get sick. They forget your face. They die. They disappoint you.” Honey paused and looked out. The sun had wrestled the morning from the clouds, turning the sky around the Lady’s head a hopeful peach. “I would never turn you in, Marlow,” Honey said. “But I think you’d be dumb not to go back to Constellation. You’re out here, giving up all those followers, to look for real people? Your real parents? Real people are so impractical.”
“Just the one parent,” Marlow said. “Just my real father.”
Honey frowned. She twisted away from Marlow and reached her hand between her seat and the wall of the drone, feeling for something in the pocket on the door. “I don’t know about that,” Honey said.
When she turned back to Marlow, she was holding the letter from Orla Cadden’s apartment. Marlow felt her mouth go bone-dry.
“Now, don’t have a fit,” Honey said quickly. “It fell out of your jeans last night, when I was looking for your jammies.”
Marlow snatched for the envelope, and Honey let her take it—let her take it with the slightly giddy smugness of someone who already knew what it said. “But you can’t read it,” Marlow protested, when she saw how Honey’s face looked. “It’s in cursive.”
“See, that hurts my feelings,” Honey sighed. “I’ve been following you since we were kids. I know every damn thing about you. But you can’t keep anything straight about me. I just told you I went to Catholic school.”
Marlow said, “And what the hell does that have to do with anything?”
As it turned out: plenty.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Orla
New York, New York
2016
The night Aston burned his new fifty-nine-million-dollar apartment black, Orla and Floss waited in the sickly pink hospital wing, in a room the nurses gave them after their presence proved a distraction. They dozed on plastic chairs with their heads together. In the morning, a nurse came and woke them, choosing Orla’s shoulder to touch. They went in to see Aston. The doctor said he was lucky, but Orla didn’t think he looked it. Lee Kumon sat in a chair by the window, glaring them out of the room, glaring harder when a cell phone rang and it took Orla too long to realize it was hers. She was still getting used to its ping—she had only recently taken it off silent, as the hatred that lit it up for weeks finally trailed off. Orla stepped out to listen to the voice mail. Before the woman on the recording even started talking, Orla looked up, saw the clock for the first time that day, and knew what the message would be. She had missed her appointment.
She was about to call back to reschedule when Floss came into the hallway, crying. She shoved her own phone under Orla’s nose, showing her an email. “The network,” she said. “We’re canceled, officially. I mean, I know they pretty much decided it the second that girl died but—” She flicked her chin at the doorway to Aston’s room, spoke bitterly. “Now, with all his drama—they say they’re just thinking of our mental health.”
A nurse passing by glanced back and shook her head at Orla once, an unwavering, split-second judgment of the entirety of her, like Orla should have known better than to be where and who and with whom she was.
Orla pushed Floss’s phone away. “That’s what you’re worried about right now—the show?” she said. “God, don’t you ever get sick of yourself?”
Floss hiccuped. She blinked, wounded. “Why are you pissed at me?” she warbled, snot clogging her words.
“It isn’t real.” Orla snapped her fingers in the air, grabbing, pinching. “Nothing you do is—none of it is anything, don’t you get that? It’s nothing.”
Floss was letting her tears run unchecked into her mouth, then letting them run right back out. Her ugly-cry was famous for good reason. “The show is your job, too, in case you forgot,” she blubbered. “I guess you don’t care if we lose it, ’cause you still think you’re different, right? You’re supposed to be a writer?”
“I will be a writer.” Orla heard something desperate, high and thin, in her voice. She ignored it. “This ends for me. You might be talent, but I have a talent. That’s the difference between you and me.”
Floss whirled on her heel and stomped off, the backs of her mule sandals slapping up and down. The doors at the end of the hall said RESTRICTED—STAFF ONLY. But she pushed right through them, and was gone.