of his room, reached for the door, and slammed it closed.
Orla flattened her hands into her sacrum and leaned against the wall’s chair rail, massaging her aching back. You’re right, she thought, a command to her confidence—she was already, automatically, doubting herself. Everything you said was right.
But that wasn’t true. One thing she said was wrong. She had been wrong to say this would end for her, that she could walk back into her old life, unmarked. The reality was the opposite. However this ended, Floss would be fine. Aston, the doctors assured them, would be fine. Craig would be fine. Melissa would be fine. Danny would be fine. There was only one bit of inescapable proof of the way they had lived this last year. It was the size of an avocado this week, and it lived inside of Orla.
* * *
There were so many ways what happened next might not have happened.
If she had made it to her abortion.
If she had rescheduled her abortion, instead of hanging up every time the receptionist put her on hold, over and over until finally she was five months along, and the abortion just wasn’t going to happen. Not because she wanted the baby, not because she felt guilty, but for the same reason most things happened to her: she could not make a choice.
If the social worker she had seen about adoption hadn’t done a double take at her face, at her name on the form. If she hadn’t said with a sigh, halfway through their meeting, “The couples won’t know who you are at first, but eventually you’ll meet them, and so you’ll have to address—things—then.”
If Marie Jacinto had agreed to sell her book instead of tossing it out with her Danish wrapper.
If Danny had loved her.
If she had loved Danny.
But none of that had happened. What happened, instead, three weeks after the fire, was that Aston took an Uber from the hospital to their apartment and collapsed in Floss’s lap like a child. Orla listened from her room for an hour as the two of them wept. Then she listened from her room for a month while they got back into their old awful rhythms, defiling all the spots Orla had Cloroxed after their breakup, all the spaces she thought were finally safe. Sometimes she heard them, in Floss’s room, planning their next act. They whispered so she couldn’t hear, and she felt both hurt and relieved. At long last, she was on the outside.
One day, her Google alerts pointed her to a new television interview Floss and Aston had done. Orla hit Play, keeping the volume low on her laptop so Floss and Aston wouldn’t know she was watching. Floss, sitting against a black backdrop, looked shattered and subdued, and Orla half wondered if she might open a cabinet later to find a new Post-it—Seem sorry!!!!
“I was responsible for everything, the night that Anna died,” Floss said, when the reporter pressed the issue. “My friend Orla had nothing to do with it.”
The reporter touched a pen to her lips, then posed to Floss one of the many questions Orla had never dared to ask. “Why do this at all, Floss?” the reporter said. “Why did you want to be a reality star, to get all these followers—what’s the point, in your mind? What did you want?”
“What did I want?” Floss repeated. She glanced at Aston, who was staring down at his lap. Though Orla couldn’t see him from the waist down, she bet his leg was jiggling.
“Were you bullied as a child?” The reporter leaned in. “Distant from your parents? What made you crave this approval, this attention?”
Floss inhaled. When she answered, it was in what Orla knew Floss thought of as her smart voice, which made what she said sound even worse. “It’s not so much that I craved it,” she said. “I thought I deserved it. I think I’m fun, I have an interesting life. I think I’m special.”
Aston looked up at the reporter, into the camera, above it. He grimaced.
The reporter smiled, a tight show of teeth. “You’re just being honest, of course,” she said.
“I mean, everyone is special in their own way,” Floss said quickly. She blushed and started pulling at her hair. “But the more people followed me, the better I felt. I mean—anyone would do this if they could, wouldn’t they?” She looked genuinely confused as she cocked her head at the reporter. “Right? Wouldn’t you?”
* * *
The interview seemed to work.