Followers

by Megan Angelo

  Orla’s heart began to pound. The photographers, who had been behaving at the edges of the ceremony, were now rushing the center aisle, blocking the shot. Orla saw the broad, gray-suited shoulders of security moving into the frame. They swept the paparazzi away. Finally, her mouth falling open, Orla saw Floss at the back of the aisle.

  She was lit from behind like an angel, and she wasn’t wearing her slutty dress. Instead she wore a plain white column of silk, a braided gold rope around its empire waistline. Her veil was thick and floor-length, opaque, bird’s egg blue. On her feet were the same type of sandals Aston wore.

  Floss took a step and all the fabric moved, shifting to reveal that when she came forward, her stomach came first. Her stomach was high and round and full. Like Orla’s.

  Forgetting her state, Orla leaped to her feet and stumbled to the screen. She put her face right up to it. The glass pixels made her eyes water. Could it be distorting things, this shitty TV?

  Then she heard Gianna say, “Folks, it’s unbelievable. Floss Natuzzi has somehow managed to keep from the entire world that she is with child, and now the theme of this wedding, I finally get it: it’s the Christmas story of Jesus’s birth.” She laughed. “No pressure, kid!”

  “And guess what, Gianna.” Chip waved another cue card in the air. “Sounds like our bosses were in on the whole thing, those scamps. I’m now being told what the major announcement we’ve been waiting on is: Floss and Aston will return to television this winter with the brand-new docuseries, Flosston With Child.”

  Orla thought she must be hallucinating as a graphic bubbled up in the corner of the screen: Aston and Floss, alien-airbrushed, a pink faceless bundle between them.

  Orla backed toward the bed and collapsed on its edge, slid down to the floor.

  On-screen, Floss proceeded down the aisle, hands folded beneath the round of her stomach. She nodded beatifically at people as they applauded—they were applauding, Orla realized. When Floss reached the altar, Aston picked up her hands, taking a moment to look lovingly down at her belly. Craig stepped between them, grinning. This was the only detail that remained intact from the version of the wedding Orla knew: Craig would officiate. Melissa should have been in the front row. But Orla saw, as the camera swept the scene, that Melissa wasn’t there. She could spot the seat-filler summoned to take Melissa’s chair—an unfamiliar, fidgety blonde with too much eye makeup and too little skirt—from where she was, two thousand miles away.

  “Fuck all of you,” Orla yelled. She threw her empty bottle of minibar water at the screen. It hit the bride square in the nose. Floss smiled.

  Orla turned her back on the TV and seized her phone. Twitter was exploding. In the midst of the swelling pile of drivel, a real-looking headline caught Orla’s eye.

  THIS JUST IN: FLOSS IS ALSO WRITING A BOOK.

  She clicked on it and waited. “Come on come on come on,” she muttered, shaking her phone.

  A press release filled the screen of her phone. At the top was the cozy logo of a publishing house. “Floss Natuzzi, Reality Star, Influencer and Mother-to-Be, to Pen Book of Essays and ‘Life Wisdom,’” the top line trumpeted.

  The seven-figure deal had been brokered by Polly Cummings.

  The tan phone on Orla’s nightstand rang so loudly, she dropped her cell on the duvet. She picked the rattling handset up, trembling. “Hello?”

  “It’s Melissa.” Orla could hear that she had been crying. “They only told me this morning, and I quit right away. They’re monsters.”

  “But why are they doing this?” Orla put her mouth right on the phone. “Why?”

  “It’s the network,” Melissa said. “Craig the dickless wonder—he laid the whole thing out for me. Months ago, Floss and Aston went to the network. They begged for another chance. They asked what it would take. They brainstormed. A reinvention. A new chapter. A family. A baby. They were impatient. They wouldn’t listen to Craig about adoption, or working with Floss’s, whatever, condition. Your baby was right there, they said. They said your baby was ready.” Melissa blew a bitter breath into the phone. “And then, Polly,” she said. “I hate telling you this part. They brought Polly in on it.”

  “What do you mean?” Orla’s eyes slid to the screen. Craig was stepping back. Floss and Aston were kissing.

  Melissa sighed. “Polly knew a book by Floss would make fucking millions,” she said. “She would have done whatever they asked. And they figured if you thought you were finally going to get to be an author, you’d be more likely—to go along with it. So Polly helped them. She said she’d pretend to represent you. She set you up. Oh, God,” Melissa whimpered. “I need you to go on your laptop right now and email me what you signed. Everything you signed. Okay?”

  “But I did what they wanted,” Orla said. “They got everything they wanted. Why are they pretending she’s the pregnant one?”

  “Oh, that.” Melissa laughed. Orla heard what Melissa wished in that laugh: that her whole life had been different. That she never met Orla, never got into publicity, never liked English more than math. “Because the network didn’t love the storyline,” Melissa said. “They didn’t love the idea of someone else’s baby. They told Floss and Aston to fix it. And as you see, they did.”

  Orla gripped the phone. “So she’ll never know,” she whispered. “They’ll never tell her she’s mine.”

  Melissa’s breath was ragged on the other end. “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” she said. “It’s just TV. I’m sure in real life...”

  Orla hung up. She put on the only shoes that still fit her. She lugged her suitcase to the door.

  It took Dr. Kodali a moment to answer her knock. When he did, he was tying a hotel robe over a pair of swim trunks. Water rolled off his shins and pooled on the burnt-orange tile. “I apologize for the delay,” he said. “I was testing out the hot tub. Is everything all right?”

  “We’re going home,” Orla told him. “Now.”

  * * *

  People asked, after awful days that split time, turning present into long-gone past overnight, “Where were you when it happened?” When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Orla was in first period, ninth-grade geometry. “A shame,” said the teacher, squinting, bent over a beige computer that faced away from the students. “Sounds like a little two-seater ran into a building in New York. Or something. Now, where’d we leave off yesterday? Prisms.”

  With the Spill, things were different. The question would always be: “What were you looking at?”

  For Orla, it was the microwave. She remembered the last time she saw it before: 6:17 p.m. She had just gotten home from St. Lucia. She was sitting on the couch, watching television. All that seemed to qualify as news, it being Christmas Eve, were recaps of Floss and Aston’s wedding. The reveal of Floss’s belly. Aston’s crazy toast: he said, with a verve that made him seem unhinged, that he and Floss were “reclaiming the story of Jesus’s birth—we make it hot. We make it sexy.” At that, Craig clapped him on the back and took the mic.

  As Orla was watching, her phone rang on her bed. When she heard the rippling chime that meant she had a new voice mail, she made herself get up. Her impossibly low-slung stomach rubbed along the tops of her thighs. She thought about the way Floss had danced in the clips from the wedding. She had jumped right off the ground during “Shout.” Had no one found that suspicious, with her presenting as any-moment-now? Had no one at the wedding ever been pregnant before?

  Orla’s voice mail was from the bride. Floss spoke over the sound of muffled conversation, Aston talking to someone in the merry voice he used to make service workers think he was like them. “Just thinking of you,” Floss said. “We missed you at the wedding. Did you watch? I’m not sure if you could get it in St. Lucia.” She paused and coughed. “If you did, you might have noticed we went in a different direction.”

  Might! Orla thought. Have noticed!

 
; Floss went on. “The network and Mason, I dunno. They got weird at the last minute. They said we needed to do it like this or else it’d look like we exploited you. I didn’t want to do it. I mean, did you see that belly? I cried. Who wants to look fat on their wedding day?” Floss sniffled. “Anyway, I hope you’re not pissed, and I hope you’re having fun at the resort. You’re probably getting a luscious prenatal massage or something. It’s snowing in New York. It’s freezing. We just got to our suite at the St. Reege, and I’m wearing like the biggest sweater. All right. Give Marlow a kiss from Mommy.”

  Orla went to her window. Floss was right. It was snowing. The air was thick with lazy flakes. Orla leaned on the windowsill, the edge of the air-conditioning unit pressing into her belly, and watched the people on Eighth Avenue, hustling with their collars up. She caught the sight of her reflection and was startled by all the space behind her. She kept forgetting her old fake wall was gone; she could see all the way back to the kitchen, with its ghoulish overhead light. The apartment felt hollowed out. There had been so much in here, not long ago: people and their shoes and their phones and their cords and their food and their fights and their crying. Floss’s blankets pooled carelessly on the couch. Aston’s strawberry shortcake bars growing frost in the freezer. Craig’s gym bag blocking the door. Melissa’s laptop hogging the counter. The free things from publicists and the wilting bouquets from asskissers and the fridge full of drawings from fans, mailed to the building or passed through the barricade. The television—always on, so often blaring their own voices back at them.

  “It’s kind of sad,” Orla said out loud, remembering that she should talk to the baby. “After what she tried to pull, she still thinks she’s gonna be your mommy.”

  Tomorrow would be Christmas, a day of clear sidewalks and out-of-office messages. There was no chance that Orla could find a photographer or get a blogger on the phone. But she had decided that, the day after Christmas, she would find someone—she’d throw herself at Ingrid’s feet, if she had to—and she would tell them everything. Due any second! A girl. Marlow. What’s that? I know! I had no idea Floss was pregnant, either! I guess we’ll see how that turns out.

  Let them trash and harass her. Let them sic their lawyers. Orla wasn’t afraid. She knew the truth: they were nothing to be afraid of. Just a few people who had mistaken their small dreams for big ones.

  She slipped her phone into the pocket of her sweatshirt, lay down on the couch, and closed her eyes.

  She never knew how long she slept, exactly. The sound of banging on her door woke her up sometime later, and the first thing she saw, lying on her side, was the faraway microwave clock. The shape of its numbers was off, vaguely unsettling. Her first thought was that there had been some sort of outage. But the lights were still on.

  She yelled to the person knocking that she’d be right there and waddled over, her bloated feet leaving prints in the drywall dust from when she knocked down the wall. It reminded her of the flour that had been all over 6D that first day of shooting. No matter what she did, it wasn’t coming up.

  Before she reached the door, she glanced again at the microwave. The shape of its hard-edged, little green numbers stopped her in her tracks.

  The time said 6:66.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Marlow

  New York, New York

  2051

  Marlow stayed in the park until it was empty and nearly dark, and she still didn’t know what she felt about her eggs. But she figured out something else: she was finished taking direction.

  So she sneaked out and found the bus while Honey slept in the next room, while Ellis slept uptown. She didn’t know how their deal turned out, and surprised herself by not really caring. The farther she got from Honey’s apartment, the smaller they seemed in her mind.

  The bus took her to a train. The train took her out of New York, under the river and through a nameless stretch of New Jersey, all graffiti-chalked cliffs and buildings with the glass punched out of them. She wore Honey’s silver wig, even though it was the middle of the night, and she was glad that she did when she looked to her right and saw, somewhere around the middle of the state, a hologram billboard for the hunt. There was a photo of her that must have been the one the girl at the Archive took. There was an update saying that the grand prize had been tripled. The bright ad played between two notices on wanted criminals, as if whoever programmed these things had been smart enough to see there was no difference.

  Marlow rode to the place where the tracks dried up, disappearing into a weedy endcap station marked Absecon. Then she started walking. She traced the route—south and east from New York, toward what people called “the Shore”—from the little paper map the guy Honey knew had given her. She didn’t need the map for long. The formidable concrete horseshoe that wrapped around Atlantis was everywhere, impossible to miss. The basin of the U-shaped wall wrapped around Atlantis on land, sealing it off from the rest of the state. The wall’s long sides extended hundreds of yards into the ocean, maritime borders slicing right through the waves. A smattering of buoys bobbed between the ends of the U. Just beyond them, small, mint-colored boats drifted. ATLANTIS COAST GUARD was painted on their sides.

  The towers inside the wall were clustered together, the ancient logos at their tops mostly cracked or fallen away. Marlow glanced at the people around her. It was easy to tell who also meant to sneak over the border. Their faces were carefully neutral, their eyes firmly on the ground. Their paces were prim and measured, engineered to deflect all attention. Marlow fell into step next to a couple, quick for their age. They looked to be eightysomething and were fusing into one set of looks, both of them wide-hipped with brown skin and thick white hair. When the man nodded at Marlow, she noticed the front of his cap. Bars of every color and, in yellow stitching, KOREA II. Together but not, Marlow and the couple aimed themselves at the border wall’s right side, where it curved and stretched out into the sea.

  Ventnor, the last town before the wall, was a strange mix of vacation kitsch and border-town glumness. The concrete hotels on Marlow’s right were streaked with rust. Bright beach towels hung from their balconies. On her left were tiny booths with flimsy plastic pulled over their wares for the night. She got closer to one of the booths and peered inside, squinting into the light of the bare security bulb. There were shot glasses and Christmas-tree ornaments painted with this still-new American border, the sand and the sea and the wall rising over them, casting a long, dour shadow. There were T-shirts that said, in artless printing, TELL MY GIRL DON’T BOTHER MESSAGING—GONE TO ATLANTIS. There were ballpoint pens filled with water. Inside them, a tiny guard with a rifle and neon-yellow sunglasses floated back and forth. Marlow whirled around suddenly, spooked by the suggestion. But the only uniformed man for miles seemed to be concentrating hard on not seeing her. When their eyes met at random, he turned and took several steps in the other direction.

  The wall was a block away when Marlow and the couple she was following found themselves in the dark. Marlow looked up to see the illumidrone that had been bouncing over her head, lighting her path, idling a hundred feet up. When she took another step toward the wall, it thrust forward once, then fell back as if it had struck something. It turned and flew away, back inland. Marlow stood there, letting her eyes adjust to the miserly gleam of the streetlamp, and waited to see what the couple would do next. They paused, then continued toward a shack at the end of the street. Marlow couldn’t read the sign on it—until, suddenly, a light over the shack turned on and blinked three times, slowly, before going off again. Her eyes put it together in the flashes: The Drinks-at-Dawn Express, the sign said. A booze cruise. The couple hurried toward it, glancing around. Marlow did, too.

  A woman in a wetsuit stood behind the counter. She looked alert and pleasant, as if it was the middle of the day and she was conducting normal business. She held her palm out. Marlow wasn’t sure how much cash she handed over. It was dark, whi
ch meant the woman couldn’t count it, either. She slipped it somewhere out of sight, beneath the splintering ledge she leaned against. “Meet on the beach at Dudley Avenue,” she said. “Two blocks that way. Wait until it’s almost light.”

  Marlow killed an hour with her back against the rear wall of the stand, dozing and watching seagulls collect dropped pizza crusts. When the sky turned a thin, easy gray, she stood up and went to the beach.

  The boat, moored several yards into the waves, looked like a life-size version of a toy: pale blue and white, plasticky, with a skull-and-crossbones flag hanging flaccid above the cabin and a whiskered pirate, eye patch and all, painted on the side. “Arrr You Ready?” the pirate asked in a sloppily drawn thought bubble.

  Marlow took her shoes off and hurried down to where a small group had gathered around the woman in the wetsuit. The woman was gesturing expansively at the boat and the life jacket in her hand and not actually talking about either of them. She was telling them, instead, how they would cross. The Drinks-at-Dawn Express would take them straight out to a sandbar. A boat bringing supplies to Atlantis from a British shipping barge would pass by precisely twenty minutes after they dropped anchor at the sandbar. “We’ll get on the boat,” she said. “Quickly. It’ll continue on to Atlantis and dock there, near a restaurant that overlooks the marina. I’ll lead you into the basement of the restaurant, where you’ll change into standard waitstaff uniforms. The owners of the restaurant, they used to live in Connecticut. Never got over missing their parents, their brothers and sisters. They’ve been helping us for years.” She looked around the group. “After that, you’re on your own.”

  A Jeep rumbled their way in the sand, its driver uniformed and bleary-eyed. VENTNOR BEACH BORDER PATROL, the lettering on the door said. Sighting it, the woman swiveled her hips and whooped. “Now, who’s ready to get faced?” she shrieked. “Sorry about that,” she mumbled when the vehicle had passed. “Last thing: the fine print. I assume you all know this if you’re here, but I have to say it anyway. The US State Department forbids travel to or from the territory now called Atlantis, formerly known as Atlantic City, New Jersey. You are aware that you’re here to do something illegal. You are about to cross into a foreign country with which America has no diplomatic relations. If you’re caught over here, you’ll go to jail. If you’re caught over there, you’ll never get back home.” She flicked her head over her shoulder at the wall, a few hundred yards down the beach. “Look how far out it goes,” she said, and Marlow did, following the slab as far as she could see into the water. “And yet,” the woman said. She smiled at them, and Marlow saw that she had a gold tooth, like the pirate on the boat. “And yet,” the woman repeated. “We can still get around it, can’t we? That’s the problem with a wall. It has to end somewhere.”