Followers

by Megan Angelo

  She kept talking, and, theoretically, Marlow was dying to cut her off. But another one of her just-unearthed feelings was perking: curiosity. She was parched for details. So she let Honey go on, and Honey went on: after Marlow bit her, she didn’t go back to War, back to the brothers and uncles and the boys she would have married, all of them with the same frowns, the same dark dust in their wrinkles. She wouldn’t go back to the rancher with its squinting, shutterless windows. She wouldn’t go back to the creek—the crick, as she said it—at the back of the property, the one that had dried up so bad over the years, it didn’t cover her parents’ ashes when she chucked them in. Age nine, straw-armed, she had to go back to the house to fill a bucket at the laundry room sink.

  Instead of going home, she came to the island passing beneath their feet, where television anchors in creased lipstick sat across from her, asking questions. They all wanted to see her right away, before she healed too much. They asked her what was going through her mind when she realized what Marlow was doing. They asked her whether she thought Constellation, that grand and indulgent experiment designed to lift the country’s Spill-ravaged spirits, to glamorize sharing again, was actually—and here they paused and raised their perfect eyebrows—dangerous.

  Their questions didn’t really matter. Honey had already decided on her answers. “I studied old interviews,” she told Marlow. “I learned what to do, how to just say what you want to say, no matter what they’re asking.” She grabbed the H-shaped wheel of the drone, even though it was flying independently, and jerked it side to side. “Pivot, pivot, pivot,” she chanted.

  She stole her talking points from people who stopped her on the street, to tell her they were sorry she got bitten. Constellation was ten years old by then, a juggernaut, ripe for backlash. Now there was a reason to pounce: Constellation had hurt Honey—a young girl, an innocent girl (so they thought)—and it wasn’t all Marlow’s fault, was it? Marlow was clearly unhinged, but that wasn’t the whole story. Of course it was bound to go bad, this world where people were filmed all day. It was their fault, too, as followers—they had gotten addicted to watching. And they had let their guards down. Though they refused to use things like Amerigram, they were slipping into sharing, weren’t they, when they partook in the Constellation Network feeds? If they liked a star’s necklace or catchphrase, they said it. They parted, when they commented, with just a bit of themselves. They handed it over to the government. Now, looking at the wound on Honey’s face—seeing what had happened to her when she’d put herself out there, sharing as much as anyone could—they felt the suspicions they’d had all along about this new web reheating, demanding action.

  Oh, they should let her go, they told Honey, gripping her arm. But before they did: Did she ever think that maybe they’d all be better off off-line? Without any internet, period? The way people were in the 1900s?

  Honey listened keenly, and heard the plea between their words: they were desperate for someone to lead the way, to help them escape the internet. America needed an antisharing renegade, a patron saint of privacy. And if she could be that saint, she bet, she wouldn’t have to go back to West Virginia.

  So when journalists asked about Marlow, Honey pivoted fiercely. She talked about how badly she’d wanted to be known, like the kids in Constellation, about how she had bought into the post-Spill propaganda—sharing was good now, sharing was safe now. She wondered aloud whether the government was really any better at protecting data now than Facebook and Twitter and banks and insurance companies had been before the Spill. She used the word privacy over and over; sometimes she just said, firmly, “Privacy good. Sharing bad.” She said, raising her voice to distract from the fact that she was only fourteen years old, “The only way to know what you share with the government is safe is not to share with the government at all.”

  It worked. She was young and blue-eyed, scrappy and freshly maimed, and people called her brave. They said the questions she asked were theirs, too. Honey was invited to speak to clubs of troubled teens, to attend galas, to sit as an honorary junior member on the boards of various charities. She was given an hour to shout at the camera each night on a cable-news station. Publications put her name on lists of the year’s most interesting people—“me,” she told Marlow now, thumping the second button of her pajamas, “me.” A woman with children to feed quickly wrote a book for Honey to call hers, and Honey promoted it hard. She did late-night-show karaoke games and kids’ programs where drones pelted her with sticky green goop. But mostly, she went on repeating herself until she grew bigger than a star. She was not just someone people looked at. She became someone they obeyed.

  The man who ran the network that aired her news show took her in. He and his wife lived on Central Park South. “I had my own bathroom,” Honey said. “It blew my mind, that bathroom.” The couple had never had children, and though Honey was seventeen by the time they got it formalized, they adopted her. She called them Papa Bob and Mama Brynn. She had her twenty-first birthday party at the Plaza Hotel. They only denied her once: when she asked for plastic surgery. Mama Brynn touched Honey’s scar and said, “Darling, it’s part of who you are.” Papa Bob was less nuanced.

  “He said it was my brand,” Honey said. “And it has been, ever since.”

  Marlow noticed now, since Honey hadn’t washed her face since the party, that she applied her makeup around the scar, not over it. “Why are you telling me all of this?” she said.

  Honey looked at her so sharply, she startled. “Because I’m trying to show you how hard I had to work to get what was handed to you,” she hissed. “All your millions of followers that you got just for growing up in the right neighborhood. You didn’t do shit. So yes, Marlow, sure. Some of my fans, some of the people who want to go private, who come to my parties—like the gentleman you ended up in the tub with...” Honey exhaled, a weary breath. “They have—traditional values. Of course privacy is going to appeal to people who have things to hide.” She leaned over and pressed a finger into Marlow’s chest. “But this movement, these people, my place in this world—this is all I have, Marlow. So if I have to look the other way sometimes, then I do. I know it means that, as we used to say in Catholic school, my soul is not as clean and white as a milk bottle. But I can live with a couple spots, Marlow. I just can, to have what I have.”

  Marlow laughed, a sharp sound that made the back of her throat burn. “You can live with spots on your soul?” she said. “You can’t handle spots on your couch.”

  To her surprise, then her fear, Honey laughed, too.

  The drone wove between the buildings. The spires on top of them made Marlow think of the needle in the fairy tale, the one with the princess who pricked herself on something inevitable and missed everything for years, her whole life. “Are they still around, your Papa Bob and Mama Brynn?” she said.

  Honey flicked her hand at the buildings below. “Not really,” she said curtly. “Fog. They’re in a home down there.”

  “Mine, too,” Marlow said. “Well, my dad. He’s been gone for years. My mom is better off. She can live on her own.”

  Honey shook her head. “Funny how that works,” she said, and Marlow noticed her voice was wobbling. “And my Mama Brynn—she did everything they said to do to try to keep it away. The meditating, the eye masks, the board games. All we ever ate was sweet potatoes. She wouldn’t so much as look at the display on an alarm clock. But Papa Bob never quit. He kept his screens till the day he forgot how to use them. And they ended up exactly the same.”

  “Do they eat?” Marlow said. “My dad doesn’t eat. I actually daydream sometimes about him eating a sandwich, or a big bowl of soup—about how nice it would be to see that.” Her face felt suddenly warm. She had wanted, many times, to confess this to her mother, but never found a moment off camera. She couldn’t say it otherwise; she knew it would embarrass Aston if she told the world something like that.

  “I don’t know if
they eat,” Honey sighed. “I never go. They don’t know the difference, and you have to remember—” She raised her eyes defiantly to Marlow’s, staving off judgment. “I already lost one set of parents. No one should have to do it twice.”

  Marlow looked away, straight ahead at the Statue. She hadn’t realized they were so close. The Lady’s dusty mint gaze filled the windshield, one blank eye trained on each of them. “I’m sorry, Honey,” she said. She said it because this was a good spot to say it, with lost parents having come up. But Marlow meant more than the formality. She meant that, though she had spent her whole life defending the bite to herself—she provoked me, I had no choice, my hands were literally tied—she had been wrong. She was grown now, she saw both sides of the story, and she understood: of course she had been wrong. She wanted to say all of this, to clarify what she was apologizing for. But something pride-shaped was lodged in her throat.

  “That’s the thing about real people,” Honey said, shrugging. “They get sick. They forget your face. They die. They disappoint you.” Honey paused and looked out. The sun had wrestled the morning from the clouds, turning the sky around the Lady’s head a hopeful peach. “I would never turn you in, Marlow,” Honey said. “But I think you’d be dumb not to go back to Constellation. You’re out here, giving up all those followers, to look for real people? Your real parents? Real people are so impractical.”

  “Just the one parent,” Marlow said. “Just my real father.”

  Honey frowned. She twisted away from Marlow and reached her hand between her seat and the wall of the drone, feeling for something in the pocket on the door. “I don’t know about that,” Honey said.

  When she turned back to Marlow, she was holding the letter from Orla Cadden’s apartment. Marlow felt her mouth go bone-dry.

  “Now, don’t have a fit,” Honey said quickly. “It fell out of your jeans last night, when I was looking for your jammies.”

  Marlow snatched for the envelope, and Honey let her take it—let her take it with the slightly giddy smugness of someone who already knew what it said. “But you can’t read it,” Marlow protested, when she saw how Honey’s face looked. “It’s in cursive.”

  “See, that hurts my feelings,” Honey sighed. “I’ve been following you since we were kids. I know every damn thing about you. But you can’t keep anything straight about me. I just told you I went to Catholic school.”

  Marlow said, “And what the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  As it turned out: plenty.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Orla

  New York, New York

  2016

  The night Aston burned his new fifty-nine-million-dollar apartment black, Orla and Floss waited in the sickly pink hospital wing, in a room the nurses gave them after their presence proved a distraction. They dozed on plastic chairs with their heads together. In the morning, a nurse came and woke them, choosing Orla’s shoulder to touch. They went in to see Aston. The doctor said he was lucky, but Orla didn’t think he looked it. Lee Kumon sat in a chair by the window, glaring them out of the room, glaring harder when a cell phone rang and it took Orla too long to realize it was hers. She was still getting used to its ping—she had only recently taken it off silent, as the hatred that lit it up for weeks finally trailed off. Orla stepped out to listen to the voice mail. Before the woman on the recording even started talking, Orla looked up, saw the clock for the first time that day, and knew what the message would be. She had missed her appointment.

  She was about to call back to reschedule when Floss came into the hallway, crying. She shoved her own phone under Orla’s nose, showing her an email. “The network,” she said. “We’re canceled, officially. I mean, I know they pretty much decided it the second that girl died but—” She flicked her chin at the doorway to Aston’s room, spoke bitterly. “Now, with all his drama—they say they’re just thinking of our mental health.”

  A nurse passing by glanced back and shook her head at Orla once, an unwavering, split-second judgment of the entirety of her, like Orla should have known better than to be where and who and with whom she was.

  Orla pushed Floss’s phone away. “That’s what you’re worried about right now—the show?” she said. “God, don’t you ever get sick of yourself?”

  Floss hiccuped. She blinked, wounded. “Why are you pissed at me?” she warbled, snot clogging her words.

  “It isn’t real.” Orla snapped her fingers in the air, grabbing, pinching. “Nothing you do is—none of it is anything, don’t you get that? It’s nothing.”

  Floss was letting her tears run unchecked into her mouth, then letting them run right back out. Her ugly-cry was famous for good reason. “The show is your job, too, in case you forgot,” she blubbered. “I guess you don’t care if we lose it, ’cause you still think you’re different, right? You’re supposed to be a writer?”

  “I will be a writer.” Orla heard something desperate, high and thin, in her voice. She ignored it. “This ends for me. You might be talent, but I have a talent. That’s the difference between you and me.”

  Floss whirled on her heel and stomped off, the backs of her mule sandals slapping up and down. The doors at the end of the hall said RESTRICTED—STAFF ONLY. But she pushed right through them, and was gone.

  Aston’s mother poked her angry face out of his room, reached for the door, and slammed it closed.

  Orla flattened her hands into her sacrum and leaned against the wall’s chair rail, massaging her aching back. You’re right, she thought, a command to her confidence—she was already, automatically, doubting herself. Everything you said was right.

  But that wasn’t true. One thing she said was wrong. She had been wrong to say this would end for her, that she could walk back into her old life, unmarked. The reality was the opposite. However this ended, Floss would be fine. Aston, the doctors assured them, would be fine. Craig would be fine. Melissa would be fine. Danny would be fine. There was only one bit of inescapable proof of the way they had lived this last year. It was the size of an avocado this week, and it lived inside of Orla.

  * * *

  There were so many ways what happened next might not have happened.

  If she had made it to her abortion.

  If she had rescheduled her abortion, instead of hanging up every time the receptionist put her on hold, over and over until finally she was five months along, and the abortion just wasn’t going to happen. Not because she wanted the baby, not because she felt guilty, but for the same reason most things happened to her: she could not make a choice.

  If the social worker she had seen about adoption hadn’t done a double take at her face, at her name on the form. If she hadn’t said with a sigh, halfway through their meeting, “The couples won’t know who you are at first, but eventually you’ll meet them, and so you’ll have to address—things—then.”

  If Marie Jacinto had agreed to sell her book instead of tossing it out with her Danish wrapper.

  If Danny had loved her.

  If she had loved Danny.

  But none of that had happened. What happened, instead, three weeks after the fire, was that Aston took an Uber from the hospital to their apartment and collapsed in Floss’s lap like a child. Orla listened from her room for an hour as the two of them wept. Then she listened from her room for a month while they got back into their old awful rhythms, defiling all the spots Orla had Cloroxed after their breakup, all the spaces she thought were finally safe. Sometimes she heard them, in Floss’s room, planning their next act. They whispered so she couldn’t hear, and she felt both hurt and relieved. At long last, she was on the outside.

  One day, her Google alerts pointed her to a new television interview Floss and Aston had done. Orla hit Play, keeping the volume low on her laptop so Floss and Aston wouldn’t know she was watching. Floss, sitting against a black backdrop, looked shattered and subdued, and Orla half wondered if sh
e might open a cabinet later to find a new Post-it—Seem sorry!!!!

  “I was responsible for everything, the night that Anna died,” Floss said, when the reporter pressed the issue. “My friend Orla had nothing to do with it.”

  The reporter touched a pen to her lips, then posed to Floss one of the many questions Orla had never dared to ask. “Why do this at all, Floss?” the reporter said. “Why did you want to be a reality star, to get all these followers—what’s the point, in your mind? What did you want?”

  “What did I want?” Floss repeated. She glanced at Aston, who was staring down at his lap. Though Orla couldn’t see him from the waist down, she bet his leg was jiggling.

  “Were you bullied as a child?” The reporter leaned in. “Distant from your parents? What made you crave this approval, this attention?”

  Floss inhaled. When she answered, it was in what Orla knew Floss thought of as her smart voice, which made what she said sound even worse. “It’s not so much that I craved it,” she said. “I thought I deserved it. I think I’m fun, I have an interesting life. I think I’m special.”

  Aston looked up at the reporter, into the camera, above it. He grimaced.

  The reporter smiled, a tight show of teeth. “You’re just being honest, of course,” she said.

  “I mean, everyone is special in their own way,” Floss said quickly. She blushed and started pulling at her hair. “But the more people followed me, the better I felt. I mean—anyone would do this if they could, wouldn’t they?” She looked genuinely confused as she cocked her head at the reporter. “Right? Wouldn’t you?”