Holly Hilliard
Endurance
When we were nineteen, Makenna Solomon was my best friend. She did all the things I thought best friends should do: she told me secrets, she lay in bed with me while we watched reality TV marathons on her laptop, she organized trips to Costco and always offered to split the cost of that 96-count box of Tampax. We were both competitive, but in a friendly way; we never fought over anything important, never boys or coursework or anything like that. It was small stuff, like how she borrowed my nail polish without asking, or how I called her rich when she thought of herself as middle class. Or how we played Settlers of Catan with a group of friends, and when she won, I accused her of cheating, and she told me I was a loser, that I’d always be a loser, and we didn’t talk for a week. But she also took care of me the way an older sister would. Whenever she heard me crying in my room at night, she’d come in and turn me into a burrito, tucking me under my comforter so tight that I couldn’t move my legs, and I’d end up laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, and she’d pat me on the forehead and tell me to have sweet dreams.
Now, ten years later, she owns a Survivor-themed “brew works and entertainment business” called Endurance, Inc., and I work for her. I’m a glorified server—the term she uses is “Challenge Host”—and I’ve been here for over a year now, no end in sight. In fact, I’m currently holding a covered tray, staring up at a group of women in their early twenties who booked Endurance, Inc. for a bachelorette party. They’re hanging upside-down from a horizontal wooden pole, like pigs roasting on a spit.
I hope they’re in pain.
I adjust my mask, clear my throat, and chirp a line from the “approved scripts” section of the Employee Handbook: “Maybe I can tempt you. The first two competitors to quit will get to share this.” I lift the cover from my tray with a flourish and reveal a Mudslide in an enormous curved glass, piled with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles, light on the Kahlua (but they don’t know that). At this point in my life, I think it looks disgusting, like hours of indigestion, but the women groan with longing, as most of our customers do. They’re only a few years younger than me, but it feels like a lifetime separates us.
Their faces look deflated and red from this angle. They aren’t required to wear masks when they’re doing a challenge, which makes me uncomfortable; I’m convinced that hanging upside-down like this could cause any number of weird bodily secretions. They look like Troll dolls, hair floating above their heads.
“I hate you, Katrina!” one of them shrieks at the bride-to-be.
“Oh, shut up,” the bride responds happily, her face a scary shade of purple.
Another member of the party says, “I wasn’t going to win anyway,” and swings her feet down, hanging for a second from her fingertips. Then she tumbles a few feet into the sand below and tries to regain her balance. For a moment, she wears that same blank expression I’ve seen so many times, the one people make when their vision momentarily fades to black. Then the blood rushes back into her face and she blinks—and just like that, she’s totally fine.
She marches triumphantly over to me and snatches the glass from my tray.
“If no one else drops, do I get to drink this all by myself?” she asks loudly, clearly trying to entice one of her friends to join her.
“You sure do,” I say, aware of my fake-sounding tone but unable to change it. “Any other takers?” I call, but one of them just flips me the finger before readjusting on the pole.
Seven women remain in the challenge, which is an Endurance, Inc. favorite. We call it Hold on Loosely (But Don’t Let Go). Most of our customers give up after a few minutes, especially the bachelorette parties, and then they move on to the next challenge. There are five challenges in total, and you get a discount rate if your party wants to do all five.
Unfortunately for me, Makenna doesn’t pay by the hour; rather, I get a flat rate upfront, and then it’s up to me to “tempt” the customers to give up so I can take my money and go home. If the bachelorettes want to hang on that pole all night, there’s not much I can do to stop them.
The woman who just lost the challenge grabs a spoon and swills it around in the whipped cream, then takes a long, self-satisfied lick. “Y’all are dumb!” she yells at her friends.
Or maybe they’re being reasonable for not wanting to share drinks during a pandemic. Who’s to say?
The Mudslide and anything else I bring out as a “temptation” is added to the group’s bill, of course. This particular business practice has inspired a few tense moments in the past—most of our customers seem to think that the temptations are part of the initial fee, rather than an added expense—and I’ve told Makenna she should make this clearer in the Terms & Conditions, but she doesn’t want to lose out on the extra income.
Turns out, opening a business at the beginning of a pandemic is kind of a bad idea.
“It’s such a unique business, though,” Makenna will say on days when we’re the only two people here, when we sit together at the registration desk and stare at the empty sidewalk outside. As if being unique should exempt her from financial hardship.
The radio on my belt beeps. I trudge through the sand that covers the floor, away from the bachelorette party, trying to get a bit of distance before radioing Makenna in return. A monkey howls over the speaker at the corner of the ceiling—the only music we play here is jungle-themed—and I wait for it to stop.
“Yes?” I finally ask, quietly, into the radio. I hate the idea of a customer overhearing. It’s embarrassing, sometimes, the way Makenna talks to me.
“Why are there still seven customers hanging on the spit?” she asks. “It’s been fifteen minutes.”
“Maybe they do Crossfit in their free time?” I answer. “Or they all play on their college volleyball team?”
“Why aren’t you trying to get them down?”
I look towards the glass wall that divides the challenge room from the bar, but I can’t see her in the shadows. This space used to be a gymnastics gym; all the helicopter parents sat behind that glass wall and watched their kids on the balance beam, the floor, the trampoline. That’s all gone now. The entire floor is covered with sand. The bar, out there, is tiki-themed.
“Are you not feeling well?” Makenna presses over the radio. “Do you need to rest?”
She loves to talk about my health. An enduring habit from college. “I’m fine.”
“Then why have you only offered one temptation?”
“No one cares about temptations,” I say, starting an old argument. “It’s not like on Survivor, where people literally eat one scoop of rice per day and will do anything for a cookie.”
“If you have a better idea, please enlighten me.”
I can picture her tugging on one of the dark curls that frames her face, her lips pressed together in a way that makes her fair skin look wrinkled. But she doesn’t want to hear my ideas; I figured that out a long time ago. Endurance, Inc. is her baby.
Even though the whole business was my idea.
* * * *
When Makenna and I were roommates, I had to take a semester off—dean’s orders—and all I did was watch TV. I torrented all the old Survivor seasons and watched them back-to-back. Makenna was still pre-med at the time, so her course schedule was rough, but she always got sucked into the show while she was meant to be doing problem sets. I’d prop my laptop on a couch cushion, and she’d curl up beside me, a textbook open on the couch at her feet.
One day, we were watching the Survivor contestants participate in an immunity challenge. They stood in a row, their wrists attached to buckets of water suspended over their heads. If they let their hands fall even the tiniest bit, the water would come pouring down.
“I bet I could beat all of them,” Makenna said off-handedly.
She wasn’t much more athletic than me, but she had a habit of soliloquizing about how she was on a State Championship-winning track and field team in high school. She knew I didn’t play sports or work out. Before that semester, I’d never had the time, always squeezing in part-time jobs around my course schedule.
I said something like, “It’s probably a lot harder than it looks.”
She made a dismissive sound. On screen, one of the contestants let his hand drop. Water cascaded over his head and shoulders.
It would be interesting, I thought, to see who would win. Makenna or me. Everything in her life had always been so easy. I was the one who knew the meaning of hard work.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” I said, “if there were a place where you could actually try some of these endurance challenges? Without having to go on the show, I mean.”
“You mean a gym?” she asked, teasing.
“Gyms don’t have that kind of thing,” I said defensively, even though I couldn’t be sure. “It would be like one of those places that has paintball or ropes courses. A specialty place for birthday parties and big groups. Tired of bowling? Try endurance challenges instead!”
She made an unimpressed little noise in the back of her throat.
Makenna graduated before I did. She always said she’d stay in Madison for a while until she figured out what she wanted to do—she abandoned all hopes of being a doctor sometime around the end of her junior year—but then she took a consulting job in Chicago, and she left me to find a subletter. I didn’t try to make her stay. I figured I’d probably been enough of a burden to her over the years.
When I finally graduated, I found an apartment a few streets down from the one Makenna and I used to share on Few Street. We kept in touch, but our phone calls grew farther and farther apart. She launched a bespoke sock company that failed. Then she dabbled in LuLaRoe. I lost track of her around that time. She sent me a text that said something like, “Hey, I recently found a great way to make some passive income! Would you be open to additional revenue streams?”
I didn’t respond. I had realized that my life always went on, whether or not Makenna was in it.
Then, about two years ago, she showed up in Madison for an alumni networking event—she’d gotten married, and her husband wanted to move back—and we reconnected. Or, I should say, she reconnected with me. I didn’t go out of my way to get back into her good graces, but she texted me constantly, left rambling voice memos. It quickly became clear that she had become that kind of person, the kind who latched on. I recognized the type because that’s who I used to be. Needy. Lonely. I saw my old self in her, and I hated it.
I didn’t have much say in our renewed friendship. But even when we were in college, that’s how we functioned. She came up with the plans, she set the expectations. Back then, I loved this about her. Like, she used to mail me a box of gifts every Christmas. No one ever gave me that many gifts, especially not my dad, who buried himself so deeply into the couch at home, Sports Center blaring at all hours, that he seemed to forget the holidays completely. I loved Makenna’s gifts, but every Christmas I went into a panic, searching desperately for something meaningful to send her that wouldn’t cost more than twenty dollars. I usually ended up making her a gift—a friendship bracelet, a sad crocheted frog for her desk—and she would call me and say something kind, like, “Thanks, hun. I love it so much,” and then I’d never see the thing again, never on her wrist, never on her desk.
Anyway, after she moved back to Madison, we started getting dinner once a week. She often called me during the workday, when she was bored or driving home from the yoga class her husband paid for. I always put her on speaker and set my phone on a high shelf, continuing to answer emails while she talked. Ever since I was twenty-four I worked as a remote customer service employee for a rideshare app. It wasn’t glamorous, but the pay was decent. It was unclear whether Makenna knew what I did for work; she rarely asked about it.
One day she called me like she always did, and she said, “I’m starting a new business. You’re going to love it.” That’s how she opened the phone call—no hi, how have you been, sorry to interrupt your day.
She went on to describe everything she had accomplished already: she had signed a commercial lease for the warehouse, found a builder for the endurance challenges, worked with a lawyer to finalize the liability waivers, obtained the liquor license, strategized a marketing campaign.
“Wait. Endurance challenges?” I asked, clicking send on another No, you can’t have a refund email as my brain caught up to the conversation.
“Yes, endurance challenges. Did you not hear me describe the company?”
“Sorry, I got distracted. Say it again?”
“I’m opening a Survivor-themed company. I’m calling it a ‘bar and entertainment business.’ Or maybe ‘brew works’ is better. There’ll be beer, but I’m sure as hell not brewing it.”
I felt something close in my chest, like a door snapped shut by a mysterious draft.
I didn’t have the nerve to say it like an accusation, so the words came out lilting, teasing: “Wasn’t that my idea?” It was the same joking tone we used in college: God, bitch, did you really just do that?
She laughed. “It was my idea, remember? We were on the couch in our old living room, and a lightbulb went off in my head, and you said it’d never work. But you did inspire me. You’re the one who got me hooked on Survivor in the first place.”
She chattered happily for a few more minutes, saying that her husband was helping her with the startup costs, that he was thrilled for her to go out on a limb and try being an entrepreneur again.
When she finally hung up, I threw my phone across the room, breaking the screen in two places, and then I called my therapist, feeling the micro abrasions in the glass catching on the pad of my thumb as I dialed.
* * * *
The grand opening of Endurance, Inc. was scheduled for Thursday, March 12, 2020. That same day, the governor of Wisconsin declared a state of emergency. The opening got postponed once, twice, three times.
Privately, I thought this was some sort of karmic revenge because Makenna had stolen my idea. I felt gleeful every time she texted me to say that the opening had been delayed. But then I got laid off, and my health insurance evaporated. I had an ungodly amount of debt. My savings were embarrassingly meager.
I knew Makenna needed employees as much as I needed a job. There weren’t many people in Madison that spring who were eager to work indoors, in-person, for a brand-new, likely-to-fail company that no one had ever heard of. But even so, when she asked me to be a Challenge Host, she did so with a pitying look in her eyes, an implication that she was doing this out of the goodness of her heart. “I know how hard things have been for you,” she said.
My breath caught in my lungs. I wanted to refuse, to spit, to tell her I had been doing fine, just fine, for so very many years without her.
But on June 5, 2020, Makenna cut the ribbon, even though the county’s emergency order meant that she could only open at 25 percent capacity. Just a week before, Wisconsin had a record-breaking 733 COVID cases reported in just one day.
I hung my head, donned my cloth mask, and went to work.
* * * *
I mentioned there are five challenges to choose from at Endurance, Inc., but we started with only two: Hold on Loosely (But Don’t Let Go) and Tree Hugger. We hardly had any business, those first few months, and then in November of 2020 all indoor gatherings were banned, and Makenna temporarily shuttered our doors for the holiday season. She didn’t stop planning, though, and by February 2021, she’d installed two more challenges, Hands Held High and Numb Buckets, and she reluctantly implemented my designs for a team challenge called Don’t Drop the Snake.
As much as I hate to admit it, working with Makenna on Endurance, Inc. kept me going through the dark months. It gave me something to think about that wasn’t just sickness, sickness, death, death. And it was nice to feel close with someone again, nice to feel like part of a team. I remembered us in college, hunkered in our apartment during the coldest days when the lakes would freeze and our windows crusted with ice.
Vaccines rolled out that spring, and finally, finally, the summer brought real business. It helped that our building had garage doors on one end, which we could open and let the fresh air roll in over the sand. We all felt safer that way. The Paint ‘N’ Sip across the street didn’t have the same luxury, and I often saw a woman in there walking back and forth across the empty studio, cleaning the storefront window from the inside, gazing out.
The hubris of that summer inspired Makenna to implement a classic Survivor eating challenge, where customers raced to eat pig brains and dried cockroaches and fertilized duck eggs known as balut. It was amazing to watch strangers arrive in droves to eat bugs, to laugh with the friends they hadn’t seen in months and celebrate being vaccinated while choking on giant fish eyes. But the fun only lasted a few weeks. It was hard to find locally-sourced stuff, and then the Delta-variant cropped up, and Makenna blamed me for the money we lost. She said the eating challenge was my idea, my fault, even though the two of us had dreamed it up together one night over the phone. Of course she would credit me for her failures, but never for the business itself. Never that.
At the height of our success, Makenna employed ten servers. She fired six at the end of the summer.
Now here we are, October, wearing KN-95s and cringing at our customers’ open mouths, acutely aware of their breath circulating around the small tiki bar. At least I am. Makenna tries to play it off like she doesn’t care, like she’s not afraid of getting sick.
One Tuesday I arrive at work and find that our only registered group—a boy scout troop—has canceled at the last minute. I won’t be getting paid tonight. There’s no one here except Makenna, who has taken off her mask, her forehead resting on her arms atop the polished wood of the bar.
“You can go home,” she says without lifting her head. “There’s no one else coming.”
“I assume you won’t reimburse me for gas?”
I say it like I’m joking, but she makes a frustrated noise and says, “I’m hemorrhaging money here, Soph. Do you not get that?”
I sit on the stool beside her. In the old days we were the touchy-feely kind of friends, always seeking out each other’s warmth.
I could place my hand between her shoulder blades, but I don’t.
We sit silently for a moment, two, and then I say, “I have an idea.”
She finally looks up at me, a red mark on her forehead. There’s the faintest glimmer of hope in her eyes, and I wonder if she thinks I have a plan, a business idea that will make everything better. Instead I say, “Let’s do Tree Hugger. Right now. Fifty bucks says I’ll win.”
She groans and puts her head back down. “I’m not in the mood for games.”
I have never seen Makenna try any of the challenges. She always refuses when I dare her to compete with me. I suspect she’s trying not to embarrass me. She’s always been so sure of herself, so confident in her own superiority. She’s trying to save me from myself, the way she always did.
I give her a little nudge, then run from the bar out to the open sand. I kick off my shoes and climb the ladder up to the top of Tree Hugger, then call out to Makenna, “Come on!”
The door to the bar has swung shut, but I see the shape of Makenna move to the glass wall, watching me from the shadows.
I wrap my arms around the top of the vertical wooden pole. Tree Hugger is a classic challenge. Each contestant gets their own wooden pole, about ten feet tall and a foot in diameter. There are small footholds carved into it, and you have to cling to it for as long as you can without touching the ground.
I swing my feet off the ladder and hook my legs around the pole, my bare feet clinging for purchase against the smooth wood. I feel around for a foothold but don’t connect with any. I begin to slide.
“What are you afraid of?” I call out, but if Makenna replies, I don’t hear it. I slide right down to the sand, landing on my butt with a painful thump.
* * * *
Makenna surprises me the following week with an invitation to her thirtieth birthday, which she plans to host at Endurance, Inc. She has invited a few of our old college friends who still live in town, and she tells me to extend the invitation to my other friends, but I don’t really have any. I don’t even have former-coworker friends—a symptom of being a remote employee for so many years. When I got laid off, I shipped my laptop back and that was that.
On the night of the party, I stand at the reception desk and greet the guests. The few faces I know from college seem surprised to see me, if they recognize me at all; I’ve lived in town all these years but I haven’t kept up with any of them.
Makenna’s husband arrives by himself, wearing a navy suit that he must have worn to his law firm that morning. He runs his hand through his graying hair and glances around the room like he’d rather be anywhere else. We’ve met before, but he acts like we haven’t. Makenna runs up to him and gives him a peck on the cheek, then takes him by the hand and drags him out into the sand, showing him all the changes we’ve made. As far as I know, he hasn’t visited since the spring.
Makenna has paid two Challenge Hosts to walk around with trays of shots and Mai Thais, and they both glare at me when I ask for a margarita. They’re seniors at UW-Madison, my alma mater, but they know I’m not someone to ask for career advice or mentorship. I have a feeling they resent me for my current station in life, nearly thirty and making the same hourly wage as them. I tug my mask down to my chin and gulp the margarita like it’s water.
After everyone has had a drink or two, they want to do the challenges. They gravitate toward Tree Hugger, all those vertical poles in the sand. Makenna’s husband remains at the bar, his legs crossed as he observes from a dark corner.
When Makenna says she doesn’t want to play, she gives me the briefest glance, then looks away.
“Come on, birthday girl!” An old college acquaintance whose name I don’t remember claps a hand on Makenna’s shoulder and gives her a shake. He looks exactly the same as he did in college, a total babyface.
Makenna looks toward the bar and shakes her head. “No, thanks. I’ll facilitate.”
I find myself wanting to goad her, to shake her out of this mood. “You’re just afraid you’ll lose,” I say.
The guy from college gives a long, low whistle. A few of the other guests hear and respond in kind.
I’m afraid I’ve angered her. She marches through the sand and kicks off her sandals at the base of one of the Tree Hugger poles. Then she theatrically rips off her mask and tosses it to the sand, and the group cheers.
I give an appreciative whoop and she catches my eye. I smile through my mask, and she raises an eyebrow and mouths the words, You asked for it.
* * * *
After an hour and twenty-two minutes, Makenna and I are the only two holding on. The effort has me shaking and desperate. I find myself shouting things at her, taunting her, half-joking and half-not.
“Give up already!” I cry, my forehead resting against the wood of the pole. My arms are wrapped around it and my fingers dig into the skin just above my elbows, clenching so hard that even my knuckles have gone white. My mask is making it hard to breathe, and I know that any second now I’m going to lose my grip and slide all the way to the sand.
“I will not,” she hisses. Her thighs quake with effort.
“I’m stronger than you!”
“You have never been stronger than me!”
I have a good view of the giant digital timer, which moves so slowly I swear it’s malfunctioning. The party guests are clustered in groups below us, drinking and chatting and generally forgetting that Makenna and I are in a battle of epic proportions right above them.
My left toe slips and my stomach drops—I’m sliding—but then I catch myself on the next foothold, a few feet below the first. “Why won’t you ever let me win?” I sound like a whiny child. I suddenly remember saying this exact phrase that night in college when we played Catan, when she called me a loser.
She makes a frustrated noise and I peer over my arm at her as she tries to readjust, her toes slipping against the pole.
My fingers are numb, but I can’t unclench them. “You win at everything,” I say. “All the time.”
She laughs grimly at that. “I guess you haven’t noticed that this business is a massive failure.”
“It’s not.”
“It is. Eric wants me to close. He says I’ve wasted his money.”
I glance down at the party below, but no one is paying attention to us. I can’t see her husband but I’m suddenly sure he’s watching. Assessing.
I feel tears starting at the corners of my eyes and I don’t know why. I don’t know if I’m mad at her for not telling me about this, or if I’m mad at her husband for controlling her, or if I’m mad at myself for being mad, for being a part of this mess to begin with. It’s none of my business.
This is not my business.
I close my eyes and picture us, Makenna and me, back when everything was simple. Late-night hangouts at the Memorial Union, watching the boats out on the lake and drinking Spotted Cow by the pitcher. Racing each other on our bikes, following the bike path through town all the way to our shared apartment, my feet pumping on the pedals.
Then I’m on the couch in our shared living room, curled on my side. My mother died weeks ago, or months ago—it’s all the same, it never gets better—and Makenna is here, her arm hugging my waist. She has made me peppermint tea. She also brought me Chippy, the purple squirrel I’ve had since I was two and which I usually keep hidden in my underwear drawer. Survivor plays on my laptop, though I’m hardly watching.
Even though she has so much studying to do tonight, she stays here for a long time. During one of those moments where I feel empty of tears, empty of any feeling at all, she brings up that old idea again, the one about the Survivor business with endurance challenges for anyone to try. She paints me a picture of how it could work, and I cling to the sound of her voice, this ridiculous vision of the future.
And she says, We could run the whole thing together.
I open my eyes. Makenna is shaking, holding on with all her might. “You can’t close,” I say, my voice breaking halfway through the sentence.
Our eyes meet, and I remember the day she visited me at the hospital, the white room, her pockets empty. She was about to graduate. I still had months, years, to go. I never thought I’d make it.
She only visited that one time. But she’s here now, and so am I.
I will not fall. I will breathe into the pain. I will take this one moment at a time, minute by minute, hour by hour, because I can’t bear the thought of letting go.
Holly Hilliard grew up in Hillsboro, Ohio and now lives in Pittsburgh. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, where she was the winner of the James Hurst Prize for Fiction. Visit her online at hollyhilliard.com.
