Читать книгу: «Followers»

CHAPTER FIVE

Orla

New York, New York2015

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?”

“Yes, Mom,” Orla said.

“Because you remember the year Aunt Diane gave us all those strange gifts? Your dad got the turkey fryer?”

“I liked that,” Jerry said tonelessly.

“And you got those black pearl earrings,” Gayle said severely to Orla, “but they weren’t real pearls.”

“I don’t have a shopping addiction, Mom.” Orla began the strenuous mental exercise of trying to come up with a restaurant that was inexpensive, close enough to walk to, and stocked with normal bread baskets, not focaccia or olive loaf or anything that might make her mother say, derisively, “Ooh la la.”

“Because it’s in our blood. That’s all I’m saying.” Gayle sniffed.

Ten minutes later: “Ooh la la,” Gayle said as the waitress set down the bread basket.

Orla sighed. “But it’s just rolls.”

Gayle pointed at the dish next to the basket, which, instead of wrapped pats of butter, held a pool of oil and herbs for dipping.

“How’s the job?” Jerry said to Orla. “Working on anything interesting?” Jerry had no idea what Orla wrote about, and they both preferred it that way. He could keep telling his coworkers that Orla was “a culture writer” if he didn’t see things like “How to Copy This Socialite Goddess’s Distressed Booty Jean Shorts in Just 13 Steps.”

Gayle, who liked to share Orla’s posts on Facebook, flapped her napkin at him. “Jerry, that’s girl stuff,” she said, like Orla’s job was a box of tampons. “She doesn’t want to talk about that with you.” Gayle pinched a piece of bread between her thumb and forefinger. “Anyway,” she said. “Guess who I saw the other day? Catherine. And Danny.”

Orla’s heart tripped. She made a show of chewing for a moment, then, when she trusted her voice to come out right, said: “And how are they?”

“To be honest with you,” Gayle said, “they seemed extremely unhappy.”

Orla could feel the blotches starting up her chest. She prayed Gayle wouldn’t notice. She could never be sure, then or now, how much her mother knew about then. Or now. “What do you mean?” she said. “How could you tell?”

Before Gayle could answer, Jerry knocked his fork off the table with his elbow and looked at Gayle helplessly. Instead of signaling for the waiter, Gayle got up, approached the wait station, and retrieved a new set of silverware. “Well,” she said, unwrapping the utensils for Jerry, “they made quite a scene at Chick-fil-A. Maybe it’d be nothing in these parts.” She looked pointedly at two men holding hands across the corner table. “They were fighting, and she...”

“She what?” Orla jumped in, forgetting to act like she didn’t care.

“She was screaming,” Gayle said. “At the top of her lungs.”

“Catherine was screaming?” Orla pictured Catherine, with her slicked-back soccer-girl braid, always pulling at Orla’s arm as soon as they got to a party, whimpering Let’s go, I know the cops are gonna come.

“Evidently,” Gayle said, “she wanted Danny to pray with her over their meals. And he wouldn’t.”

Jerry swallowed and laughed to himself without looking up.

Orla had noticed a religious tinge to Catherine’s online presence, the last time she browsed. This was the term Orla clung to—browse had a light touch, a whiff of the happenstance—as she bored through everything she could find on Danny, sucking her ice cream spoon in the light of her laptop. She recalled an Instagram photo of a sunset, shot from Danny and Catherine’s backyard, just a few miles from her parents’ house, and the photo’s caption: When something beautiful happens and you just can’t help but thank Him. #nofilter.

Gayle watched Orla carefully as she said: “When he got her calmed down, she said, ‘This is why I can’t be with you anymore.’”

Orla’s fingers itched. She needed to get rid of them, get back to the apartment, get online. Since she and Floss began working together, she had been spending fewer nights looking up Danny. But it didn’t really matter how much time she spent clicking around his life, how many times she entered his name into a search box or how many days she managed not to. She was always waiting, still.

Jerry shook the empty little cylinder and called out, “Salt?” The waitress came over to refill it and got trapped in Gayle’s signature rant on allergies (she did not have any; she just wanted to establish that she thought people invented them these days. People needed to toughen up about peanuts and gluten, that was all). The waitress looked to Orla for aid, but Orla was glad for the distraction. She let the letters on the menu blur in front of her and thought about Danny, the last time she ever spoke to him.

They were at a party, the night before high school graduation. The party was at the home of a kid named Ian, whose parents were never there. Neither, usually, were Orla and Catherine. Gayle and Jerry never had to police Orla’s whereabouts; her best friend was frightened of everything. But they were graduating, Orla insisted to Catherine, and they wouldn’t want to look back and remember that they had spent the last night of high school making Cheez Whiz nachos and rewatching Austin Powers. “We’ll bring Danny,” Orla added, feeling bold. “Danny won’t let anything happen.” Finally, Catherine gave in.

Danny drove them. Catherine slid into the front seat, and he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. He made sure her seat belt was clicked in right. Orla watched from her place in the back—behind Catherine, where she could see him.

It was simple: Orla had always loved him. She had loved him since the first day of ninth grade, when she and Catherine, allies from middle school, sat next to each other in English. Danny sat in a desk on the other side of the room. His arms were pale and muscled, folded across a wordless gray T-shirt on a day everyone else had picked their clothes like their lives depended on them. When he twisted around to look, at the teacher’s urging, at a how-to chart on bibliographies, his dark blue eyes locked on Orla’s pale brown ones, and that was what she would always remember: the way he was willing to stare, when so many boys nearly wet themselves from eye contact. Orla looked at him, and he looked back at her, and she wished the teacher would never shut up about how to cite sources.

Afterward, Catherine turned to Orla in the hallway, red as an angry infant, and said, “Did you see him?”

And Orla said, “I know.”

They were talking quietly, because he was behind them, all of them shuffling toward next period, struggling to hold the map of the school in their heads. Catherine turned quickly, as if she needed to do it before she lost her courage. Her braid grazed Orla’s face, a quick, bristling lash. “Hi,” Catherine said to Danny. “Do you know which way Upper B is?” Danny glanced once at Orla, then nodded and started speaking to Catherine. Simple again: Danny and Catherine started dating that weekend, and never stopped.

Orla could have raged or cried or sabotaged them, but she was strangely content to orbit them instead. For four years, she joined Danny and Catherine for movies and camping trips and felt only shallow pangs when they went into one tent, and she went into the other. She dated plenty of his friends, was always happy to take on another for the pleasure of Danny leaning against her locker, grinning, his hand on her shoulder as he joked, “Be nice to this one.” They spent high school in the same carpeted basements and starry parking lots, under the arms of different people. And as Danny and Catherine synced up their applications to state schools, Orla never tried a thing, never made an advance, never confessed. She was already writing him into the story of her life later on. She had it all planned: she was going to be a New Yorker, an author with chic glasses and a grip on what to do with her disorderly hair. At seventeen, she went to bed dreaming not of going to prom with Danny, but of him knocking on the door of her brownstone. She bundled him together with success and self-confidence—things from the future—and her ability to wait for them made her feel brave and pure and wise, like a monk. Catherine often told the story of how she and Danny met. “He stared at me all through freshman English on the first day of school,” she would say, turning to her best friend for backup. “Ask Orla. She was there.” Orla would nod and murmur, “It’s true. I was there.” But the truth, the smooth and immutable fact that propelled her through each day, was that Danny’s gaze had been on her first.

At Ian’s pre-graduation party, Catherine gulped Mad Dog too fast from a jelly jar with Lion King characters on it. Danny and Orla put her to sleep in the only untrashed room of the house, atop Ian’s parents’ plain navy quilt. Danny sandwiched Catherine between pillows, propping her on her side in case she threw up. When they got back downstairs, the other kids had all passed out or gone home, abandoning the strobe light that sat blinking on a card table. Orla was starving. Danny suggested they go back into town, to Wawa, for hoagies.

When they left the store, bags swinging, Orla thought they would head right back to watch Catherine, but Danny felt like a drive. Orla, sitting in the front seat for once, touched the gearshift and said, “I wish I could drive stick.” She wished no such thing; she couldn’t have cared less. But she was always on the lookout for ways to seem interesting.

Without taking his eyes off the road, Danny had covered her hand with his and left it there as he guided the car through its powers. Orla hadn’t said a thing, hadn’t moved, hadn’t breathed. He was driving too fast, she thought, drifting too close to the yellow line, getting careless on hairpin curves. She had never felt safer in her life.

When they got back, they sat on Ian’s porch, eating and talking. Orla had given Danny a book a few weeks earlier, a whiny teenage manifesto she took as gospel at the time. “I loved it,” he said. “I tried to get Catherine to read it, but I don’t think she got it.” He looked out past the porch rail as if there were a great vista in front of them, though the house across from Ian’s was only thirty feet out. A string of Christmas lights, half-burned-out, still drooped from its eaves. “It’ll be our thing,” Danny said.

Inside, they found Catherine sleeping deeply. Danny felt for her breath with his hand, then crawled into bed beside her. Orla collapsed on the floor, and Danny pulled the pillow from beneath his neck and tossed it down. “Are you gonna remember us, Orla?” he said quietly.

Orla’s heart pounded in her throat as she wondered, briefly, if she had done it all wrong, being brave and pure and wise, if she should withdraw from her fancy mountainside college, or beg him to come along. Like the seventeen-year-old girl she was, she believed him full of potential that was invisible to everyone but her.

“Who’s us?” she said finally.

Danny was half-asleep when he answered. “All of us,” he said. “You know, you’re gonna be somewhere else, you’ll be this writer, and...” He paused, gave a long moan of a yawn. “I’ll be like, ‘I know her.’”

The next morning, after the principal and class president were finished, Orla had to give a speech. She had served as class vice president after running unopposed, at Gayle’s insistence, for the sake of her college applications. Onstage with her speech, a single-spaced printout of metaphors that didn’t quite land, Orla spoke slowly, hoping Danny and Catherine might show up by the end. But their seats were still empty when she finished.

A few hours after graduation, the phone rang at Orla’s house. It was Catherine. Though both girls had cell phones by then, they still called each other’s homes, a habit both formal and intimate, proud proof of their long friendship. Catherine was shaky with guilt. She had been sick from drinking all morning, she said. Then she had gone to the car wash with Danny, to wait with him while he had his car detailed. She had vomited, on the way home from Ian’s, all over the passenger seat.

“Was I awful?” Catherine said. “At the party?”

“Not awful,” Orla said. She drew the word out carefully, as if Catherine had really embarrassed herself and Orla was sparing her the truth.

“I feel terrible I missed your speech.” Catherine’s voice was gaspy in the receiver, the way it got when she was headed for a cry. “Are we okay?”

“Sure,” Orla said. Nothing else. She listened to Catherine’s trembling sighs on the other end, the sound of her waiting for Orla to comfort her. But all she could think of was Catherine puking in Danny’s car, on the seat that had been hers in the middle of the night. She tucked the receiver under her chin and stayed stingily silent.

When Orla hung up, she saw Gayle in her bedroom doorway, holding the lidded plastic tub that would live under Orla’s bed at Lehigh. “You have so much going for you, Orla,” Gayle said. “Let Catherine have what Catherine has.”

Summer drifted past, and Orla made excuses not to see Catherine. They said shallow precollege goodbyes over the phone. Orla hadn’t lied, when Catherine asked; they were okay. She wasn’t angry. She just didn’t see the point of staying close. Her feelings for Danny had been validated—I’ll be like, I know her. He wanted to see how she was going to turn out. No matter where the story went from here, Orla thought, Catherine was destined to be a footnote.

College became the place she started watching him, because college was the place she started being alone. For no reason Orla could see, the girls on her freshman-year dorm floor looked around her as if by agreement. Her roommate mumbled something about a sleeping problem and transferred elsewhere in October, just weeks after she and Orla had agreed, with the rusty manners of two girls who have always had their own rooms, where to put the posters and the minifridge. After the roommate’s furniture was removed, Orla vowed each day to plant her feet in front of one of her hallmates and say, “I have a single now, you know, if you guys want to drink in my room tonight.” But—perhaps because they mostly saw each other while wearing only towels—she never found the bravery.

By the time fall break began, the borders of cliques were bonded and set. Orla could hear groups of friends moving outside the door she no longer kept propped hopefully open, as her orientation counselor had advised. She heard them going to breakfast late without her, going to dinner early without her, going to parties loudly without her. Her aloneness was so random, so total and unprovoked, that she almost thought someone from the school would come along to smooth it out, the way they might a housing mix-up, or a schedule snafu. Just before winter break, she tried to join a sorority, walking into an information session to find two hundred girls in the nearly same black pointed boots, ink-blue jeans, and tartan scarves. Only one other girl in the room was not wearing some version of this look: a girl from India whom Orla recognized from her discrete math class. An eager blonde who had been talking to the Indian girl, enunciating loudly, turned to Orla when she sat down. She assessed Orla’s Lehigh hoodie and sky blue denim, the plastic claw in her hair. “And what country are you from?” the blonde said loudly.

By spring, Orla was leaning into isolation. She sold her meal plan on the student exchange website and took to eating buffalo wings in her room. She worked her way through Sex and the City on DVD. She wrote: short stories, song lyrics, never-ending screenplays. And, as more and more ways to do it were invented, she kept up with Danny. She would write for four minutes, then refresh Danny’s Myspace. She would falter on a passage, then toggle over to stare at his screen name on her Instant Messenger buddy list, watching the letters go from black to gray when he found something better to do.

The semesters turned into the next ones, and nothing changed. Once, Orla saw the Indian girl from the sorority meeting in the student union. She walked toward the girl, an opener gathering itself in her mind—Remember that night, how crazy was that, like was there a Burberry memo we missed? But as she got closer, a harried redhead ran up and punched the arm of the Indian girl. They found a table and unzipped their jackets. Orla saw that the Indian girl had on the right scarf, the right jeans and boots. And a crew-necked sweatshirt with Greek letters, denoting Alpha Phi.

When she went home on breaks, Orla would sometimes glance up at the ring of her parents’ landline. But, after a school year’s worth of silence, Catherine had started to text her. She would send Orla canned messages on holidays—happy this or that, and hi to your parents—and each girl would ask how the other had been. What could really be said that way? Twice, Orla snuffed out an exchange by saying, with a smiley, “Nothing new to report!” Facebook had not yet reached Catherine’s lower-tier state school, but Orla didn’t need it; she could picture how well her friend had moved on. She imagined Catherine’s soccer teammates with tight stomachs and clean faces, fussing over Danny the first time he came to visit. She imagined them teasing Catherine about being a lightweight, and putting her gently to bed when she proved them right. There was only one thing she really wondered about her old friend: how long she and Danny would be together.

She got the answer she wanted a few weeks after college graduation. Orla moved straight back to Mifflin, to make good on a deal she had struck with her parents: she would live at home and work locally for one year, to save money before moving to New York. She had secured a job covering town council meetings for the newspaper that fell on Mifflin’s doorsteps.

One night, a week before she was due to start at the paper, Orla ran into Catherine while picking up takeout at TGI Fridays. (Jerry was fond of saying that the chain’s Jack Daniel’s chicken was the best dinner on earth, that “you”—who “you” was had never quite been defined—“can keep your Michelin-star joints.”) When their eyes met, Orla was holding her father’s credit card, and Catherine was holding a drink with a flashing scrotum plunged into the ice.

“It’s my bachelorette party!” she crowed, grabbing Orla’s elbow to anchor herself. “Danny and I are getting married next month.” Her eyes widened and she dug her fingers into Orla’s arm. “Stay!” she pleaded. “Hang out.” Orla phoned home, hoping for an out, but Gayle joyfully insisted that Orla forget about bringing home the food and enjoy herself.

Catherine’s soccer friends—there were three of them—looked exactly as Orla had envisioned. They were bright and healthy, sculpted muscle covered in skin that was somehow tanned and freckled at once. They all had hair that looked like it was only worn down on special nights like this—too long, too limp, and vaguely damp-seeming, but somehow on the whole not unappealing. Catherine fit with them perfectly, Orla thought, though it was her old friend who, for once, had a good haircut. Catherine’s braid was gone, replaced by a pretty bob, the golden ends of which twisted into her mouth as she spoke.

“This is Orla,” Catherine said, and Orla didn’t miss what happened next. The friends’ eyes narrowed at the mention of her name. They looked at each other. They straightened. It was obvious: they had heard, at an earlier time, a memorable explanation of who she was.

Orla took her penis straw. She endured the torrent of inside jokes. She was careful not to let anyone catch her looking at the clock. Catherine more or less ignored her for the rest of the night, until it finally ended and the bossiest of the soccer girls jingled her keys. “Okay,” she said to Catherine, taking the drink right out of her hand. “Let’s get you home.”

Catherine shook her head. “It’s out of your way,” she said. “Orla will take me.”

Orla had her car from high school—the boxy, cat-eyed Taurus. She watched as Catherine popped open the glove compartment, an automatic reflex, and pulled out the little book of Orla’s old burned CDs. “The one with the Incubus,” she slurred, rifling.

“I forgot those were in there,” Orla said. She was surprised to find herself suddenly on the edge of tears, and grateful that Catherine seemed too drunk to notice, her index finger swaying as she pointed out the turns.

The house was a small brick Cape with white metal awnings over the windows and a black horse and buggy embedded in the screen door. “Wait here a minute,” Catherine said. She got out of the car and stomped toward the house, missing every bluestone paver in the path. Mulch splintered upward as her heels sank into the earth. The concrete stoop’s metal railing wobbled as she gripped it.

He’s in there, Orla was thinking, her eyes on the front window. Danny is in there.

And then she saw him, rising from the couch opposite the window to answer Catherine’s knocks. He rubbed his eyes as he ambled across the room. The light was behind him; all Orla saw was his outline, the shadows of his features. He opened the door and looked out through the screen, but Catherine prodded him back as she pushed inside the house and pulled the door shut behind her. Orla gripped the wheel. Was she still supposed to wait?

A minute later, Catherine reappeared. She stumbled back toward the car. In her hand was an envelope, rimmed in black-and-white damask. She got back in the car and thrust it at Orla. Orla clicked on the overhead light and disassembled it quickly. The card she pulled out began: “Together with our families, Daniel and Catherine...”

“Oh,” she said. “Catherine, that’s—You don’t have to.” She tilted the wedding invitation. Even in the dim light, she could see that the words were slightly askew, cocked toward the top right corner of the card. Catherine must have printed these herself. The lump in Orla’s throat grew, and she realized suddenly why it was there: she did not want to go to this wedding, she did not intend to go to this wedding. But the gesture overwhelmed her; she had been so cruel, and Catherine was being so nice to her. At least, that was what she thought until Catherine started speaking again. Her voice was suddenly so intense, so oddly charged, that Orla looked up, as startled as if she had screamed.

“You were at the bachelorette party,” Catherine said, “so it’s only proper you’re invited.” Orla watched as she opened the glove compartment again and began to rummage through it. After a moment, she found what she was looking for—a pen—and handed it to Orla point first, stabbing the small glinting end at her palm. She nodded at the invitation. “Just pick your entrée now,” she said. “Save you the stamp.”

Orla swallowed and looked toward the house. The couch was vacant now, the room surrounding it dark.

“He’s not coming out,” Catherine said. She lifted her arm to the edge of the car door and rested it there, where the window was all the way down. She dragged her nails back and forth on the vinyl. She smiled at Orla—a knowing smile. “He’s not coming out to see you.”

The lump in Orla’s throat dried up, chased away by a settling calm. She felt the same way she did when she sat down to an exam she was well prepared for. Whatever theory Catherine had, right or wrong, was just that: a theory, lacking evidence. Orla had been so careful not to create any evidence, and she was not going to stammer.

She looked at Catherine. “Of course he’s not,” she said evenly. “It’s late.” She looked down at the invitation and scratched her finger over the date. “I’m not sure I can make it, actually.”

Catherine cut her off with a laugh. She clapped a hand to her mouth, like she hadn’t meant to let the sound out, then dropped it and giggled again. “But where would you be?” she said. “I know you always thought you’d be somewhere else, but you’re here. You’re around.” She grabbed the card back, then the pen. She clicked its point in and out, in and out. “Chicken or steak, Orla?”

“I’ll have to check the date,” Orla said.

Catherine snorted. She made a violent X next to the steak option. She got out and slammed the door, leaned down near the open window. “I’m glad you’re coming, Orla,” she said. “I think it’s important you be there to see this.”

But Orla wasn’t there to see it. The Monday after she ran into Catherine, she emailed the newspaper editor who was meant to be her boss. Something had come up, she explained. Something undeniable. Gayle was apoplectic about Orla reneging on the offer; she left the editor her own rambling voice mail, spelling her full name and saying that she had raised her daughter better than this.

A week later, Orla agreed to sublet a room that didn’t exist yet from a girl named Jeannette in Chelsea. Jeannette explained it over and over: the place was a one-bedroom, and she’d wanted to live there alone, but she found she couldn’t afford it and needed someone else to chip in. Did Orla understand—she would have to put up a wall in the living room to box off some space for herself. Orla said she got it, she didn’t mind, and yes, she understood: the cost of the wall was hers to bear.

On the morning of Catherine and Danny’s wedding, Orla and Jerry set out in a U-Haul for Manhattan. Orla waited to call the bride until the skyline was close enough to touch, mirror gray on her right as the rented truck rumbled toward Jersey City. She told Catherine the same thing she told her parents: she’d gotten a job at a website. Soon enough it would be true—within months, she would find the job that would turn into the job that turned into Lady-ish. But just at that moment, it was a lie. Orla had funded the check for Jeannette by cashing in all her old savings bonds, the brittle peach stubs given by grandparents and godparents on the milestone days of her premillennium childhood: baptism, birthdays, eighth-grade graduation. “These haven’t fully matured yet,” the bank clerk warned Orla, “if you want to wait.” Orla didn’t want to wait. She asked for all of it in cash.

Let Catherine have what Catherine has, her mother had said years ago. But wasn’t that exactly what Orla had been doing? She was letting Catherine have Danny until Orla became the person he predicted. And that was who she would become, she resolved: the person Danny thought she could be, not the one Catherine thought she was. She would be damned if she turned out to be someone Catherine could laugh at from down the road. She would be damned if she turned out to be around.

“This is really late notice,” Catherine said when Orla called to say she couldn’t make the wedding. Orla could hear the hot hiss of a hair straightener working on the other end. “We paid twenty-six dollars a head,” Catherine added.

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Orla said. “I had to take the move-in slot the building gave me. They’re really strict about this stuff in New York.”

Orla never spoke to Catherine again, but she saw her plenty while she kept watching Danny, just as she had all through college. She wore out screens and acquired new ones, and all the time—though countless new ways to reach him bloomed around her—she only watched. She watched as he started balding and managing a cold-storage locker one town over. She watched as Catherine put on weight, her athletic figure retaining its contours but not its firmness, and started selling three-step skin care systems. She watched as the newlyweds renounced carbs and started traveling with friends from the gym, and she watched as they got sick of all that and started a blog about Catherine’s slow-cooker shortcuts and Danny’s home repairs. Orla didn’t like a bit of their marriage, not online and not in real life. But she was curiously undeterred. She understood now, in a way that she hadn’t in college, that waiting for him was just part of her life. That she would never really stop. When people bumped her on the street without seeming to see her at all, she brushed it off with the thought: Someone is waiting to brag that he knows me.

So it wasn’t buried quite as deep as the back of her mind, the notion that maybe this business with Floss would prop her up at a height Danny couldn’t ignore. Somewhere he could find her easily, and see that, all along, he’d been right.