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.”