Followers Page 13

  That was when Aston Clipp showed up, calling his name through the door.

  When Floss opened it, all Orla could see was a giant cube of jewel-toned flowers. Aston’s face was completely covered by them; what she saw first was his hands, golden tan and expertly manicured, cupping the bottom of the vase. The bouquet was too wide to fit through the doorway. Aston barreled in anyway, snapping blooms’ necks on the door frame, crushing petals underneath his space-age high-tops.

  When he set the flowers down, Orla saw that there was not just one person behind the flowers, but three.

  There was Aston, looking just as he did in photos, if slightly smaller. He was easily the best-looking person she had ever seen. His thick black hair fell into his gaze and curled along his jaw, which had a tripod of dimples—both cheeks, and one in his chin. His dark, curved eyes became, as soon as he walked in, the room’s magnetic pole.

  Behind Aston, bent over picking up flowers, were Craig and Melissa. Craig was a compilation of unappealing parts—mottled skin, baby-blond hair, watery blue eyes, small teeth—who nevertheless carried himself with the pomp of a handsome man. Melissa was startlingly muscular, with a burnt-sienna spray tan and hair about the same shade, shellacked into tight spirals. When they were finished cleaning up, Melissa took all the petals and brushed them into Orla’s palms. Orla knew what they thought right away. They took her for Floss’s assistant.

  “This apartment,” Aston said to Floss. “It’s special. I’ve been at the Bowery for months. I hate it. It’s, like, too nice. They won’t stop making my bed.” He looked up at the flickering orb by the door, down at the scuffed parquet. “This place is so—nothing. But sometimes it’s the soulless places that turn out to have the most soul.”

  “Exactly,” purred Floss, whose name wasn’t even on the lease. “That’s so like you to get it.”

  Aston pushed off the drywall. He went and stood so close to Floss, the rest of them looked away. “It’s over with Paulina,” he said. “And I’d love to get to know you. Can I take you to dinner?”

  “Omigod, of course,” Floss whined through her nose.

  Craig looked up from the phone he had been assaulting. “Great,” he said. “Now that’s done. And we come with the deal, Melissa and me.” He pointed at himself. “Manager.” He pointed at Melissa. “Publicist.”

  “You mean, like, for the date?” Orla said.

  Craig ignored her. He looked slowly from Floss to Aston and back, then turned to Melissa. “I think this will be good. I think this will be huge,” he said to her, scratching his jaw. “What do you think?”

  Melissa tossed her hair. Orla heard the racket of her hard curls settling on her back. “I think what I always think,” she said. “That if we ride the wave and never fight it, there will be good things ahead for all of us.”

  Aston took Floss to dinner. Orla waited into the night, drinking coffee to keep herself up, thinking that Floss would want to dissect the entire evening when she came home. But the two of them stayed out till sunrise, then slept all day in Floss’s room. By day two, Orla still hadn’t seen them again, but she had heard the door open and close a few times. The next time she came out of her bedroom, she saw that Aston’s things—clusters of glass-bottled essential oils, a remote-control helicopter, great heaps of sneakers—had materialized in the apartment, making it seem young and boyish and smaller right away. After that, he did not leave. Sometimes, Orla minded very much—her back was sore from picking up toys and shoes, and her ears were sore from her earplugs, which covered the sounds of what went on in the bedroom. Other times, she didn’t mind at all, because Aston made the place feel kinder, too. He had a tender side he kept indoors, where his fans and foes couldn’t access it. Orla had seen him do phone interviews, being uncooperative and unquotably profane, while snuggled under a blanket on the couch, like a child. She had overheard him Skyping with his charity-assigned “little brother,” had heard him tell the boy to stay in school (though Aston himself had quit in ninth grade) and to respect women (though he sometimes showed the kid racy photos of his exes from his phone). When Floss was out or sleeping, Aston would mill in the living room, hanging on Orla. If she had a book in her lap, he would say: “Whatcha readin’, bookworm?” If a video was rolling on her laptop screen, he would say, “Whatcha watchin’, couch potatah?” Once, when both girls had had enough of his hyperactivity, he retreated good-naturedly to the kitchen and scrubbed the crusted pans they never touched, the ones that came with the place. Then he baked blueberry muffins from scratch.

  Three weeks after Aston walked into 6D, he and Floss signed a deal to star in a “docuseries” about falling in love.

  Six weeks after that, Floss and Orla took the C train to a gym that had sent them free spinning coupons and found Floss’s face writ large in an ad on the subway wall. Sharpie penises prodded at both of her nostrils. They screamed and hugged each other.

  A month after that, the show premiered, which was when things went both wrong and right. Right: Flosston Public was an instant hit, completing Floss’s transformation from heartless sociopath to sympathetic goddess. Wrong: it made Orla famous, too.

  * * *

  Flosston Public began with a prank. The show’s writer, a tall girl with stringy red hair, explained in her nicotine rasp how things would go. “Floss comes in the front door, Floss yells out ‘babe,’ Aston springs out from the end of the kitchen and dumps a bucket of flour on her.”

  No one had invited Orla to the preproduction meeting, but it was a Saturday, so she was home, and she happened to live on location. “Why?” she asked as she refilled the Brita.

  “It’s a good prank,” the writer said. “The audience loves pranks. Floss and Aston love pranks. It’s part of their brand. It’s perfect.”

  “Sick.” Aston clapped his hands. “We do love pranks, babe.”

  The closest thing to a prank Orla had seen Floss and Aston pull was when they had sex on the breakfast bar and knocked her microwaved enchilada to the floor. She looked at Floss dubiously.

  “I actually don’t love pranks,” Floss said. “What if my shirt rides up? I look fat when my shirt rides up.”

  “Good,” the writer snapped. “You could stand to be more relatable. It’s nice that you’re hot and all, but that only gets you male fans watching you on YouTube without the sound on. You have to make the girls like you.”

  “But Orla’s the only girl who likes me,” Floss said. “I get along so much better with men.”

  “It’s true,” Aston said. “We get along great.” He pulled Floss back down the hall and slammed the bedroom door. The writer rolled her eyes.

  “THE PRANK WILL ESTABLISH A SENSE OF PLAYFULNESS,” boomed Mason, the show’s producer. He was a puffy man with dark under-eye circles who, in stark contrast to his writer, shouted everything in monotone. He laughed by saying “heh heh heh,” doled out precisely, just like that.

  “I get that,” Orla said. “But why does it have to be flour?”

  Mason frowned at her and said, “Can you get the talent back out here?”

  Before the meeting, Floss and Aston had been holed up in Floss’s bedroom, bingeing a TV drama, and now Orla heard the hourly jingle of the theme music wafting from the room. “I’m not their assistant,” she said to Mason, sharply. She picked up her laptop from the counter and flopped down to work on the couch, where she assumed she would be out of the shot. Hair and makeup had taken over her bedroom.

  This was the truth: she rerouted her whole life by picking the couch instead of the love seat.

  “We’ll send a cleaning lady to take care of the mess, first thing in the morning, I promise,” Mason said.

  All night, they threw the flour, setting and resetting the shot, coughing as the air filled up, and in the morning, there was no cleaning lady. Everything Orla touched for the next few days was gritty. When she could stand it no longer, she took a sick day from work
and scrubbed the apartment, vacuuming it three times over. Even the insides of the doors on the kitchen cabinets needed to be wiped. It was inside one of them that Orla found a Post-it with Floss’s frantic cursive on it. The ink lay in deep grooves on the paper, like Floss had pressed with all her might. “Be relatable!!!!!” the Post-it said.

  The next day, the crew descended again. “The audio from that flour scene is complete shit,” Mason said. “We need to do it again.” He made Orla sit in the same spot on the couch, with her computer. “For continuity,” he said. She shrugged, imagining herself foggy in the background, no more part of the action than their Ikea stick lamp. No one told her different.

  And then came the premiere.

  In episode one, as Floss and Aston pawed at each other, giggling, drawing streaks in the flour dust left on their skin, Orla sat in the background, but not really. Every eye roll of hers had been left in the edit, every sigh made perfectly audible. The dynamic was quickly established: Floss and Aston were idiots, and Orla was the brainy third wheel trapped in their love nest. The response, online, was instant. Bloggers declared Orla the “bitchy heroine” of Flosston Public; people turned her sour faces into GIFs. The finger she had swiped across her face to remove a stray crumb became, as it spread across the internet, an emblem of everywoman defiance. I CAN’T WITH HER! someone screamed. QUEEN! Someone else screenshotted Orla’s dismal pout and wrote, So here for this girl not being here for this.

  Half an hour after the Flosston Public premiere ended, someone figured out who Orla was, matching her face to her author pic on Lady-ish.

  Forty minutes afterward, she got a text from her dad: Aunt Marie says you were on television tonight. Maybe you could call your mother and tell her about it?

  Forty-seven minutes afterward, she got an email from her boss. Ingrid kept it short. Subject: You on Flosston Public. Body: The fuck?

  Orla looked up from the email to see Floss watching her from the other couch. They had decorated with streamers and bought André brand champagne—the last cheap champagne they would ever drink—to celebrate the show’s debut. Aston had fallen asleep with his head in Floss’s lap just after the episode began, and now, as Floss raked his endless hair with her fingers, she glared across the room at Orla. Orla realized she must look happy, thumbing through her own reviews. She quickly changed her face and put her phone down. Ingrid could wait till the morning.

  * * *

  But the next morning, when Orla got to the Lady-ish office, her chair was gone. All that was left at her desk was a sinewy clutch of rainbow-colored cables.

  “Orla,” Ingrid called from her office. She motioned her in and shut the door.

  Sitting across from her boss, Orla tried to quiet her pulse by focusing on a fabric-framed photo of Annabella, Ingrid’s French bulldog.

  Ingrid noticed her looking. She turned the photo facedown protectively. “You’re fired,” she said. She opened her mouth to say something else, then stacked her hands atop each other on her desk, elbows wide, and placed her forehead on top of them.

  Orla stared at the half inch of graying hair on either side of Ingrid’s scalp, grasping for something to say. A line from her quitting fantasy came back to her. “Ingrid,” she said, “I want to thank you for the opportunity.”

  Ingrid kept her head down. “You don’t strike me as the sellout type, Orla,” she said into her knuckles. “I don’t know why you would put me—put all of us—in a position like this.”

  “What do you mean, position?” Orla said.

  Ingrid straightened. She dabbed at the oily crescents on either side of her nose. “The position,” she said, “of looking like we let you use Lady-ish to make you and your friend famous.”

  Orla felt blotches rising on her chest. “Not me,” she said. “I wasn’t even supposed to be on the show.”

  “I’m not interested in the details,” Ingrid said. “Just go.” She checked her phone. “I have interviews for your replacement starting in, like, ten minutes. Oh, and, Orla,” she said. “Just so you know. When whatever this is blows up in your face, you can guaran-fucking-tee we will cover it.”

  * * *

  When Orla got off the elevator at home, she could hear high, messy crying coming from her apartment. She paused just ahead of the door and put her ear to the wall.

  Inside, she heard Mason, sounding like he was saying something he’d said a thousand times. “She’s all anyone talked about from the first episode. I’m confused—do we not want a show? Do we not want to get paid?”

  Then Craig: “All right, Mason, but I’m sure—I’m sure—you still feel that Floss and Aston are the stars of this show. Don’t you, Mason?” Craig exhaled. He rapped on something. “Melissa, will you...deal with her?”

  Melissa’s voice, dull and obligated: “There, there, Floss.” Orla had a sudden memory of Melissa the night they celebrated getting green-lit. It was the only time she had ever seen Melissa drunk. She had beaten Craig in arm wrestling, flattening his forearm against the sticky table. Afterward, she growled to no one in particular, “I’m never having a baby!”

  Floss let out a sob that barely arranged itself into words: “AstonSTOPwiththefuckingBALL!”

  A bouncing in the background stopped. “My bad,” Aston chirped.

  “Floss, I’m sorry,” Mason said. “But I’m not here to pimp your ego. I’m here to see that Flosston gets a full-season pickup. You want that producer credit? Yeah? Then you should be calling Orla right now to say how great she was.”

  There was a long, sniffly period where no one spoke. “Fine,” Orla heard Floss say. “But she has to be clear on her role.”

  “For sure,” Mason agreed. “You’ll see, it’ll be funny, kind of like a Three’s Company vibe that will really endear—”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Orla heard the deliberate click of Floss’s heels on the wood, moving closer to the door. “I mean we all know who I’m supposed to be, and we all know who she’s supposed to be. Right?”

  All of them went around, echoing: “Right.”

  Except for Aston, who made a lip-trumpet sound and said, “Wha? I’m not following this toxic convo. Who’s Orla supposed to be, now?”

  There was silence. Orla could picture them, waiting on the talent.

  “You know,” Floss said finally. “A secondary character.”

  * * *

  That night, Floss opened Orla’s bedroom door. Her eyes were still red from crying. “Let’s go out,” she said. “Just you and me. We’ll do karaoke. We’ll celebrate our ratings.” The “our” came out, to Orla’s ear, like a piece of glass Floss had to gag up.

  They went to a place in Koreatown. It was the early side of evening and the bar was bleeding people when they got there, happy hour holdouts stumbling on to search for pizza. The drinkers who were staying, trying to bridge the gap into the real night, blinked and pulled out their phones when they saw the girls walk in.

  “They’re tweeting that we’re here,” Floss whispered in Orla’s ear. But Orla saw a girl with silver bangles up her arm thrust her phone at her friend. Its screen was glaring white and lined with search results. “See, look,” Bangles said triumphantly. “Told you she was someone.” She and the friend clutched each other’s forearms and moved toward Floss. “Can we get a picture?” Bangles said.

  Floss smiled and nodded. She stretched her face forward politely, like a zoo animal accepting food through a fence. Bangles looked at Orla.

  “Aren’t you—” she began brightly. But then Floss interrupted.

  “Orla,” she said loudly, “would you mind taking the picture?”

  Bangles held the phone out. Orla took the phone and backed away from them, counted “one, two, three.” By the time she was finished, a guy in a polo oxford, soaked through with sweat from singing, was jamming his greasy phone at her and sidling up to Floss, eyes unabashedly on her breasts.

&nb
sp; It went on like that for several minutes—Floss in front of the camera, Orla behind it. By now, by word of mouth or search engine, everyone in the club seemed to know who Floss was. “Where’s Aston?” someone shouted. “Where’s the bitchy girl?” somebody else said, and Orla thought, For fuck’s sake, I’m right here.

  When there was no one left who wanted her, Floss took Orla’s hand and tugged her toward the stairs to the basement. A second earlier, Orla had been annoyed, close to walking out of the bar. But now she looked down at Floss’s fingers clamped over hers, pulling her through the bodies. She had seen girls do this before in packed bars—hold hands to keep the mob from separating them—and she had always, always, always wanted someone to do that with her.

  In the basement, they ducked into a private room. It had a huge TV with blurry footage of people dancing and was soundproofed with ugly padding in burgundy and blush. A binder of laminated pages, songs and their six-digit codes, stuck to a ring-stained table. Floss picked up the binder and flipped through it, jabbed a code into the remote.

  The song’s intro began, all simpleton chords and synthetic drums. It was familiar, either a song Orla knew or one that sounded like everything. She was hardly listening, anyway. She was thinking of how Floss had said the word secondary that afternoon, the consonants bitter and violent. Orla gathered her anger back and tried to believe she could do it—she could say to Floss, right now, I heard you, why would you, after all we, you bitch.

  The song went on and Orla remembered it. It belonged to a star who she had since forgotten was once famous for music, one who went on to play in a reality romance and make midpriced shoes for chain stores. The lyrics came up on the screen, blue rippling across them in time, and Orla found she still knew every word. She remembered herself during a lazy middle-school summer, using Catherine’s landline phone to call a video request channel called The Box, pressing in the digits for this overdone ballad. Catherine wringing her hands, Orla rolling her eyes and telling her to relax, that her parents wouldn’t notice the charge.