Followers Page 20

  Slumped against her window, Marlow panted.

  “What do you mean, restrain her?” Grace said uncertainly. “Maybe we should just pull over.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Honey said smoothly. “So let’s just do what’s safest.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “I know,” she went on. “Why don’t you boys put your belts around her hands and feet, so we can keep her safe till she calms down?”

  “That’s insane,” Grace said, her voice wobbling.

  “Oh, it’s totally not,” Honey said. “It’s actually what paramedics do in this kind of situation. I swear.” She looked at Taylor in the rearview mirror. “You guys do have belts on, right?”

  Taylor and Angel looked at each other. “I don’t know if—” Angel said.

  “It’s really the safest thing for all of us,” Honey insisted. “It’s what’s best for her right now.” Marlow saw the way Honey moved her face to find Taylor’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “And it’s not that much farther to the beach,” she said. “I cannot wait to get this dress off.”

  Marlow heard the tinkling of buckles coming apart.

  * * *

  “We’ll hang out here until you get in touch with Eva,” Honey said when she turned the car off. The Land Rover had tackled the dunes with ease and settled on a dark stretch of sand near the water.

  “Just tell her,” Grace whispered for the hundredth time, curling over her lap to talk into Marlow’s ear. She was holding Marlow’s head between her palms. Marlow didn’t answer. She had decided not to say another word. The last time she checked her followers, they had grown tenfold. Let the rest of them, Grace included, look like the biggest fucking assholes. Marlow would remain still and innocent. She focused all of her energy on trying to suck her stomach in, trying to find a way to hold her body, as they laid her across the back seat and left her, that wouldn’t look horrific on camera.

  “Everybody out,” Marlow heard Honey say. “She’ll feel better after she rests.” Then Marlow was alone in the car, counting four doors slamming, listening through glass to the thrum of the ocean. She was lying on the back seat with her wrists, which were tied with Angel’s brown belt, resting on her stomach in front of her. She grunted and lifted her feet into view. Taylor’s black belt was binding her ankles. After a while, she sat up, her stomach muscles burning with the effort, and saw that Honey had misjudged the tide. The waves were starting to lap at the car, foam collapsing in the tread of the tires.

  Down the beach, she saw Grace, on the sand by herself, arms wrapped around her knees. Angel squatted at the edge of the surf, his face tucked down on his chest, poking at the ground with a stick. Taylor was in the water with Honey. True to her word, she had taken off her dress. She jumped in and out of the waves in her sodden bra and underwear, her whole body quaking every few seconds. The Pacific’s cold, moron, Marlow thought. She remembered learning about the Atlantic in third grade. The outspoken teacher had taken some liberties, like the East Coast’s ocean was a rival team: “Brown, full of trash, piss-warm,” he had scoffed.

  She gingerly raised her arms, watching her wrists move as one. Her skin was starting to chafe beneath the leather. Outside, Honey jumped into Taylor’s arms suddenly, and he stumbled under her weight.

  Marlow remembered that it was dangerous to leave a child in the car with the windows up. Did that still apply to her? She didn’t feel like a child at the moment, but she was sure none of them were adults. If they were adults, they wouldn’t be here now—one of them would have been brave enough to speak up. She thought of the teacher who talked shit on the Atlantic. He had been dismissed that same year, disappearing from the enclave, for being too frank with her class about the Spill. She remembered what he said about why so many of the lives lost belonged to teenagers. It wasn’t just that they did everything online, he said. It wasn’t just that, unlike their parents, they didn’t know life before technology. It had nothing to do with their habits or the point in time when they were born. They died mostly because of factors that hadn’t changed over the course of human history—their still-developing brains and the manic chemicals pooled inside them. “Teenagers don’t really get that there’s a life beyond the moment,” the teacher said. “You know that phrase I’d rather die? Teenagers actually would.”

  * * *

  Marlow fell asleep sitting up. She woke up sometime later to a chorus of ragged breathing. Everyone was back in the car. She could just make out their forms: Honey and Taylor were crammed together beneath the wheel, lying back, reclined. Angel was folded neat and straight into the passenger seat. Grace sat in the back with Marlow, her cheek smashed on the opposite window.

  Marlow heard sloshing somewhere near her hips; the water must have reached the car’s wheel wells. Her device leaned suddenly into her wrist to let her know she had lost service. She wondered if, here, in the ocean’s shallow end, the car’s cameras had lost signal, too.

  She looked out the window, which was the same thing as closing her eyes. It was distant-from-anything dark outside. No lights on the beach. No moon. So this was what it was like, she thought, to feel abandoned. Marlow loved her parents—she did. She loved her father with ease and loved her mother with effort. But from a young age, perhaps from the first time she had seen how disappointed they looked when she stole out of bed and slipped into their parties, she had understood that both of them, as parents, topped out at half-functioning. She was able to love them anyway, because she knew there was a third thing keeping her safe: the network. Her followers. When Floss claimed to be stopping by a thing and came back two days later with a yacht-front sunburn, or when Aston got a message that he claimed was from his mother, but grinned in a way Marlow felt she shouldn’t see, she felt like the cameras were there, standing with her. It was the same at night, when her parents were usually gone; it was up to Marlow to put herself to bed, to shut down the house, and she never figured out a way to do it that didn’t mean she had to pass through some rooms in the dark. But she was never really afraid, the same way, when she got older, she was never afraid to walk down an empty street or to be caught, at a party, with the wrong boy on the wrong side of a closing door. Her whole life, Marlow had been sure that if she got into trouble, the network would protect her. But here she was, tied up in a drowning car, and no one was doing anything.

  She told herself the cameras weren’t working. They couldn’t be. If the network knew, they wouldn’t leave her. They prized drama, but not at this cost. She was sure. They’d have a placeholder card splashed over her feed, brightly claiming technical difficulties, as they tried to figure out how to help her.

  There was the sound of something landing on the roof.

  The others stirred but didn’t wake. Marlow listened. Whatever was on top of them was crawling the length of the car now. Two legs? Four? She counted. No, five. She looked up just as the thing dragged its silver belly over the moonroof. There was the toonk of glass on glass, and Marlow saw it then: an eye, all inky pupil, looking in at them.

  Suddenly, there was blinding light. Marlow saw everything she couldn’t see before: the way Taylor’s and Honey’s hair, nearly the same shade of blond, wove together and shone. The way Grace’s face had dried pink and brown, as if she had cried for hours. The way Angel’s hair rose, like a shadow, over the headrest.

  The thing on the roof had a voice that boomed through the glass. “This car has been identified as stolen,” it said. “Get out of the vehicle. Put your hands in the air.”

  The others were wriggling, turning pale, untangling themselves. But Marlow saw that Honey was frozen still, terrified. “Whatisitwhatisit,” she screamed, covering her eyes. “Police drone,” Taylor was saying over and over, until he was shouting it, furious. The explanation only seemed to scare Honey more. The drone slithered down the driver’s side window, looking for a culprit, and the next thing Marlow knew, Honey had hurled herself into the back seat. She huddled next to Ma
rlow, shaking.

  “Get the fuck off me,” Marlow said. The swear word felt good, a small pocket of pressure deflating, and she let herself have another one—she was that sure she wasn’t being broadcast. “Untie me, bitch,” she snapped at Honey, knocking her with her shoulder, but Honey only screeched and burrowed deeper into her. The others were tumbling out at the drone’s command, were wading with their arms up toward the human cops moving toward them, rifles raised. More cops skimmed the sand in a tank, its looped tires flattening the beach beneath them. Behind the tank, struggling mightily, was Aston’s low-slung red Porsche. Marlow watched as the car spun its wheels and gave up. It was still on, headlights shining, when her father got out of it. The sea breeze and the wind of the drone whipped his hair straight back from his face. A moment later, the Porsche’s passenger door opened, in several tentative movements, and a woman stepped out. Marlow couldn’t see her well, but she could tell that she was thin and staying out of things. So it definitely wasn’t her mother.

  The water began seeping into the car where Grace hadn’t closed the door right. Marlow looked down at it, pooling around their feet, and spit at Honey, “What, you’ve never seen a police drone?”

  You piece of redneck trash. She didn’t have to say that part; her tone left it curdling in the air. And she could tell that Honey heard it, that she knew the sound of words like that being meant without being said.

  “No,” Honey answered softly. For a moment, she sounded as young as the rest of them. But then she stared out the window for a long, rapt moment and turned back to Marlow with the look of a gun with one bullet left in the chamber.

  “Who’s that lady with your dad?” she said. She leaned so close that her nose brushed Marlow’s. A fleck of her spit landed on Marlow’s lower lip as she spoke—a fleck that Marlow had to let sit there, bound as she was. Two cops were running toward the car, the beams of their flashlights passing gold through Honey’s curls.

  Honey slid her face against Marlow’s until she was speaking right into her ear. “I mean,” Honey whispered, “if Aston even is your real dad. You don’t look anything like him, and your mom’s always been such a slut.”

  Marlow strained her arms and legs, trying one more time to break the belts. There was something rising in her. It reminded her of the time that sewage had backed up into their house through a drain in the basement floor. Aston had stood above a plumber and said, “Can’t we just cover the drain?” The plumber had squinted up at him like he was everything he was—rich, clueless, impatient with reality—and said, “You can cover this one. But the crap will find another way out.”

  The leather on her wrists and ankles didn’t budge, and Marlow saw that Honey was laughing. She was laughing as she started sitting back. “Such a slut,” she said, pulling away.

  Marlow opened her mouth like she was going to scream, then closed it, hard and fast, on Honey’s face. Her teeth sank into the pad of flesh between the spot where Honey rubbed blush on her cheek and the long curve of her jaw. Marlow heard Honey gasp. She felt her jerk and go still. Honey screeched, her words warped, like she was the one with a mouthful. “Marlow, fuck, stop it!” When Honey pushed away, something tore and stayed behind. It was still in Marlow’s mouth when she saw Honey looking horrified, scrambling backward to the seat’s other side. There was an oily pink patch on her face with tattered, uneven edges. Blood was rising, more than running, from it.

  Honey’s skin was still in her mouth as the police reached the car and pulled Honey out first. Marlow waited her turn. The throbbing scrap in her teeth waited, too, for her to spit or swallow.

  * * *

  Most of the cameras in the car hadn’t been working. One by one, as Honey drove them farther and farther from Constellation, they had lost their signals and gone off-line. But there was a camera in the dashboard—a sort of emergency option, with low-grade definition and no audio at all—that had still been transmitting video. Its angle missed the painful way Marlow’s hands and feet were cuffed. All the viewers could see was her head in Grace’s lap—all it seemed like, without the sound, was two friends fooling around. The camera was not as generous to the moment Marlow lunged at Honey. It captured Honey, looking terrified of the police drone, shaking and curling into Marlow. And then, in a violent flash, like a wildlife film, Marlow attacking, leading with her teeth, followed by Honey falling back, bitten. Marlow herself felt bile in the back of her mouth when a talent welfare officer played the scene for her, afterward. She had never seen herself on camera before—Constellation stars were prohibited from watching any of the content they made—and so at first she could almost convince herself it was someone else, someone who looked a bit like her, clamping down on Honey’s face. But she knew, deep down, she had done it; she remembered the taste.

  Kick her off the air! one of Marlow’s followers wrote. I check my feeds after a long day of REAL work in REAL America. I tune in for a laugh, not to see twisted little psychos.

  Heard that one girl was “eating” another one on camera and I’m pretty disappointed it was this LOL, said another.

  Someone else just wrote: Ur a monster.

  Everyone wanted Marlow’s family out. Marlow was turned away, the next week, at school. Parents stood in a line in the parking lot, keeping her from the doors. “Jealous nobodies!” Floss shrieked at them, purple-faced, bucking the car into reverse as Marlow slumped in the back seat. Aston was at City Hall that morning, getting reamed out by the network.

  “We’ll just move somewhere else,” he said when he got home. “We’ll go back to LA or New York, and...”

  “And get jobs?” Floss said. Marlow was sitting at the kitchen table with her head down. She heard the way Floss said “jobs.” Her voice was thick with uncertainty, the same way it sounded when she pretended to know French. She watched her mother get up and walk out the door.

  For days after that, Marlow stayed in her room and thought about that—the sound of her mother saying “jobs.” It brought back things she didn’t know she knew: vague memories of life before Constellation. She could see, in blurry hindsight, the hotels they had lived in when she was a little kid: the fancy ones, at first, where Floss loved being recognized, then the dingy ones where, when people came up to her, she pretended to be someone else. She recalled games of hide-and-seek, Aston springing at her from behind the ice machine, Floss holding her on rusted pool chairs late at night. Floss would sing to Marlow, to help her fall asleep—but then she’d seem insulted when Marlow did. “I only sing for you, you know,” Floss would say, annoyed. “Don’t you think Mommy has a pretty voice?” Marlow thought her mother had a beautiful voice, but she didn’t know then this was special. She figured all mothers had beautiful voices—it was nothing worth staying awake for. So she would nod off to the songs, then the sound of what they gave way to: Floss trying to talk herself into going on. “Look at this girl in your arms,” she would mutter. “She’s beautiful, and she’s yours. Hashtag blessed. So toughen up for her, Floss. Fucking toughen up now.”

  She remembered the hotels getting worse and worse until they landed in one so dirty, Floss tore the bedspreads off the beds and stuffed them right out the broken window. Floss took towels from the maid’s cart and laid them on the floor, mapping a path from the bed to the bathroom, forbidding Marlow to step anywhere else. She asked Aston, when she thought that Marlow was asleep, “What about your mother?” And he said: “Oh, no problem. I’ll just have to divorce you first. What about yours?” Floss didn’t answer.

  Marlow remembered feeling like that last motel room was swelling like a balloon, like she could see the walls warping outward from the pressure building inside them. And then, one day, at the height of the tension, Floss banged in with a brand-new look on her face and a brand-new bag on her arm. She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips. She said to Marlow and Aston, “We’re in.”

  “They liked the footage?” Aston said skeptically. He and Marlo
w had been playing scat on the walnut nightstand, laying discards down on top of the curse-word mosaic scratched into it. (The first time her father saw the profanity, he had turned to Marlow and sighed, “You can’t read yet, right? Let’s keep it that way. Don’t be trying to sound this stuff out.”)

  Floss dug her fists into her hips like a superhero. She had left the door to the room open and was silhouetted, now, against the hazy arid hills, the moping California traffic. “They loved it,” she said.

  Marlow looked down at her cards. They meant nothing to her; usually, she needed Aston to peer over the edge of her hand and tell her if she was close to twenty-one. Even when he saw her cards, he played on in good faith, like he hadn’t.

  Floss kicked the towels on the floor out of her way and walked across the room to them. “That birthday party was worth every penny,” she said as she sank down onto Marlow’s bed.

  Marlow put her arm around her mother’s waist. Privately, she disagreed. Her fifth birthday party, a few months before, had been an odd affair, with hushed lighting and down-tempo music. The guests were all children she had never met who seemed uncertain as to why they were there. A frightening cluster of men with cameras documented everything. Marlow noticed that, though it was her party, they seemed more interested in following her mother. This suspicion had been confirmed afterward, when she saw the footage, which her mother watched obsessively for weeks—searching for what, Marlow still couldn’t say.

  “We’re going to move to a new town,” Floss told Marlow, squeezing her. “A place no one’s ever lived before. They built it just for us. And when we get to our new house, we’ll be famous again. You, too.”