which Orla struggled to look natural at. She was terrible at dancing and even worse at drugs. “Holy shit,” someone had said to her at a party recently, “go wipe your nose. There’s coke on it. You look like an albino pig.” The idea of snorting things made Orla queasy, so she tended to simply skim her face along the mirror instead of inhaling.
The craziest thing about fame was not the fact that she had a trick for wasting fine cocaine now.
It was not even the fact that the person who had noticed her powdered snout was an Olympic darling du jour, a javelin hurler with more DUIs than medals who had followed her into the bathroom, waited for her to clean up, and mashed himself up against her.
It was almost, but not quite, the fact that it seemed to exempt her from the weather. Winter in New York, for Orla, was suddenly no more difficult than any other season. Gone were the days of underestimating icy puddles and paying with damp feet all day. Winter was half-over, and Orla had barely buttoned her coat. The rain boots from Gayle stayed under her bed. She went out in silk flats and suede platforms, in all sorts of impractical, delicate shoes. If the street filled with rain, or a curb was blocked by snow, their driver and bodyguard, Amadou, would put his hands beneath her arms and lift her over the moisture, into his Escalade.
No, the craziest thing about fame, to Orla—who was never meant to have it in the first place—was that, deep down, she didn’t mind it. She wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone: when a perfect stranger looked at her twice or followed her on Instagram, she felt a flickering understanding of Floss and what she wanted. She knew how strangers saw her: as the cheapest sort of star, the tagalong friend of a TMI queen. But the point was: they saw her. She was visible. She was there.
* * *
On most red carpets, Orla would stand with Floss for ten seconds or so. Then, despite the way Floss sometimes called out over the camera shutters’ soft gunfire—“that’s my friend Orla Cadden, C-A-D-D-E-N, she’s a literary talent on the rise”—Orla would be asked to move off to the side, so that Floss could be shot alone. She never minded. She liked to stand at the edge of the step-and-repeat, watching Floss give what they called, together, The Face. It was a thing to behold. Floss would suck in her cheeks, push her lips out in a pout, and make her eyes smolder like she was charging into battle. She would cast The Face down her nose, over her shoulder—it was a beam she could throw anywhere. Orla always felt mesmerized, watching her. Who cared that Floss was, essentially, just standing there? Orla knew now how hard it was to stay put in the crosshairs of so many flashbulbs. The instinct, when things got that bright, was to run, or at least to blink. But others who witnessed The Face in person were not as impressed. If Floss heard a camera click while she was talking to someone, she’d abandon her sentence cold and go right to work, posing. Whoever she was talking to would be left to stand there, perplexed and forgotten, until they saw themselves out of the moment—or until Orla did, smiling apologetically and trying to finish Floss’s point. “Doesn’t she know that, like, we can see her?” one of those people had whispered to Orla once. But Floss was not concerned about the people in front of her; Floss was concerned about followers. Her followers only saw the picture, and the picture always turned out.
One night, as Orla killed time out of frame, she looked down the press’s side of the carpet and saw the laminated paper she used to stand on—LADY-ISH. There was a set of delicate, neon-polished toes covering the name that had replaced hers, and Orla followed them up to the rest of a girl who must have just finished college. Only recently had Orla come to accept that there was now a whole class of people living and working in New York who were several years younger than her, that they were not interns who had overstayed their summers—they were here to stay and grow up and compete.
Orla walked toward the girl from Lady-ish. “Hi,” she said, feeling radiant, generous.
The girl looked up from scribbling on her notepad. She had enormous