met, though now he only had a third of the hair he had then. “You’re terrible at it,” he said, “because you’re not cheating. Everyone else is, you know.”
Marlow stared at him. “What do you mean?” she said. “Cheating how?”
Ellis held up his wrist. “We use our devices,” he said. “We just ask them the questions, and whoever’s fastest...”
Here it came, with a force disproportionate to the moment: her anger. She imagined it black and crinkling, peeking out from all the places Hysteryl had long hidden it—behind her pink organs, between the gray folds of her brain. The trivia master made it clear before every game: No devices. Use the rest of your brain! “Everyone’s cheating?” Marlow repeated. “What’s the fun in that?”
“The part where you win,” Ellis said. “Come on,” he added, somewhat sharply. “Don’t be sad.”
“I’m not sad.” Marlow turned away from the window of the bar, so that her friends couldn’t see her face, even if twelve million strangers could. “I’m pissed.”
Ellis shrugged and dug into his jeans pocket. “Then why are you crying?” he said.
She took the tissue he handed her. She didn’t know she was.
She went to Jacqueline’s again, for a mud mask party, and found her lungs constricting in the middle of it, her brain suddenly rattling with the sensation that she had wasted too much of her life here, watching Jacqueline smearing on things. She backed quietly toward the front door, then out of it. On her way to her car, she stopped at the line of vintage lawn flamingos in Jacqueline’s front yard.
“What is the point of you?” she hissed at them, glaring into their black button eyes. Her hand twitched at her side. She knew, if she gave in to the urge, what would be waiting for her when she woke up: a note from the network, idling in her mind, warning that erratic behavior had been flagged on my feed, that commercial cutaway had been employed as a stopgap, that I should please restrict such behavior, in the future, to off-camera zones.
She hauled off and slapped the plastic birds, every one of them, and felt savagely wronged when they didn’t fall. Jacqueline had staked them in firmly, and so they only bobbed, beaks glinting in the haze of the illumidrones waiting in the sky for someone on the ground to need them. When an illumidrone sensed a person walking in the dark, it swooped down to light a path, looking, from a distance, like a shooting star in descent. When she was young, Marlow remembered, that was what she thought they were. Another pretty thing she had misjudged.
She toggled over to see what her followers were saying.
She’s losing it again. Go bitch! Show them one-legged fuckers what’s up!
What did those birds ever do to you Mar? LOL
NOOOOOOO NO ONE WANTS TO WATCH ANOTHER PILL AD—PUT THE MARLOW FLAMINGO SMACKDOWN BACK ON!!!!!
And:
What I don’t get is how she’s so unhinged over this pregnancy thing, like it’s some big surprise. Course they were gonna give her one, with Ellis on that deal or whatever and her being thirty-fucking-five. Saw this “twist” coming a mile away.
That was the thing about being the mouse in the maze, Marlow thought as the flamingos finished trembling, went still. She was the only one surprised by where she ended up.
CHAPTER FIVE
Orla
New York, New York
2015
Right from the start, it was suspiciously easy. At least, Orla should have been suspicious of how easy it was, two girls hijacking the public eye from the floor of their Chelsea rental. Her mistake was seeing the ease—the way things ribboned out in front of her and Floss—as a sign she was on the right path.
They started the way everyone did: they shared. Floss posted pictures online—of herself, her things, her food—constantly, as if she was someone whose meals became fascinating just by virtue of her being in front of them. Nobody ever said, as Orla worried they would, With respect, what do you do for a living? or Who dis bitch? Floss didn’t even have a proper bio on any of her platforms, just a quote: “There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity.” She had attributed it to Britney Spears before Orla plugged it into Google and found that it had been said by General Douglas MacArthur.
One day, Floss prepared to post a Snapchat of herself explaining how to apply brow gel. “So fire,” she rehearsed, as she ran the brush across her arches. “So fi-yah.” A thought