loudly through the whole terrible movie. Someone at the premiere captured her snuffling on video. It went viral instantly, via a website called Lady-ish. Orla was the one who put it there.
Sage had lain still at the pool until around eight in the morning, when a towel boy watched a seagull shit directly onto her stomach. Sage didn’t even flinch. The towel boy—“towel maintenance associate,” as he would later correct a reporter—walked over, wondering what the most tasteful part of her body to jostle was. He saw that her lips were blue. Her eyes were still, but just slightly open, watery slivers cast down through brittle lashes. He touched her shoulder, the one directly in the sun. It was cold.
Orla was in the middle of ordering her salad when the news on the flat-screen over her head cut to an aerial view of the hotel. The shot circled its gray slate roof, hovering above the oblivious billboards on Sunset, and informed viewers that, somewhere down there, Sage Sterling was dead at twenty-seven.
The girl behind Orla, who wore dingy flip-flops with her skirt suit, looked up from her phone and said, sounding bored, “I literally thought she was dead already.”
The stout Guatemalan man on the other side of the counter sighed as Orla gaped at the screen, ruffling brown-edged romaine with his tongs. He was waiting for her to choose another topping. Orla always spent a long time pretending to consider vegetables before saying, as if it had just occurred to her, “Actually, just double croutons, please.”
The man in front of Orla was tapping out a missive on his phone in all caps: SAGE STERLING DEAD! Like no one would know it had happened, Orla thought, if this guy didn’t tweet it.
Not that she was much different. Back at the Lady-ish offices, Orla’s intern would be looking over the obit Orla had written for Sage eighteen months ago, the one she had marked with a warning: DO NOT PUBLISH UNTIL. Sage had been Orla’s beat at Lady-ish for most of the time she’d worked there. Ingrid, Orla’s boss, had identified Sage as a source of “bonkers” traffic early on, when a post Orla tried about her nail art drew ninety thousand views in ten minutes. From then on, every move Sage made, every boy and girl she kissed, every gown she put on was Orla’s to write up. The clicks flooded in, even more so when it became apparent that Sage had a temper. Sage grabbed photographers’ cameras and forced them down to the sidewalk. Sage scratched a bouncer, nearly blinding him. Sage pushed her boyfriend off his own parents’ yacht. Orla received small bonuses for stories that clocked more than five million views in a day; Sage’s boat rage had paid for her laptop. She tried now, very hard, not to think about what the star’s death might bring, pushing away the thought of a pair of boots she had seen in a shop window recently—soft gray suede and knee-high, meant to be worn in weather that was still weeks away. Maybe months, with this heat.
Orla apologized to the Guatemalan man and left. The intern would have published Sage’s obituary by now, Orla’s name at the top of it. The clicks would be raging, Ingrid ecstatic. No one on the internet would care about anything else today. Orla could afford, in terms of time and money, to go to the good salad place now.
* * *
That night, Orla wrote three hundred ninety-six words of her novel while watching a dating competition show. She had been aiming for six hundred words, but the episode had been too engrossing. Dabbing at her nose with a tissue, a finalist had confessed that she was bipolar. The oatmeal-faced host had raised his eyebrows and said, “Wow. This is a first for us.”
Orla promised herself she would write more tomorrow. Three hundred ninety-six words, she figured, would turn easily into six hundred once she went back and filled in some of the parts about the Orthodox Jews. She didn’t know any Orthodox Jews. She kept meaning to google them. But along with themes of self-discovery and female sexuality, along with tiny doodles and charts she drew herself, she felt that, to be edgy and relevant, her book needed an Orthodox Jew or two. For now, she marked the passages about them with the same shorthand they used at work for “to come” where they didn’t yet know what to say in a story: “TK.” Then