Follow Me

by Kathleen Barber

  I was wrong.

  I didn’t understand how my body’s metamorphosis could fail to translate into increased social standing until I met Audrey. Objectively, she was no great beauty. She was unusually short, with red hair, freckles, and a sharp chin; there was something foxlike in her appearance. She had one bicuspid that turned inward and a crooked smile to conceal it, and she was quick to develop dark, bruise-like circles under her eyes. If you were to score us on discrete physical attributes, I might rate more highly than Audrey.

  And yet she captivated people. Audrey turned every head in every room she ever entered, and people fell all over themselves to be in her presence. I studied her, trying to understand what made her so utterly bewitching. After weeks of careful observation, I finally concluded it was indefinable. Audrey sparkled and that was all there was to it.

  Knowing I would never possess even a fraction of Audrey’s innate charm was somehow freeing, allowing me to stop trying to emulate her and to instead focus my energy on things that were in my control, like my education and my career. I was proud of what I’d accomplished, and greatly enjoyed updating my LinkedIn page with new achievements: big cases on which I’d worked, articles I’d written for legal journals. I might not ever hold a roomful of people in my thrall like Audrey could, but I would impress the right audience.

  Still, I wanted more. I longed to be the delicate, romantic heroine setting my prince’s heart aflutter. So when Audrey suggested doing my hair and makeup before trivia, I agreed with only the briefest hesitation. I left work at five o’clock for the first time in my professional life, leaving my office light on and sneaking into the elevator when no one was looking, and was waiting with a stomach full of nerves when Audrey arrived at my apartment thirty minutes later. It was silly to expect she could transfer some of her je ne sais quoi to me through a swipe of mascara, and yet I was hopeful.

  She greeted me with a frown. “That’s not what you’re planning on wearing, is it?”

  I glanced down at the gray J.Crew sheath I’d worn to work, trying to see it through Audrey’s eyes. It had always been one of my favorite dresses, an understated, easy piece with a matching suit jacket, but now I realized how boring it was.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  Her light eyes twinkled as she laughed. “Liar. But don’t worry. I’m here to help.”

  From her bag, Audrey produced a black T-shirt with a plunging neckline.

  “I can’t wear this,” I told her. “There’s no way I can pull it off.”

  “You absolutely can.”

  “No, Audrey—”

  “It’ll look great on you,” she interrupted. “Come on, Kitty-Cat. Trust me.”

  I eyed the shirt nervously, imagining my thin, pale chest exposed by the expansive V-neck. How would that be appealing to Connor?

  “You trust me, don’t you?” she pressed.

  I wanted to trust Audrey. I wanted to believe she could work a miracle.

  “Of course,” I finally said. “I trust you.”

  * * *

  AUDREY SET UP her laptop on my bathroom counter and began searching for YouTube videos on eyebrow shaping. Shame burned in my chest as she clicked through video after video, a pair of neon-pink tweezers in her hand.

  “Sorry about these masculine brows,” I murmured, running my fingers over them self-consciously.

  “Are you kidding? You have amazing brows.”

  I searched her face for signs of sarcasm, but saw none.

  “I would kill for strong brows like yours. That’s why I’m looking up these videos—I want to make sure I’m doing you justice. I only have these little scraggly things to work with.”

  I studied Audrey’s eyebrows, realizing with surprise that they weren’t the perfect, tawny arches they appeared to be. They were sparser than I thought, filled in with pencil and powder.

  “Your eyebrows look great,” I said honestly.

  “It’s all smoke and mirrors,” she said, taking hold of my face in one hand. “Now don’t move.”

  * * *

  AS AUDREY SMOOTHED creamy foundation over my skin, I couldn’t help but think of Emily Snow daubing Cover Girl on my face in our cabin. Look at you, she’d chirped. Just like a model.

  I shuddered.

  “Hold still,” Audrey said. “Unless you want makeup in your eye. Then you do you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Suck in your cheeks,” she ordered, picking up a peachy-pink blush and a fluffy brush.

  I complied, contorting my face and closing my eyes as Audrey dusted me with color. Next came contouring powder, multiple eye shadows, eyeliner, false eyelashes, mascara, brow pencil, brow gel, highlighter, and lip gloss, after which she turned to my hair. She smoothed a glossy serum through my mane and then twisted a few face-framing pieces with a curling wand.

  She took a step back and studied me for a moment before breaking into a huge smile. “Take a look! What do you think?”

  With trepidation, I rose and turned to the bathroom mirror. I gasped. Audrey had used so many products I’d expected to look like a pageant contestant, but I didn’t. I looked like myself, only better, as if I were lit from within.

  “You’re a magician,” I said, astonished at the subtle changes to my face.

  “I know, right?” she said, raising her phone and pointing it at me.

  Instinctively, I twisted away and shielded my face. “What are you doing?”

  “Posting my handiwork on Insta,” she said as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “Come on, move your hand.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Really?” she asked, sounding annoyed. “You’re not seriously still that phobic about social media, are you?”

  It was the same tone of voice she’d used the first time I stopped her from posting my image on social media. All throughout college, I’d let her paper the internet with pictures of me, pictures in which I looked less than perfect while she was smiling flirtatiously. But then, during Jasmine’s bachelorette party, I’d gotten a notification that Audrey had tagged me on Facebook. I’d looked at the photo and choked on my pink champagne.

  “Take that down!” I had demanded. “I’m interviewing with law firms next month. I can’t have a picture of me wearing a penis necklace on the internet.”

  “Relax, Kitty-Cat. It’s obviously a bachelorette party. They’re not going to think you’ll, like, show up in court wearing it or something.”

  “Law firms are conservative,” I’d insisted, ripping off the flimsy necklace as my panic grew. “I need you to take it down. Now.”

  Audrey had made a show of rolling her eyes, but she complied. After that, I stripped my Facebook profile and locked it down. I knew Audrey didn’t mean any harm; she just didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want that picture online, just as I didn’t understand her seemingly pathological need to share every detail of her existence. How could I explain to someone like Audrey that social media reminded me of a high school cafeteria, a place where you and your vulnerabilities were on full display for the jackals who were your compatriots? I couldn’t release my hopeful, made-up face for their consumption. I couldn’t put myself through that again.

  “You’re being silly,” she said, aiming the phone at me once more.

  “Don’t!” I shouted, the alarm in my voice surprising us both.

  She lowered the phone. “What’s going on?”

  I drew a shaky breath as I gathered myself. “I … I don’t want people to make fun of me.”

  “What?” she asked, looking genuinely puzzled. “Cat, no one’s going to make fun of you. You’re a total babe.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t get it. How could you? Everyone loves you.”

  “Everyone loves me?” she echoed in disbelief. “That’s a joke, right? Have you ever read the comments on my Insta posts? Did you know there’s an entire thread on Reddit devoted to what a self-obsessed airhead I am? Here, let me pull that up for you.”

  “Don’t,” I said,
putting out a hand to stop her from typing on her phone. “I get it. But, Audrey … that’s different. So a handful of people on the internet are giving you a hard time. You still have, what, thousands of followers—”

  “A million,” she corrected me.

  “Right. Exactly. You still have a million followers hanging on to your every word. And that’s just online. Wherever you go, people love you. That’s not how it is for me.” I took a deep breath and turned my eyes to the ceiling, trying to stop the tears from ruining my flawless makeup. “It’s never been that way for me.”

  “Cat, you have plenty of friends. I mean, we’re going to trivia to see a bunch of them right now.”

  I leveled my face at her. “I have a few friends because I work hard at it. Social graces don’t come easy to me. They never have. You know that.”

  “Cat—”

  “Stop pretending otherwise, Audrey. It’s disingenuous.” I put my thumb in my mouth and bit down hard, the pain drowning out the aching memories. “Don’t you remember when we met?”

  “Sure. What about it?”

  “You didn’t think … ?” I tasted blood suddenly and removed my thumb from my mouth, tucking it inside my fist. “Come on, Audrey. Why did you decide to be friends with me?”

  “Cat …”

  “Tell me. You and I both know how awkward I was. Why did you decide to be friends with me? No one else did.”

  Audrey’s aqua-blue eyes flashed briefly, a dare, and then she looked away. “Just remember you asked for this, okay?”

  I nodded and steeled myself for the worst.

  “I went to high school with this girl named Tara. She was … well, she was weird. She never washed her hair and she shopped at Goodwill, but not in a cool way, you know what I mean? She was a punch line for our whole class.” Audrey paused and studied her nails, frowning at a chip in the gold polish. “Senior year, my biology teacher, this vindictive troll of a woman who’d always had it out for me, I swear to God, assigned Tara to be my lab partner. And … I mean, I just lost it. Trust me, I know how it sounds now, but at the time I really couldn’t imagine anything worse. What if we, you know, had to study together outside of class? What if people saw us? What if they thought we were friends? God, it would have ruined my social life. Or, I mean, I thought it would have. I was being dramatic, I know, but I was seventeen years old, so cut me some slack.” She glanced quickly at me, ready to defend herself, but I said nothing. She sighed and continued. “Anyway, Tara was nothing but nice to me, and I … I just was mean. Like, I barely spoke to her, would only answer direct questions. Mostly, I just rolled my eyes at her and called her stupid. And … um, well, I started spreading these rumors. I told everyone that her parents were cousins and that was why she was so stupid.”

  My heart clenched. I knew what it felt like to be the Tara of the story. I knew the desperation, the feeling that you would do anything—anything—to escape the torment.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just … well, anyway, Tara took an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills.” Audrey noted my shocked expression and quickly added, “She’s fine. I saw her on Facebook a couple of months ago, and she’s an executive with some tech company out in California. She’s doing well for herself. But at the time, I felt awful.”

  “You should have,” I said, still aghast.

  “I know. Trust me, I know. And so I decided to be different. I wasn’t going to be that sort of mean girl anymore.”

  Suddenly, I remembered why Audrey was telling this story, and sour saliva filled my mouth.

  “Wait a second. So what you’re telling me is that you’re friends with me as a way to atone for bullying some poor girl into attempting suicide?”

  “Jesus, Cat. No. That’s not what I meant. I just meant that the thing with Tara made me more aware of other people’s feelings. I started to pay more attention to those in the room who might need a friend.” She looked at me baldly. “And you, Kitty-Cat, needed a friend.”

  “What about now?” I asked hesitantly. “Is that why we’re friends now? Because you think I need someone?”

  Audrey looped an arm around my shoulders and grinned. “Don’t be silly. You know why we’re friends. Besides, you have more people in this city who love you than I do.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HIM

  If you asked the regular commenters on the Overexposed forums, no worse place exists to meet a woman than in a bar. To an extent, I agreed: the floors are sticky with spilled drinks, the music drowns out any chance of meaningful conversation, and the air of desperation hangs heavy. But I disagreed with the party line that the only women you’ll meet in bars are promiscuous binge drinkers who use alcohol as a substitute for personality. I knew that wasn’t the truth. After all, Audrey frequented bars and she wasn’t promiscuous or a binge drinker. She was just social.

  Bars and parties had always been part of her life, for as long as I had been following her. Her college blog had been chronicles of one party after another, and when she lived in New York, her Instagram feed involved a regular rotation of artistic craft cocktails, mint sprigs sticking jauntily up from highball glasses, rocks glasses with enormous square ice cubes. The images were so impeccable that if they had been posted by anyone else, I would have sneered, imagining them selecting their drink to match a color scheme and micromanaging the bartender in order to obtain that perfectly coiled lemon peel garnish. I knew that wasn’t how Audrey operated, though. Beauty simply came to her. Like attracts like.

  Now that she lived in DC, however, the fashionable cocktails in her feed began giving way to Stories showing draft beers and house wines from trivia night. Those images might not have been as photogenic as the cocktails of the past, but they didn’t dim her sparkling persona one bit. She remained the brightest light in the room, the sun around which the rest of us orbited.

  I watched her standing at the bar, her small, bejeweled hands toying with the stem of her empty wineglass. I knew I shouldn’t stare, knew that it would be all over if she caught me, but I was powerless to drag my eyes away from her. Her skin, glistening faintly, looked as though it were covered in millions of tiny diamonds. She shook her head and her glorious mane rippled, shimmering like it was spliced through with spun gold. She was stunning, a physical punch in the gut. It took all the strength I had to not seize her around her dainty waist and bend her sylph-like body backward as passion overtook us both.

  I swallowed hard and pressed my hands firmly against my sides to prevent them from reaching for her.

  Soon, I promised myself. Soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AUDREY

  I tried to hide my aggravation as I stood up from the booth. I couldn’t sit there and watch Cat stare down at the scratched tabletop all night and offer meek, monosyllabic answers whenever Connor spoke directly to her. That wasn’t why I’d painstakingly glued individual false lashes to her eyes.

  “Where are you going?” Cat asked, panic threading her voice.

  “To the jukebox,” I said faux breezily. “If I hear ‘Tiny Dancer’ one more time, I’m going to murder someone.”

  I stalked away, silently adding that the someone I would be murdering would be Cat if she couldn’t get her shit together. Honestly, sometimes she had the personality of a baked potato.

  Be nice, I admonished myself. I didn’t know why I expected anything different. Cat had never been good at flirting, not even at college parties that were little more than Bacchanalian mating rituals set to pop music.

  As I stood at the jukebox, considering the Tom Petty offerings, a large hand clamped down on my shoulder. I whirled around to find Connor grinning broadly at me. I glanced behind him in the direction of the booth.

  “Where’s Cat?”

  “She had to go to the restroom.”

  Of course she did. It was literally painful not to roll my eyes at Cat’s cowardice.

  “Here, let’s get some Journey in there,” Connor said, leaning around me to touch th
e screen. “ ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ is my karaoke jam of choice.”

  Despite myself, I groaned. “Oh, man, we have to find you some new material.”

  “What’s wrong with ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’?” He sang the first couple of lines for my benefit, as though I had mistaken it for another song.

  “Nothing. It’s just everyone’s karaoke song. I mean, be a little more basic, Connor.”

  “Ouch, that hurts,” he said teasingly. “But I’ll let it slide. You know, even though you wound me with that sharp tongue of yours, I’m glad you came tonight.”

  “Yeah, without me, your team wouldn’t have gotten that answer about Kanye,” I joked. “You’re desperate for someone up on Kardashian-adjacent trivia.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” he said, his voice going husky and his eyelids lowering.

  Too late, I realized he intended to kiss me.

  “Connor, no,” I said, pushing him away.

  “Wait, Audrey, I—”

  “I’m going back to the table,” I said firmly, stepping around him. “Cat’s waiting.”

  “Audrey,” Connor started, putting his hand on my arm. I shook him off and walked briskly to the booth, where Cat sat alone.

  “How was the jukebox?” she asked.

  I glanced uneasily at Connor, who smiled guilelessly. I knew I had to tell Cat that Connor made a pass at me. She was my friend—right then, she was my best friend—and she deserved to know that the man she was interested in was pressing himself against other women in bars.

  But how could I tell her that after she’d laid bare her insecurities? After everything she’d said about her low self-esteem and her mistaken belief that everyone loved me, how could I tell her that Connor had tried to kiss me?

  For her protection, I swallowed my bitter discontent and said, “Great. The music selection should improve shortly.”