Followers

by Megan Angelo

  The motion Floss made was so small, so fast, like the flit of a hummingbird, and yet it was entirely unmistakable: she jerked her arm away. The model tumbled down the stairs. Her head knocked against the steps twice. She settled at the bottom in a shape that hurt to look at, one arm hooked unnaturally beneath the rest of her body. A gasp echoed through the store, loud but barely audible over the throbbing trance music. Floss looked up at Orla helplessly.

  Orla looked back, her mouth dry and hanging open. She wasn’t sure if the hollow thumps she had heard came from the model’s shoes or her bones, which sat so close to the surface of her skin, Orla felt like she could see her whole skeleton struggling. The model groaned and thrashed her head. Nothing else was moving. “Paulina!” someone shrieked. Someone else yelled, “Call 911!”

  Floss clambered up the stairs, knees bound by the hem of her bandage dress. By the time she reached the top, people were wedging themselves between her and Orla, screaming at them, trying to push Floss. Together, they ran—to the door, to the corner, to the cab they flagged down frantically. They did not see the other cab, the one the hysterical girls piled into, could not hear one of them saying to the driver, “Follow that car!” They did not see the driver, besotted with the girls’ young cleavage, nodding at a command he usually would have laughed at.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Orla said in their cab.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” Floss covered her face. “She might have been trying to hit me, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.” Orla bent at the waist. She was nauseous. “And neither do you.”

  They did not pay any attention when both cabs came to a stop in front of their building, the teens waiting in theirs as Orla and Floss got out and hurried inside. And they were already in their respective bedrooms, somber and pale, as the girls snapped pictures of their front door and blasted the photos out on their networks with vicious captions.

  Home of the EVIL worthless whore.

  Aston + Paulina forever payback’s a bitch, bitch.

  This is where that skank who hurt Paulina lives, if anyone wants to drop by and beat the shit out of her. C’mon world. Don’t hold back.

  * * *

  The next morning, Orla awoke to her phone’s persistent symphony. She rolled onto her stomach and felt beneath her pillow for it, swiping her thumb across its screen in an attempt to silence her alarm. It was only when she heard a tiny, tinny version of her mother’s voice—“Orla? Orla, are you there? Orla Jane!”—that she realized the phone had been ringing.

  She slid it between her cheek and the pillow. “Mom.”

  “Look out your window, Orla.” Gayle’s voice quivered on the other end. “Your building is on the news. Your front door.”

  “What do you mean, my front door?” Orla couldn’t see the black-gridded double doors at the building’s entrance. They opened onto Twenty-First Street; her window faced the avenue. “Is it terrorists?” Orla said. “Mom!”

  “Tell her it’s on channel ten!” Jerry shouted, as if such things were the same the world over. She felt around in bed for the remote to her bedroom TV, the glass-domed box that had followed her since her freshman year of college.

  “Orla,” Gayle said, “I need you to go lock your door. You know my friend Adele, from the scrapbooking place? Her son has a Twitter—”

  Orla went to lock the dead bolt. When she got close to the door, she heard the rising voices of people near the elevator.

  “Tweeted,” Jerry said to Gayle in the background. “They call it tweeting.”

  “Some person in your building,” Gayle wailed, “hurt a young woman, a model, Paulina Kratz? I know her from Dancing with the Stars. She survived the tsunami, and this is what she gets? She danced with Maks. She danced beautifully.”

  “Val,” Jerry corrected her. “She danced with Val.”

  “This woman in your building pushed her down the stairs,” Gayle said. “Can you imagine? It’s all over the news. People are furious. Someone tweeted your address. They’re outside your door. With signs. One paintballed your super.”

  Orla closed her eyes. Poor Manny. She hoped his son, Linus, who trailed him everywhere, hadn’t seen that.

  “Tell her the police just got there,” Jerry called out in the background. “They’re setting up a barricade.”

  As if on cue, there was a slap on the door. “Ms. Natuzzi?” came the voice from the other side, deep and urgent. “Open up, please. NYPD.”

  “Who is that?” Gayle demanded. “You’re old enough to have gentleman callers, but—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” muttered Jerry.

  Orla watched the door shake in its frame from the second knock.

  “It’s not a guy, Mom,” Orla said. “It’s the police. They’re looking for my roommate. She’s the one who pushed the model. I have to go.” She thumbed the red circle on the screen.

  Floss, in a periwinkle satin camisole and briefs, ambled to the door. “Are you gonna get that?” she said, rubbing her palms over her eyes.

  Orla stared at her. The door went on shuddering. Would the police believe Orla if she denied everything? If she let her jaw go slack like a frightened kid, and said that Floss was just her subletter? There wasn’t a soul on earth who could corroborate their friendship. “I really don’t know anything about her,” Orla imagined herself saying. She froze in the middle of the thought. I really don’t know anything about her. It was the truth. Where was Floss from, for real, before Akron? Had she gone to college? How had she learned to hack people’s emails? When had she had her first period? Her first kiss? Did she have siblings? Friends? Enemies? A driver’s license? A criminal record? Together, they had chosen her passions from the things that arrived on their doorstep, her dreams from the common denominators of the getting-famous playbook. They assembled the soulless army that made up most of her followers—the bots who applauded her pictures and disseminated her thoughts—on a web page they had to translate from Russian. What of the triumphs and loves, the fights and failures that predated their efforts? Floss had never offered. Orla had never asked.

  And she never would. This, she was sure of. She had been sure since, a few days earlier, she brought up a package that looked like anything else from a publicist. Floss, paging through a magazine on the couch, barely glanced at Orla opening it, at Orla lifting, from a sea of weightless packing peanuts, a vase. The vase was strangely heavy and squat, marbled green, with a matching cap screwed on tight and rimmed in gold. There was a gold plate embedded in the cap, engraved.

  “‘Biscuit,’” Orla read out loud. “Weird name for a decor line.”

  Floss had been licking a finger to turn the page when Orla said “Biscuit.” Now she slowly dropped her finger from her tongue and got up. She walked over and lifted the vase from Orla’s hands, her arms buckling slightly as she took on the weight.

  Floss said, with her eyes on the porcelain, “Biscuit’s my dog.”

  “What?” Blood rushed between Orla’s eyes and ears. She felt her pulse quicken in an embarrassed way, as if she had been caught doing something.

  “My dog,” Floss repeated. “I guess these are her ashes.” As Orla watched, horrified, Floss moved the bristles of her ponytail away from her face and pressed her cheek against the urn. “I told my mom to wait. She was bitching about taking care of her,” Floss said. “I told her soon I’d have the money to fly home and get her, but she didn’t think I would. She didn’t think I could do this. She didn’t think I could do anything.” Floss held the urn out and blinked at it, disbelieving. “It was so not Biscuit’s time,” she said. Then she turned her back to Orla and started to cry.

  Orla licked her lips, preparing all the questions she knew she should ask—But why would your mom do this? How could any mom do this? Before she could say anything, though, Floss whipped around. Mascara was running down her face. It hovered, in dark
drops, from her chin.

  “Don’t,” Floss said to Orla, her voice patching out. “Don’t ask me anything about it. This—” She raised the urn. “This is the end of something. And if you have shit in your past, I don’t want to know about that, either.”

  So Orla let her tongue lie still in her mouth. She understood what Floss was saying: they would be, from here on out, only who they were from here on out.

  And now, as they stood in the entryway, listening to the cop’s knocks cross into hostile, Orla stayed quiet again. She watched as Floss pulled a robe on and cinched it tightly, nodded at the door. “Go ahead,” she said to Orla. “Open it.”

  Had it ever really happened before? She was famous overnight.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Marlow

  Constellation, California

  2051

  In the exam room, as Marlow sat down on the table, Grace told her not to take her clothes off. “Just needed to get you off-camera,” she said. “I don’t have access to Pap smear results. Hopefully it takes the network’s weekend crew a second to pick up on that.”

  “I can’t believe you ended up on a medical arc,” Marlow said. “Remember the cat?” In seventh-grade biology, the teacher had shown the class a taxidermied feline, split open down the middle to reveal its pickled insides. Grace had thrown up immediately, in the aisle between their desks, prompting the teacher to put down the cat and pick up a bulk bag of sawdust.

  “I’m nowhere near the blood and guts, trust me,” Grace said. “I’m professional talent, science. I do genetic design here. I’ve been working on your baby.” She grinned as Marlow’s mouth fell open. “Yeah, I know,” she murmured. “They don’t let us talk, but I can build you a baby. Go figure. Guess they didn’t think of that wrinkle when they revised a couple kids’ contracts.” Grace picked up a doctor’s tablet, with its lightless, fog-safe gray screen, from the long shelf against the wall. She smoothed its smudged surface. “I need to show you something,” she said.

  Marlow watched Grace summon a diagram, a honeycomb of yellow twigs connected by blue and green and red dots. The heading at the top of the graphic said BABY #1217, TRIESTE. “I kept waiting to send in your mock-up,” Grace said. “I didn’t believe what I found, when I went looking through your genes. I thought maybe the network was up to something—a big reveal, or whatever. But here we are—your sowing’s today, right? And they still haven’t told you.”

  “Told me what?” Marlow said. A perverted hope, the size of a tender shoot, sprang up—what if the designers had discovered that she and Ellis were distant cousins? They’d have to break them up then.

  “It’s about your dad,” Grace said. She leaned in and explained.

  Grace, as she worked to turn Marlow and Ellis’s preferences into a person, had come across something curious. The physical traits belonging to Marlow’s father, the ones they had selected for their baby—brown eyes with an epicanthic fold to the lids, black hair with a thick shaft—did not match the DNA in Marlow’s own genome. In all the places her father should have been, there were the genes of someone else. Someone whose hair and nails and spit Marlow and Ellis had not brought to Liberty.

  “I’m so sorry to tell you this,” she said, “but I can’t find Aston anywhere. He’s not your biological father.”

  “No, he’s my father,” Marlow said dumbly. “Did you look—could you look again?” She felt her breath quickening. This was a mistake. People made them all the time.

  The first warning from the network sounded in her mind. I should return to an on-camera space. Grace got it, too, Marlow could tell. She started to talk faster.

  “I tried to do some research, before I got you all upset,” Grace said. “And this was weird, too: I can’t find your birth certificate on file anywhere. I know you hardly need them for anything these days, but still.” She frowned down at her nails, shy in her accusation. “I mean, that could be unrelated, if you don’t have one,” she added. “It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing, considering your birthdate.”

  Floss was always bragging about when Marlow was born. “The whole world’s divided into born before or born after,” she said sometimes. “Not too many people can say ‘during.’”

  Grace slid a scrap of paper across the desk to Marlow. Marlow startled at the sight of it, and picked it up quickly, automatically, as if to hide it from the cameras. But when she remembered that no one could see them, she looked at it closely. The paper was thick and plum-colored. A golden pattern was laced across it—the swirls rose off the paper, catching under her nails.

  “It’s wallpaper,” Grace said. “Left over from my dining room. I didn’t have anything else to write on.” She reached out and turned the paper over.

  There, on its yellowish-white side, was an address, scrawled in Grace’s hand.

  Mount Sinai West. 1000 Tenth Avenue, New York, New York.

  “The hospital where I was born,” Marlow said.

  “Yeah,” Grace replied. “I pulled the address from your file. Maybe someone there can tell you something. Maybe they have a record of your real—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She never did, Marlow thought, have a mean bone.

  The pads of Marlow’s fingers pawed awkwardly at the scrap. “Could you just message me this info?” she said.

  Grace looked at her a long time before she answered. “I think it’s better if I don’t,” she said. “I’m just worried that...” She looked down, shook her head at her lap. “The network runs all our storylines by the Department of Info, you know,” she said. “And the network clearly didn’t mean for you to find out about this. If I message you, and the Department of Info flags it, I’m worried they’ll...” Grace raised her eyebrows wearily. “Well, it’s a discrepancy. We’re going off-script here, Marlow.”

  An eerie jangle ran through Marlow. She had never had a secret from the network before. She had never really had a secret, period. She couldn’t find a place in her mind to put it. It wasn’t a comfortable fit.

  I should return to an on-camera space immediately, the voice reiterated firmly.

  “And I would pump your mom for information,” Grace said. “Like, ask to see a picture of your dad, at the hospital when you were born.”

  Marlow already knew that there were no pictures from when she was born. She had asked about them when she was a kid; she wanted to see her mother bare of makeup. “I’ve told you this,” Floss said when she asked. “We couldn’t take any photos. Nobody’s phones were working, and it was pitch black most of the time. Besides, sweetie, I assure you—I was wearing makeup.”

  Grace stood up. “We should go now,” she said. She stopped with her hand on the door and turned back. “I really feel so bad, Marlow,” she said, quietly. “About this, but about everything with Honey, too. That’s why I had to tell you—I owe you. I always felt like it was my fault.”

  Marlow felt the start of tears. She pinched the bridge of her nose to stop them. “No, Grace,” she said. “It wasn’t. That’s not how I see it at all.”

  Then the door was open and they were back in the hall, Grace telling loud, specific lies about test results, and things looking fine after all. Marlow nodded, playing along. In her mind she saw her father, young beside her bike. This time, when she remembered that day, she felt the rope slip from her waist.

  * * *

  The party was beginning, Marlow saw from her car. Guests were winding around the side of her mother’s house, accepting drinks from a bot who nodded as each person made its tray a little lighter. Marlow looked up at the roof. Instead of bothering to weed, she saw, her mother had merely covered her whole overgrown roof garden in gaudy blue fabric.

  It was Ellis who found her sitting there. He yanked the car door open, puncturing the pleather vacuum. “What are you doing?” he said. “You know my boss is here, right?” His hair was perfectly dry—Marlow recalled him telling her that, at the surfing simulat
or, no one actually got wet.

  She let him pull her into the kitchen, where Jacqueline was dropping sprigs of mint and sliced cucumber into a pitcher of water. “There’s the hot mama!” she sang.

  Floss was across the room in a folding chair. She stood when she saw Marlow and stamped across the room. One of her eyes was sludgy with gunmetal shadow. The other was bare, vulnerable-looking. “Where were you?” she demanded. “You know it takes at least an hour to do anything with your hair, and people are here already.”

  The makeup girl stood poised with her brush in the air. She was the only real human hired for the day—no one liked bots so close to their eyes. “Should I keep going, Mrs. Clipp?” she said. “Or do you want me to start on the mother-to-be?”

  Marlow straightened her spine. “I need to talk to my mom,” she said, forcing herself to sound firm. She borrowed a phrase from Floss. “Can we have the room, please?”

  It was amazing, once Marlow started talking, how quickly Floss’s full range of dramatics kicked in. It was a symphony of fidgets, everything firing at once, like an emergency alert had gone out to her nervous system. Floss fluffed her roots like a maniac. She pursed her lips into a tight bud. She dabbed at her lower lash lines with her ring fingers. These weren’t just antics for antics’ sake, Marlow knew. Her mother had taught her the trick once: “When someone confronts you,” she said, “don’t respond right away. Give it a second, so that as many followers as possible have time to tune in.” Now Floss was breathing in and out loudly, letting her eyes fill up.

  “Don’t you dare cry,” Marlow snarled. She felt like she could shake Floss, could bang her head on the glass—oh, how her thoughts could startle her, without Hysteryl to keep them at an even chill—and she closed her eyes for a moment to drain the image from her mind. “I’m the one who should be crying, Mom,” she said, when she opened her eyes again. “Me.”