outside the twenty-four-hour Rite Aid. She was looking across the parking lot at the entrance to the TGI Fridays. Outside it, Danny and Catherine were pressed against the wall, making out like they had just met. Catherine wore a stiff satin cocktail dress and brassy chandelier earrings that brushed her bare shoulders. She looked strange. But then, Orla thought, people could be strange when they wanted someone. And where else was Catherine going to wear a dress like that, anyway?
It was the same weekend that, the year before, it had snowed and Danny got her pregnant. This year, April was the month of her driving her parents everywhere, trying to decode the symptoms they had begun to complain of. Sometime toward the end of the month, a hobbled version of the internet flickered back on. People began posting rumors about whose files said what. Dark secrets piled up, easily searched, easily browsed. Orla found the deepest shames of everyone she knew in the time it used to take her to locate the closest burrito.
Mason, the producer, must have caught hell at home. For decades, he told his husband that they were mentoring a poor boy from Camden, New Jersey, chipping away at his needs, college and books and security deposits. It turned out that the boy was actually a prostitute Mason had frequented for a short time and been blackmailed by for a long time. The checks and the Venmo exchanges, email chains that were several kinds of heated—the bots sent it off to Mason’s husband with their standard note: Apologies.
Craig had an affair with a seventeen-year-old, ten years before, when he was twenty-nine. The texts released in his file, Orla thought, colored him improbably likable. He had wanted the girl to marry him. Orla wouldn’t have said as much, but she couldn’t help thinking it: take away the ages, and this was a story of ordinary meanness—a lonely, besotted guy and the girl less in love, taunting him.
Danny, before he ever came to find Orla, had bought a bunch of domains with beauty-related takes on Floss’s name: styledbyfloss, flossgloss, looklikefloss. He wanted flossy, too—badly—and tracked down the person who owned it. His file contained the emails he had sent the woman, which moved from middle-school formal (To Whom It May Concern) to desperate (Can you AT LEAST let me know you are getting these?) to threatening (Seriously bitch you need to get back to me...please don’t make me come after you other ways). It bothered Orla, but not as much as the file’s final email exchange, the dates of which fell within his stay in her room. After she told him about Floss’s skin care line, he had hurried to try to get facebyfloss for himself.
Catherine had stolen a science test’s answers for her whole soccer team in college. Orla noted how old this information was, how far back the hackers had to go to find Catherine being her harmless worst.
Ingrid, decades before, had misunderstood eBay and bid extravagantly on vintage fashion items, then panicked when she learned what she was expected to pay and backed out of all of the deals. She must have been, Orla thought, the kindest person she knew.
Melissa had undercut her best friend back when they were both assistants at a publicity firm, writing a long (and drunk, Orla guessed as she pored over the file) email to her boss about why she should get a promotion, not her friend. The week after her file dropped, Melissa died. A short story on her death conceded that she might have slipped—she had been dressed for hiking, after all, in a forest filled with slippery ledges. But Orla was sure she did it on purpose. The people she knew who were dying then—besides Melissa, they were all friends of friends, or cousins of cousins—they all had one thing in common, and it wasn’t that they’d done something terrible. It was that they had shouldered shining reputations, from kindergarten into adulthood. The people who had been known as good—they were the ones who, frequently, could not survive their own bad.
Aston’s file said he stiffed people who worked for him, over and over again. But the revelation was dull compared to what Aston—who Instagrammed his own stools as a teen and who was once seen making the eating-pussy sign at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—had always done in the open.
That, to an extent, was the same reason Floss’s and Orla’s files flopped. Oh, their devices turned on, blaring terrible