aside politely, and Marlow reached past it to grab the duffel she had stashed in the corner of the kitchen. The network had approved her and Ellis’s request for a babymoon, only a short distance away, just past the Mexican border. It would help with her stress, Marlow had reminded the talent welfare officers pointedly, when she petitioned them to let her go. She had booked an in-room acupuncture treatment and a private session with a yogi who specialized in fertility poses. Ellis was going to learn to roll a cigar. They were all packed, slated to leave right after the party concluded.
Marlow tucked the slip from Grace into a small pocket sewn on inside of the bag.
There was only one thing left to do now, she knew, if she really wanted to go. If she really wanted to run, and have a fighting chance of getting away. She would not be like Ida, half-gone and traceable. She didn’t want anyone following her.
Marlow hesitated with her fingers curled over the gem on her wrist. Dad, she intuited, squeezing her eyes shut. It’s Marlow. Are you there? He still wore his device—though he never answered, the messages technically still went through. I love you, Dad, Marlow intuited. Please try to eat. She wondered if he could hear the words on some level, if he tried to figure out who she was. For the first time, she realized, thinking back to Grace at the clinic—she and Aston were even. She didn’t know, now, who he was, either.
Marlow slid her finger underneath her device, easing it upward one side at a time, wincing as its powerful adhesive relented, taking a few strips of skin with it as it went. She dropped her device between abandoned drinks on Floss’s countertop. An odor shot up into her nose: sweet and stomach-turning, the smell of skin she hadn’t seen in years. She felt something dim in her brain.
How long would it take for the people outside to come looking for her? She was already one minute late. Soon it would be two. Her mother, Ellis, anyone who had her on their maps—they were likely shifting in their seats right now, checking for her inside their heads and confirming that everything was all right, they had proof: she was still here, in the house. How many minutes until someone decided to come inside and look, to trust their instincts for once, instead of their devices?
The violinists were still playing, chins tucked low. Their faces gave nothing away, like the song always went on this long. The people were standing, waiting, their gaze on the back door.
But Marlow was going out the front.
She hurried across the lawn to her car. The dress spread out like a single useless wing, tulle hissing behind her as it skimmed the grass. A man walking his small, wet-eyed dog stopped to stare as she pushed herself into the driver’s seat, bundling the endless skirt in around her, slapping it down so she could see. She figured out, as she cleared the mess from her vision, why she didn’t like the gown anymore. It wasn’t just that she had seen the color wrong, that the yellow screamed more loudly now than it had when she chose it. It was that she didn’t like yellow at all, she realized. She had always thought it her favorite color, but that was a trick of the pills. It was just that, before she saw everything clearly, it was the brightest thing.
CHAPTER NINE
Orla
New York, New York
2016
As someone who made a living taking down wheat-dull quotes from glossy somebodies, Orla had always thought she knew what fame meant, what it consisted of, what it promised and took away. She had met Floss in August, the melon-colored end of the New York summer, everyone trudging and dying for fall to arrive and remind them why they came here. By January—another month in which everyone forgot, again, what it was they liked about this place—Orla had learned that everything she thought she knew about fame was wrong. Adorably outsider.
For instance: the craziest thing about being famous was not the being recognized, mostly by the girls who spent their twenties in the East Thirties, but also, sometimes, by men, who cupped their hands and yelled down the block, “Yo! It’s the roommate!”
The craziest thing was not the money, which landed in chunks in Orla’s account, knocking it up to five figures and finally, unbelievably, six.