Followers Page 10

  But Marlow remembered this much about the week of her egg reaping: her mother didn’t want her father to know that she wouldn’t be home to take care of Marlow. So Floss asked their driver, Amadou, to supervise, and pitched in by waking her daughter constantly with guilty messages. How are you, honey? Do you have enough grape Popsicles? I told Amadou to be sure he got them. Were you surprised when you saw the grape Popsicles? I bet you thought I forgot! I would never forget my girl’s grape Popsicles. I said Amadou this is very important! Marlow had not answered. This was the essence of Floss: not mother of the year, but mother once a year, working remotely, and wanting the same medal.

  Finally, when Marlow cried from the way her insides rang with pain, Amadou had closed his eyes and made a call on his device, stroking her hair silently the whole time. Marlow’s father had come immediately with an overnight bag, had told Amadou to take the next few days off, that Floss, he promised, would never be the wiser. He gave Marlow a little bell to ring if she needed him when he was downstairs. He spent her long naps milling around the place he used to live, running his fingers over splits in the walls and water spots in the ceiling. He summoned other men to come fix things.

  “Dad, what should I do?” Marlow whispered now as she pulled the straw away. She looked at him, marveling, as she often did, at his dark, shining eyes, at his jaw upholstered in skin too young for him, too smooth and vital-looking for someone wilting down to nothing. How she would miss the sight of his face when he was finally done disappearing.

  Her father blinked back without answering, and suddenly something came to her. This face she loved—it could outlive them both. She could code it right into her child, bypassing her own looks, which were such diluted versions of her parents’, people sometimes looked at her with pity before they could stop themselves. Marlow’s parents waved it away: they swore her blue eyes were shaped like her father’s brown ones, that Floss’s hair had been just like Marlow’s—untamed and ashy—at her age. Marlow had never thought much of it. She knew that, back in the twentieth century, Americans would list the things in their bloodstreams proudly—I’m a quarter Irish, half-Ugandan, part French—but people never did that anymore. The fractions had gotten too complicated by the time Marlow was born, and the children who came after her had even more heritage to keep track of: noses and brows and chins were less predictable, less indicative of any one thing. Still, Marlow wondered on occasion where her parents’ features were hiding. Sometimes she played a game in front of mirrors, jerking her head up before her face could prepare itself, hoping to catch a glimpse of her mother or her father. It never worked. When her dad was gone, there would be nothing in her reflection to remind her of him.

  Maybe, she thought suddenly, with a pang of guilt, she could be a bit like Ellis, and see potential in this child. An opportunity to save her father’s face—to start it over, really. She would get to see it younger than she had the first time. If she lived long enough, she might even see it again the way she did in her favorite memory of theirs. She pictured it now: the day he taught her how to ride a bike, jogging alongside her unicorn two-wheeler with the end of a rope in his hand. The other end was tied around Marlow’s waist—a compromise. She wanted him not to hold her; he couldn’t let go just yet. “Sweetheart, look where you’re going,” he kept saying. “Look straight ahead.” But she felt better looking at his face, at his hair flopping wildly as he trailed her. She could still see it now, the sweat at his temples, the crinkles in his eyes as he laughed with her, at her.

  How old was her father in this memory? She asked her device to do the math, and the solution gave her an existential jolt: Twenty-eight. Seven years younger than she was now.

  “Oh, Anna,” her father said suddenly, weakly, his voice pushing through the phlegm of many speechless hours. “You’re all right.”

  Marlow didn’t know who Anna was, but she’d come to feel familiar with her. Her father called her by the name roughly a third of the time. The rest of the time, he didn’t call her anything. Marlow didn’t correct him, now—he sounded so relieved. She just nodded, retucked his blanket, and focused on looking that way: all right.

  * * *

  She and Ellis struck a deal: the boy he wanted, with her father’s face. They messaged the Liberty center, and someone replied that the designers would start the mock-up right away.

  The last days before her sowing passed in a heady blur. Floss got into a fight with the caterer that ended in brief, light shoving. Bridget threw a fit regarding the carbon implications of the cake Floss had ordered from the other side of the country. Marlow hung her yellow dress at her mother’s house, where she wouldn’t have to look at it. She attended her hen party, a spa day planned by Jacqueline. The women were all subdued because hen parties were always dry; the mother-to-be had to abstain, so everyone else did, too. “Buck up, losers,” Jacqueline snapped, stamping her foot in the pedicure tub. “At least we can talk about Tia behind her back.” Tia was the only one from their group who wasn’t at the party. Childless women were never invited.

  “You guys must have talked a lot about me over the years,” Marlow said. Everyone laughed nervously.

  The morning of the sowing, Marlow sat at her mother’s kitchen table, sipping hot water with lemon. Ahead of her egg replacement, they had finally cut off her coffee. Through the glass doors that led to the backyard, she watched drones lower gold-painted chairs into the grass as a writer and exec from the network looked on. The backdrop that her son’s face would be projected on had already been unrolled from a bar high over the lawn. Around her, inside, three bots were in high gear. One steamed Marlow’s dress in the hallway, one chopped fruit at the island, and a third dropped tea lights into wide bowls of water. They were all client-facing—it was a special occasion. People didn’t dress up to look at wires.

  Though the machines were right on schedule, the humans were running behind. Floss was in the house somewhere, probably doing her makeup-before-the-makeup act. She would show up powdered with bronzer soon, claiming to be bare-faced. Jacqueline was on her way, set back by a drama with one of her daughters. Ellis was surfing with his sisters’ husbands at a simulator facility. Its website promised to make the men feel like they were riding waves on the Gold Coast, then in Oahu, then off the Canary Islands, all inside a warehouse fifty miles from the Pacific.

  As Marlow sat waiting, a message cut through the noise in her brain. Urgent, for Marlow Clipp, from Liberty Family Planning—Can you stop by the office ASAP?

  Sure, Marlow responded. She slipped out of the kitchen without saying anything to the bots. They went on working, half smiles in place.

  She drove to the center and stepped inside, finding the office dark and quiet, the chipper nurse nowhere to be found. Someone was waving at her, backlit, at the end of the hall.

  Marlow walked toward the figure, its features falling into place as she got closer: a serious-eyed woman her age, thick-limbed in her blush-and-gray scrubs, with warm brown skin. Her ponytail was tied back tightly. The second Marlow saw it, her fingers tingled with a deep-seated memory of what that hair felt like: thick in her hands because there was so much of it, but brittle in her fingers, each strand highly breakable. Marlow knew the feeling of trying not to snap a single one as she coaxed them into braids and then elastics at the end.

  “Grace,” she breathed. “You work here?”

  Grace swallowed. She looked anxious. “We need to give you a quick exam,” she said loudly. “Your Pap came back abnormal. Please follow me.”

  “No problem,” Marlow said. And just like that, for the first time ever, she was in violation of her contract. There was a clause in it that forbade her to talk to any of the children who had been there that night. But they weren’t children anymore, were they? She hadn’t seen Grace in twenty years.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Orla

  New York, New York

  2015

  “Hey,” Fl
oss said at brunch one Sunday, rolling the stem of her glass between her fingers. “You know that singer, Aston Clipp?”

  “Is he a singer?” Orla said. She took a sip of her mimosa, tasting virtually nothing. The mimosas at their regular brunch spot—a cheesy rooftop bar in Midtown that still smelled of bleach and liquor when it opened for eggs on Sunday—were advertised as bottomless. But Orla and Floss were pushing it; they had been there for nearly three hours. The angry waiter had started bringing their glasses back a shade darker each time, until Orla was sure that there wasn’t a drop of champagne in the cup. Now he was even cutting the orange juice, with water. At least, she hoped it was water.

  “Whatever he is—” Floss shrugged “—I think he’d be perfect. Don’t you?”

  They had been talking for weeks about the next step: coupling Floss with someone who would up the wattage of her star. Orla thought of a recent, blurry video they had run on Lady-ish: Aston Clipp’s fist rising above the scrum of a crowd in Ibiza, coming down on a guy he thought had jostled his manager. Except the guy turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl.

  “I don’t know,” Orla said. “He could be trouble.”

  “Oh, he’s trouble.” Floss did the thing that Orla had come to know as her attempt to wiggle her eyebrows. Thanks to the injections she got, it only made her temples pulse.

  Orla imagined Floss at a party on Aston Clipp’s lap, ducking her head to hear him whisper, and felt preemptive jealousy shoot through her. She was lost in thought as Floss stood and led her out of the restaurant. They were almost to the door when Orla realized they hadn’t paid. She looked back, mortified, and caught the waiter’s eye. He stared at her, but didn’t come after them. He mostly looked relieved that they were gone.

  * * *

  Aston Clipp was born Austin Kumon, the fourth son of Lee, a Kentucky single mom who bleached her jet-black Japanese hair and dreamed of seeing her best-looking kid on the Disney Channel. She showed up in LA a couple of times a year, prodding Austin into rooms where boys his age ducked their heads and mumbled the lines of kid detectives with talking dogs, kid surfing prodigies with talking dogs, and kid computer geniuses with talking dogs. Austin had a terrible speech impediment. “Walph,” he would say to the casting assistant playing the talking dog at auditions, “wanna come suwfing, boy? I’m heading down to Wedondo. You should see how the guys thewe whip!” Gently, the casting directors would ask Lee to stop bringing her son to these things, but Lee didn’t listen. She registered Austin under fake names. She ran speech drills with him mercilessly on the thirty-hour drives. On one of these road trips, having had enough of Lee, Austin secretly recorded her nagging him, added some effects, and put it on YouTube. He called it “My Dumb Bitch Mom.” Six million people watched Lee, a cigarette clamped in one corner of her mouth, swerving to avoid a tractor trailer as she prompted, “The rooster...crows...in the morning!” Austin kept making the videos, egging his mom into tantrums she had no clue were being filmed until a Hollywood manager, Craig, showed up at their Dixie Highway rancher. Six weeks later, Austin inexplicably had a record deal, and a contract with a network that specialized in crass content for men. They invited him to create and star in his own sitcom. By the end of the year, Austin and Lee were living in Malibu, and she was wearing ribbed tanks that said DBM everywhere. Austin was sixteen.

  Things quickly imploded. The sitcom, about a boy plotting to kill his dumb bitch mom, was met with uproar. Cable news—particularly the channel that shared an office building with the male-network douchebags—delightedly booked outraged parents and scandalized reps from religious leagues. (Teenage girls, taken with Austin’s blinding grin and soft black wavy hair, were tuning in to the show behind their parents’ backs, coming away with catchphrases like “Ground me, bitch? Imma burn your corpse!”) The male network canceled the show, apologized to the public, and found a way out of paying the Kumons. Scrambling to keep her new lifestyle, Lee moved to sue everyone in sight. She even hauled Austin into court on charges of defamation. Though the judge threw it out, the damage had been done to the relationship. Craig advised Austin to emancipate himself; Austin agreed, stuffed his jeans and phone charger in a plastic shopping bag, and moved into Craig’s guest bedroom.

  Shortly afterward, Lee tracked Austin and Craig down at a Pinkberry. She lunged at her son, who raced around the other side of the counter, hiding in the toppings. Lee followed, and when Craig stepped between them, she grabbed Craig’s head and smashed it into the counter. He came up holding his nose, bits of crushed Fruity Pebbles sparkling in his blood. So many bystanders had cell phone footage, the news stations were able to put together a practically professional film of the fight, complete with facial reactions and alternate angles. Some “Dumb Bitch Mom” fans wondered whether the whole thing had been staged.

  Which was what gave Craig, before his nose had even healed, the idea to pretend that it was. To spin all of Austin—from his earliest YouTube videos through his auto-tuned singles and the slurs he whipped at his mother—as one long experiment in media and morality. “If you think about it,” Craig begged his department head, “he really is an artist. He challenges our notions about language and propriety.” The department head snorted. “He’s a bratty backwoods idiot,” she said. “I’m only entertaining this because every teenage girl in the country wants to suck his dick. Go ahead, knock yourself out.”

  So Austin changed his name to one of the fake ones his mother had come up with—Aston Clipp—and declared himself an artist. He traded in his Jordans for sandals and traveled the world, mainly amassing a collection of beaded bracelets. He sat shirtless atop the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and bothered monks in Tibet for selfies. He went to explore his roots in Japan, where he got bored of the customary bows and began to invent spontaneous dance moves in response to them. (He also asked for a fork everywhere he went, because, as he put it, he did not “fuck with chopsticks.”) On a trip to South Africa, he tweeted, while sitting in his Learjet on a Johannesburg tarmac: My heart is heavy thinking of the genicide here in Rwanda—think of how many young girls (and guys! LOL) couldve become Clippers.

  Eventually, Craig insisted that Aston create something. A song, a book, a web series—anything he could monetize.

  “I was thinking about a stand-up special where the whole time I act like an Indian,” Aston said, while bouncing on a pogo stick.

  “No,” Craig said, trying to imagine which kind of Indian Aston meant, and which kind would sink the both of them faster. “Artist,” he reminded him. “You’re an artist.”

  Aston nodded. He did some coke. Seven minutes later, he had an idea: he wanted to stage an exhibition in which he would sit in a pitch-black room, completely naked but for a pair of glow-in-the-dark leg casts, like the ones he had to wear the summer before fifth grade, after he fell under a friend’s ATV. Visitors to the exhibit would each be allowed five minutes alone with him, to sign his casts with black light markers. “Let’s do it at a museum,” he said to Craig. “Whichever one’s gonna pay us the most.”

  “That’s not how museums work,” Craig said.

  Aston, who had turned twenty-one the day before, shrugged and said, “Urban Outfitters, then.”

  Which was how, that night, Orla and Floss ended up walking to the store on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. They stood in a long line beneath a marquee that read: “Urban Outfitters Presents an Extraordinary Work: Aston Clipp’s My Legs, Your Canvas: On the Summer of 2005 Being Shitty as Hell.”

  “He’s seven years younger than you,” Orla reminded Floss as they shuffled forward.

  “Yeah,” Floss said. “But look at him.” She gazed up at the story-tall black-and-white photo of Aston in the window. In the picture, Aston gripped an old Super Soaker in one hand, offered the lens the middle finger with the other. “He’s totally an old soul,” Floss sighed.

  A black Mercedes sedan crept around the corner, came to a stop in front of t
hem, and expelled a model. The model, whose towering shoes were made of slippery wood, walked toward the store haltingly, like each step was her first. She cut the line and was ushered inside by a man with an earpiece, in a blazer.

  Someone behind Floss and Orla said, “Oh, I think they’re dating.”

  Floss dug her fingers into Orla’s arm. Tears were clinging precariously to her mink lashes, the ones they had saved up for, the ones that weren’t supposed to get wet. “Don’t worry about her,” Orla said. She thought of Catherine talking to Danny first, sealing their fates forever. “Just go down there and get him like she isn’t even there,” she went on firmly. “Once he meets you, she won’t matter.”

  * * *

  After an hour of wandering the upper level of the store, touching dream catchers and face-sized hoop earrings, Orla spotted Floss coming out of the dark room where Aston sat naked. She walked to the top of the staircase to wait for her.

  As Orla stood there, the model brushed by her and began descending the steps, carefully negotiating the slick teak of her heels. Orla’s pulse quickened as Floss stopped where she was, her hand on the railing, and waited for the model. Her mouth curled into a shape that Orla knew meant she had just thought of something. When the model was only a stair or two above her, Floss raised the back of her hand to her mouth and, with great deliberation, wiped it.

  The model cursed and spit at her, wobbling as she jabbed her finger in Floss’s direction, but Floss only smirked and started climbing the stairs again. Just as the two of them met in the middle, the model’s ankle buckled in her strange, dangerous shoes and her torso jerked to the left. She yelped and reached out for Floss to steady herself.