Followers

by Megan Angelo

  * * *

  The interview seemed to work. Orla scanned the comments, the blog posts analyzing it; Floss had reclaimed her relatability, because Floss had been so honest. Everyone did, as it turned out, think they were special in their own way. Everyone was again Floss Natuzzi some days. Orla heard Floss and Aston leaving again, often, sounding like they really had places to go and needed to be on time. They were no longer people who could afford to make others wait.

  One morning, Floss skipped into Orla’s room as if they had never fought. She threw an arm over her head and dropped into a squat, writhing like a stripper on an invisible pole. “Guess who you’re having lunch with today?” she said.

  “Whom,” Orla said. “And no one.”

  “Wrong.” Floss popped up and swiveled her hips. “Polly Cummings.”

  Orla sat up straight. “You don’t know Polly Cummings.”

  “The agent. Big lady, blonde, Parisian vibe?” Floss swayed from one foot to the other. “I met her last night at a thing. I told her about your book. I told her all about you, actually, except for the part where you’ve been, like, jerking off to her business card since you were little.”

  Orla’s heart was pounding. “You’re disgusting,” she said. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Excuse me, I know book people,” Floss said. “I read.”

  Floss owned, Orla knew, exactly three books. They sat on the windowsill in her bedroom. They were all by an heiress who wore stretchy dresses and dispensed tips on having it all. When Orla opened one of them once, its spine crackled with newness.

  “What did I say back in the day?” Floss said. “An agent would come to you. Now get up. Lunch is an hour. We have to find you an outfit.”

  * * *

  Orla ended up wearing the same thing she had worn to meet Marie Jacinto. It was not ideal. The black pants had to be held shut with a shoelace Floss threaded through the fly, and the owl-printed blouse was so snug that the outline of Orla’s belly button bled through. Her flats honked with each step, fighting the swell of her feet. When Orla saw Mrs. Salgado dozing on her chair outside, she tiptoed to make the shoes silent.

  Orla spotted Polly Cummings as soon as she stepped inside the restaurant. Polly was seated at the back of the sunken, blush-lit dining room, facing away. Her fierce blond bob swung forward over her menu. Her linebacker shoulders were wrapped in an olive-colored scarf. Orla took a moment to will her sweating to stop as the maître d’ stood eyeing her. She could tell he took her for someone who wasn’t staying, who only wanted to use the bathroom. She lifted her head and walked past him.

  Then she was standing at Polly’s table, looking at the woman she had only seen in the trades and watermarked party pictures. Polly looked up and snapped her menu shut. “Orla Cadden,” she said. “Sit.”

  Under Polly’s menu was a stack of papers with a Post-it on top, and on the Post-it was Orla’s name. Orla looked at the page, the paragraphs that spread around the sticky note, and felt a streak of dizziness. It was her book. Floss must have gone on her laptop and emailed Polly the manuscript, without asking or telling Orla.

  Orla sat down hard. Across the table, Polly seemed to be counting each flyaway buzzing on top of Orla’s head, each pill dangling from Orla’s blouse. When Polly’s eyes moved down to her stomach, Orla blurted, mostly to bring up her gaze, “I’m so honored to meet you, but I have to say one thing up front, based on, ah, past experience.”

  Polly blinked at her through her glasses, the frames of which were green and heavy-looking, like they were carved out of stone. “Go ahead,” she said.

  The busboy poured their waters, holding his tie with one elegant hand. “I don’t want to write about Floss,” Orla said. “Natuzzi,” she added, blushing, in case Polly didn’t watch TV.

  Polly nodded. “Thank you, Darrell,” she said to the busboy, and then to Orla, “That’s fine. I’m not interested in that from you.” She tapped the papers in front of her. “I see promise here,” she said. Orla almost laughed. It was the same thing Polly’s assistant had said about the pages years ago, back when Orla was seventeen. Back when she knew how to finish things.

  “I like the first chapter,” Polly went on. “And there are certainly some bold choices. The experimental elements—the drawings, the lyrics. The Orthodox Jewish character who metaphorically remains to be filled in—I found that quite interesting, though we’ll have to find another way into it. ‘TK,’ that’s too inside baseball, don’t you think?”

  Orla felt like her stomach was dropping through her legs. The experimental elements. Floss must have sent an old version, a wild version, maybe from as far back as when Danny was around, filled with padding and errors and gaps and, she remembered, feeling like she might pass out, a sailboat made of lowercase r’s.

  “Oh,” she said weakly, “I should explain what—”

  “I think this could be quite a debut,” Polly said. “I don’t like the words ‘next big thing,’ I think they’re crass, but...” She raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps, just for scale, think in those terms.”

  “Are you kidding?” Orla stared at her.

  Polly shook her head. She lowered her eyes to the salad the waiter was placing in front of her. The waiter did not look at Orla or ask if she wanted to eat. Polly frowned at the arugula, then picked up her fork with a sigh. “Though I do think,” she said, stabbing a tomato, “you may have some logistical issues.” Her eyes scrolled downward again.

  Orla pulled her napkin up over her stomach. “This, you mean? Pregnant?” she stuttered. “Sorry. I don’t know what...”

  Polly wiped her mouth. “I guess I just want to know,” she said, “how serious you are about becoming an author. If you’re making arrangements to have the time to be an author.”

  Orla weighed her options. She wondered how Polly would respond if she let the whole truth roll out of her mouth. I am as serious about becoming an author as I am about being alive, she wanted to say. It’s the reason I’ve stuck it out here for years. It’s the reason I made myself blog about booty shorts. I used to be a girl who wrote after school until her legs got numb. And recently, yes—I got lazy. And distracted and lonely and pregnant. But I have only been this way for such a short part of my life. And I have been that other girl forever.

  “I have a two o’clock,” Polly said coolly.

  “I’m serious,” Orla said quickly. “Very serious.” It was suddenly clear to her, clear as the empty whisper-thin wineglasses cluttering their table: she would do whatever was best for this book, whatever worked for Polly Cummings. She had been giving things up for so long: Danny to Catherine, a decade to cyberstalking Danny, just about all she had to Floss. She had one thing left—her long-lost dream—and she was going to keep it. This was the truth, no matter who it made her: she couldn’t give it up.

  Orla looked Polly in the eye and said, “I’ll figure something out.”

  * * *

  To her surprise, Amadou was at the curb when she came out. She hadn’t seen him since they cut back on expenses after Anna’s death, when they weren’t going anywhere anyway.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, hugging him, watching herself in his mirrored glasses.

  “Miss Floss asked me to come get you,” Amadou said. “For a surprise.”

  In the back seat of his Escalade, she found some earrings in the well beneath the door handle. “I haven’t been driving any one client regular,” Amadou said quickly, as if it might make Orla feel bad to hear that he had replaced them. “No one special.” He nosed the car onto Forty-Second Street.

  When he turned onto the FDR, Orla leaned forward. “Where are we going?”

  “Oh,” Amadou sighed. He adjusted his GPS unit as it slipped down the inside of the windshield. “Somewhere new.”

  * * *

  Orla had never been to Brooklyn Heights. It was eerily quiet, with flat-faced, shuttered houses a
nd streetlights out of a storybook.

  Amadou pulled over in front of a massive three-story home. It had gray clapboard siding and a navy door flanked by thick white columns. Ferns, lime green and deep maroon, spilled out of the window boxes.

  Orla got out of the car and walked around to the sidewalk, which was made of small, smooth slates, so unlike Chelsea’s shit-streaked concrete. She looked to her left and was surprised to find that, just a block away, the street dropped off and the river rose up to where she could see it. Past that, across the water, were the tall blocks of the Financial District. “What is this place?” she said.

  Amadou answered literally. “Thirteen Pineapple Street.”

  As he spoke, the front door swung open and Floss leaned over the threshold. She had on a bizarre dress: strawberry pink, with a high, square neckline, a flouncy skirt, and little puffed sleeves. She had rolled her dark hair back on both sides and secured it with rhinestone-dotted combs. There were white leather pumps on her feet. The overall effect reminded Orla of her great-aunts in the sixties, smoking at parties in pictures.

  “Welcome.” Floss did a sort of curtsy.

  “To what?” Orla said, climbing the stoop.

  “To our new home.” Floss let her in, and shut the door behind them.

  Orla stood in the foyer, her head turning slowly. In front of her were stairs, wide and walnut, leading up to a second-floor landing with a small hexagonal window above it. To her right was a living room with heavy gold draperies and a long velvet sofa, emerald green. A fire burned beneath the mantel, which was engraved with dozens of icons—fruit and wheat and men in wigs. To her left was a dining room, a blizzard of blue and white—chinoiserie vases on the round, polished table, royal-and-cream-striped curtains, aqua crystal and milk glass held in the triangular cabinets built into the corners. A discordant flash of green inside one of the cabinets caught Orla’s eye. It was the urn with Biscuit’s ashes, she realized.

  Orla looked at Floss, who was watching her carefully. “If this is a prank,” she said, “I’m not in the mood.”

  Aston came padding barefoot down the thick runner in the hallway then, headed straight for her. Orla blushed fiercely, because—why had she assumed that by “our,” Floss still meant Floss and her?

  Aston was wearing pants and a zip-up sweater, both cut from pale gray cashmere. Above where the zipper ended, Orla saw the new pink flesh of the scars on his chest. “Shouldn’t you be in, like, the best mood ever?” he said. “Miss new bestselling author! Polly just called Floss a minute ago.”

  “She did?” Orla looked between them.

  “Oh, yeah, you know Polly,” Floss said vaguely. She grabbed Orla’s hand and pulled her down the hallway. “Hope you didn’t fill up. I made lunch.”

  They came into the kind of kitchen Orla thought did not exist in New York, not even for the rich; it was so deceitfully suburban. There was endless counter space, a full-size dishwasher, a real stove with lemon-patterned tiles behind it. At the far end of the room was a wall of windows, looking out on a narrow, sloping yard, and a long bench, padded in flowered fabric and bolted to the wall. Floss motioned for Orla to sit down there. Aston pulled the table back so that it didn’t squeeze her belly.

  Floss brought things to the table, an endless parade of food off-limits to pregnant women—mayo-drenched seafood salad and sliced-turkey sandwiches that she left in their containers, not bothering with presentation. They talked about Polly. Floss would not apologize for sending the manuscript without Orla’s permission—“Because I was right—she loves you!” Aston wanted to know if Orla could give him the “TLDR” version of her book. “Like a shorter version of the story, because I have this thing where I can’t get through books,” he said, bouncing on his seat. “TLDR means ‘Too Long, Didn’t Read.’”

  Could she even believe it, they asked, over and over, and later she thought that they must have been checking to see if she actually did.

  Floss brought three champagne flutes to the table and sat down. She slid the one with the darker liquid toward Orla. “Sparkling apple juice.”

  Orla flicked her glass. “Just this once, I’ll take the real stuff,” she said. “One glass of champagne won’t kill the baby.”

  Floss and Aston grew quiet. They looked at each other.

  “Whoa,” Orla said. “You guys are different in Brooklyn. Fine. Half a glass.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Aston said. He sounded like a child playing grown-up.

  Floss lifted one puff-sleeved shoulder. “Maybe better safe than sorry?”

  Orla rolled her eyes and reached for the bottle. Floss gripped its neck and tugged it back. She got up, skirt whirling, and set it on the counter, as if that settled that.

  “Okay.” Orla leaned as close to the table as her stomach would allow. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “Let’s just get to it,” Aston grumbled to Floss. His shoulders slumped. “It’s just Orla. I don’t know why we had to make a big show.” He pushed aside a vase of carnations blocking his face from Orla’s view.

  “Because,” Floss said. “It’s, like, a big deal, and I wanted it to feel special.”

  Floss and Aston interlaced their fingers and put their hands on the table together. Orla gasped. Between the house and Floss’s costume, she somehow hadn’t seen it: a teardrop-shaped choking hazard of a diamond, covering Floss’s left ring finger all the way across.

  Floss and Aston began taking turns talking, like nervous bridesmaids sharing a toast.

  “We’re getting married,” Floss said. “Soon.”

  “It’s more than that, though,” Aston said. “We’re, like, new people.”

  “Literally new,” said Floss. “You were so right, Orla, that day at the hospital. I needed to take a hard look at myself. To learn what was real. So I did that, and then we got this place—we just, like, want to simplify. We rented it furnished,” she added, in a tone that made we rented it furnished sound like we built it brick by brick and hewed the table before you by hand.

  “This is where our new life begins,” Aston said.

  Orla looked at Floss. “So you’re moving out of 6D?” she said.

  Floss nodded. “My movers will come get the rest of my stuff tomorrow.”

  There was more. There was so much more. They had quit drinking, they said proudly, except for wine and champagne at meals, of course. They were getting acupuncture. They had had their auras photographed. They were immersing themselves completely in the study of cathartic movement.

  “Is that exercise?” Orla said.

  Sharply, they both answered, “No.” They said they went thrice weekly to a loft in Tribeca, to beat their hands against their thighs and scream about what they deserved. Floss thrust out her phone to show Orla a picture of the class’s teacher. It took Orla a long moment to remember where she’d seen the face before. Their teacher was the anxious, overdressed waif from the red carpet where Orla met Floss. She thought of telling Floss this, but Aston was deep into a story that had the pink lines on his chest pulsing, catching the chandelier’s light.

  “So class is over, right,” he said, “and Floss and I are just standing there. We’re exhausted. Our throats are raw. Our tunics are see-through, we’re so sweaty. Everyone else has left the room. And we’re just staring at each other. We were thinking the same thing. Then we said it, at the same time.” He beamed. “‘Let’s have a baby.’”

  “We told Emily—that’s the teacher—what happened,” Floss said. She flapped her hands. “And she was just like, ‘Oh, you had a shared revelation? That’s just another Tuesday in here! Happens all the time!’”

  “So anyway,” Aston said. He put his arm around Floss, who leaned into him. “We’re going for it.”

  “Well, cool,” Orla said after a moment. “I mean, congratulations. So, you’re...pregnant, too?”

  Aston gave a s
omber shake of his head, and Floss bit her lip. “No,” she said. “I had surgery when I was young, to get a cyst out, and something went wrong. The doctor was a douchebag. The point is, I can’t.”

  “And I want to adopt anyway,” Aston jumped in. “I’d rather. I love kids so much, Orla. Like, I relate to them more.” He reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. “I think I’d be a really good dad.”

  This was the part in the story, when Orla looked back, where things slowed to a surreal pace. The part where she could remember all the details in high definition—every one of Floss’s lashes its own blade against her skin, the way Aston’s sweater puckered each time he breathed. It probably wasn’t true that she actually knew these things. It was probably her mind combing for things to cling to, to prove that what happened had actually happened, that Floss really took a breath and said: “And we were thinking that this could be perfect, since you meant to abort yours, anyway.”

  It was so quiet, Orla could hear the strokes of the clock above the cabinets. Her heart beat twice to each tick.

  “But I didn’t,” she said. “I’m not.”

  “But you would have,” Aston said. “If I wasn’t in the hospital. So maybe you could just, like, still pretend that you did, in a way.”

  “What?” Orla said.

  Floss shot him a look. “We know it’s unorthodox,” she tried.

  Orla stood up. She forgot that she was pregnant and on the tighter side of a booth. The table’s edge forced her back down. “I know that you went to a lot of trouble,” she said, “buying these sandwiches. But no. No! I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this—I’m not giving you my baby.”

  Floss made her voice sympathetic. “When we discussed it with Emily—”

  “When you discussed it with Emily?” The bitch from the red carpet, reincarnated as an expert on glutes and fate, discussing her baby with Floss and Aston. “I swear to God, Floss,” Orla said. “You have no filter!”