticket back to Seoul and almost didn’t make it back in time! Seats were selling fast on all trains but this lady managed to get my economy class at 1825. That was over an hour later than what I wanted but it was better than being stuck in the station until 2100. Time for a coffee, get on free KTX internet, and write down my train and bus routes just in case I wouldn’t have internet later on when I ‘needed it’. i watched people come and go, talk, hug, laugh, run, and chat along during that hour wait. I already knew this but I have to say it again, “People are people”. They love, cry, say goodbye, give giant hugs when they see their loved ones, get married, hubbies all carry tiny babies on the trains, women rub their pregnant tummies while their husbands protectively walk besides them. What I did notice too is that Korean couples are just plain cute. The men are protective over their women, not like they are going to be robbed protective, no it’s more like caring protective? They open doors for older women, those with bags in their hands, carry the babies, ask if their girlfriend or wife is “okay” as they walk long ways, and just seem more attentive to others feelings. Maybe because this is a culture where others are supposed to be thought of first versus yourself. You see this on the buses and trains here in Korea. They have special seats for pregnant women, elderly, or handicapped. You can sit in those seats as long as their isn’t a need. I watched over the last two weeks the same scene play out over and over again - a younger person, including myself, would get up and offer their seat to a grandma/grandpa or obvious person who was not feeling well. It’s automatic, not a second thought to it, they just offered their seat immediately. Many times the elderly men would try to offer me a seat and I would nicely say “no”. The two times I did take a seat I gave it up the second a women older than me got on board. Respect for the elderly and those older than you - it’s built in, it’s taught from birth, it’s a good thing, it works and it’s amazing to witness. 

Off my soapbox of Korean societal praises, don’t worry I’ll be back later lol. Long walk to line 1 to catch my train in reverse back to Taereung. Two stops away the conductor tells us all to get off because of a problem. No worries, the trains run every 6 minutes and bam, there was another train and back on schedule. Off perfectly and walked to the correct side of the station to be on the correct side of the street. Buses actually follow the flow of traffic for their routes - go figure. Only 3 stops and I was off and walking the few blocks back to the university and to my dorm building. First thing I noticed once coming outside for the bus ride? Humidity had returned to Seoul while I was gone - welcome back sweating lol. A nice shower and a made bed waiting for me. Maybe tomorrow I can get a ton more pictures uploaded for ya all. Night!