Follow Me

by Kathleen Barber

  I tried to give her a sympathetic look but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Leanne said to ring the bell for Unit 1 when I arrived,” she told me, then set her jaw and marched up the front stairs, platform sandals heralding her arrival. She depressed the buzzer and then looked back at me, offering a brilliant, obviously fake smile.

  Her smile dropped when the door swung open to reveal a thin, wiry man in his twenties. He had greasy dark hair looped into a bun on top of his head and a tattoo of something with wings—an eagle? a dragon?—spreading out from beneath his wifebeater, and he clutched a canned energy drink in one hand with jagged, dirty nails.

  “Sorry,” Audrey said, obviously taken aback. “I must have pushed the wrong buzzer. I’m looking for Leanne Lo—”

  “Grandma!” he hollered over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Audrey, running his jumpy, mud-colored eyes over her body. “You must be the new tenant.”

  His feral stare sent a shiver down my spine, but Audrey remained as composed as ever.

  “Good morning!” a singsong voice called as a small, smiling woman with a creased face and vibrant maroon hair appeared behind him. “You must be Audrey. Let me grab the keys and we’ll go down to the unit. This is my grandson, Ryan. He lives on the first floor here.”

  As Leanne bustled away, Ryan looked at Audrey and curled his mouth into a smile, revealing small, yellowed teeth. “Hello, neighbor.”

  This is why you don’t rent apartments over the internet, I thought uneasily.

  “Tell your grandmother I’ll be waiting downstairs,” Audrey said brusquely. She pivoted and hopped down the stairs, ponytail bouncing, mouthing oh my God to me.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I hissed to her. “I can look at your lease. I’m sure there’s an escape clause or—”

  “It’s fine,” she interrupted. “Honestly, you should have seen some of my neighbors in New York. They’d make this guy look like Mister Rogers.”

  “Here we are,” Leanne trilled, hobbling down the stairs.

  She unlocked the gate under the stairs and then the door, and Audrey and I followed her inside. I held my breath as I ducked through the hobbit-sized doorway, prepared to see one of the dark and dreary “English basements” that were so ubiquitous in the city. To my surprise and delight, however, we stepped into a decently sized, recently renovated apartment with an open-plan living area. The faux wooden floors gleamed, the updated appliances in the small kitchen shone, and the whole space smelled like lemon-scented cleaner. Sunlight streamed in, despite the living area’s only window being partially blocked by an overgrown bush and covered in iron bars.

  “What’s with the bars?” Audrey asked, pointing to the window.

  Leanne pulled open a closet door. “Did I mention this unit has a washer and dryer?”

  She then proceeded to hit the rest of the highlights—dishwasher, rain-style showerhead, ample closet space—before pressing two keys into Audrey’s palm (“The big one is for the gate, the small one is for the door,” she explained) and telling her to call if she needed anything. As Leanne gave us a final, cheery wave and pulled the door shut, I noticed there were three locks on the door.

  “You should ask her about those other keys,” I noted, pointing to the pair of keys Audrey held. “But otherwise this place is incredible.”

  “There’s no need to be hyperbolic,” she said, laughing drily. “But it’ll do until I find something a bit more upscale … or, you know, aboveground.”

  “You know you’re always welcome to stay with me.”

  “Thanks, hon.” She threaded one of her Pilates-toned arms through mine and tugged me toward the bedroom. “Come on, help me decide where to put the bed.”

  As we entered the bedroom, I noted how bright it was—even brighter than the front room. Row houses traditionally have all the windows on the fronts and backs of the buildings; the sides remain windowless because they share walls with neighboring row houses. But Audrey’s bedroom had two windows: one small, slit-like window at what was the back of the building, and one larger one to the side.

  I peered through her side window and frowned. “This bedroom looks out onto an alley.”

  Audrey shrugged. “Yeah, I saw it on the way in. But it’s a skinny little alley. It’s not like there are going to be cars driving up and down it all night or anything.”

  “It’s not cars I’m worried about,” I murmured, pressing my face against the window to better view the alley. “At least it looks like there’s a gate on either end. But you should definitely get a curtain ASA—”

  Bang!

  Audrey and I both jumped at the sound of her front door whipping open. We exchanged a look and returned to the living room, where we found her skeevy upstairs neighbor standing in the doorway, his fingertips drumming an irregular beat on the can he still clutched.

  “You ever hear of knocking?” Audrey demanded, hands on hips.

  He looked at her without blinking. “Grandma wanted me to tell you that the dumpster and recycling are behind the building.”

  “Thanks. Knock next time.”

  He lifted a bony shoulder in a noncommittal response.

  “By the way,” Audrey said, “can you tell your grandmother she only gave me one key for the front door?”

  “There’s only one key.”

  “But there are three locks,” she said, pointing.

  He barely concealed the amusement on his face as he repeated, “There’s only one key.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AUDREY

  I’d never lived alone. I moved from my parents’ suburban home to a shared dorm room at OSU to a crowded sorority house to New York City, where I couldn’t have afforded to live alone even if I had wanted to. I met my first New York roommates—a pair of eating-disordered PR assistants looking for a third for their soulless, cramped Upper East Side convertible—on Craigslist, and I cheerfully abandoned them and their empty refrigerator when Izzy announced she was moving to the city. The fact that we hung sheets to partition that first apartment—a tiny one-bedroom in Chinatown—didn’t faze me at all; there was something comforting in hearing someone else sleep. I would die before I admitted it, but I was a little sad when we upgraded to our two-bedroom in the East Village.

  As the movers stacked my boxes in my living room, I worried I had made a mistake and should have taken Cat up on her offer. I wasn’t cut out for living by myself. The silence alone would kill me. I thought of my Granny Wanda, who took to leaving the television on all day after my grandfather died. My mother chastised her for it, argued she was wasting electricity, but I understood. Granny Wanda had needed those soaps and game shows to keep her company; she needed their voices so she didn’t go completely mad.

  * * *

  AFTER THE MOVERS LEFT and I’d made an inaugural trip to Trader Joe’s to stock up on necessities like cheap wine, frozen Indian food, and animal crackers (my favorite snack food, something my ex-boyfriend Nick had mercilessly teased me about, often quipping, “Can you really call yourself a vegetarian if you eat animal crackers?”), I collapsed onto the only piece of furniture in the apartment—my bed—and, too tired to locate glassware, began swigging wine directly from the bottle.

  I scrolled through Instagram, double-tapping gorgeous nature shots, pictures of internet-famous dogs, and candids of my sister Maggie’s children with their chubby faces smeared with food, until I stumbled upon one of Izzy’s posts. It was a softly filtered, overhead shot of a meal for two: two plates of green salad topped with slivers of rare steak, two glasses of bloodred wine, and a partially sliced artisan baguette on a wooden cutting board. I recognized the dinner plates as the mismatched blue and green ones we’d found at the Brooklyn Flea. Izzy and I had picked them out together, but she’d insisted on paying for them, later claiming that made them hers when I tried to take half of them with me. I rolled my eyes and continued, seeing more celebrity pets, some gorgeous shoes I couldn’t afford, and then my friend Hannah’s attempt at an art
sy shot of what appeared to be a bourbon old-fashioned. I cringed with secondhand embarrassment. The poor thing would never learn. She had been running a small lifestyle blog called Hannah in the City for almost four years now, and she hadn’t gained any traction or improved her skills. Most of her images were just like this one: poorly framed, poorly lit, with poor attention to detail. The stained, crumpled napkin in the corner of this shot might have read as a style choice from another photographer, but from Hannah it just looked amateurish. I’d always deflected when Hannah asked to write a guest post for my old blog or suggested that she “take over” my Insta for a day.

  I couldn’t blame her for asking. She had almost no audience while I had over a million followers. But it had taken years of hard work to cultivate that following, and I wasn’t about to entrust it to someone as careless as Hannah. A woman has to zealously protect her brand.

  I hadn’t always been so meticulous about what I posted. Like every other basic white girl on the planet, I’d started a blog in the late 2000s with a free WordPress template and very little to say. I wrote terrible poetry and posted memes and thinly veiled gossip columns about my friends. (Lavender slept with yet another member of the worst fraternity on campus, I wrote, as though Jasmine wouldn’t be able to tell that her code name was “Lavender” or, for that matter, that she had been the one sleeping with the terrible guy.) Despite being a shameless scandalmonger, I never lost any friends over it—almost certainly because no one was reading that blog. I had, like, two unique visits per day. I was essentially shouting into a black hole.

  Then I moved to New York and started copying some of the more popular lifestyle bloggers. I splurged on a fancy camera and began posting “outfits of the day” and photos of my “meals” (in reality I only posted about 30 percent of what I actually ate, since the rest was popcorn and cheap wine). For more than a year, I diligently posted and received no engagement. I was discouraged, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. I stopped posting the things I thought I was supposed to post, and instead started posting the things I wanted to post: bizarre art installations, thrift store finds, my favorite hole-in-the-wall dim sum place.

  And then I met Elle Nguyen, a top-tier fashion blogger, at the art gallery where I worked. We bonded over a series of mixed-media sculptures and our disdain for a particular D-list blogger who posted nothing but sponsored content. Elle took me under her wing, and she gave me a primer on best blogging practices, introduced me to some of her contacts, and, most important, linked to my blog in one of her posts.

  My readership exploded overnight. No one was flying me to Milan, but I suddenly had offers of representation from management companies and an inbox full of emails from brand reps who wanted to work with me. I seriously considered quitting my job and devoting all my effort to becoming a major influencer—those girls could rake in some serious cash—but the idea of writing glorified ad copy drained my soul, and I couldn’t bring myself to give up a steady paycheck. I still believed I’d made the right decision. I’d stayed true to my vision and developed the engaged, loyal following that I craved—all without having to resort to shilling personal care products, like a not-small percentage of my blog friends.

  I took another pull from the bottle and snickered. Swilling wine atop a half-made bed was hardly aspirational, but that was the magic of the internet: my followers saw only what I wanted them to see.

  I was answering comments on my latest post when my buzzer rang, a wholly unpleasant sound that called to mind a dying cat. I made a mental note to ask Leanne if anything could be done about it and turned back to my phone. After all, I wasn’t expecting anyone. Someone must have hit my buzzer by mistake.

  Scraaaaape.

  I paused, tilting my head toward the sound. Was someone opening the gate outside my door? Fear shot through me as I remembered Cat’s warning about the alley, and I glanced uneasily at the curtainless window. I wrapped one hand firmly around the neck of the wine bottle and grasped my phone—unlocked and ready to dial 911—in the other, and then I eased off the bed. Just as I stepped into the living room, the front door swung open. I was already raising my makeshift weapon when I recognized the intruder as my upstairs neighbor and landlady’s grandson.

  “What the hell?” I demanded, letting my arm drop to my side. “Knock, remember?”

  He blinked bloodshot eyes at me and glanced around my apartment. “I heard noises down here.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, moving to block him from entering.

  He ignored me and strolled into the apartment, surveying my boxes and making his way to the kitchen.

  “Hey,” I said, roughly setting the wine bottle down for emphasis. “You can’t just come in here uninvited.”

  “I rang the bell,” he said as he reached one hand into the open tub of animal crackers on the counter.

  “And I didn’t answer because I didn’t want guests. Or unwelcome neighbors.” I stuck out my hand. “Now give me your key to this door and show yourself out, or I’m going to call your grandmother.”

  He smirked. “Hey, man, I’m just being neighborly. Checking on the new tenant and all. You’re the one who left your door unlocked.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Let me give you some free advice,” he said, popping an animal cracker into his mouth. “That door and gate don’t lock automatically.”

  Could that be true? I had never lived somewhere where doors didn’t lock behind me; it hadn’t occurred to me to manually secure them.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, his eyes gleaming with cruel amusement. He put another animal cracker in his mouth and meandered toward the door. In the doorway, he turned around and gave me a toothy grin caked with partially chewed cracker. “Have a good night, neighbor.”

  I shuddered. Creep. Determined not to show him how rattled I was, I made my face a stony mask and followed him out the front door. I yanked the iron gate firmly shut behind him, locked it, and gave it a good rattle to ensure it was secure.

  “There you go,” he said with a condescending sneer.

  I flipped him my middle finger and stepped back into my apartment. He was still watching me as I slammed the front door. My hands shook slightly as I twisted the lock until I heard its angry, satisfying click.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CAT

  After the unpleasantness that summer at Camp Blackwood, my parents sent me to a doctor who diagnosed me with social anxiety disorder. I resented the diagnosis at the time (there was nothing wrong with me), but as the panic I sometimes felt around my peers began to diminish with treatment, I was forced to admit the doctor might have been right. Eventually, I realized that, while my anxiety might’ve been more extreme than most people’s, it wasn’t unusual to feel unsettled at times. Lots of people feel tension around social interactions, and everyone gets nervous occasionally. Even people like Audrey, who hid her fears behind false bravado and a biting sense of humor, experienced anxiety sometimes.

  If you’d just met Audrey, you’d think that she was unflappable. It wasn’t until I shared a room with her in the sorority house that I realized her carefree persona was just that: a persona. I started to recognize her tells, like the way her cheek sucked slightly inward when she chewed on it and how her true emotions would show briefly on her face before being remolded into a smile. I was loath to admit it, even to myself, but I found comfort in knowing that even someone like Audrey wasn’t perfect. She was a real person just like me under all that flash and charisma.

  You had to know her to see the cracks in her veneer. For example, when she realized she’d rented an English basement, concern flickered through her blue-green eyes for a fraction of a second. She blinked it away so quickly that most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but I did. That was part of being a best friend.

  I didn’t need that minute slip to know she was anxious, though. Sometime around three that morning, I’d been walking to the bathroom when I heard a voice coming from the guest room.
I eased open the door and peered inside. There was Audrey, stretched out on the bed with eyes closed and mouth moving. I strained to hear what she was saying but it sounded like nothing more than gibberish. I was turning to leave when she clearly said, “I’m scared.”

  I knew little about somniloquy, my entire experience limited to the times Audrey talked in her sleep during college. Her nighttime utterances were usually indiscernible, but often included some variation of the phrase I’m scared. At first, I thought Audrey was having nightmares, but I later realized they corresponded with a particularly stressful time: midterms, finals, the weeks leading up to graduation. That was the only clue that Audrey was nervous; she hid her anxieties well. I would have sold my soul for a poker face half as good as hers.

  I wished that for once she could allow herself to be a bit vulnerable and admit that she was scared. She didn’t have to stay in that basement apartment with its window opening onto an alley and its sketchy upstairs neighbor. She could move into my guest room instead. I could help her. Back in college, Audrey had offered me a hand, had given me hope when no one else did. Her friendship saved me. She had guided me through a tough transition, and I was determined to repay the favor in kind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HIM

  Like all of Audrey’s followers, I knew she moved to Washington, DC. I’d seen the announcement during one of her Instagram Lives. I had been so captivated by her pale, freckled shoulders, visible from underneath a white, spaghetti-strap dress, and the way that her beautiful red-gold hair curled around them, that I almost missed what she said. For days, she had been teasing “exciting news” and I’d guessed she had a trip planned—the last two times she’d done a Live reveal of “exciting news,” it had been for trips to London and Miami. So when her glossy lips revealed that she was moving here, my brain short-circuited. I rewatched the Live twenty times or more, my pulse thundering more loudly and powerfully each time, until I realized that it was true: Audrey would soon be here.