Followers Read online

  Ellis didn’t turn to look at her. “See how she jokes?” he said to the nurse. “She’s going to be fine.”

  The nurse nodded uneasily. “Right,” she said. “Well, it’s incredibly important—” the nurse trailed off, like she was listening to something come through her device, then nodded and squinted threateningly at Ellis “—that Marlow avoid stress completely during this time. Because she won’t have her normal defense system in place.”

  That night, the housekeeping drone whirred into their bedroom and set only half a pill on Marlow’s nightstand. Both of them looked at it. Ellis patted the blanket near where her leg was.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll just have to be vigilant about self-care. All you have to do is stay happy.”

  * * *

  A week later, Hysteryl was officially out of her system, the tiny dish beside her bed empty for the first time since she was fourteen.

  “You’re feeling good? Good girl,” Ellis said, scrutinizing her over his coffee, when she came into the kitchen each morning.

  And she was feeling good, at first. Then she began to feel strange, as if she was expanding, taking on new acreage too rapidly to keep up with her own topography. Feelings were returned to her like toys she hadn’t seen since childhood, and she held them awkwardly, unsure of what to do with them as an adult.

  Pettiness—at least, that was the best word she could think of for the sensation—came over her like hunger, several times a day.

  Once, in the middle of taking a bath, she stood up and sloshed naked into her bedroom, tugged Ellis’s snacks out from under the bed, and shoved every morsel down the garbage disposal. A few days later, she walked out of trivia night—a monthly outing with Ellis and their friends—after getting an answer wrong.

  “What’s the matter?” Ellis said, his voice deadly even, when he found her in the parking lot.

  “I hate trivia,” Marlow said. “I’m terrible at it.”

  Ellis ran his fingers slowly through his hair. He did this as often as he had when they met, though now he only had a third of the hair he had then. “You’re terrible at it,” he said, “because you’re not cheating. Everyone else is, you know.”

  Marlow stared at him. “What do you mean?” she said. “Cheating how?”

  Ellis held up his wrist. “We use our devices,” he said. “We just ask them the questions, and whoever’s fastest...”

  Here it came, with a force disproportionate to the moment: her anger. She imagined it black and crinkling, peeking out from all the places Hysteryl had long hidden it—behind her pink organs, between the gray folds of her brain. The trivia master made it clear before every game: No devices. Use the rest of your brain! “Everyone’s cheating?” Marlow repeated. “What’s the fun in that?”

  “The part where you win,” Ellis said. “Come on,” he added, somewhat sharply. “Don’t be sad.”

  “I’m not sad.” Marlow turned away from the window of the bar, so that her friends couldn’t see her face, even if twelve million strangers could. “I’m pissed.”

  Ellis shrugged and dug into his jeans pocket. “Then why are you crying?” he said.

  She took the tissue he handed her. She didn’t know she was.

  She went to Jacqueline’s again, for a mud mask party, and found her lungs constricting in the middle of it, her brain suddenly rattling with the sensation that she had wasted too much of her life here, watching Jacqueline smearing on things. She backed quietly toward the front door, then out of it. On her way to her car, she stopped at the line of vintage lawn flamingos in Jacqueline’s front yard.

  “What is the point of you?” she hissed at them, glaring into their black button eyes. Her hand twitched at her side. She knew, if she gave in to the urge, what would be waiting for her when she woke up: a note from the network, idling in her mind, warning that erratic behavior had been flagged on my feed, that commercial cutaway had been employed as a stopgap, that I should please restrict such behavior, in the future, to off-camera zones.

  She hauled off and slapped the plastic birds, every one of them, and felt savagely wronged when they didn’t fall. Jacqueline had staked them in firmly, and so they only bobbed, beaks glinting in the haze of the illumidrones waiting in the sky for someone on the ground to need them. When an illumidrone sensed a person walking in the dark, it swooped down to light a path, looking, from a distance, like a shooting star in descent. When she was young, Marlow remembered, that was what she thought they were. Another pretty thing she had misjudged.

  She toggled over to see what her followers were saying.

  She’s losing it again. Go bitch! Show them one-legged fuckers what’s up!

  What did those birds ever do to you Mar? LOL

  NOOOOOOO NO ONE WANTS TO WATCH ANOTHER PILL AD—PUT THE MARLOW FLAMINGO SMACKDOWN BACK ON!!!!!

  And:

  What I don’t get is how she’s so unhinged over this pregnancy thing, like it’s some big surprise. Course they were gonna give her one, with Ellis on that deal or whatever and her being thirty-fucking-five. Saw this “twist” coming a mile away.

  That was the thing about being the mouse in the maze, Marlow thought as the flamingos finished trembling, went still. She was the only one surprised by where she ended up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Orla

  New York, New York

  2015

  Right from the start, it was suspiciously easy. At least, Orla should have been suspicious of how easy it was, two girls hijacking the public eye from the floor of their Chelsea rental. Her mistake was seeing the ease—the way things ribboned out in front of her and Floss—as a sign she was on the right path.

  They started the way everyone did: they shared. Floss posted pictures online—of herself, her things, her food—constantly, as if she was someone whose meals became fascinating just by virtue of her being in front of them. Nobody ever said, as Orla worried they would, With respect, what do you do for a living? or Who dis bitch? Floss didn’t even have a proper bio on any of her platforms, just a quote: “There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity.” She had attributed it to Britney Spears before Orla plugged it into Google and found that it had been said by General Douglas MacArthur.

  One day, Floss prepared to post a Snapchat of herself explaining how to apply brow gel. “So fire,” she rehearsed, as she ran the brush across her arches. “So fi-yah.” A thought came to Orla, torn from the script of people more famous than Floss.

  “You know what I think you should do at the end?” Orla said. “Say that you don’t have a deal with them. The brow gel people. Say, like, ‘I swear, they’re not even paying me to say this.’”

  “Why?” Floss jammed the wand back into its bottle and stretched her eyes in the mirror.

  “Because then people will think that other brands do pay you,” Orla said. “To talk about their stuff.”

  That was at seven thirty in the morning. As Floss mulled the idea, Orla showered, then went to work. She was at her desk when Floss posted the video, at 8:45 a.m. “I’m not getting any money for this, either, you guys,” Floss sang dutifully. At 9:03 a.m., Orla sent the video to Ingrid, who popped her head out of her office thirty seconds later. Her lips were coral. Lady-ish had recently taken a firm stance on coral being the new red.

  “Orla,” Ingrid called, “why do I care this girl’s doing her eyebrows?”

  “It’s Floss Natuzzi,” Orla said. “She’s big on Insta? Plus, you know that hundred-dollar brow gel, from that Korean beauty line that doesn’t write anything on their packaging? It looks from the video like she might be one of the first stars here they sent it to.”

  It did look like that, because, just before stepping onto the elevator at home, Orla had run back to the apartment, scraped the lettering from an old Maybelline tube, and pressed it into Floss’s hand.

  “Fine,” Ingrid said, and
slid her door shut.

  At 9:27 a.m., Orla published the post: “Sooo What Does The World’s Most Expensive Brow Gel Actually Do? One Instagram It Girl Finds Out.” Then she cupped her phone in her hands and swiped to Floss’s Twitter account. As Floss, Orla tweeted the link to the post, tagging Lady-ish. She waited.

  Two minutes later, Orla got an email from Ingrid: Floss tweeted our post! What a SWEETHEART. RT from Lady-ish, pls. That was the thing about Ingrid: every semifamous person disgusted her right up until the second they threw her a bone.

  Orla used her computer to log into the Lady-ish account and retweeted the missive she had written as Floss. She quickly silenced her phone, muffling the incoming notifications of Floss’s new followers. It was 9:30 on the nose.

  That night, when Orla got home, Floss was waiting for her at the door. So was a crate of cream-flavored vodka, a pallet of whispery diet chips, and a dozen forty-dollar lipsticks, arranged like chocolates inside a black box.

  “This one came by messenger,” Floss said. “And he asked me for a selfie.”

  The more she tweeted, the less they spent. Orla found herself living almost entirely off Floss’s loot. Their apartment filled up with the sort of things Orla never would have chosen for herself—gluten-free freezer meals with a pop star’s face on the box, shoes downy with calf hair, purses pimpled with ostrich flesh—but she ate them and wore them eagerly, because they were free and they were proof: she and Floss were succeeding. The doorman never grinned at them anymore; “Package,” he said wearily, over and over, rising from his stool when he saw one of them coming. Orla sometimes slipped him bags of free cookies or chips, removing the hopeful notes from entry-level PR girls. Almost invariably, the girls were named Alyssa.

  Orla didn’t have time, most nights, to work on writing her book. As soon as she walked in the door, Floss would hand her a bowl of Apple Jacks for dinner. They would sit cross-legged on the parquet, a laptop between them, and work. Before long, Floss would be begged to attend all sorts of events, dozens a week—but in the meantime, she had found a way to hack into several publicists’ email accounts, to keep track of what invites were going around. She forwarded the invites to an address she made up for her imaginary publicist, Pat White. “Gender-neutral and forgettable,” she said of the name. As Pat, Orla RSVP’d Floss to events she hadn’t been asked to, saying she would be there, plus one. Floss made Orla swear she’d never tell anyone about the scheme. “I could get in trouble,” she said. But Orla knew that wasn’t it. Hacking required intelligence, and intelligence was off-brand.

  Orla was in charge of writing about Floss on Lady-ish, and of breaking down the shipping cardboard the free things came in, and of maintaining Floss’s Twitter account. She changed the password on it twice weekly, dutifully jumbling numbers and letters with asterisks and exclamation points. Of course, even as she concocted them, the passwords were already useless. It would almost make her laugh, later, after the Spill, remembering how she labored over those combinations. They all thought special characters would save them.

  One day, Orla got Floss to trend worldwide by lashing out at a snack company’s corporate account. The operative behind it had called a recipe for bruschetta made with its wheat crisps “an Italian wonder on par with the Sistine Chapel.” As Floss, Orla bombarded them with claims that the comparison offended her on behalf of Italians and Italian Americans, a “group that continues to be underestimated in culture”—even though Floss was only one-eighth Sicilian, half-Latina, and a few other things she claimed not to recall. The whole time her online ego was battling crackers, Floss herself was at the gym, doing arm day with a famous trainer who was very expensive, if one wasn’t sleeping with him. Orla didn’t even run the stunt by her. Floss’s identity had become a thing they shared respectfully, like the skim milk in the fridge.

  As Orla sat at her desk at Lady-ish, stabbing out a call to boycott the snack company from Floss’s handle, Ingrid instant-messaged her: Did you see Floss going APESHIT about racist crackers? THREAD, she wrote, linking Orla to Orla’s own handiwork. Go ahead and post. Dude, you practically invented her.

  Orla thought, You have no idea. She was electric with adrenaline. All these years in the city, she had been telling herself, in the bathroom mirror, that she was a modern woman, chasing modern goals. But sometimes, as her subway car went through the tunnel, she’d catch a glimpse of herself in its smudged glass window, and see herself the way the world did: another girl with a dream and a hemline set precisely knee-high, low enough that no catcaller should notice it, that no coworker should factor it into her credibility. There, on the darkest part of the ride, as the train nearly kissed the one running parallel, Orla often caught her breath at how dispensable she looked.

  But now, with nothing but her job and her phone and her instincts, she had claimed a minor superpower: she had made someone famous just by saying it was so.

  Better yet: she had made herself a friend. When they got ready to go out, Floss shouted from down the hall, over their deafening playlists, “What are we wearing tonight? I hate all my clothes!” When they ordered Chinese food, Floss let Orla have both fortune cookies. Floss thought they were bullshit, that her fate was hers to shape—plus, she didn’t do carbs. But Orla still thought it was generous. Not wanting something didn’t make it easy to give it away.

  She would get back to writing her book soon, but for now she was busy being important, busy not being lonely. The change she had yearned for was dawning around her. She was waiting for just one more thing.

  Danny.

  * * *

  One morning, as Floss and Orla napped off hangovers, the doorman rang the white phone on their wall. Orla picked herself up off the sofa and got it. “Be right down,” she mumbled automatically.

  “No deliveries, Miss Orla. It’s Sunday,” he said. “Your mother and father are here, okay?”

  “Okay,” Orla said. She hung up, and flew across the floor to Floss, who was curled on the love seat, one breast easing free of her black satin nightie. Orla squatted down. “Hey, my parents are here. Can you...?”

  “Your parents?” Floss was awake immediately, gathering herself, making a break for her room. “Why?” she said harshly, over her shoulder.

  Orla flushed with anger—not at her roommate, but at her parents, for puncturing their world. Orla was steering the tides of celebrity; she didn’t need her mother to bring her Tupperwares of plain grilled chicken breasts, which Gayle would unbag while saying, “You need your protein, and I know you won’t go to the trouble yourself.”

  Orla opened the door. Gayle and Jerry snapped their heads toward her as if she’d startled them, two pairs of eyebrows clutching toward each other with concern. This was how her parents had been greeting her since the days of them meeting her at the school bus: like they had spent all day discussing her worrisome behavior.

  “Surprise!” her father said, grabbing Orla by the shoulders and kneading them.

  “Hel-lo,” her mother murmured, in her strangely formal way, reaching around Orla not so much to hug her but to lightly tap the base of her neck. She was wearing a hunter green long-sleeved shirt and an aggressively plaid vest. Orla’s father wore beaten khakis, the black sneakers he passed off as dress shoes, and an old suit shirt with a drooping collar. When his dress shirts wore out, instead of getting rid of them, Jerry demoted them to casualwear.

  “You should have seen us getting down here,” Gayle sighed, smoothing back her dyed-cranberry bangs. “We sure stuck out.”

  “You mean because it’s eighty degrees out?” Orla said, eyeing the vest. But she knew what Gayle meant. Orla came from Mifflin, Pennsylvania, a town smack between New York and Philadelphia—growing up, she had gone to the zoos in both cities on field trips. Mifflin had been nothing but fields strung together by farms until the 1980s, when families like Orla’s descended, slapping up vinyl siding everywhere. Their neighborhood had sidewalks and young
trees and a superfluous name, embossed on a concrete block at the turn-in: Hidden Ponds. (The one semiboyfriend Orla had ever brought home from the city had stood in her driveway, looking at all the short grass and macadam, and said, “They hid those ponds pretty well.”) Still, Orla’s parents pretended they had nothing to do with suburban sprawl. They did imitations of people who worked the earth. Gayle stomped around in rain boots all year and wore clothes she ordered from a catalog that had a mallard on the front. Her father puttered and fussed over their half-acre lawn and four tomato plants as if it was his job. “Frost tonight,” Orla could recall Jerry, a CPA, saying wistfully throughout her childhood, as if they might not eat. Gayle would call Orla in from the yard for dinner by ringing a large bell she had nailed to a beam near the back door. “6:00 p.m., supper’s on!” she’d shout. The kids in the adjacent yards would freeze, kickballs in hand, and blink at Orla. “Why does she do that?” one of them asked Orla once as they tugged at a tangle of Barbies. “So I know what time it is,” Orla said. The girl pointed at the CoreStates Bank on the other side of the cypresses at the back of the development. The bank’s tall sign blinked 6:01 at them in red. “The rest of us just use that,” she said.

  After depositing the chicken breasts in Orla’s fridge, Gayle looked around the apartment, surveying the flattened boxes piled at the door. “What’s all this?” she said.

  Orla handed each of them a glass of water. Her dad pulled out his hankie, dipped it in, and wiped his balding head. “I don’t know,” Orla said. “They’re my roommate’s.” In her room, Floss was soundless, not even her phone daring to chime.

  Gayle lifted the flap on one of the boxes, trying to read the label.

  “Mom,” Orla hissed. “I said they’re not mine.”

  “Just checking,” Gayle said. “If you had a shopping addiction, you’d tell us, wouldn’t you?”