the thought. I really don’t know anything about her. It was the truth. Where was Floss from, for real, before Akron? Had she gone to college? How had she learned to hack people’s emails? When had she had her first period? Her first kiss? Did she have siblings? Friends? Enemies? A driver’s license? A criminal record? Together, they had chosen her passions from the things that arrived on their doorstep, her dreams from the common denominators of the getting-famous playbook. They assembled the soulless army that made up most of her followers—the bots who applauded her pictures and disseminated her thoughts—on a web page they had to translate from Russian. What of the triumphs and loves, the fights and failures that predated their efforts? Floss had never offered. Orla had never asked.
And she never would. This, she was sure of. She had been sure since, a few days earlier, she brought up a package that looked like anything else from a publicist. Floss, paging through a magazine on the couch, barely glanced at Orla opening it, at Orla lifting, from a sea of weightless packing peanuts, a vase. The vase was strangely heavy and squat, marbled green, with a matching cap screwed on tight and rimmed in gold. There was a gold plate embedded in the cap, engraved.
“‘Biscuit,’” Orla read out loud. “Weird name for a decor line.”
Floss had been licking a finger to turn the page when Orla said “Biscuit.” Now she slowly dropped her finger from her tongue and got up. She walked over and lifted the vase from Orla’s hands, her arms buckling slightly as she took on the weight.
Floss said, with her eyes on the porcelain, “Biscuit’s my dog.”
“What?” Blood rushed between Orla’s eyes and ears. She felt her pulse quicken in an embarrassed way, as if she had been caught doing something.
“My dog,” Floss repeated. “I guess these are her ashes.” As Orla watched, horrified, Floss moved the bristles of her ponytail away from her face and pressed her cheek against the urn. “I told my mom to wait. She was bitching about taking care of her,” Floss said. “I told her soon I’d have the money to fly home and get her, but she didn’t think I would. She didn’t think I could do this. She didn’t think I could do anything.” Floss held the urn out and blinked at it, disbelieving. “It was so not Biscuit’s time,” she said. Then she turned her back to Orla and started to cry.
Orla licked her lips, preparing all the questions she knew she should ask—But why would your mom do this? How could any mom do this? Before she could say anything, though, Floss whipped around. Mascara was running down her face. It hovered, in dark drops, from her chin.
“Don’t,” Floss said to Orla, her voice patching out. “Don’t ask me anything about it. This—” She raised the urn. “This is the end of something. And if you have shit in your past, I don’t want to know about that, either.”
So Orla let her tongue lie still in her mouth. She understood what Floss was saying: they would be, from here on out, only who they were from here on out.
And now, as they stood in the entryway, listening to the cop’s knocks cross into hostile, Orla stayed quiet again. She watched as Floss pulled a robe on and cinched it tightly, nodded at the door. “Go ahead,” she said to Orla. “Open it.”
Had it ever really happened before? She was famous overnight.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Marlow
Constellation, California
2051
In the exam room, as Marlow sat down on the table, Grace told her not to take her clothes off. “Just needed to get you off-camera,” she said. “I don’t have access to Pap smear results. Hopefully it takes the network’s weekend crew a second to pick up on that.”
“I can’t believe you ended up on a medical arc,” Marlow said. “Remember the cat?” In seventh-grade biology, the teacher had shown the class a taxidermied feline, split open down the middle to reveal its pickled insides. Grace had thrown up immediately, in the aisle between their desks, prompting the teacher to put down the cat and pick up a bulk bag of sawdust.
“I’m nowhere near the blood and guts, trust me,” Grace said. “I’m professional talent, science. I do genetic design here. I’ve been working on your baby.” She grinned as Marlow’s mouth fell open. “Yeah, I know,” she murmured. “They don’t let us talk, but I can build you a baby.