Followers

by Megan Angelo

  And then Honey was there, making them roar, stepping into a spotlight that swung toward her from somewhere unseen. The people began to clap. Marlow edged into a space along the wall and watched them. Men were misty-eyed. Women bounced in their shoes. Honey held up her glass to them.

  “My friends,” she said. “So good to see you.”

  As if prayer had begun, every head tucked downward.

  “I remember privacy,” Honey said. She slid her free hand into her jumpsuit pocket and began to sway slightly. “I was born right before the Spill. The federal internet didn’t start till I was five, in 2021. Yes—I’m old.” She gestured, with her drink, at a cluster of twentysomething girls. They tittered. “My parents didn’t trust it, like most people,” Honey went on. “Though they did like the mapping.” She smiled with practiced mischief. “There was an old sycamore tree on my uncle’s land my mama wouldn’t never let me climb,” she said. “But I used to sneak right past her and climb that dang tree anyway. That tree gave me courage. That tree made me strong. But once the new internet came along, the government always knew where everyone was. And my mama always knew where I was. I never climbed that tree again.”

  Marlow glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed that Honey had just begun speaking in a heavy Southern accent. But the people were shaking their heads, as if this business with the tree was the most tragic thing they’d ever heard.

  “And then, when I was fourteen,” Honey said, “I went out to Constellation. Y’all remember what happened there, don’t you?”

  Marlow froze. Around her, the people were murmuring sympathetically. One woman pressed all ten fingers to her lips and blew a pained kiss Honey’s way.

  “I was saved,” Honey said, her eyes glittering. “Saved from the life I thought I wanted. Everywhere I looked, I saw those old ads, you remember ’em? ‘Share American Stories Again.’ And I was a young girl with a nice set of tits coming in, and I thought—well, I thought what so many girls think when they decide more people should be looking at them. I thought, ‘Why not me? Why shouldn’t I be famous?’” Honey laughed. She stroked the scar on her face. “But that night, on that beach, with all of you watching, I sure got my comeuppance. And I realized the government was wrong. I realized that sharing isn’t the way. I realized what my true calling is: to bring privacy back to America. And that’s why you’re here tonight, right?”

  Whoops from the crowd. Bodies shimmying slightly, thrilled to hear Honey ramping up.

  “You’ve been lied to all your life,” Honey said softly. “You were lied to when you were told the only way another Spill could be prevented was if the government ran the web, and if all of you kept sharing on it. You were lied to when you were told that, because your smartphone was cooking your brains, you’d be better off with a device—something that would speak right into your brain. That could look, too. That would talk like it’s you! ‘I should take five steps east—I need to replenish my skin’s moisture levels.’ Those aren’t your thoughts.” Honey let her mouth fall open, as if she had just thought of this, shocking herself. She continued: “And what does your life look like now? Well.” She thrust one hip out. “For one thing, we know from the color of your public profile just how much money you have. That part doesn’t bother me, exactly. Mine’s a nice shade of platinum.”

  Thunderous laughter. Honey waited it out, licking her lips. “But I’ve got my gripes, too. My device was always telling my doctor, ‘Wah, Honey had gnocchi again! With extra Parmesan!’ My device was always telling my boyfriends, ‘You know, Honey faked that orgasm.’ Look, I’m a busy lady.” Honey threw her hands up, faux-exasperated. “If I wanna fake it and get on with my day, that’s my business!”

  Sheepish looks from the men. Shrieks so loud from the women, Marlow almost covered her ears.

  “That’s why I quit my device,” Honey declared. “Quit sharing years ago.”

  Marlow looked across the room, at the kitchen drawer where she had seen David tuck Honey’s device, sliding it beneath folded white dish towels. She took a sip of her drink, finishing it, and caught another as a waiter sailed by.

  “That’s why I went private,” Honey said. She raised a fist and pumped it with each word that came next. “You. Can. Too.”

  Applause—applause like they had been holding it in the whole night, their whole lives.

  “Living only the part of your life you would if your grandma was watching,” Honey said. “Does that sound like the land of the free? The home of the brave?”

  “No!”

  “Would you like to see what freedom’s really like?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ready to experience privacy?”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay, then,” Honey said. She tapped her lip with a finger, as if she was trying to think of something. “Let’s see. You’ve removed your devices. We’ve disabled every bit of technology in this apartment, down to the security sensors.” She held one hand up to her mouth, stage-muttering a secret. “I’d like to rip the goddamn things out of the walls,” she said. “But alas, I’m just a renter. Sometimes I’m tempted to pour tequila on the sensors—you know that’s how you break them, right? Or so I’m told. The tequila I keep around is too damn good to waste on such things.” She clapped her hands together. “What am I forgetting?”

  Marlow jumped a little as they all said it together, without hesitation: “The drapes!”

  Honey nodded. She raised a finger in the air. “The drapes!”

  Ivory velvet began to descend over every pane of glass. Marlow stepped forward as one of the curtains swished, ghostlike, against her on its way to the floor. She looked at the glass in her hand. This one was empty now, too. The network had a two-drink maximum for talent, unless intoxication had been prescribed for the sake of a storyline. If a star tried to go for a third drink—Jacqueline attempted it constantly—a stagehand would be dispatched to crouch-run past the talent in their own home, swiping the glass the moment it was set down.

  If she were at home, she would have to stop.

  But she wasn’t at home, Marlow thought, holding the gaze of the waitress coming toward her. She didn’t have to stop.

  * * *

  She woke the next morning in her own pajamas, tucked as primly into the guest bed as if she had fallen asleep reading. But her hairline was drenched and her stomach was throbbing as if it had its own pulse. And her mind—she groped, but her mind was blank. The hours between Honey’s speech and the dawn taking reluctant gray shape outside her window—they had fallen into a hole.

  She sucked in her breath and tried to put the night together.

  People started to figure out who she was, even with the mask. They wished her luck evading the hunt. They shared their Hysteryl stories. “I started taking it after I didn’t win homecoming king, which was bullshit,” one guy said. “This other dude who hated me totally rigged the system.” He paused and finished his beer. “Joke was on the other dude, anyway. My parents had the same crown made for me custom.”

  At some point, she got boxed into the kitchen by two men, both stocky and thick-browed, cut from the same pattern.

  “What are you doing here?” one said. “Mom would kill you.”

  “What are you doing here, Barry?” the other retorted.

  The first one shifted closer and hissed, “I’m not Barry in here. It’s Shane.”

  A woman with a terrible voice sang over the music, her own song, in a corner. She faced the drapes.

  Someone turned to Marlow and said, “I think you’re mental, but you should still hit this.”

  Marlow took whatever it was, something slim and black and rocket-shaped, and sucked from the slit. The air she took in tasted earthy and sour.

  In the center of the room was an all-white cardboard model of a planned privacy community, a place where people would give up tracking each other, where they would t
ake off their devices and literally keep their thoughts to themselves. “It just looks like a town,” a twentysomething blonde girl said, distressed, and Marlow laughed without knowing why. Within a few minutes, she and the blonde were drinking mojitos with their elbows linked. “I think I could really do it, though,” the blonde said when they lowered their glasses. “Go totally private.”

  Her tall friend tossed her hair and said, “Yeah, right, Jenna. You don’t even know your address without your device. Can’t see you doing the full 404.”

  “404,” Marlow had repeated. She knew it meant something to her, but the thought was trapped behind cloudy glass. “What does that mean?” she said.

  The tall one began to answer—but then Jenna, the blonde, stumbled into the model, her palm crushing a whole street flat.

  Honey mingled, reprising her pitch in pieces all night. She waved a shrimp tail, empty of the curl she had sucked down already, and reminded people that if they liked how they felt tonight, and if they wanted to feel this way all the time, they should join one of the fifty gated communities currently being built. Living there would feel, Honey promised, like being totally off the grid. No more devices. No more federal internet. All interactions with the government—taxes and the like—would be handled discreetly by the main office, a service built into the residents’ HOA fee, alongside mowing and snow removal.

  “A privacy town in every state,” Honey said. “Sea to shining sea. David can explain more about packages and pricing.” There was also a more affordable option, Marlow heard David say as he took over: you could keep living where you were and simply give up communication as you knew it. For $1,399, you’d get a box of materials meant to coach you through withdrawal: Honey’s books on going private, videos of her lectures, and a bulky machine that would play the oily-looking discs the videos came on.

  A while later, when the woman with the terrible voice was still singing, Marlow looked down at her own feet and arms and realized she was dancing. On a table. A man—one of the brothers from earlier—laughed when he saw her horrified expression. He reached his hand up to help her down. “Shane,” he said hotly in her ear.

  He propped her against a wall. “Did you ever think about how weird it is that babies are born, like, whenever they want, like a Tuesday when everyone’s at work?” he said. “Or how people can die on a sunny day when kids are playing next door?” His mask had slipped a bit and she couldn’t find his eyes, but the way his jaw ground made him seem angry at her, like she, specifically, should have sorted out these indignities. She let Jenna pull her down the hallway, and watched Shane-not-Barry’s hands clutch dumbly at the air where she had been.

  In the bathroom, Marlow let Jenna go first. She raised her mask and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair looked like she had slept on a balloon. The color of her skin, beneath her sweat, alarmed her; it was slightly gray, as if concealing a shadow cast from the inside. She looked like someone old, doing something she was too old to do, and she suddenly felt like she could not keep her eyes open for one more moment. She told Jenna she would be right out and climbed carefully into the slippery concrete bowl of the tub. She put her head back.

  The door swung open again. Shane-not-Barry was moving from the dim hallway into the bathroom’s starched light. “You trying to ditch me?” he said. “You can’t ditch me.”

  She remembered him climbing in. She remembered laughing at the fact that the tub was inconvenient, even though she didn’t feel like laughing. She remembered when he let out a sound—mmm—and put more of his weight on her. She remembered that she had mumbled something to stop him after waiting what might have been too long. Maybe not the best idea. She remembered that Shane-not-Barry had giggled and turned on the faucet over her face, let her sputter in the stream for a moment. “Live a little,” he said.

  In the guest bed, now, her heart went cold as she remembered how it ended.

  Her anger had saved her.

  How strange, she thought, that so many livelihoods—hers, her parents’, Ellis’s, his coworkers’, network staffers’—had depended on her moving through every day complacent. All that effort and money spent on making sure she stayed sweet and even, when the real hero inside her, all along, was this other thing. The thing she was meant to tamp down.

  Something in Marlow snapped when Shane turned on the faucet. It wasn’t about the water that shoved her breath back down inside her. It was about the way he yanked the faucet knob: without hesitation, like there was no chance he wouldn’t get away with it.

  Marlow rose out of the stream and wrapped her hands around his neck. She could remember thinking just for a few seconds, just so he knows I’m for real—but she couldn’t remember actually counting.

  Then Honey was there, on her knees, peeling Marlow’s fingers back one at a time. Shane-not-Barry flopped out of the tub like a fish, screaming you crazy bitch. He threatened things, but Honey just held up a hand and reminded him of what he had signed. Tall men came in to remove him. “And give him a pill first,” Honey told them. “David knows which ones.”

  Marlow remembered muttering that she wanted to go to bed. But Honey ignored her, pushed her toward the party, wouldn’t let her fix her hair.

  “Please don’t touch it,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

  Then they were back in the living room, the people all turning to face them. Honey held Marlow’s limp form triumphantly—by the armpits, as if she had hunted her—and ripped off her mask. There was a gasp as the party took in this star they had streamed for years, this talent looking ill and worn and desperate. “See?” Honey shouted into the crowd. “See what comes from a life of being watched?”

  * * *

  There was more meat for breakfast. Actually, Marlow corrected herself, as she surveyed Honey’s kitchen table, there was only meat for breakfast. There was sausage and bacon and ham. Honey, inexplicably, was eating fried chicken. Before Marlow could speak, she sucked glistening fat from her thumb and stood up. “Good morning, sunshine,” she said. “Make a plate and bring it with. I want to show you something.”

  Marlow followed Honey to a door at the back of the apartment, then up the stairs to the roof. “No way,” she said, when she saw what was parked there. It was a drone, the million-dollar, person-carrying kind, a giant muscled bug with a storm-gray glass windshield. The sight of its vicious little propellers made Marlow’s gut lurch.

  Honey grinned at her. “Who’s afraid of drones now?” She climbed inside, white robe billowing in the wind behind her, and patted the passenger seat.

  As they lifted off, Honey searched Marlow’s face, then nodded as if she was satisfied. “Good,” she said. She stole a sausage from Marlow’s plate. “I was worried you’d be mad at me for using you as an example.”

  “I am mad,” Marlow said. “Or I’ll be mad, later. Right now I’m just working on not throwing up.” They were passing a tower that reminded her of a telescope she had as a child: round and stacked with narrowing layers, seemingly ready to collapse into itself.

  “I figured you’re used to it,” Honey pressed. “Being used to sell something. You really changed the world, you know that, Marlow? Kids never kill themselves these days. You’d sooner hear of a child dying of cancer.”

  Marlow wanted to eat a piece of bacon, just to give herself time to think up a response while she chewed, but she couldn’t—she knew it would come back up. “Kids don’t kill themselves for a lot of reasons,” she said. “They’re built not to, now.” She thought, with a jolt of nausea, of the mock-up of her and Ellis’s baby, the one they had left unfinished. “And they don’t have secrets anymore,” she added.

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.” Honey smirked. “But admit it. You didn’t mind a little privacy last night.” She turned toward Marlow conspiratorially and pulled her knees up, like they were best friends at a sleepover. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

  Marlow lo
oked at Honey. She felt her anger resurfacing. “Oh, yeah, it was a thrill,” she snapped. “I liked the part where I almost got raped.”

  Honey pinched the last piece of bacon from Marlow’s plate. “Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “You shut that down just fine. I’m sure no one’s ever bothered to say this to you, they’ve been too busy making you eat pills and wear cardigans, but—Marlow, you can take care of yourself.”

  Marlow jerked her face away, toward the window. She didn’t want Honey to see how much it meant to her, to hear someone say something like that, even someone who didn’t really care about her. It would shift everything between them Honey’s way.

  Honey took both plates and tucked them somewhere out of sight. “You know, I went to Constellation specifically to fuck with you people,” she said, the way someone else might have said I went out there to major in mechanical engineering. “Back when we were kids, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I picked up on that,” Marlow said. “Right around the time you drove my dad’s car into the ocean.” Her heart pricked at the word dad. But that was still Aston, wasn’t it? Even when she learned who her father was, it would be too late for that person to be her dad.

  “And it wouldn’t have made sense to go home afterward.” They were drifting toward the Statue of Liberty, and Marlow swore she saw Honey give the statue a curt nod, like she was a coworker. “I had momentum,” Honey said. “I was famous, all of a sudden. But fame was not enough, you know? I wanted something else. I couldn’t have come up with the word, back then, but I’m big-time now, I have a good vocab.” She smiled. “Influence. That’s what I wanted.”