Followers Page 17

  “How did you know about my book?” she said.

  He pinched the skin on the top of her hand. “I see it on the show sometimes,” he said. “In the background. I knew what it had to be.”

  Orla felt blood flooding into her cheeks. She had not yet kissed him, she had not yet slept with him, but she realized now that this was the pinnacle: luscious validation. He had been watching her as closely as she was watching him. “You were right,” she said. “It’s my book.”

  “Yeah, I knew it,” Danny said. “I always knew it.” He put his hands on either side of her jaw and pulled her toward him. She felt the pulse of the strobe light at the graduation party. She felt his serious eyes trained on her the first day of school. She heard him asking if she would remember them, the line that had pulled her through years and years, that had sent her the only way she wanted to go: back, by way of special.

  When she pulled him onto the mattress, she steered him away from the end of the bed that touched her desk, not wanting to disturb the papers he had marveled at. The pages were full of Microsoft gibberish, lorem ipsum and so on. When production had asked her to print out her book as a prop, she only had, after all this time, forty-nine pages. The heft of them would not hold up on camera. “It’s no problem,” Mason had said, beckoning to an intern. “We’ll make it look like a real thing.”

  * * *

  Danny stayed and stayed. He told Orla he had endless days off available, because Catherine didn’t like vacations. Orla pretended to be hearing it for the first time when he said he managed the cold-storage facility, though she had known it from Facebook for ages, and she listened as he explained what this meant: tracking the comings and goings of frozen fish and icy medicines, dressed in an industrial-grade parka and usually alone, working long hours that ensured he saw the sun only on Saturdays. She wanted to do nothing less than change his world, to turn it from an unending spool of cold and dark to something filled with light and warmth, and to make sure he knew the glow depended on her. She brought him to everything: a charity gala for which Melissa begrudgingly called in a loaner tux. A Brooklyn arena concert that they watched from a luxury box, Danny’s eyes popping at the twinkling private bar. A women’s magazine party celebrating female “influencers.” Danny asked what the term meant, and Orla shrugged before turning to receive the editor in chief, who murmured in her ear, “If those bottom-feeders at Lady-ish could see you now!”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Danny whispered when the editor floated on. “Let’s get pizza.” Having him around reminded Orla that she, too, had once felt starving at every fancy event, that there was a time before she could be satisfied by artful bites of almost nothing on crackers.

  “We’re leaving,” she told Floss.

  Midselfie, Floss gave a shuddering sigh without looking away from her phone. “Must you make my best friend be lame every night?” she whined in Danny’s direction, loud enough that the departing editor glanced discreetly over her shoulder.

  Orla flicked her hand at Danny in a way that meant he shouldn’t worry about Floss. Floss’s attitude toward Danny, Orla sensed, was one of patient disdain, as if Orla had started wearing a tacky hat everywhere, and Floss could only wait for her to outgrow it. If Orla wasn’t careful, she could find herself feeling flattered by this show of possessiveness. She had to remind herself that that was what it was: a show. She didn’t doubt that she and Floss were best friends, but that only meant she knew Floss very well—well enough to realize that, to Floss, friendship was theater. Floss shrieked with joy when Orla entered a room, and captioned pictures of the two of them with venomous affection—my best friend is hotter than yours. The edge of jealousy toward Danny was another one of these pantomimes, the kind that might have seemed genuine to the people in the cheap seats. But Orla, in the front row, saw them for just what they were: distractions sequined over the truth. Floss might have believed she loved Orla, but Orla knew Floss was only for Floss. She knew that Floss was the kind of selfish friend most women could only keep one of. The one they tried hard to love but had to hang up on twice a year, the one they told the rest of their friends about, in sentences that always began, “You know I love her, but...” Orla felt aware that it was risky, having this kind of friend as her only one, with no cushion of other contacts to help metabolize the crazy. But she had lived the alternative, too. She knew it was better than having no one.

  It took a blizzard for Floss to soften toward Danny. The storm started up in the middle of the first Friday morning in April, shocking the city with more snow than had fallen all winter. It stranded them as a foursome—Orla and Danny, Floss and Aston—together in 6D, drinking rum mixed with instant cocoa someone found in an out-of-reach cupboard. The power went out, which was quaint. They talked and talked.

  “My little liberal here thinks I’m nuts when I say the government wants our guns,” Danny said as Orla stroked his hair. “But someday they won’t just come after our guns. They’ll want to know everything about us, want to track our every move. It’s starting already.”

  “No shit, man,” Aston said, spreading his arms as he jumped off the couch. “I have this super-rare Uzi at my house in Santa Monica, and it was such a bitch to register. Like, let me do me. I only bring it out at parties, anyway.”

  “Oh, you two,” Floss said fondly. Orla’s heart leaped to hear Danny mathematically included in her tone. She smiled at Floss, who looked up from the spray of split ends she had been inspecting and grinned back. Men, her eyes seemed to say. Holding her gaze—me and my best friend, here with our boyfriends—Orla had never felt so content in her life.

  The weeks went on: sex, takeout, events, sex. Photos of Orla and Danny had begun to surface, had made their way into the consciousness of home. It was too much for Mifflin to bear: Orla Cadden becoming ultrafamous-adjacent and then—get this—bringing the dude from American Cold Storage along for the ride. Twined together on the couch, Orla and Danny tracked Facebook chatter about themselves. They read aloud to each other from emails they got and never responded to, sent from classmates they laughed at. They weren’t trying to be mean; it was just that the existence of other people suddenly struck them as funny.

  Orla was careful, though, to never let Danny see her inbox. Gayle emailed a dozen times a day. Orla ignored one message, then another, until there were so many that the idea of reading them overwhelmed her, like an assignment she would rather take a zero on than face. The subject lines piled up in desperate bold:

  Have you lost your mind

  This has to stop

  Please talk to me

  We are here for you

  When Danny asked casually, after weeks, about her book, Orla started sitting at her laptop in front of him. But she was always stuck, always blocked, and she spent most of the time online shopping. She had learned to enter her credit card digits with a cadence that mimicked prose.

  Sometimes, while she sat there, Danny would bring her her glasses. Orla had never explained they were fake. In the beginning, she had forgotten, and now too much time had passed. The truth was more embarrassing than it was important, she thought, so she kept it to herself.

  * * *

  One late afternoon as they lay in bed, afterward, their breathing beginning to normalize, Danny extracted his arm from behind Orla’s head and sat up. He grabbed his laptop from the windowsill. He got back into bed, set it on his thighs, and opened it so they could both see the screen.

  He pulled up a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide read, in blocky font, MERCHANDISING PLAN—FLOSS NATUZZI.

  Orla’s stomach puckered, a flicker of doom, as he cursed under his breath, trying to cue up some music. “What are you—” she said, but he shushed her as the song began.

  He clicked through, being rough on the trackpad, and Orla read in silence: three-bulleted ideas of his for jewelry and clothing and unbreakable athletic water bottles, all of them branded with Floss’s name. O
n the slide detailing cosmetics, mascara was spelled with twice as many s’s and r’s as it needed. There was choppy clip art of lipstick that made her heart sink into her legs.

  “I know the music isn’t synced up,” Danny said, “but you’re just practice. I’ll have it perfect before I show Floss.”

  Orla sat up, tugging the sheet around herself, and looked at him. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t what?” The song continued to play, though the presentation was stuck on its final slide, which read: AND MUCH MORE IN THE FUTURE! “I worked really hard on this,” he said, darkening. “Floss needs to be licensing. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table here.” He reached into his beat-up backpack, which sagged on the floor, and pulled out a book. Make Your Name Make You Rich: A Primer on Branding & Licensing, the title read. The cover pictured the author: a Lebanese man in a pin-striped suit and neat magenta pocket square. “It’s all here,” Danny said, tossing the book at her stomach—a little hard, she thought. “You should read this. It’s a business-category bestseller on Amazon.”

  Orla picked up the book. “I’ve met this guy,” she said. She couldn’t look at him. “He handles Floss’s licensing personally. They’re starting with a skin care line. Face by Floss.”

  Danny leaned forward and hooked his arms around his drawn-up knees. “Well,” he said after a moment. “She still needs someone on the ground.”

  Orla put a hand on his back. “It’s a huge undertaking,” she said. “You couldn’t do it with another job.”

  He looked back at her, harshly. “Maybe I won’t have that job much longer,” he said. “I’m starting to think about my next move.”

  Being with him had been perfect, eerily similar to what she imagined, until now. But now she realized that the strange thing about having a life she had built in a dream was that she had only dreamed so far. She had thought hundreds of times about the first time she would see him again, had thought thousands of times about their first kiss. Now she had run out of fantasy. But maybe, she thought, Danny’s plans went further than hers. Maybe she wasn’t the only one in the bed who knew what it was like to scheme toward something better. Who needed to hear they deserved it.

  “That’s cool,” she said limply.

  They didn’t talk about the PowerPoint again, but after that day, something tightened between them. Orla saw the way Danny ground his jaw when the crew bustled through the apartment, skirting him like he was furniture. One day, when he casually stayed next to Orla on the couch as the crew got set to roll, Mason looked up, annoyed, and said, “Hey, Orla, your boyfriend’s in the shot. Can we put him somewhere?”

  Danny shrugged afterward, wounded, and said, “It’s just that I want to be with you all the time.”

  She looked at the flannel shirt pulling apart at his chest, wearing thin at the elbows, and said, “Okay. I’ll fix it.”

  They went shopping, Amadou shuttling them at Orla’s direction. She nodded as the women she knew at each boutique, the ones who let her in the side doors, draped Danny in shawl-collar sweaters, blazers that curved snug around his shoulders, fitted jeans that fell on his scuffed Reeboks all wrong but on the buttery desert boots from the other side of the store just right. Danny hesitantly touched a pale gray cashmere sweater, and Orla nodded emphatically. Then she took him to the man who cut Aston’s waves. Danny watched with naked wonder as the stylist whipped his thinning spikes into a head of hair. The man tucked pomade and thickening treatments into a small white bag and handed it to Danny with a smile. “Much better,” he said. Orla paid with her credit card. She had had it out all day.

  After, they met the others at a restaurant on Downing Street. Orla led Danny down a narrow set of stairs to the basement, where the rest of them were already seated in a private, warm room off the kitchen, walled in with colonial brick and walnut. Orla could tell instantly that Floss and Aston were fighting. Floss had her elbow propped on the table. Her head sat in the curve between her thumb and index finger, the rest of her fingers spread, blocking Aston out of her sight. Aston kept rocking back so that the front legs of his chair reared into the air. He was frowning mournfully—until he saw Danny. He pulled him into a headlock. “Looking fresh, my man!” he shouted. Craig and Melissa looked up from their phones at Aston’s exclamation, reviewed Danny, and locked eyes with each other. They didn’t say anything to Orla, who sank into a chair next to Mason. The second her butt hit the seat, Mason turned to her and said, “Nope.”

  She spread her napkin across her lap. “What?”

  “Orla.” Mason took a forceful glug of his wine and grimaced as he swallowed. “I’m not putting him on the show.”

  “I’m not asking for him to have a starring role.” Orla sipped her water—it was flat. She found a bottle of Pellegrino and tipped it into a random empty glass. “I just wanted him to look presentable. So you wouldn’t have to shoot around him.”

  “And thank you so much for that,” Mason said. “But I’m gonna keep shooting around him.”

  “Shh,” Orla hissed. She thought she saw Danny’s ears stiffening toward their conversation. “Why?” she whispered, feeling desperate.

  Mason seized a roll—deep brown, with floured white diamonds—from the basket on the table. He tore it apart. “What Danny’s doing to you?” he said. “I’ve seen it a million times.”

  “What he’s doing to me?” Orla said. She gestured at Danny, the boy from home, redone in things that she had paid for to make him look like part of her life. “Does it really look to you like he’s running the show?” she said to Mason.

  Mason dipped his chin apologetically. “Of course it does,” he said. “Of course.”

  She wanted to protest, but Danny was changing seats, making his way around the table toward her. Before he reached her side, she leaned close to Mason, her hair almost falling into his glass, and said, “If you don’t need him, maybe you don’t need me, either.”

  Mason stared back plaintively. “That’s a possibility.”

  * * *

  Floss and Orla and Aston and Danny rode home after dinner together, silent as Amadou wound the SUV north. Floss and Aston sat with space between them in the middle, heads trained out their respective windows, while Orla bounced in the deep back, under Danny’s arm.

  A red light stopped them outside a shop with a pink-and-white marquee. The headless mannequin propped in the window wore a crisp navy suit. Danny crossed his hand over Orla’s neck and pointed, pushing her head uncomfortably to one side, at the dummy. “I like that,” he said. “Maybe we’ll check that place out tomorrow.”

  Floss turned around to face them, her flawless features washed in the ghost-story glow of her phone. “You really do have some nice new things, Danny,” she said. “Some real investment pieces.” She paused. “Now, tell me again. You work in a big fridge, right?”

  Orla’s face began to heat.

  “You get paid by the hour?” Floss pressed.

  “Shut up, Floss,” Aston snapped.

  Danny remained cool. “That’s right,” he said. “I manage a cold-storage warehouse. But if this is what you’re getting at—yeah, the clothes were a gift from Orla. A very generous gift.” He kissed Orla’s ear.

  The car stopped outside the girls’ building. Amadou got out and shut his door softly. They waited in silence for him to come around the other side.

  Floss was wearing a jacket hung with ivory feathers. The plumage trembled as she raised her finger in the air and moved it in a circle. “All of this,” she snapped, “is a gift from Orla. You’re in our world as her plus-one. Don’t forget that.”

  “Ignore her,” Orla ordered him. “She’s jealous.”

  And there it was, crushing her: Danny’s face didn’t look like it should. He wasn’t offended or embarrassed. She could swear that he almost looked hopeful. All of a sudden, she knew exactly what he thought she meant. The thin
g she had tried to keep from knowing—he’s using you to get to her—came tunneling up, unstoppable.

  “Not jealous of me, for being with you,” she said, correcting his mistake. “Jealous of you, for being with me. She used to have me all to herself.”

  Floss was smirking. She had seen Danny’s face, too.

  The door of the Escalade clicked open. Floss got out, then the boys, then Orla. She took Amadou’s hand. Adrenaline made her feet shake in her latest pair of shoes. They had a column, running up the front, of patent leather bows, deeper blood than the red of the sole, and though the salesgirl swore they were stronger than they looked, the spike beneath Orla’s foot felt too flimsy to rest her full weight on.

  Floss dawdled on the sidewalk, bitching at Aston as he held her wrists, looking angry. “I’m tired,” Orla heard him say. “I’m fucking tired, Floss.” A teenage boy passing by did a double take, then fished his phone out and snapped a photo without breaking stride.

  In the lobby, Danny ignored the doorman’s friendly eye. He followed Orla into the elevator and glared at her as he pushed the button. “You need to apologize to Floss,” he said.

  Orla looked at his reflection in the smudged metal panel. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she said.

  “You were way out of line.” His finger was still on the button, and Orla wondered why. Then the sound of Floss’s heels on the tile grew closer, and Orla realized Danny wasn’t pressing 6. He was holding down the button that kept the door open. He would hold it, for Floss, for as long as it took.

  * * *

  A few days later, Orla got her first injections. She felt like a sellout, but she didn’t have much choice after the Met Gala, to which she had worn the wrong gown. Insanely cut, it exposed the outer sides of both her thighs. Lady-ish took the lead on destroying her. Yale Girl had the byline. Her post featured pics of Orla’s legs in close-up, ostensibly to show the ugly beading on the dress’s crotch-bib hem. But the actual headline was the sight that went unmentioned: Orla’s thighs, stark white and pocked with cellulite from hip to knee. Not sure if her leg is the Titanic or the iceberg, but either way it’s fucking huge, a commenter had written. It was the kind of remark, Orla thought, that Ingrid used to take down instantly. But maybe she had made an exception.