146 JUNE 2019 VOGUE.COM
BREAKING FREE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 104
that features Spider-Man’s star Tom
Holland, too. She likes to get the group
together for movie nights, or engage
in the typical downtime activities of
wired young millennials, like binge-
ing true-crime podcasts (she’s a fan
of Serial) or falling into Netflix rabbit
holes. She and Schafer recently traded
increasingly shocked selfies watching
the Netflix documentary Abducted in
Plain Sight from their separate homes.
Schafer, a model and champion of
LGBTQ rights who was barely out of
high school in North Carolina when
she was cast in Euphoria, is especially
effusive about the Thanksgiving dinner
Zendaya invited her to last year. “It
was my first Thanksgiving away from
my family, while I was working on the
show,” she says. “Z invited the whole
cast. Her being willing to create that
sort of ‘chosen family’ is something I’ll
always be grateful to her for.”
Zendaya recently installed an
extra-long table in her dining room,
in order to host more polished ver-
sions of that family-style feast. In the
meantime, though, our Thai dinner is
being eaten out of takeout containers.
Talk turns to Zendaya’s spring/summer
agenda: There are more episodes of
Euphoria to shoot, and then she begins
a worldwide press tour for Spider-Man.
“I’m really excited about going to Ja-
pan,” she says. “And I’m excited about
some of the looks Law and I are put-
ting together. Or lewks.” She laughs.
I prod her to cast her gaze a little
farther over the horizon, and she re-
plies that, frankly, she just hasn’t made
her mind up about what she wants to
take on.
“I can tell you, one celebrity whose
career I think is interesting is Donald
Glover,” she says. “He’s given himself
permission to do... whatever. And
whatever he does—he goes deep, you
know?”
Earlier in the day, chatting about
fashion, Zendaya had mentioned to
me that one of her favorite looks ever
is the one-shouldered butterfly dress
by Moschino that she donned for the
Australian premiere of The Greatest
Showman. It struck me, as she said it,
that she was a bit like a butterfly set to
break out of her cocoon, taking control
of her career and evolving her public
persona as she figures out where, pre-
cisely, she intends to fly. “Girls like Z,
in this industry, they can be sheltered,”
notes Roach. “And that’s not a bad
thing, because there’s so much stuff
coming at them, and they need to know
who they can rely on. Early on, it was
me and her dad, two strong black men
going everywhere with her. Now this is
her time to grow.”
Zendaya and I decide that maybe a
tarot reading is in order. A day earlier,
I’d purchased a beginner’s deck from
one of those crystal-and-incense shops
popping up around L.A., and on my
way to the Valley, I realized I still had
it in my handbag. Zendaya’s intrigued:
She’s never had her tarot read. I warn
her that I have no idea what I’m doing,
but she’s game nevertheless, and deals
out a seven-card spread. She and Isys
trade a knowing look when the card
auguring her imminent future suggests
she might be due to take stock and,
possibly, rest. A bit of stopping to smell
the roses, as it were.
“My grandparents got my colors
read when I was two,” she tells me as
Isys shuffles the deck for her own read-
ing. “Apparently, my aura is mostly pur-
ple, which signals that you’re creative.
And then there was a little bit of green,
which is like, practical stuff. Business.”
“I’m ready,” interrupts Isys. ’Daya
finishes her story: “Now, I have no idea
whether this is true, but according to
my grandparents, the guy who did the
reading, he stared at my photo for a
long time. A long time. And then he
looked up, and he told them: ‘This
girl, for your whole life—she’s going to
amaze you.’ ” @
SMALL TOWN HERO
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He raises his eyebrows. “I mean, in
some ways, being married to Chasten is
the most normal thing in my life—the
only normal thing,” he says.
The mayor has to drive to some busi-
nesses downtown and suggests that we
take a tour around South Bend. We
get into his car, a Chevrolet sedan in
a particularly subdued shade of gray.
He drives at a controlled pace—part-
ly, it seems, from caution (the mayor
is an exceedingly defensive driver) but
partly out of pride. “College Street,
where I lived as a little kid, is up there,”
he says, as we pass a stretch of tidy
one-floor houses with small lawns. As
a child, Buttigieg dreamed of being an
astronaut, but by high school his atten-
tions had turned. For a national essay
contest (which he won), he composed
an admiring portrait of an indepen-
dent Vermont senator who, though
speaking from the left, reached out to
work across the aisle: Bernie Sanders.
Buttigieg won his first election, as class
president, that same year.
When exactly he decided, in his own
mind, he would seek the U.S. presi-
dency is less clear. He announced his
exploratory committee in January. In
February, his elegantly written memoir,
Shortest Way Home, appeared, intro-
ducing him to the nation (“a chance
for me to tell my story before some-
one else does,” as he tells me), and soon
began climbing The New York Times
best-seller list. Books taking what they
do in the way of time, this project of
national self-presentation was clear-
ly in the works more than two years
ago. Did he have White House plans
then? I keep asking him the question, in
various phrasings, but he never replies
head-on. Eventually it occurs to me
that this is probably an answer in itself.
Buttigieg’s memoir takes its title
from a line in Chapter 13 of Ulysses,
by James Joyce: “Think you’re escap-
ing and run into yourself. Longest way
round is the shortest way home.” (In
a February tweet, the mayor touted
the novel as “a very democratic book,
about a guy going through life and the
incredible depth and meaning to be
found in the everyday”—a description
that, impressively, manages to oversell
and undersell it at the same time.) His
father, who died in January, was a pop-
ular English professor at Notre Dame
who wrote on Joyce’s aesthetics, though
he was best known as a scholar of the
influential Italian neo-Marxist philos-
opher Antonio Gramsci. His mother,
also on the English faculty, taught at
Notre Dame for nearly 30 years. In his
memoir, he writes of his fascination
with discussions between his parents
and their brainy friends. “I would hear
but not understand arguments over
the uselessness of post-structuralism
or the relevance of Hobsbawm’s his-
toriography,” he writes. “The more I
heard these aging professors talk, the
more I wanted to learn how to decrypt
their sentences and to grasp the polit-
ical backstory of the grave concerns
that commanded their attention and
aroused such fist-pounding dinner
debate.”
Eventually, he went to Harvard.
He majored in history and literature,
but spent much of his extracurricular
