mouse, which was under a pile of confidential files on New York State white-collar crimes, and woke her desktop. She’d never been on Facebook officially, or not personally anyway. Gaby had their comms team handle the social media accounts, which Cleo glanced at once in a while, but she mostly thought her energy was better served elsewhere. She had Twitter because she had to keep up with the news, but Facebook struck her as a little juvenile and also, she didn’t have a huge desire to keep in touch with her high school classmates and see the photos of their grinning family units of four on the beach or their July Fourth parties or, in MaryAnne Newman’s case, her posing with a championship trophy from the round-robin at the country club.
She grabbed her phone. Texted Lucas, who was only down the hall but generally responded best to digital requests.
Cleo: Can u come help me for a sec? She added a smiley-face emoji.
Lucas: No emojis, Mom.
Cleo: Fine. Can u come help for a sec, no emoji?
She heard a rumbling from his room, then the padding of his footsteps down the hall. Her office door swung open.
“What?”
“Remember that time you signed me up for Facebook? Do you remember the login?”
Lucas sighed, exasperated. “You’re not eighty. You should know how to do this.”
“I know,” Cleo conceded. “But I’m busy trying to save the world, so please just log me in.”
Lucas’s eyes rolled so far back that Cleo wondered if they would ever return, but they did, and he leaned over her desk, pounded her keyboard, and voilà!
“Do you want me to add a profile picture? Right now, you look like an anonymous troll. No one can tell it’s you. You made me sign up as Cee Mac. It’s like a bad rap-star name.”
“No!” Cleo pushed his hand off the keyboard. “That’s exactly how I want it.”
“God, you have issues,” Lucas said, but she could tell he was only partially serious, and frankly, to get her teen to rib her was possibly the highlight of her day (though her day admittedly was terrible), so she laughed and replied, “Aren’t you lucky that I’m your mom then.”
He walked out without answering.
MaryAnne Newman’s Facebook page was public, so Cleo had no problem finding not just her profile but her posts and photos and, of course, the op-ed.
I JUST WANTED TO SHARE THIS. IT TOOK A LOT FOR ME TO SPEAK MY TRUTH, BUT A LOT OF US REMEMBER CLEO MCDOUGAL, AND I DO. NOT. THINK. SHE. SHOULD. BE. PRESIDENT.
Cleo nearly giggled because twenty years later, MaryAnne hadn’t changed one bit. True, Cleo had been a type-A perfectionist, tap-dancing not just because it made her parents so happy but because Cleo got off on being the best at everything too, but MaryAnne had been her mirror image—all charged up without quite the dexterity or acumen that Cleo possessed, and so while they were perfect best friends (for a while), this was also the reason they were so combustible. Now Cleo could see that it had never been an equal relationship, unlike Cleo and Gabrielle, who were true sparring partners. There were petty jealousies between MaryAnne and her, and an uneasy sense of competition lurked just under the surface (competition that went both ways, Cleo knew, even if she usually triumphed), but as teens, neither one of them was adept enough to recognize this dynamic. They loved each other, they really did, even when they didn’t. And maybe Cleo should have just let things take their natural course. She probably would have bested MaryAnne in debate and on the school paper; she didn’t have to cheat, to take shortcuts. But part of her—the regretful part—wanted to win more than she wanted to protect her friendship.
Cleo stared at MaryAnne’s Facebook profile picture and remembered how, for that internship their junior-year summer, just before her parents died, she gave MaryAnne bad advice on her essay, knowing full well that writing about the day her dog died was trite and clichéd and would never win her a spot in the mayor’s office. Just prior, MaryAnne had casually bragged that her parents were golfing partners with the mayor’s personal lawyer and that he was going to put in a good word for her. Cleo, feeling undermined and yes, a little less than, could not let that stand. She herself wrote about her relationship with her sister, how she felt like two people—one an only child and one a much younger sibling of