Followers Page 19

  In any case: no matter how the Department of Info pleaded, Americans were keeping their likes to themselves, teaching their kids to do the same. This was the part that truly frightened the government. What if the internet they had built only lasted for one generation? That was where Honey came in. The exchange program was part of the effort to pry teens from the rest of the country away from how they’d been raised. If a kid came to Constellation and spent a year on camera, tasting attention, chances were she wouldn’t want to stop sharing her image and her voice when she got home. Maybe she’d start using Amerigram, get her friends hooked on it, too.

  It took Marlow years to see the irony in the way they called this program an exchange. Constellation never sent a child anywhere.

  Honey came from War, West Virginia. She swore the name of the town was real. She went to one of the spooky religious schools Marlow and her friends had only heard of in stories, the ones with sad-eyed pictures and gory statues in the classrooms—the man on the cross bleeding out of his side, the veiled woman whose virginity was discussed constantly, even by children, even in prayers. Honey’s parents technically survived the Spill, but it still killed them. When she was in fourth grade, the two of them drank too much at a party and got into a fight about one of their files. Her father shot her mother, then himself.

  Afterward, Honey and her brothers went to live with her grandparents. Her grandfather had been the last in a long line of Mitchell men to work in the Mountain Laurel mine. Now that it had been closed and gutted, he still worked there, in the underground theme park it had been turned into. He wore a red hat that said Mountain Laurel Family Funzone and ran a roller coaster all day long.

  Marlow could remember her eighth-grade teacher urging all of them to listen to Honey, saying she could teach them a lot about the history of America: about factories and assets chipped out of the ground, about sooty, grimy means of energy. She could remember Honey fixing the teacher with ice-cold eyes and saying, “It’s only history to you because you live out here and aren’t poor.” Honey wasn’t interested in being a counterpoint to clean power. She had come to Constellation in search of another kind of power: absolute.

  Her strategy for getting it was ragged at best, but her looks were on her side. When the pawns in question are ninth graders, what can a new girl in town not do? Especially one who has caught them off guard with her beauty. After years of the exchange, the Constellation kids had expectations for the students who came through it: they were usually rough or fat or knobby-kneed, covered in skin that looked like it had lived several lives. Invariably, their teeth overlapped.

  But Honey was perfect fruit. Her skin was peach-cream velvet. The hair that tumbled down her back was blond and full of curls that jostled and shone when she giggled. Short as she was, her legs seemed endless, and her breasts were high and formed. Marlow could still remember the sense of respect that overwhelmed her when she first saw those breasts. She believed that the way the girl filled out her bra meant she knew more than the rest of them.

  The queens of Marlow’s class aimed to become her gatekeepers, the ones who would tell the boys, Honey hates when you do that or Honey thinks you’re cute, you might have a shot. This way, the boys could not afford to neglect them altogether, these still-curveless girls they had grown up with.

  But Honey didn’t want anything to do with the girls who were popular at school. She wanted the ones who were popular with the audience. Though they were middling players in the eighth grade, Marlow and her best friend, Grace, were well watched across the country that year. As usual, it was hard to tell exactly why; while the appetites of adult Constellation fans were more consistent, the kid viewers treated the network’s junior talent like crushes, following and unfollowing them unpredictably. The surge in Grace’s numbers might have been because of the acoustic guitar covers she breathed directly into a camera in her bedroom, but it wasn’t anything dozens of other kids weren’t doing. Though Marlow did everything she could to set herself apart from Floss, the network’s cleavage-baring jester—she wore black lipstick, combat boots, and mercilessly tight twin braids—her numbers always seemed to grow in tandem with her mother’s, spiking when Floss did a Floss-like thing, such as tripping drunk into a bush or buying a nude sculpture for the front lawn. Whenever her mother did something vulgar, the very next thing she did was check her numbers and Marlow’s, muttering like a stage mom: “We’re doing so good today, baby.”

  When Honey walked over to Grace and Marlow, during lunch on her very first day, she held her tray and looked between them, waiting to see who would say something first. Marlow didn’t look up from her tofu. She had no interest in Honey Mitchell. The last thing she needed in her life was a peer who, just like her mother, acted bold and nervy and led with her breasts, making Marlow feel flat in every way.

  It was Grace who moved over on the bench—a silly thing to do, since their table was, but for them, empty. As Grace scooted down, Marlow watched Honey’s eyes moving from the spikes on Marlow’s boots to Grace’s shy, gapped grin. It was easy to see who was softer, who was more open to being shaped.

  Honey sat. She poked at her avocado toast and went on about a thing that had happened in class earlier, while Marlow was in the bathroom—a boy’s voice cracking in such a way that he sounded just like their lady principal. As Honey spoke, she faced Grace exclusively, leaving Marlow to stare at her ear. When Marlow tried to chime in, Honey just wiggled her eyebrows at Grace and said, “Yeah, you kind of had to be there.”

  When school ended that day, Honey followed her host family’s son—a shy piano prodigy whom Marlow felt sorry for, having to live with that rack in the next room. Marlow and Grace were walking the other way. Honey called over her shoulder, “Bye, G!”

  “G?” Marlow said to Grace.

  “For Grace, I guess she means.” Her friend studied the ground.

  By the next morning, Honey and Grace were a unit that Marlow floated outside of. On weekends, she spotted them from a distance, entering the spa and leaving the frozen yogurt shop. At school, she tried to ignore them quoting jokes she didn’t know the roots of. Grace only looked sorry about any of it if she ran into Marlow alone, like the time they were both in the bathroom and Marlow told the lie that set it all on course.

  She was washing her hands at the sink when Grace came out of the stall behind her. Their eyes met in the mirror. Grace looked, Marlow noticed, like she would rather turn around and drown in the toilet than talk to her.

  “You could come with us to this thing tonight if you want,” Grace said, but Marlow could see how hard she was hoping that Marlow would say no.

  So she said she couldn’t make it, along with the next thing that came into her head: she had plans with someone else.

  “Who?” Grace asked.

  Marlow felt an anxious flick. “Eva,” she said, without thinking. It was the name embossed on the box of pink slime soap bolted to the wall between them.

  Grace’s eyes shot down to the dispenser, back up. “Eva who?”

  Who knew where she got the next part? “Tree,” Marlow heard herself say, and then she silently shrieked every curse she could think of, in the order they came to her.

  “Eva Tree?” Grace extracted from her pocket a tube of tangerine-colored lip gloss. She had been wearing it every day, at Honey’s recommendation.

  “You don’t know her,” Marlow said. She ducked over the sink, trying to keep her burning face out of the mirror. “My parents are friends with her parents. She just moved to Pismo Beach. From Paris.”

  The week after Marlow invented Eva Tree, the school held its first dance of the year. Marlow didn’t want to go, but Floss insisted. “It’s my job to make you tough,” she said. “I’m not going to let you shut yourself in your room just because Grace is being a dick.” The logic checked out, parenting-wise, but Marlow saw panic in her mother’s eyes. She knew Floss had plans for the night that she didn�
�t want her daughter ruining.

  So Marlow went, and stood alone, her back against the cool pocked surface of the gymnasium wall. Honey had decided she and Grace would wear the same dress, and now Marlow watched them walk in, clad in the same strappy thing. The dress had a smattering of tiny pink paisleys and three pearly buttons at the chest.

  By the time Grace walked over to Marlow, with an hour left in the dance, Marlow knew what she should say. Meanness had been brewing in her stomach all night. It was time to let it taste the air.

  “The same dress as Honey?” she said, looking pointedly at Grace’s smooth chest. The top of the dress gapped over it. “I’m guessing that wasn’t your idea.”

  Grace lowered her eyes to the shell-shaped toes of her white sneakers. “I came over here to ask if you wanted to hang out after,” she said. “If we could go to your place.”

  It was how they spent Friday nights before Honey came: lying on Marlow’s bed, heads flung back over the edge, messaging boys to tease them as their long, thick hair brushed the carpet. Marlow felt her heart surge with unexpected hope. She let the version of herself she was trying out dissolve. “Okay, yeah,” she said. “We have lots of chips and stuff. I’m ready to go whenever.”

  “Great,” Grace said. When she looked up from her shoes, there was guilt in her eyes.

  “Great,” Honey repeated, appearing out of nowhere. She linked arms with Grace. “I’ll tell the guys,” Honey said, then added, “Tell Eva Tree to come, too.”

  They walked to Marlow’s house in a group of five, Marlow in the lead. Two well-liked boys, boys who had never noticed Marlow and Grace before Honey, came along. Each of them tried walking next to Marlow for a moment, gauging up close whether or not she was of interest. But she was nauseous with dread, too sick to smile or flirt, and soon they drifted backward, away. Once, Grace touched Marlow’s arm, and Marlow turned to hear what she had to say for herself. But Honey whined right away—“G, I need you”—and Grace fell back into her shadow.

  The group reached Marlow’s front door, fanning out behind her on the step. Marlow’s thumb was slick with sweat as she punched the code into the keypad. What would her father say when he saw who she was with: Grace in strange lipstick, two boys he didn’t know, and a half-woman girl from Appalachia?

  But the house was dark. Aston wasn’t home. Marlow’s stomach knotted as she walked around, waving on lamps. Her father was supposed to be here; she had heard her parents arranging it. She had been sure he would see her face and find a reason to kick them all out. She had been counting on him.

  When Marlow turned and padded back to the kitchen, the boys had the fridge door wide open, its otherworldly light and cold leaking into the room as they got out her father’s starchy beers and pored over the labels.

  “Buncha old-man IPAs,” one of the boys muttered, green eyes rolling high. Taylor, his name was. A jock. They both were. The other—Angel, who wore his hair in a boxy flattop—closed the fridge and handed the bottle in his hand to Honey. He hadn’t even taken a beer for himself, Marlow realized. Pathetic. She had entertained a crush on Angel earlier that year, and now she had an urge to call up her diary in her head, to swipe away all the passages concerning his smooth biceps and nut-colored eyes. She was forever editing her diary.

  Marlow looked over at Grace. She was doing what she always did when she first got to Marlow’s house: perching forward on a stool at the kitchen island, rearranging the fruit in the shallow wooden bowl. She would not meet Marlow’s eye.

  Honey rested the lip of her beer’s ridged cap against the island. She angled the bottom of the bottle toward herself and brought the heel of her palm down hard on the cap. It popped off the bottle and fell to the floor. Powdery chips of the countertop rained down after it.

  “So,” Honey said, over the trickle of steam. “Is Eva meeting us, or?”

  Marlow pulled herself up to sit on the counter. “I texted her and she can’t,” Marlow said curtly. “She’s stuck at home. She has to watch her little brother. Billy,” she added, almost giggling at her own recklessness. Where the fuck was her dad?

  “No big deal,” said Honey. She kept her eyes locked on Marlow as she raised the butt of the bottle and started to chug from it. Ten seconds went by, then nearly twenty, and still she didn’t stop. The beer trickled out both corners of Honey’s mouth and tunneled down her neck to her cleavage. Taylor’s eyes tracked the drip hungrily, but Marlow saw that Angel was frowning now, looking away. It was silent in the room but for a series of muffled yelps, like something tiny dying in a bag. It took Marlow a moment to place the sound: Honey’s rhythmic swallowing.

  Finally, the bottle was empty. Honey lowered it. She burped with a force that rattled her face. Taylor laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

  “So let’s go to her house,” Honey said.

  “Who?” asked Grace. It was like they couldn’t remember life before Honey chugged the beer.

  “Eva,” Honey said impatiently. She tossed the bottle into the sink and walked across the kitchen. She didn’t have to ask which door led to the garage. She grabbed the knob right away, like she had been there many times. She must have been a longtime follower, Marlow thought. She must have been a loyal fan.

  * * *

  The car Honey chose was one of Aston’s favorites, because of-fucking-course it was: a silver vintage Land Rover, retrofitted with autonomous everything.

  Honey was in what was still called the driver’s seat. Grace went for shotgun, but Honey tilted the world she had built by waving Grace off and summoning Marlow. So Grace was in the back seat, wedged between Angel and Taylor, who set their hands on the upholstery in just such a way that their pinkies grazed her thighs.

  “On,” Honey said to the car. To Marlow, she said, “What’s Eva’s address?”

  Marlow started to panic. She kept her eyes on the closed garage door.

  “Marlow.” Marlow felt Grace’s fingertips on her shoulder. “Just tell her the truth,” she said quietly. “Tell her Eva isn’t real.”

  “What’s she talking about, Marlow?” Honey pressed her palms into the wheel so that her arms went straight. She waited.

  Marlow tugged at her seat belt. “I don’t know the exact address.”

  Grace sighed.

  “Can’t you look her up on your map?” Honey said.

  “She—” Marlow straightened her spine. She had gone this far, and she rather liked the sound of the fib that came to her next. “Eva doesn’t use mapping,” she said. “It’s a French thing.”

  In the back seat, Taylor laughed again.

  “That’s okay.” Honey eased the car forward. Marlow’s heart began to pound. The garage door sensed the vehicle coming and slid up to let them out. Honey turned left out of the driveway, right onto the main road. “Grace says you claim she lives in Pismo Beach. Pismo Beach,” she said, loudly, to the navigation.

  “Go home,” Marlow countered at the same volume, and the car braked.

  “Cancel last command,” Honey said. It started moving again.

  “Honey.” Marlow leaned across the console, hoping no one could see her shake. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she said. “But we are not stealing my dad’s 2004 Land Rover and taking it to Pismo Beach. Do you know how much trouble we could get in? We’re fourteen. We don’t know how to drive.”

  Honey turned and looked at Marlow. She waggled her fingers above the wheel. “What exactly do you think you have to know?”

  Something shifted in the car then, the air drying up the same way it had when Honey chugged the beer. Marlow knew that all of them—Grace and Angel and Taylor—had to be thinking the same thing she was: Why hadn’t the network intervened yet? She did the mental math—all right, maybe the executives would look the other way on one beer. But grand theft auto? Talent welfare wouldn’t let this play out, would they?

  Ma
rlow was considering saying something. It would get her in trouble with her parents, it would get them all in trouble with the network, if she referenced, on camera, the fact that they were filming. But Marlow wondered, as Honey put the car on the freeway and pushed it to ninety, if it might save their lives, reminding this girl that people could see her.

  Then Honey fluffed both sides of her hair and winked at a spot on the dashboard. A spot where there was a camera embedded.

  Marlow’s stomach turned to ice. Honey, she realized, wanted to be watched. She saw Honey’s game laid out as clearly as the road in front of them. She pictured Honey at home, wanting badly to be noticed, having no real way to pursue her goal from her bedroom in West Virginia. Resolving to hijack the country’s biggest platform, its capital of fame: Constellation. She had come here to make herself a star, and this was her breakthrough moment.

  “Go. Home,” Marlow said again to the car, her voice chipping into something uneven.

  Honey looked at her like she was the most boring thing on the planet. “Automation off,” she said, then gripped the wheel and frowned. “This thing is dusty.”

  “Uh,” said Angel, “what’re you doing?”

  “Driving,” Honey said. “Some of us still know how.” And to prove it, she zigzagged the car in the lane, laughing as they tossed from side to side.

  Marlow started to yell then. She started to threaten. She said she would call the cops, then backtracked and said she’d called them already. Aston had antitheft on all of his cars, she cautioned. He had surely been alerted.

  “Then I guess he doesn’t care,” Honey said.

  Marlow unbuckled her seat belt. Without thinking, she lunged for the wheel and grabbed it, pulled it toward herself. The front part of the car careened toward the side of the road. Its back end went the other way, bucking toward the middle. Grace screamed, a deafening, unfaltering sound of fear.

  Honey put a hand on Marlow’s chest and pushed hard, thrusting her back to her side. She righted the car. “Hey, guys?” she said to the others, looking in the rearview mirror. “It’s incredibly dangerous for someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing to be messing with a car at these speeds. I think maybe Marlow is getting hysterical. We need to restrain her, or else we’ll crash.”