Followers Page 14

  Then Floss began to sing, and Orla’s thoughts fell apart. Floss’s voice, the real one, the one she abandoned so often in pursuit of something put-on, was phenomenal. It was deep, and ribbed, and searingly on-pitch, demolishing notes out of standard human reach. Floss pushed her hair into a knot on top of her head, carelessly, as if she was fed up with it keeping her from something.

  Orla was thinking of Floss’s faceless mother, doubting her daughter’s talents, when she blurted, “You’re so good, Floss, God. Wouldn’t you have rather been a singer than a...?”

  Floss waited for her to finish and smiled sadly when she didn’t. “I tried to be a singer, at first,” she said. “But how do you be a singer? It’s not like what we’re doing. There’s no formula.” She shrugged. “Maybe if the show gets big enough, they’ll let me do a single.”

  “You could have tried harder,” Orla said. “You still could. We could forget the other stuff.”

  The song was over. Floss put down the microphone and picked up her drink. She stuck the little red straw in the corner of her mouth. “I don’t want to,” she said. “It just isn’t a practical dream.”

  * * *

  Several Saturdays later, after three subsequent episodes of Flosston Public had aired to a growing audience, Orla had plans with her mother. Gayle was coming into the city to see Jersey Boys with some of her friends from Zumba. It was not the first time for any of them. Orla was hungover, but she forced herself to try to write beforehand. She held down different keys, creating little pictures in her manuscript that began as procrastination but sort of started to seem like something, perhaps a meaningful graphic that could be worked into the story. Orla highlighted a crude sailboat she had made of lowercase r’s and called up its word count. Thirty-nine. Not bad.

  Orla could tell from the moment she saw her that Gayle had more news about Danny. Her mother practically glittered when she was holding fresh gossip.

  Orla herded Gayle and her friends onto the C train, then the B train. She led them aboveground and toward Mulberry Street. They ambled down the sidewalk five across, mortifying her, and succumbed to the first Little Italy loudmouth who beckoned to them from his doorway. They sat down and ate pasta drowned in sludgy red sauce. Everyone but Orla declared it “heavenly.”

  Orla tried to settle herself into a place of indifference. The more she wanted to hear about Danny, the longer Gayle would hold back. So Orla smiled as one of her mother’s friends performed a long retelling of an episode of King of Queens. When another asked Orla if “they still call it the Big Apple,” she treated the question thoughtfully. When a third screamed and knocked back her chair, claiming to have seen a roach—it turned out to be a tile scuff, but the woman sniffed that they should still get a discount, for the scare—Orla apologized on New York’s behalf. Finally, the girls from Zumba rose to go to the bathroom. Orla and her mother stayed behind.

  Gayle drew her credit card out of the leather billfold with a flourish. “They’re getting a divorce,” she said. “Maybe you should reach out.”

  Orla blushed, feeling caught. “Why would I reach out?” she said.

  Her mother rolled her eyes. “Not to Danny. To Catherine. To offer your condolences.” She shook her head. “I never got why you turned so cold to her. Maybe if you’d kept her in your life, you wouldn’t be...”

  The waiter refilled their waters, unnecessarily.

  “I wouldn’t be what?” Orla felt her heart closing up. They were going to waste time that could be put to use parsing the details of this divorce revelation—Was Gayle sure? Who told her? When?—on Orla’s entanglement with Floss. This confrontation had been brewing for months, Orla knew, as Gayle’s texts and emails grew terser. Even before Orla got fired, her mother stopped posting her work on Facebook.

  “You wouldn’t be—Well, what do you call what you’re doing?” Gayle leaned forward. “I saw the clips of you on TV. You looked so unpleasant.” Her mother’s friends were beginning to file out of the restroom, negotiating their way back to the table. “I thought,” Gayle said, “you wanted to be a writer.”

  “Is that what you thought I was before?” Orla squashed the paper sleeve from her straw beneath her thumb. “Because honestly, what I’m doing is pretty much the same as my old job. Now I’m just on the other side.”

  Gayle opened her purse and began rearranging it. She was in charge of the tickets, and Orla knew that Gayle would not fully relax until each Zumba girl had been seated in the theater. “Being part of what Floss is doing,” Orla went on, “meeting the people I’m meeting—trust me, Mom, that’s the fastest way for me to get to be a writer.”

  Gayle looked up then. She zipped her purse shut. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I’ve been telling you since you were ten years old, Orla,” she said quietly, like she was trying not to embarrass her. “It’s not good to be a follower.”

  “I’m not,” Orla said. The second word came out just as she did when she was ten: a squeaking, two-syllable opera. “Look, Mom, I’m sorry, but you don’t get what it’s like, handling all this.”

  “When I was your age,” Gayle said slowly, “I already had you. And a job at State Farm.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Orla said. “You don’t get how things work in the real world.”

  Gayle blinked then, revealing a face Orla had never seen on her mother: damaged, blown back, her skin utterly smooth, like a calm before a storm. Her mouth began to tremble.

  “Is that right?” she said. “You think you’re so great, up here, where everybody understands you. And they do! That’s the joke of it, if you ask me.” She pulled her chair in to let one of the women pass, and Orla startled as the leg scraped the floor. “You really believe it,” Gayle hissed. “That whatever you’re doing is more important than what people do everywhere else. Just because you’re doing it in a city where, when we come to visit you, we see rats eating on park benches and people shitting on the subway!”

  “That was one time,” Orla said, though the shitting had been twice.

  “Let me tell you something,” Gayle said, leaning in. “I’m more interesting at home in my kitchen than you’ll ever be in this city.”

  She jerked backward as soon as she said it, as if she had slapped Orla. But she didn’t apologize; she didn’t say another word. The girls from Zumba took over the space around them, rounding up their bags, arguing loudly over who had seen Jersey Boys first.

  Orla still took them to the theater. She knew her mother wanted her to, even if they were no longer able to look at each other. Now she understood why her parents always peered at her with worry in their eyes: despite never having said it, they thought she was doing nothing. This, what she was doing at this moment, was what Gayle believed to be the sum return on their investment in her: she knew her way around Manhattan. She knew to look to the still-new tower to go south, and how to find the Hudson as soon as she climbed aboveground. Phones could do as much these days, but there was a certain pride in knowing how to do it on your own. This was what Orla had amounted to, in her mother’s eyes: an expensive collection of instincts, useless on the other side of the river.

  * * *

  It took a while for Orla’s official Flosston Public offer, the deal that would make her a regular part of the cast, to come through—the studio had to approve it, then the network. When Orla asked Craig what was taking so long, he went on about holidays. To hear Craig tell it, there was always a festive reason he couldn’t reach someone in Hollywood. The Fourth of July gave way to Labor Day. Rosh Hashanah turned into Yom Kippur, which put everyone “out of pocket.” He wouldn’t call anyone with an Italian last name for a full week surrounding Columbus Day.

  Finally, the contract arrived. Orla would make sixteen thousand dollars an episode—“really decent for a minor player,” Craig said. Orla just nodded—she had no way to tell otherwise. She hesitated with the pen in her hand, thinking of her mo
ther’s angry gaze, then of Floss in the karaoke room, so sure her real dream wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t forever, this show, Orla reminded herself. The show would pay her rent, and give her a platform—a place to start when she was ready to send her book out and be an author. Once her book sold, Flosston Public would become trivia, moving steadily down her Wikipedia page as the years and her accomplishments piled up. She would laugh about it later, on a stage somewhere, as an author in conversation.

  After she signed the papers, Aston gave her a high five and a wet willy.

  Melissa emailed her a summary of her fees, ending the message, “Of course, I know you can’t afford me now, but for the future.” She tacked on a winky-face emoji. Orla looked across 6D, at Melissa’s actual face. It was trained on her phone and stony.

  Mason handed Orla a pair of glasses—glossy, gaping, black. She held them awkwardly, the pads of her fingers pressed into the lenses.

  “But I see fine,” she said.

  Mason nodded. “Yeah, we think it helps establish your character,” he said. “You know, your corner of the brains-brawn-beauty trinity. Heh heh heh.” Orla didn’t have to ask which corner was hers. She put the glasses on and everything looked the same.

  Floss was draped on a chair, letting someone touch her up before her next shot. She winked at Orla and said, in the voice she used to only use on other people, “I love you in glasses. This is gonna be so fun.”

  * * *

  When the New Year began, Flosston Public was the biggest thing on TV. The one-sheet Melissa always used to describe it summed up the gimmick thus: “A wackadoodle, white-hot celebrity couple and the sarcastic schlump who shares their living space.” Orla’s name appeared, in parentheses, after the word schlump.

  Money accumulated meaninglessly. Floss and Aston did big things, like chartering a yacht to watch a rare comet (but everyone got drunk and forgot to look for it). Orla did small things, like running up four-digit bills at Saks, pushing away the sense that she would be exposed as a fraud, asked to give her items back, by the time she reached the golden doors.

  Though Orla and Floss could have afforded to, they didn’t move. They stayed in the little apartment, where the paparazzi knew to find them. The five of them—Orla, Floss, Aston, Craig, and Melissa—were nearly always in 6D, five coworkers, each with their own dress codes. Floss never changed out of lingerie, Aston tramped around in designer tank tops, Orla wore yoga pants and hoodies, and Craig and Melissa dressed respectably, in pants that zipped closed. Melissa arrived first, at nine sharp, bringing coffees for herself and Floss and Aston, as if walking into a room of four people with three coffees was the most natural thing in the world. Aston would take his and pull himself up cross-legged on a bar stool, arranging his crystals and chanting. Floss would review the selfies they had taken in bed that morning, usually ones with her breasts artfully hidden by the sheets, and ask Melissa which one she thought she should post. (She almost never used Melissa’s choice.) Melissa would give Floss and Aston what she called “their assignment” for the day—she might ask them to take a slow stroll through the Bronx Zoo in matching beanies, or to scoop corn at a soup kitchen in the East Village for fifteen minutes. In the pictures, Floss slipped and fell near the lizards, sneaked theatrical tastes of the corn. When her Post-it—Be relatable!!!!!—lost its tack and fluttered down from the cabinet, she used tape to put it back up.

  Craig would walk in midmorning, often with a box of strawberry shortcake ice cream bars from the Gristedes next door. Aston ate around four of the bars every day. Craig would shove the box in the freezer, then cast an irritated look at Orla. “Is there coffee?” They would all sit together and go through the press clips and the tweets. Floss would bite her nails over anything mean, but Aston would just bellow “ooooooh,” like someone else had been called to the principal’s office.

  Then Mason and the crew would materialize in the hallway, ready to shoot until lunchtime. Orla noticed, as time went on, that almost all the scenes were the same: Aston would say something grossly sexual to Floss, Floss would throw a pillow at him, and Orla would snort and say “you guys” from what had become her mark—the cushion Mason liked her to sit on had a little X of tape on it now. The only note she ever got was to make her eye rolls bigger, to exaggerate the motion for camera.

  In the afternoons, there was nothing to do, but Orla got nothing else done. Her book was always there on the screen before her, but distractions were everywhere, endless. Now, in addition to watching Danny, she had to watch Floss, and herself. She would sort through Twitter and Instagram to see who was down at their door; at any given time, up to a dozen fans stood at the barricade, hoping for a glimpse of them. Now they brought squash out of love—and Melissa, in her opportunistic wisdom, had begun having Floss, trailed by paparazzi Melissa called to come, walk the squash down the street to a shelter. (At least, that was what they did until the shelter begged them: please, no more squash.) Now they just threw it away.

  Orla would end up, often, going down to see the fans in person. She would put on foundation and lipstick and pretend to have somewhere to be. She would act surprised to find people waiting for her. She would lean in for their selfies. She could not deny the warm feeling it gave her, all these people glad to see her, even if she knew she was a distant third on their list. Once, ten minutes after meeting a girl who told Orla she was her “spirit animal,” Orla stood in line behind her at the Jamba Juice down the block. “Yeah, it sucks,” the girl was saying, on the phone to someone at home. “But we did see the roommate. I forget her name.”

  One March day she was doing this, squeezing hands and moving down the line, when she came all the way to the back of it and—impossibly—there he was. He was pressed against the metal barricade, grinning and clutching the bar so hard his fingers had turned white. In the flesh was the phrase that came to her mind, and she understood it for the first time. She had to keep double-checking his face, his body, to make sure it was really him. And it was, and now every doubt Orla had felt, fixing her fate to Floss’s, dissolved. So a model had fallen. So her book wasn’t done. So she had been fired. So her mother wasn’t proud. So what? He was here. It had all come true.

  “Hey there, star,” he said, and she could tell he had practiced it. But she didn’t care.

  Orla reached up and took off the sunglasses she had recently paid three hundred dollars for. Floss had sat on the counter at Bergdorf’s, legs swinging, egging her on. “But what if I break them?” Orla had said. “Then you get another pair,” Floss had answered.

  Orla pulled him out of line with everyone watching, some of them calling her name, all of them raising their phones. She knew she should have waited until they walked inside, but she found she couldn’t wait another second. She hugged him, the sun bleeding into her eyes as she rested her chin on his shoulder. When she heard herself speak, she found it wasn’t just Floss who had tweaked her natural vocals. This was her voice from home. She hadn’t heard it in ages.

  “Danny,” she said, the way she used to sound catching in her throat. “Danny. Hi.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Marlow

  New York, New York

  2051

  When Marlow opened her eyes, she was in New York, the sky a glum lavender outside the tablet-shaped windows of the plane. The pilot came on and told them it was 5:44 in the morning. Marlow, who had never left California before, felt a punch of giddiness at the time. No matter what they did, everyone in Constellation would be three hours behind her. She had outrun them into the next day.

  It hadn’t been easy. Her car was not familiar with the concept of a getaway. No matter how she shouted and pounded, it took long rests at every stop sign on their way out of town. It dropped down to a prim ten miles per hour as it rolled beneath the vine-draped wooden arch at the edge of the enclave. Welcome to Constellation, said the side of the arch that faced the rest of the state, as if the place was open to the public. A
s she approached the edge of the enclave, Marlow tensed every muscle in her body, bracing for—what? A bullet? An armored truck skidding sideways to block her path? As she reached the guard post, a uniformed man looked her right in the eye. When he raised his arm, it was only to flick his device at her, snapping photos as he leaned out of his booth’s little window, watching her leaving town.

  Just the other side of the border was Constellation’s miniature airport. Marlow got out of her car at the curb. “Go home,” she told it, sharply, and it lurched off like an obedient pet.

  In the ladies’ room, she changed into jeans and a black gauzy sweater. She rolled the yellow dress into a ball and left it under the sinks. Then she pulled out the stack of cash she and Ellis had brought to exchange for pesos and marched to the check-in desk.

  The bot behind it, though, had no idea what to do with paper money. It summoned a weary-looking human attendant, who sighed when Marlow held out the bills. “It’s been about a hundred years since you could buy airfare with cash,” she said to Marlow coolly, “and besides—to New York, you said?” She counted it clumsily. “You don’t have enough here for round trip.” The woman shuffled the bills into a pile and poked at her gray-screened tablet. She frowned. “We don’t have an approved itinerary for you on file here from the network.”

  Marlow smiled and tilted her head, even as her heartbeat picked up. The cash had to work; she had no device to access her credit, and anyway, she was sure the network had frozen her accounts by now. “You know,” she said slowly, “my husband was supposed to take care of it for me, since he travels so often. Ellis Trieste?”

  It was funny, the way the woman’s face changed. It softened, but not in the glad way it would if, say, Ellis was the type to wink and thank everyone each time he flew. It softened in a way that made the woman look fearful, reminding Marlow that the whole world saw her husband the same way: not as someone worth accommodating because he was kind, but because he was important, and not afraid to act it.