Followers

by Megan Angelo

  Floss ignored her, unleashing a long soprano sob. “Why are you so obsessed,” she said, “with ruining this day? I worked so hard on this day.”

  “You lied to me all my life,” Marlow hissed. “I don’t care about a party. I have a different father? Who is it? Does Dad know?”

  Floss eyed her, her lower lip trembling. “I’ve always tried to do what’s best for you,” she said. “And so has Aston. That’s what makes someone a parent.”

  Marlow clenched her fists at the sound of the line. It was so accurate, so smooth, so out of sync with Floss’s sputtering reflexes. The sentence must have been in the wings for years, Marlow realized, waiting for its cue. Its scripted patter gave her a horrible thought. The thought came out of nowhere and out of everything. It came from being used to finding out, again and again, that something she thought was real was not.

  She had broken her contract once already today. Why not shatter the spell?

  “Did they cast a different dad for me?” she whispered to her mother. “They can’t do that, right?”

  Floss gasped. She grabbed Marlow by the elbow and dragged her down the hall, to her master bath. She slammed the door. “How dare you?” she hissed at her. “How dare you talk about the network like that—and on camera? Shame on you. After all they’ve done for us, the life they’ve given us—” Floss stopped to catch her breath. Her chest was heaving beneath her dress, which was too tight everywhere, Lycra burrowing mercilessly between the soft shelves of her flesh. Marlow noticed, for the first time, that her mother was wearing a necklace with diamond-stacked letters, spelling NANA.

  And she noticed something else: her mother’s walk-in shower was crammed with vases, with hundreds of roses in a dozen different kinds of pink. There were roses the color of a shell’s pale inside and roses the color of the scorching lipstick Floss wore in the summer and roses every shade in between. They had been shoved in here, to dry and wither, because Floss hadn’t wanted to wait on the florist order for the sowing until Marlow and Ellis picked a sex. She had simply ordered both pink and blue, then cast aside the one she didn’t need.

  Strangely, that was what Marlow was thinking of—all those flowers cut and dying, for absolutely nothing, behind sealed glass—when she said it: “See, Mom, this is why we don’t want the baby having any of your genes.”

  Floss was silent as she walked to the sink. She rummaged in her bin of endless products, found a pot of eye shadow, and finished what the makeup girl had started. Marlow could see, as she crept closer, that there were more tears in her mother’s eyes, threatening to fall. And then they simply didn’t. They went away on their own.

  Floss snapped the eye shadow shut. “It’s time,” she said. She opened the door, pushed past Marlow, and went back out into the hall. A moment later, Marlow heard the French doors that led to the backyard clicking open, then closing with a slam.

  Jacqueline had tactfully retired to the kitchen while Floss and Marlow fought, but now Marlow felt her hand on her back. She looked up and saw her friend behind her in the mirror, holding the yellow gown open at the knees. Marlow stepped in, and Jacqueline zipped it up.

  When Jacqueline led her back down the hall a minute later, Marlow could see her sowing beginning. Just beyond the French doors, at the base of the deck stairs she was to walk down, the string quartet was seated in their spots, bows sawing. She could hear the violins.

  Jacqueline walked Marlow to the doors and rubbed her back. Once, gently, in a circle. Then she was gone, too.

  Marlow took in the scene on the other side of the glass. This was it; she should be out there. The music had stopped and started again—Brahms, it was always Brahms, when the mother-to-be was about to appear. Jacqueline was in her place, up front and to the side, her floor-length hem circled by her children, standing with her as a reminder of what this was all about. Ellis stood in front of the crowd, waiting for Marlow beneath an arch draped in bluebells. He was smiling at the guests, cracking jokes that didn’t seem to land. Bridget twisted in her front-row seat to note who was and wasn’t laughing at her magnificent son. Floss sat across the aisle from Bridget, staring straight ahead, all clues to her expression hidden by the swollen back of her updo.

  Come to think of it, Marlow thought, it wasn’t just about her mother. She didn’t want to make a baby out of any of them.

  There was one bot left behind Marlow, sorting cocktail napkins in the kitchen. She turned and walked over to it. She looked it right in its crystal eyes. “Move,” she said.

  The bot stepped aside politely, and Marlow reached past it to grab the duffel she had stashed in the corner of the kitchen. The network had approved her and Ellis’s request for a babymoon, only a short distance away, just past the Mexican border. It would help with her stress, Marlow had reminded the talent welfare officers pointedly, when she petitioned them to let her go. She had booked an in-room acupuncture treatment and a private session with a yogi who specialized in fertility poses. Ellis was going to learn to roll a cigar. They were all packed, slated to leave right after the party concluded.

  Marlow tucked the slip from Grace into a small pocket sewn on inside of the bag.

  There was only one thing left to do now, she knew, if she really wanted to go. If she really wanted to run, and have a fighting chance of getting away. She would not be like Ida, half-gone and traceable. She didn’t want anyone following her.

  Marlow hesitated with her fingers curled over the gem on her wrist. Dad, she intuited, squeezing her eyes shut. It’s Marlow. Are you there? He still wore his device—though he never answered, the messages technically still went through. I love you, Dad, Marlow intuited. Please try to eat. She wondered if he could hear the words on some level, if he tried to figure out who she was. For the first time, she realized, thinking back to Grace at the clinic—she and Aston were even. She didn’t know, now, who he was, either.

  Marlow slid her finger underneath her device, easing it upward one side at a time, wincing as its powerful adhesive relented, taking a few strips of skin with it as it went. She dropped her device between abandoned drinks on Floss’s countertop. An odor shot up into her nose: sweet and stomach-turning, the smell of skin she hadn’t seen in years. She felt something dim in her brain.

  How long would it take for the people outside to come looking for her? She was already one minute late. Soon it would be two. Her mother, Ellis, anyone who had her on their maps—they were likely shifting in their seats right now, checking for her inside their heads and confirming that everything was all right, they had proof: she was still here, in the house. How many minutes until someone decided to come inside and look, to trust their instincts for once, instead of their devices?

  The violinists were still playing, chins tucked low. Their faces gave nothing away, like the song always went on this long. The people were standing, waiting, their gaze on the back door.

  But Marlow was going out the front.

  She hurried across the lawn to her car. The dress spread out like a single useless wing, tulle hissing behind her as it skimmed the grass. A man walking his small, wet-eyed dog stopped to stare as she pushed herself into the driver’s seat, bundling the endless skirt in around her, slapping it down so she could see. She figured out, as she cleared the mess from her vision, why she didn’t like the gown anymore. It wasn’t just that she had seen the color wrong, that the yellow screamed more loudly now than it had when she chose it. It was that she didn’t like yellow at all, she realized. She had always thought it her favorite color, but that was a trick of the pills. It was just that, before she saw everything clearly, it was the brightest thing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Orla

  New York, New York

  2016

  As someone who made a living taking down wheat-dull quotes from glossy somebodies, Orla had always thought she knew what fame meant, what it consisted of, what it promised and took away. She had met Floss in Au
gust, the melon-colored end of the New York summer, everyone trudging and dying for fall to arrive and remind them why they came here. By January—another month in which everyone forgot, again, what it was they liked about this place—Orla had learned that everything she thought she knew about fame was wrong. Adorably outsider.

  For instance: the craziest thing about being famous was not the being recognized, mostly by the girls who spent their twenties in the East Thirties, but also, sometimes, by men, who cupped their hands and yelled down the block, “Yo! It’s the roommate!”

  The craziest thing was not the money, which landed in chunks in Orla’s account, knocking it up to five figures and finally, unbelievably, six.

  The craziest thing was not the parties, which Orla struggled to look natural at. She was terrible at dancing and even worse at drugs. “Holy shit,” someone had said to her at a party recently, “go wipe your nose. There’s coke on it. You look like an albino pig.” The idea of snorting things made Orla queasy, so she tended to simply skim her face along the mirror instead of inhaling.

  The craziest thing about fame was not the fact that she had a trick for wasting fine cocaine now.

  It was not even the fact that the person who had noticed her powdered snout was an Olympic darling du jour, a javelin hurler with more DUIs than medals who had followed her into the bathroom, waited for her to clean up, and mashed himself up against her.

  It was almost, but not quite, the fact that it seemed to exempt her from the weather. Winter in New York, for Orla, was suddenly no more difficult than any other season. Gone were the days of underestimating icy puddles and paying with damp feet all day. Winter was half-over, and Orla had barely buttoned her coat. The rain boots from Gayle stayed under her bed. She went out in silk flats and suede platforms, in all sorts of impractical, delicate shoes. If the street filled with rain, or a curb was blocked by snow, their driver and bodyguard, Amadou, would put his hands beneath her arms and lift her over the moisture, into his Escalade.

  No, the craziest thing about fame, to Orla—who was never meant to have it in the first place—was that, deep down, she didn’t mind it. She wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone: when a perfect stranger looked at her twice or followed her on Instagram, she felt a flickering understanding of Floss and what she wanted. She knew how strangers saw her: as the cheapest sort of star, the tagalong friend of a TMI queen. But the point was: they saw her. She was visible. She was there.

  * * *

  On most red carpets, Orla would stand with Floss for ten seconds or so. Then, despite the way Floss sometimes called out over the camera shutters’ soft gunfire—“that’s my friend Orla Cadden, C-A-D-D-E-N, she’s a literary talent on the rise”—Orla would be asked to move off to the side, so that Floss could be shot alone. She never minded. She liked to stand at the edge of the step-and-repeat, watching Floss give what they called, together, The Face. It was a thing to behold. Floss would suck in her cheeks, push her lips out in a pout, and make her eyes smolder like she was charging into battle. She would cast The Face down her nose, over her shoulder—it was a beam she could throw anywhere. Orla always felt mesmerized, watching her. Who cared that Floss was, essentially, just standing there? Orla knew now how hard it was to stay put in the crosshairs of so many flashbulbs. The instinct, when things got that bright, was to run, or at least to blink. But others who witnessed The Face in person were not as impressed. If Floss heard a camera click while she was talking to someone, she’d abandon her sentence cold and go right to work, posing. Whoever she was talking to would be left to stand there, perplexed and forgotten, until they saw themselves out of the moment—or until Orla did, smiling apologetically and trying to finish Floss’s point. “Doesn’t she know that, like, we can see her?” one of those people had whispered to Orla once. But Floss was not concerned about the people in front of her; Floss was concerned about followers. Her followers only saw the picture, and the picture always turned out.

  One night, as Orla killed time out of frame, she looked down the press’s side of the carpet and saw the laminated paper she used to stand on—LADY-ISH.COM. There was a set of delicate, neon-polished toes covering the name that had replaced hers, and Orla followed them up to the rest of a girl who must have just finished college. Only recently had Orla come to accept that there was now a whole class of people living and working in New York who were several years younger than her, that they were not interns who had overstayed their summers—they were here to stay and grow up and compete.

  Orla walked toward the girl from Lady-ish. “Hi,” she said, feeling radiant, generous.

  The girl looked up from scribbling on her notepad. She had enormous black-rimmed glasses, perfect olive skin, and nude lip gloss, shiny and pearly, the kind Orla would have thought was out of style. Self-consciously, she touched her own lips, which were a thick red Floss had talked her into.

  “Huh?” the girl said. She studied Orla. “Oh. Right. You’re on Flosston Public. The bookish one, right? Orla.”

  It was her brand, but Orla still flinched at being called bookish. Not knowing what else to do, she trilled, feeling fake, “I love Lady-ish.”

  The girl broke into a knowing grin. “I guess you do,” she said. “You worked there a long time.”

  Orla bristled. “Right,” she said, reddening. “It’s a great place to start out.”

  The girl shrugged. “I went to Yale,” she said, as if this explained multitudes. “I won’t be there that long. I’m writing a play. About—Well, I shouldn’t say too much. My agent wouldn’t want me to. I swear it’s like her full name is Polly ‘Top Secret’ Cummings.”

  Orla nodded, teeth frozen. The girl had to be bluffing, she thought. There was no way she was repped by Polly Cummings. Polly was a lioness of literary agents, one whose name Orla had known since high school, when she checked a guide to the industry out of the local library. Her senior year, she had mailed Polly a short story she had written, the same one that now made up most of her manuscript. She remembered the day she got the response from Polly’s office. Gayle had come running out to where Orla floated in their aboveground pool, waving the envelope—Polly’s response came by mail, because it was only 2005—“Polly Cummings wrote back!” I see promise here. Keep going!!—P, said the Post-it on top of the packet Orla had mailed. Beneath the Post-it was another sheet, a half page of typed feedback. Now that she knew how these things worked, Orla understood that the letter had been written by an assistant—this was back when people Yale Girl’s age were expected to be assistants, not self-ordained playwrights. Yale Girl was full of shit, Orla ruled. But something must have crossed her face, doubt or envy or fear, because Yale Girl smiled suddenly, like she had won a race between them. Just before she turned to see who else was coming down the line, Yale Girl looked at Orla with pity in her eyes. “Anyway, good luck,” she said. “I mean it.”

  Orla was already shuffling away when she realized: the bitch hadn’t even bothered asking her a question.

  * * *

  Floss had broken through, become known, back in September. What did it was Paulina’s fall at the Urban Outfitters, and Floss looking on, not catching her. It should have ruined Floss’s life. It might have sent her to court. But instead, she was saved by a sound effect.

  There had been video, of course. At first, this was a bad thing. It looked somehow worse each time they watched it—Floss tugging her arm away, Paulina collapsing in a pile of wrong-way bones. They huddled together on Orla’s bed as the Paulina fans who saw their address on Twitter stood outside their building, hurling overripe squash at the brick. (The internet had decided that Floss’s face was gourd-like.)

  Over the course of twenty-four hours, the video transcended web bedlam and landed on the news, local and national. Anchors shook their heads and talked about new lows. “You don’t understand,” Orla said, trying to impress on Floss how big and bad this was. “It’s not just online. Grown-ups know about it now.”


  The little mobs kept coming. Orla and Floss were trapped inside. They quickly ran out of food. The police had stopped bike messengers from entering the building because of safety concerns, so there could be no takeout. Their neighbors all hated them for the fuss, so there was no one to beg for help or ramen. In a desperate moment, thinking the Ukrainian man might sympathize, they took a ride up to the roof. But all they found was a new padlock on the patio gate. Floss was furious. She took it personally. But Orla thought, as she stared at the lock, Good for you.

  Gayle kept calling Orla and then refusing to speak to her, handing the phone to Jerry as soon as Orla picked up. But when Orla told her father that she and Floss were hungry, her mother went to work. Twelve hours later, the doorman held out a crazily markered-up box—FRAGILE!!!! PERISHABLE!!!—filled with cardboard sleeves of pasta and bubble-wrapped jars of Prego, Campbell’s soup, Chex Mix, Oreos, a bunch of bananas, Maxwell House coffee, and the drip coffee maker that sat on the counter in her parents’ kitchen. They had simply torn its plug out of the wall and would go without it, for her.

  By the time they had eaten the provisions from Gayle, the strangest thing had happened: the video began to work for them. Someone, somewhere, had taken it and edited in a sound. Womp-womp, went the sound, as Paulina careened. Perhaps it was because the news said the model was healing, perhaps it was because everyone had seen the fall too many times to be shocked again—people decided they liked the womp-womp version of the video. They began to laugh about it. They shared. “We are ALL Floss Natuzzi some days,” someone wrote, and suddenly, astoundingly, everyone agreed.