Followers

by Megan Angelo

  Catherine’s soccer friends—there were three of them—looked exactly as Orla had envisioned. They were bright and healthy, sculpted muscle covered in skin that was somehow tanned and freckled at once. They all had hair that looked like it was only worn down on special nights like this—too long, too limp, and vaguely damp-seeming, but somehow on the whole not unappealing. Catherine fit with them perfectly, Orla thought, though it was her old friend who, for once, had a good haircut. Catherine’s braid was gone, replaced by a pretty bob, the golden ends of which twisted into her mouth as she spoke.

  “This is Orla,” Catherine said, and Orla didn’t miss what happened next. The friends’ eyes narrowed at the mention of her name. They looked at each other. They straightened. It was obvious: they had heard, at an earlier time, a memorable explanation of who she was.

  Orla took her penis straw. She endured the torrent of inside jokes. She was careful not to let anyone catch her looking at the clock. Catherine more or less ignored her for the rest of the night, until it finally ended and the bossiest of the soccer girls jingled her keys. “Okay,” she said to Catherine, taking the drink right out of her hand. “Let’s get you home.”

  Catherine shook her head. “It’s out of your way,” she said. “Orla will take me.”

  Orla had her car from high school—the boxy, cat-eyed Taurus. She watched as Catherine popped open the glove compartment, an automatic reflex, and pulled out the little book of Orla’s old burned CDs. “The one with the Incubus,” she slurred, rifling.

  “I forgot those were in there,” Orla said. She was surprised to find herself suddenly on the edge of tears, and grateful that Catherine seemed too drunk to notice, her index finger swaying as she pointed out the turns.

  The house was a small brick Cape with white metal awnings over the windows and a black horse and buggy embedded in the screen door. “Wait here a minute,” Catherine said. She got out of the car and stomped toward the house, missing every bluestone paver in the path. Mulch splintered upward as her heels sank into the earth. The concrete stoop’s metal railing wobbled as she gripped it.

  He’s in there, Orla was thinking, her eyes on the front window. Danny is in there.

  And then she saw him, rising from the couch opposite the window to answer Catherine’s knocks. He rubbed his eyes as he ambled across the room. The light was behind him; all Orla saw was his outline, the shadows of his features. He opened the door and looked out through the screen, but Catherine prodded him back as she pushed inside the house and pulled the door shut behind her. Orla gripped the wheel. Was she still supposed to wait?

  A minute later, Catherine reappeared. She stumbled back toward the car. In her hand was an envelope, rimmed in black-and-white damask. She got back in the car and thrust it at Orla. Orla clicked on the overhead light and disassembled it quickly. The card she pulled out began: “Together with our families, Daniel and Catherine...”

  “Oh,” she said. “Catherine, that’s—You don’t have to.” She tilted the wedding invitation. Even in the dim light, she could see that the words were slightly askew, cocked toward the top right corner of the card. Catherine must have printed these herself. The lump in Orla’s throat grew, and she realized suddenly why it was there: she did not want to go to this wedding, she did not intend to go to this wedding. But the gesture overwhelmed her; she had been so cruel, and Catherine was being so nice to her. At least, that was what she thought until Catherine started speaking again. Her voice was suddenly so intense, so oddly charged, that Orla looked up, as startled as if she had screamed.

  “You were at the bachelorette party,” Catherine said, “so it’s only proper you’re invited.” Orla watched as she opened the glove compartment again and began to rummage through it. After a moment, she found what she was looking for—a pen—and handed it to Orla point first, stabbing the small glinting end at her palm. She nodded at the invitation. “Just pick your entrée now,” she said. “Save you the stamp.”

  Orla swallowed and looked toward the house. The couch was vacant now, the room surrounding it dark.

  “He’s not coming out,” Catherine said. She lifted her arm to the edge of the car door and rested it there, where the window was all the way down. She dragged her nails back and forth on the vinyl. She smiled at Orla—a knowing smile. “He’s not coming out to see you.”

  The lump in Orla’s throat dried up, chased away by a settling calm. She felt the same way she did when she sat down to an exam she was well prepared for. Whatever theory Catherine had, right or wrong, was just that: a theory, lacking evidence. Orla had been so careful not to create any evidence, and she was not going to stammer.

  She looked at Catherine. “Of course he’s not,” she said evenly. “It’s late.” She looked down at the invitation and scratched her finger over the date. “I’m not sure I can make it, actually.”

  Catherine cut her off with a laugh. She clapped a hand to her mouth, like she hadn’t meant to let the sound out, then dropped it and giggled again. “But where would you be?” she said. “I know you always thought you’d be somewhere else, but you’re here. You’re around.” She grabbed the card back, then the pen. She clicked its point in and out, in and out. “Chicken or steak, Orla?”

  “I’ll have to check the date,” Orla said.

  Catherine snorted. She made a violent X next to the steak option. She got out and slammed the door, leaned down near the open window. “I’m glad you’re coming, Orla,” she said. “I think it’s important you be there to see this.”

  But Orla wasn’t there to see it. The Monday after she ran into Catherine, she emailed the newspaper editor who was meant to be her boss. Something had come up, she explained. Something undeniable. Gayle was apoplectic about Orla reneging on the offer; she left the editor her own rambling voice mail, spelling her full name and saying that she had raised her daughter better than this.

  A week later, Orla agreed to sublet a room that didn’t exist yet from a girl named Jeannette in Chelsea. Jeannette explained it over and over: the place was a one-bedroom, and she’d wanted to live there alone, but she found she couldn’t afford it and needed someone else to chip in. Did Orla understand—she would have to put up a wall in the living room to box off some space for herself. Orla said she got it, she didn’t mind, and yes, she understood: the cost of the wall was hers to bear.

  On the morning of Catherine and Danny’s wedding, Orla and Jerry set out in a U-Haul for Manhattan. Orla waited to call the bride until the skyline was close enough to touch, mirror gray on her right as the rented truck rumbled toward Jersey City. She told Catherine the same thing she told her parents: she’d gotten a job at a website. Soon enough it would be true—within months, she would find the job that would turn into the job that turned into Lady-ish. But just at that moment, it was a lie. Orla had funded the check for Jeannette by cashing in all her old savings bonds, the brittle peach stubs given by grandparents and godparents on the milestone days of her premillennium childhood: baptism, birthdays, eighth-grade graduation. “These haven’t fully matured yet,” the bank clerk warned Orla, “if you want to wait.” Orla didn’t want to wait. She asked for all of it in cash.

  Let Catherine have what Catherine has, her mother had said years ago. But wasn’t that exactly what Orla had been doing? She was letting Catherine have Danny until Orla became the person he predicted. And that was who she would become, she resolved: the person Danny thought she could be, not the one Catherine thought she was. She would be damned if she turned out to be someone Catherine could laugh at from down the road. She would be damned if she turned out to be around.

  “This is really late notice,” Catherine said when Orla called to say she couldn’t make the wedding. Orla could hear the hot hiss of a hair straightener working on the other end. “We paid twenty-six dollars a head,” Catherine added.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry,” Orla said. “I had to take the move-in slot the building gave me. They
’re really strict about this stuff in New York.”

  Orla never spoke to Catherine again, but she saw her plenty while she kept watching Danny, just as she had all through college. She wore out screens and acquired new ones, and all the time—though countless new ways to reach him bloomed around her—she only watched. She watched as he started balding and managing a cold-storage locker one town over. She watched as Catherine put on weight, her athletic figure retaining its contours but not its firmness, and started selling three-step skin care systems. She watched as the newlyweds renounced carbs and started traveling with friends from the gym, and she watched as they got sick of all that and started a blog about Catherine’s slow-cooker shortcuts and Danny’s home repairs. Orla didn’t like a bit of their marriage, not online and not in real life. But she was curiously undeterred. She understood now, in a way that she hadn’t in college, that waiting for him was just part of her life. That she would never really stop. When people bumped her on the street without seeming to see her at all, she brushed it off with the thought: Someone is waiting to brag that he knows me.

  So it wasn’t buried quite as deep as the back of her mind, the notion that maybe this business with Floss would prop her up at a height Danny couldn’t ignore. Somewhere he could find her easily, and see that, all along, he’d been right.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Marlow

  Constellation, California

  2051

  The morning after she slapped Jacqueline’s flamingos, Marlow woke to a reminder from her device, one that filled her with fear and a deep longing for the chemicals that blunted her anxiety.

  She was due, in forty-five minutes, to meet both her mother and mother-in-law at the dress shop, to try on her sowing gown.

  She walked, taking Lohan instead of Pitt, so that she wouldn’t have to pass her childhood home close-up. It was bad enough glimpsing it from three blocks away. The house’s rooftop garden was overgrown, the mortifying jumble of vines and brown leaves indistinguishable from the tidy grass pigtails that had been there when they moved in. “The houses all have hair!” Marlow had crowed that day, as her father pulled the car up to the gray-sided Colonial Type 5 with the moss-colored metal roof. She had thought herself very clever, and her parents had laughed at the joke. By the time the sun set, though, most of the other children had said the same thing. A chorus of house-hair comments echoed up and down the fresh pavement, the opening chords of a town that had gone from soulless to settled in twelve hours. Marlow could still remember standing in the street that evening, as the town’s first man-made sunset went off without a hitch and the banners unfurled ceremoniously from the streetlights. Welcome to Constellation, they said. Where Fame Is Our Patriotic Privilege. On went the cameras. The new neighbors cheered, introduced themselves to each other. Marlow’s mother had turned to her, eyes shining. “You’re officially famous, honey,” she said, and laughed when Marlow asked why. “Because you’re here,” her mother said. “That’s how it works now.”

  She reached the center of town and walked around the fountain, its jets firing high into the cloudless blue. The lilies floating in the pool at the fountain’s base were mic’d, perfect for capturing the conversations of talent who stopped to sit there. On the other side of the traffic circle, Marlow stopped to let a wave of bots cross in front of her. They emerged like cheerful commuters, throughout the day and night, from a staircase that stretched underground, designed to evoke a subway station. But no train ran underneath it. There was just a quiet cave where the bots waited to be summoned for work. They mostly served as extras, filling out empty restaurants or sparsely attended parties, their voices set to mute, while the human talent shone in the foreground. The real train, a tubular high-speed, stopped at a station set away from the filming areas, just within the perimeter. It deposited, every day, domestic workers from the south, for Constellation stars who didn’t like bots sorting through their laundry.

  Marlow saw, as she crossed the street toward the dress shop, that her mother and mother-in-law were both already there. The sight of them together made her slightly sick to her stomach, but when she flicked over to her follower dashboard, she saw her total followers number skyrocketing, climbing toward twelve and a half million. The enmity between her mother and mother-in-law was the one ratings boon out of Marlow’s marriage. She knew that, at this moment, lots of people—especially retired Southern women and gay men across the country—were settling in to witness gold. The preparations for Marlow’s sowing party, which would celebrate her impending pregnancy and be four times the size of her wedding, had already been great for ratings—the mothers had fought twice so far. The first clash happened when Ellis’s mother suggested using repurposed coffee bean sacks as table linens, and Marlow’s mother replied that the line between rustic and “fugly” was a fine one. The second happened when both women decided they wanted Marlow’s baby to call them Nana.

  In the shop, Marlow stood in the three-way mirror, wearing the dress that had been altered to fit her body, and realized that her mother-in-law had been right, months ago, when Marlow first tried it on. The color was awful. Marlow could have sworn that it was close to buttercream, but now that she was no longer taking Hysteryl—one of the pill’s biggest side effects was a color blindness that skewed all shades sepia—she saw that the dress was a greenish neon canary.

  “I am sorry to say,” she sighed, “that I hate this.”

  Her mother got up, batting down the chair that clung to her wide backside as she stood. She stomped toward Marlow. She was wearing sharp-toed calf-hair booties, a fur vest with padded shoulders, and lacquered black leather leggings. Her wig slid askew as she shook her head at Marlow in the mirror.

  “Are you fishing kidding me?” Floss said. “You fishing chose it yourself. What the fish?” Long ago, after being fined the annual maximum for on-air profanity, Marlow’s mother had retrained her cursing reflexes.

  Floss ran her fingers over the silver embroidery that snaked around the waist of the dress. She fluffed the train of tulle and fanned it out behind Marlow. Then she got distracted by the sight of her face in the glass. Marlow watched as her mother forgot what she was doing and defaulted to her usual reflection-triggered motions: pursing her lips, turning her chin this way and that.

  Marlow’s mother-in-law, Bridget, recrossed her legs beneath her simple white tunic. Sitting in a chair identical to the one that was too small for Floss, she took up less than half the cushion. “I suppose I could see,” she said, as if they didn’t all remember that she had never liked the dress, “how you could hate it.”

  Floss sighed. “But yellow’s your favorite,” she said dreamily. There was a pause. Then her voice thickened. “We can choose something else, but your dad will kill me about the money.”

  Bridget half rose out of her chair, then sat back down. “Marlow, I think—”

  Marlow nodded. She was already reaching for Floss’s hands, helping her down from the carpeted platform. “I got her,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  “Will she be all right?” Bridget’s voice was pitched at an impatient octave, and Marlow briefly imagined some massive force sucking Bridget’s chair back—right through the window behind them, smash—and depositing her mother-in-law in some other dimension. Bridget had no room to be sniffy about Floss’s fogs. Both Bridget and Ellis’s father, Ryan, had to be secluded by their housekeeper bot immediately whenever their own fogs struck. Their spells were long and engulfing, leaving them in drooling stupors that would terrify children passing by, not to mention network shareholders. Marlow was one of the very few people who knew that her in-laws had quietly commissioned a room in their basement that would keep them safe from themselves and out of view when a fog took over. The walls were padded. The padding was green, not white, of course. Like all Americans of a certain age, white padded walls made Ellis’s parents shiver.

  By contrast, Floss was lucky, especially considering how much she had us
ed the old phones with screens when she was younger. Floss’s doctor had showed Marlow once, on a chart with bars that ran from pale pink to red, where her mother’s mind should have fallen—the darkest part of the graph. But Floss’s fogs were short and relatively mild, marked by glazed eyes and time travel. Anyone who didn’t know better might think she was only high, or deeply nostalgic. “It’s like smoking, if you’ve ever heard of that,” the doctor said. “We can usually predict the damage by how much someone used screens, but there are exceptions. Your mother’s lucky, for now.”

  Marlow’s father, of course, was a different story.

  Floss looked at Marlow without seeing her, her hands motionless in Marlow’s fingers. “He yelled at me about the AmEx at breakfast,” Floss murmured.

  “Mom,” Marlow said softly, trying to fit Floss gently back into the chair, “Dad didn’t yell at you. He’s not at home anymore.”

  Bridget was standing now, nervous, edging toward the fitting room’s doorway. “Water,” she said. “Let me get your mother some water.”

  “Can you help me unzip this first?” Marlow said, but Bridget was already gone. Floss leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

  Marlow raised her elbows above her head and stretched her fingertips down toward the dress’s zipper. She worked it far enough south to slide her arms out of the fabric, but then it got stuck between her shoulder blades. She tugged and twisted the dress, trying to pull the zipper to where she could see it, near her rib cage, and had just succeeded in exposing her torso when the curtain slid aside and the saleswoman bot stepped in.

  “Just a second—” Marlow threw her forearm across her breasts.

  “How are we doing in here?” the bot said. It was trim and vaguely Asian. Marlow could tell that its curves had been filed down to look less sexual—it had probably once been a companion bot, neutered and repurposed for the dress shop. “That looks gorgeous on you,” the bot gushed. Marlow saw that its filmy eyes were darting between Marlow’s forehead and the spot where Floss slumped, trying to figure out which pocket of body heat belonged to the person with the spending power. Marlow dropped her arm from her chest, reminding herself: there were no cameras in the dressing room, and there was no reason for modesty in front of a machine, no matter how much it looked like a person. This bot—Kendra, its name tag said—was the kind they called client-facing, with a fine mist of body hair and its own human tics. It was subtly chewing on its inner cheek as it waited for someone to speak. But under the algorithm-driven authenticity, Kendra was no different than the ones they called back-office. Marlow had caught an eerie glimpse of one of those earlier, when Kendra went into the storeroom to retrieve her dress. The upright figure Marlow saw as the door swung wide had hands that looked just like her own—tapered fingers, soft palms, even dull fingernails. The hands plunged into a swath of white satin, drew a flashing needle out, and pushed it in again. But from the wrists up, the bot was all chrome and wires, shining steel limbs. Where Marlow had a face, it had a blank, black-glassed lens.