nothing—no sign-offs—and then Orla heard Florence pacing. Orla lifted herself off her bed, avoiding the creaky pit in the mattress, and came to sit on the ground beside her door, one shoulder and ear leaned against it.
Florence was making more calls—short ones.
“I sent you my demo a few months back—Oh, you did?”
“And you thought you might have a spot in the showcase—Oh, it was?”
“I saw your posting about needing models for—Hello?”
“Yes! That’s so sweet of you. I mean, I’ve been working on those songs since—Oh. No. I’m sorry, I have to stop you—I’m not blonde. No, I was the brunette. Sure. I understand. I’ll be at this number if you want to—Okay. Bye.”
Orla held her breath, waiting for things to resume. She could picture, vaguely, the sort of people Florence must be calling: the so-called promoters and producers who were always male, who claimed to know everyone and have a hand in everything, who did all their business from their cells rather than an office, who picked up the phone on Sundays. The sort who only ever seemed to see potential in pretty girls, sidling up to them at bars to set meetings which, invariably, took place in the man’s apartment.
After a minute of silence, she heard Florence murmur, in the stilted tone of someone leaving a voice mail: “Following up on the entry-level programmer position. Fuck,” she finished softly. Orla hoped she had hung up before that last part. Ten seconds later, Florence left for brunch.
After an hour of enjoying being alone in the apartment, Orla got bored and went to the office, walking directly into the sun as she moved east on Twenty-Third Street, toward the not-old, not-new Gramercy building Lady-ish shared with dentists and accountants. She wanted to get a jump on her posts for the week. Sage had been dead six days. The slideshow of celebrities walking into her funeral had gotten nine million clicks and counting, but the pace was tapering off. Orla’s follow-up, a trend piece on a hat three stars had worn to the services, had done about twice that, despite everyone on the internet pretending to be horrified by it. SO INAPPROPRIATE! a Lady-ish reader had screamed in the comments, echoing Orla’s original thoughts on the post. Ingrid had only said, “If we didn’t do it, someone else would have.”
Orla liked the office on weekends—the half-light, the natural coolness it took on when jittery bodies weren’t packed along the tables. She sat down and closed her hand over her mouse, nudged her computer awake. She was scanning social media, looking for actresses who might have cut their hair over the weekend, when she saw Ingrid’s office door sliding open out of the corner of her eye.
“Hey,” Ingrid said when she reached Orla’s desk. Orla looked up. Ingrid’s hair was even greasier than usual. Her boss had a six-step lip routine involving liners and glosses and setting powders, but she seemed to only wash her hair roughly once a moon cycle. “How was your weekend?” she said, like it was already over, and without waiting for an answer went on: “Can you cover a red carpet tomorrow? It’s this what’s-her-name who’s going to be there, her publicist’s always bothering me, and we need to keep the publicist happy because she also reps that—you know, that YouTube girl, with the harp?”
“Tomorrow?” Orla rolled her eyes sideways, grasping for an excuse.
“I just thought you might have some extra time,” Ingrid said meaningfully, “now that the Sage stuff is going away.”
Orla nodded. She would do it. The year before, a handsome European prince who was constantly falling down outside clubs got sober, joined the armed forces, and largely disappeared. As a result, one Lady-ish blogger lost her job. Orla was determined not to lose hers—after all, if she lost it, she would never get to leave it. And this was something she fantasized about constantly: her quitting Lady-ish after selling her book, just like her Tinder-star colleague. In the fantasy, she carried a box of her things, though she didn’t have things at the office. Her desk was just a two-foot section of a long cafeteria-style table shared by nine other bloggers. No one had drawers or plants or picture frames—they barely had supplies. “Where’s the pen?” one of them would cry out a few times a day, and whoever had it last would send it skidding down the row.
She knew she wasn’t the only one who dreamed about quitting. When she and her colleagues sat in the conference room, watching Ingrid run her laser pointer over a screen filled with top-performing headlines (“You Won’t BELIEVE What This Megastar Looks Like WITHOUT Her Extensions”), Orla would think about how every one of their minds was somewhere else, lusting over their next moves, reminding themselves they were better. Better than this job, and better than the girl in the next seat doing it, too. That last part was important. Orla believed it fiercely: she would be gone someday, on to greater things, and the next girl down would still be in her chair. She better still be in her chair. Someone had to stay to be who Orla was before.
But before what? That was the question in her mind at dawn, when Florence slammed over the threshold and woke her, and at night, when she lay staring at her phone while she should have been writing or sleeping. More than anything else—to be an author, to have a boyfriend, to learn how it felt to breathe without being forty thousand dollars in debt—she wanted the answer to the question. She was living in the before of something, and she was getting tired of it. The dangerous thing about the way she felt, Orla knew, was that she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to happen, and she didn’t care that she didn’t know. Almost any change would do.
Marlow
Constellation, California2051
The morning was for numbers. Marlow woke at seven to take one pill in front of—she gave a mental glance at the dashboard that kept track of her followers, blinking on the screen inside her mind—eleven-point-six million people, as of this moment. She hooked the quilt beneath her armpits in two places—wardrobe malfunction prevention had installed loops on all her bedding, had sewn prongs into the lace edges of the short silk gowns she wore to bed. Then she sat up and took three deep breaths, opening her eyes on the last one. She blinked four times, unhurried. Smiled twice. The first smile was meant to look sleepy, to hint at consciousness emerging. The second was meant to look spontaneous, giddy, as if she had just remembered that she was alive and felt unspeakably blessed.
To look, in other words, as though the pill worked that fast.
Lately, Marlow had been adding some movement to this second smile, sighing and stretching her arms over her head. But the network had sent her a clucking note yesterday, reminding her to aim for consistency wherever possible. Departures from long-held routines can seem to the audience like signs of emotional trouble. Her followers had other concerns. After Marlow lowered her palms this morning, she closed her eyes just in time to see a comment scrolling: Is it me or does Mar have kinda chubby armpits?
Marlow looked at Ellis, sleeping stomach-down beside her. She couldn’t ask him if he thought her armpits were fat. To bring it up on camera would be to acknowledge the follower’s comment, to acknowledge the existence of followers at all. This was against employee policy. Which was a total farce, of course; her followers knew she knew they were watching. They knew she could see them talking about her. But the fact that she and the other talent never let on, that they pretended to just be living—this was what her followers wanted. They
