has a zero-tolerance policy on spell-breaking.
She got up and padded across the bedroom, listening to the faint saw of the cameras in the shiplap wall’s grooves sliding on their tracks to follow her.
The writers had been editing her closet again, Marlow saw when she pulled its doors open. Yesterday, as the day stretched empty before her, Marlow had reclined in her backyard cabana, let her eyelids close behind her sunglasses, and intuited lazily, just for something to do: vintage fashion images. The browsing turned into obsession; the obsession turned into a wardrobe request that was filled within the hour. As Marlow sat cross-legged in her sarong on the dove-gray cushion, eating a spinach salad with strawberries, a drone descended from the sky and landed on the deck. It unfurled its arms to release a metal bar hung with the clothes she had asked for: jeans with the knees cat-clawed out, shoulderless blouses that billowed in the breeze as they settled down in front of her.
When she put everything on, Marlow grinned at herself in the mirror, feeling like a twenty-teens pinup. But then she saw her dashboard throbbing with feedback. Those pants just made me second-guess being on the same meds as her, someone wrote.
That night, as she lay in bed, Marlow heard the overnight drone making more noise than usual. After it cleaned and filed the dishes, after it folded the blankets she and Ellis left slopped on the couches when they ambled to bed, she heard the drone pushing its way into her closet, clattering around. Sure enough, this morning, all her vintage looks were gone.
Now she pulled a lime-colored hoodie and matching leggings off a hanger. If the network cared so much about what she wore, let them green-screen it in themselves.
Such a bold floral on that cardigan, but she’s pulling it off! went the follower comment that appeared a moment later. Clicking to buy!
Marlow fought the gag that rose inside her at the phrase bold floral. She swore someone in wardrobe had it out for her.
On the other hand, she thought as she went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, she had a guardian angel in craft services. Science had definitively linked caffeine to anxiety recently, and the network had immediately freaked about the optics of Marlow consuming it. But someone in crafty had come to the rescue, developing a coffee, just for her, that could be dyed to look like cold-pressed juice. Now Marlow uncapped a plastic bottle with a label that read Carrot Apple, took a sip of terra-cotta-colored liquid, and tasted the bitter cool of iced espresso. The sensation loosened her instantly; her shoulders retreated downward, her heart rose, her face relaxed. She could sense herself having an attractive moment, and, as if on cue, she heard a muted snap. The camera in the brass knob on the cabinet door across from her had detected, and captured, a still image perfect for the Hysteryl ad that would be patched onto the corner of her live feed in—Marlow counted—three, two—
She DOES always look so content though, someone piped up on her dashboard. Next time they do a promo code for Hysteryl I might give it a shot.
Doesn’t anyone think it’s weird the way she drinks that juice, someone else said. She’s like SAVORING the tiniest sips. I bet she’s on coffee and they’re CGI’ing shit.
Marlow froze with her lips on the bottle. She waited a beat for the comment to clear, then tipped her head back and forced herself to take a giant gulp of her drink. She exhaled discreetly, to keep from releasing the telltale coffee char of her breath. Then she stifled a smile; her followers couldn’t smell her. Her heartbeat stuttered as it always did when she came up with another thing, though sometimes she could go years on end without adding to the list: Things I Have to Myself. The hour before 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., when the network broke for ad interruption. Dressing rooms and doctor’s office chambers and bathrooms, in her home and all over town. Her favorite was a toilet stall in the vegan gastropub downtown—as a teenager, she used a nail file to scratch mean things about some of her ruder followers into its enamel walls. And now: her smell. Something small, but hers alone.
This was how it had gone, at Jacqueline’s parties, for nearly a decade: Marlow sat on the cantaloupe-colored sofa, against its right arm, her good side facing camera east. Ida slumped opposite her, on the daisy-patterned club chair, droning unbearably. Marlow had once liked being across from Ida, back when the woman was a bawdy, sloppy drunk. But these days, Ida was sober, and a stay-at-home mom, and she spent most of Jacqueline’s parties performing small dramas about her allergies. Marlow had seen Ida walk around an ottoman like it was a land mine, sniffling, “Oh, God, is that mohair?” Ida routinely flung herself across the room to close a window, whining, “Sorry, pollen, I have to.” Once, failing to detect Ida’s allergy profile from her device, a server bot had extended a tray of shrimp cocktail her way. Ida had gone to City Hall the next week, made a twenty-minute speech about her hives, and insisted that the network decommission—and dismember, Marlow recalled, with a scandalized chill—the offending machine.
But tonight, Ida was missing, recast without explanation. A new girl—olive-skinned and sleek, formidably cheekboned, with bronze lipstick and black hair parted into pigtail braids—sat in Ida’s chair with her bare feet pulled up under her, like she had been here forever.
Marlow looked at Jacqueline, who stood in the center of the thick sand-colored carpet, holding up something called a “scrunchie.” At these parties, Jacqueline pushed things that, according to her invites, changed her life: ab gadgets, smoothies, ugly quilted handbags. Marlow knew—they all knew—that none of these things had really changed Jacqueline’s life. The network chose the items based on sponsorship agreements. Then Jacqueline threw parties where she raised them up and gushed about them to her dozen in-person guests and her roughly nine-point-nine million followers—plus all of her guests’ followers, too. The items the network chose reflected Jacqueline’s core audience demo: married mothers across America, aged twenty-eight to forty-four, who tuned in while folding laundry around 9:00 p.m. on weeknights. Though Jacqueline fit squarely in with her followers—she was thirty-eight, with two daughters—she was always embarrassed when someone mentioned her demo. “It makes me feel so old and boring,” she told Marlow once. “It’s better than mine,” Marlow had said. No one would argue with that.
“Where’s Ida?” Marlow called to Jacqueline, raising her voice above the scrunchie-induced oohs and aahs.
Jacqueline ignored her. She pushed the scrunchie onto her wrist and waved her hand around for all to see. “And it’s supercute as a bracelet,” she said.
“Jac?” Marlow repeated. “Is Ida on vacation?”
The end of her sentence slipped under the clatter of something breaking on the ground. The women turned to see a server bot bent over the shards of a wineglass. Marlow watched the lilies in the coffee table vase twist in the same direction, their scarlet pistils stretching to train their tiny cameras on the action. She could swear the bot had dropped the glass to drown out the sound of Ida’s name.
When she looked back at Jacqueline, her friend nodded once and dabbed at her lips. It was their signal for Tell you off-camera.
An hour later, as Marlow passed the powder room, Jacqueline’s arm shot out of it and pulled her inside. “Ida’s gone,” she said, as she pulled the door shut.
“Gone?” Marlow saw herself in the mirror. One of Jacqueline’s hair drones, its silver talons clacking near her ear, had pinned a ridiculous silk bow barrette into her dark waves.
“Yup,” Jacqueline said. “Just up and left Mike and the kids. Blew right through the perimeter. Left the fucking state.”
