by Eva Robinson
Swallowing hard, she opened Twitter and felt like throwing up all over again. She’d been tagged thousands of times—most of it about how she’d had a nervous breakdown, and plenty about how disgusting she looked. She was attention-seeking, desperate.
She could hardly breathe.
One thing at a time.
Maybe she finally had Marc’s attention, but this wasn’t how she’d meant to do it.
She had two options now. The most obvious was to delete it immediately. The second option was to double down, to explain that it was an artistic, feminist statement.
She closed her eyes. Who did she trust enough to help her figure this out?
She dropped the phone, turning back to the sink, sickness overtaking her. She threw up, watery vomit. Then she grabbed a paper towel to dry off her mouth. She pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it to rinse out her mouth.
She’d start with Heather. But when she opened the text messages, the capital letters made her stomach clench.
CALL ME NOW!!!
Heather was going to yell at her. Her parents were going to cut her out of the will.
She chewed the end of her thumb. She’d just ruined her own life, hadn’t she?
She needed someone levelheaded. Who did she trust most of all? Marc, first and foremost.
Except she felt too embarrassed to speak to him now.
She knew him so well that she could almost envision what he would say. He’d soothe her, and she wanted desperately to hear his soothing voice. He’d tell her to delete it, but he’d remind her that once it’s online, it’s there forever. He’d say she should be honest about making a mistake, that everyone makes mistakes. He would tell her to come clean.
Just like he wanted her to come clean about everything. A confession. And that was one of the things she loved about him, his relentless honesty.
But something about that strategy wasn’t quite her.
Hannah, then. Another dark swarm of shame clouded Rowan’s mind. Something had happened with Hannah last night, too. They’d fought over Daniel, to start, and then it got a bit fuzzy. She remembered grabbing Hannah’s arm…
Rowan wondered what the hell was wrong with her. The coke use was one problem, she knew, but it made her feel so alive. When she’d written the caption, she had probably been certain it was genius.
Right now, Rowan felt like a thousand tons of rocks were pressing on her chest, and they’d never let up.
She picked up her phone and called Hannah. She only remembered that Hannah had looked very beautiful, and that it had excited her and made her jealous at the same time.
She actually winced as the phone started ringing, and her stomach plummeted when Hannah picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hannah.” Rowan felt like she might drown in shame. Where to even begin, when she didn’t remember last night? “Well, I wanted to get in touch because last night is hazy. I was hammered, basically. And… maybe a teensy bit high?”
“A teensy bit?”
“A lot. Did we have an argument?”
“Well, not really. I got mad at you for sitting on Daniel’s lap after he’d asked me on a date, but in the cold light of day, that seems like a dumb thing to get mad about.”
“He asked you on a date? That’s fantastic.”
“Yes. He actually got in touch already. He’s going to pick me up in Porter Square this week, and then we’re going to drive out to Concord.”
“This is amazing. I knew you two would hit off. I have a sixth sense for these things.”
A long, awkward silence followed, during which Rowan surmised that maybe Hannah had seen her Instagram and didn’t know what to say about it.
“I remember grabbing your arm,” Rowan blurted. “But not what happened after.”
“Oh, well. You tried to kiss me.”
“Oh. Is that it? I thought it was something embarrassing.”
“Yes, and I almost fell off the balcony. But I didn’t,” said Hannah. “Most exciting thing that’s happened to me in years. Now I’m just back to killing ants in my house. I’m the death queen of the ant world. The Somerville insect goddess. And Luke has his date tonight.”
“Forget Luke. Daniel is obviously better. So it appears that when I came home, I took a naked photo and uploaded it, and my snatch is all over the internet with an apple on it. And to make it worse, I didn’t even use a good fill light.”
Hannah burst out laughing. “I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m glad you brought it up.”
Pure humiliation crawled over Rowan’s skin. “What do I do? Hannah, how do I handle this? I’ve just killed my whole career, haven’t I? I had a very carefully cultivated brand of artistic photos. And how do I manage the whole teen center thing after this?”
“You haven’t killed your career.”
“Should I just delete it and pretend it never happened? I want to jump into the river—” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, poor choice of words.”
“Delete it, yes. But the way you just described it to me—the way you said, ‘I didn’t even use a good fill light’—I don’t know; it was funny. I think you should make a joke of it. Nearly everyone has done stupid things when they were drunk and regretted it. It might be relatable. Just own it. Admit you got drunk and made a terrible decision, but show you have a sense of humor about it.”
And that was the missing ingredient, the thing even Marc wouldn’t have come up with. “Hannah, you are a genius. You’re right: I never claimed to be a saint. Okay, before I post anything new, can you look over the caption?”
“Of course I can.”
“I’m terrible at grammar. Well, reading and writing in general.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it takes me ages to write anything normally. I couldn’t read until I was in the fourth grade. Despite where I went to college, I’m afraid I’m not really brilliant.”
“Rowan. Having trouble reading or spelling doesn’t mean you’re not smart. Trust me. I evaluate learning disabilities for a living. It’s not like speaking. Humans didn’t evolve to read or write. It’s a technological skill that’s relatively new in human history, and it doesn’t reflect your ability to reason logically.”
“Oh, good. I love that. I could use more of your clear thinking in my life.”
“Hmm. I’m not sure I’m clearheaded. I was awake all night thinking about bugs and the sheets being wrong.”
“What?”
“Nora was at Luke’s house, and I wasn’t sure he’d put the sheets on right in her crib. If they’re not in right, she could get her head stuck and suffocate.”
“What? You can die from sheets being on incorrectly?”
“Well, I don’t know. But there are warning signs on everything. Put the sheets on wrong, and your child dies. Buy pajamas that are too loose, and she’ll catch fire and burn to death. There are warnings everywhere.”
Being a parent was clearly an endless nightmare. “No wonder you can’t sleep.”
“Nora’s still at Luke’s house, but I’ve been up since four a.m. anyway. She turned out to be fine, by the way.”
Rowan wasn’t sure what to say about the news that the child had survived the night after several dangerous hours spent with a crib sheet. “Oh, well, that’s good. But a four-a.m. wake-up is brutal. I was apparently making art at that time. Oh, and there’s something else weird that happened. I just had a cop show up here for the interview about Arabella.”
“What did he want to know?”
“He wanted to know if I was having an affair.”
“With Arabella?”
“No, me and Adam. We weren’t, by the way. He’s like the margarine sandwich of humans. But the cop said Arabella didn’t die of natural causes. And for some reason they think I have answers for them.”
Something stopped Rowan from telling her the rest—that the police had asked about Hannah specifically. It seemed best to keep that a secret.
And Rowan was used to secrets, wasn’t
she? Because so much of her life was a lie.
Twenty-Five
Sunlight washed over Michael as he sat on one of the colorful chairs in Harvard Yard. A coffee sat on the chair next to him, waiting for Ciara—three espresso shots.
He stirred his own tea—a deep tan, strong tea with milk. Sixteen swirls of the spoon before he popped the top on again, wincing a little as a drop spilled on his trousers.
He stared at the drop, thinking of what he’d read about Arabella—what her last hours would have been like before she’d slipped into a coma. The thallium would have affected her nervous system, her heart, her lungs. She would’ve been gasping, nauseated. Her legs would have been paralyzed, her hands numb. Drowning in terror.
Guilt tightened his chest, and he wondered if he should have done something differently when she’d come to see him.
He’d spent the night going through her recent coursework. It only confirmed his original impression of her, and now he was certain that she wasn’t psychotic. Her writing was coherent and logical, concise. Psychosis was easy to spot, and he had enough firsthand experience with its strange rhyming and associative language that he could recognize it right away. But her pace of production had slowed down in the past few months, and her colleagues said she’d grown disillusioned with academia. And in her pictures with Rowan, beautiful as she was, she just looked sad. Like she was trapped.
Possibly the result of being married to a complete tosser.
He pulled out his phone and brought up the photo again—the one of Rowan and Arabella together. In her older photos especially, Rowan seemed to have a charmed life. An actual fairytale. But the woman he’d met in her apartment seemed like a train wreck.
And since he’d found TOI.com, he’d been able to read every little transgression in detail.
There were the larger issues—a giveaway for her book release that may have been illegal, her drug habits, the bizarre nude photo that suggested a nervous breakdown.
Then there were the ridiculous complaints, like when she had incorrectly called her pasta rigatoni but it was actually ditalini.
The commenters worked each other into a frenzy, spurring each other on. They’d developed a sense of community as they watched her every move, picking it all apart. They noted when she gained weight, or when she lost it, and analyzed the meals she posted in her stories. She veered from being too fat to too thin. Dirtiness was a frequent accusation, and they seemed to have a particular revulsion for her feet.
If Rowan read these blogs, it might help to explain the nervous breakdown.
When he looked up, he saw Ciara crossing to him. Her pale skin looked rosy in the setting sun, her hair aflame. She’d been telling him earlier that the Puritans buried their dead facing the east, to face the second coming when it happened. But it was to the west that the real magic happened, where the sun set.
When she reached him, she smiled and snatched up the coffee cup before sitting down next to him.
“How did the interview go?” she asked.
“She wasn’t what I expected.”
“How so?”
“She’s an addict, I think. She was just waking up when I got there. Her apartment was in shambles. She’s using coke. I’d guess a lot of coke.”
“Did she tell you anything useful?”
“She told me she forgets things when she gets drunk. She doesn’t remember last night, which might explain the naked photo she posted, then deleted. She completely denies an affair with Adam. She looked genuinely shocked and offended that I’d suggest it, like he was beneath her. And his name never came up on the blogs.”
“The blogs?”
“Well, it might not mean anything, but she has a legion of… stalkers, sort of. She posts all day, oversharing in her stories, and they watch everything she does. They analyze her pictures, blowing them up to get every detail. They draw bright circles around the piles of clothes on her floor, saying it’s evidence that she’s falling apart, or how long it’s been since she tidied certain parts. They notice when she throws out plastic instead of recycling. They know…” He sipped his coffee, trying to figure out how to express this. “They know what every inch of her skin looks like. If she has any flaws. They know when she changes her clothes or when she’s worn a dress too often. It’s disturbing.”
Ciara’s nose wrinkled. “That sounds deeply unhealthy. Well, we don’t have a pillory anymore, do we? In the old days, she’d be tied to the back of a cart and whipped through the streets as a fornicatrix. We’re supposed to be civilized now, but that impulse doesn’t go away. We need to throw rotten vegetables at someone, and that someone will most likely be glamorous, so we all feel better.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Fornicatrix?”
When she smiled at him, her green eyes lit up. “It was a crime in the old days. But people are still twitching their curtains, obsessing over each other’s little sins. So did any of these commenters mention Arabella?”
“Yes, things like ‘Now that was someone who actually had talent. The wrong person died’ and ‘She was actually much prettier than Rowan.’ There are a few there who are deeply obsessive. In fact, if Rowan turned up dead instead of Arabella, that would be where we’d start looking. It almost made me wonder…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone was jealous of the only person to show up in Rowan’s photos? Maybe one of her stalkers stole the computer, and is waiting for a big reveal.”
“It’s possible. But guess what? I have something more concrete. I got the Find My Mac password from a drawer in her office and was able to track where her Mac had been used.”
“Did someone turn it on after it was stolen?”
She nodded. “Just once. Not in Rowan’s neighborhood, or Adam’s. It was just enough time to look through whatever was on her computer and maybe delete it.”
“Where was it? And when?”
“Somerville. A neighborhood in Porter Square. Friday, May the first, at around six p.m.”
“Anything more specific?”
“It’s narrowed down to one block, but I don’t know beyond that. And at this point, I have no idea who it was in Somerville.”
Twenty-Six
In her little Somerville apartment on the third floor, Hannah was staring at her phone, feeling as if she’d been thrust into a glamorous new life. It had only been two weeks since Stella’s last party, and already Hannah was dressed up for the next one. Apparently there was some good news about the teen center, and they planned to celebrate.
In the past two weeks, she’d been on three dates with Daniel. They’d gone to Walden Pond, just as they’d planned. It had been a glorious day of swimming, walking through the woods, and eating at a small café in Concord. Then they’d spent an evening at the arboretum in Jamaica Plain, picnicking in the sunset.
Last night, Daniel had taken her out for an evening sail in the harbor, and they’d stayed up till midnight talking on one of the harbor islands. It turned out they had plenty in common. They’d both lost their dads to cancer. Both of them wanted to someday live on a canal. And both were fascinated by the 1920s.
Hannah picked up her phone, delighted to find that her Instagram following was growing, and fast. But her mood quickly darkened. Because along with Rowan’s followers came their comments.
I hope you know Rowan is just using you.
That comment was posted beneath an innocuous review of a young adult book about an academy for fairies.
At least they weren’t as brutal as the ones left on Rowan’s own page. Especially since she’d posted the unflattering nude.
I’m just impressed she put down the coke long enough to snap a photo of her minge. Her parents must be so proud.
Anyone else think Rowan looks like a bloated weasel sometimes? LOL
She totally ripped off her style from other influencers, never credited. She straight up SUCKS.
Wow, great role model for high school kids. Get trashed and strip for the cameras! Whoe
ver she’s trying to thirst trap here must be disgusted. It’s kind of sad at this point.
The charity crap is so transparent. As if she cares about inequality. Her entire feed promotes privilege. SHE DOES NOT CARE.
Do you actually think people are interested in your empty, shallow life?
Hannah clenched her teeth, a surge of anger rising in her. But they were interested, because they were always watching. And what kind of pleasure did they get out of being so mean? Imagine putting that much effort into making someone feel terrible.
On the last brutal comment she’d read, she started typing out a reply. You obviously DO care, since you’re all watching every single thing she does. Then, for extra punch, she added, Loser.
Her thumb hovered over the Post button.
But no, this was a bad idea. She’d get drawn into the drama.
She flicked off her phone, and only at that point did she notice the timer beeping.
“Make a noise!” Nora shouted from the floor. “Hear a noise.”
Nora had somehow found a corkscrew, which she’d opened up and was about to jab into her leg.
“No, Nora!” Hannah lunged, snatching it out of Nora’s chubby hand. No wonder the girl had been quiet—she’d been doing something dangerous while Hannah was immersed in her phone.
Nora stared at Hannah, alarmed. “Not touch, Nora. Not for baby.”
“That’s right. Not for little kids.”
Hannah turned, grabbing a dishcloth and opening the oven. The smell made her mouth water, and she grabbed a knife from the countertop to slide it into the brownies. They seemed perfectly done.
Breathing in the scent of chocolate, she dropped the brownies onto the stovetop, frowning at the mess around her. She’d been so intent on Rowan’s comments, and texts from Daniel, that she’d forgotten to clean anything up. The remnants of Nora’s dinner lay all over the countertop—bits of bread, an open jar of peanut butter.