"Listen to your spirit guides," she told her phone's front camera, holding her hand over her heart, "they are always with you. Always." Her most-viewed video was "Moontime ritual for welcoming bleed", in which she kneeled on the gleaming tigerwood yoga deck, rhythmically rubbing her Disney Channel stomach, eyes closed.
They were all the same, one after the other, these gringas and their content, these gringas and their $400 backpacks. On a "soul journey" from Minnesota suburbs, where they were the second choice in their friend group (and refused to admit this painful fact to themselves) to sleepy beach towns in Central America, taking the direct air-conditioned shuttle.
This one was prettier than most, like all girls with a secret mean streak. She had the same vacant grey-blue eyes and weak chin as the rest, as if they were all sprung from one great German-Irish mother of the Midwest. But there was a distinctive appeal there - it might have been because she genuinely looked her nineteen years, with round, fresh cheeks. She was also endearingly small for an American woman, her waist and shoulders slight and delicate in an ethically-traded cotton crop top.
There was one time she never told anyone about, her fourth day there. The retreat center was uncharacteristically empty (a big group from Toronto had checked-out), and she felt flat and anxious all day - no amount of positive affirmations seemed to soothe her irritation at the unexpectedly low engagement for her latest video, in which she fed papaya chunks to a toucan from her morning smoothie bowl.
The only reason she found out about the toucan on the grounds to begin with was that there was a crew of laborers working on the property that day, a stocky man in his late fifties and two others who looked barely out of high school. One of the boys saw her hate-scrolling under the guava trees in the sunshine, and beckoned for her to come see.