from her earplugs, which covered the sounds of what went on in the bedroom. Other times, she didn’t mind at all, because Aston made the place feel kinder, too. He had a tender side he kept indoors, where his fans and foes couldn’t access it. Orla had seen him do phone interviews, being uncooperative and unquotably profane, while snuggled under a blanket on the couch, like a child. She had overheard him Skyping with his charity-assigned “little brother,” had heard him tell the boy to stay in school (though Aston himself had quit in ninth grade) and to respect women (though he sometimes showed the kid racy photos of his exes from his phone). When Floss was out or sleeping, Aston would mill in the living room, hanging on Orla. If she had a book in her lap, he would say: “Whatcha readin’, bookworm?” If a video was rolling on her laptop screen, he would say, “Whatcha watchin’, couch potatah?” Once, when both girls had had enough of his hyperactivity, he retreated good-naturedly to the kitchen and scrubbed the crusted pans they never touched, the ones that came with the place. Then he baked blueberry muffins from scratch.
Three weeks after Aston walked into 6D, he and Floss signed a deal to star in a “docuseries” about falling in love.
Six weeks after that, Floss and Orla took the C train to a gym that had sent them free spinning coupons and found Floss’s face writ large in an ad on the subway wall. Sharpie penises prodded at both of her nostrils. They screamed and hugged each other.
A month after that, the show premiered, which was when things went both wrong and right. Right: Flosston Public was an instant hit, completing Floss’s transformation from heartless sociopath to sympathetic goddess. Wrong: it made Orla famous, too.
* * *
Flosston Public began with a prank. The show’s writer, a tall girl with stringy red hair, explained in her nicotine rasp how things would go. “Floss comes in the front door, Floss yells out ‘babe,’ Aston springs out from the end of the kitchen and dumps a bucket of flour on her.”
No one had invited Orla to the preproduction meeting, but it was a Saturday, so she was home, and she happened to live on location. “Why?” she asked as she refilled the Brita.
“It’s a good prank,” the writer said. “The audience loves pranks. Floss and Aston love pranks. It’s part of their brand. It’s perfect.”
“Sick.” Aston clapped his hands. “We do love pranks, babe.”
The closest thing to a prank Orla had seen Floss and Aston pull was when they had sex on the breakfast bar and knocked her microwaved enchilada to the floor. She looked at Floss dubiously.
“I actually don’t love pranks,” Floss said. “What if my shirt rides up? I look fat when my shirt rides up.”
“Good,” the writer snapped. “You could stand to be more relatable. It’s nice that you’re hot and all, but that only gets you male fans watching you on YouTube without the sound on. You have to make the girls like you.”
“But Orla’s the only girl who likes me,” Floss said. “I get along so much better with men.”
“It’s true,” Aston said. “We get along great.” He pulled Floss back down the hall and slammed the bedroom door. The writer rolled her eyes.
“THE PRANK WILL ESTABLISH A SENSE OF PLAYFULNESS,” boomed Mason, the show’s producer. He was a puffy man with dark under-eye circles who, in stark contrast to his writer, shouted everything in monotone. He laughed by saying “heh heh heh,” doled out precisely, just like that.
“I get that,” Orla said. “But why does it have to be flour?”
Mason frowned at her and said, “Can you get the talent back out here?”
Before the meeting, Floss and Aston had been holed up in Floss’s bedroom, bingeing a TV drama, and now Orla heard the hourly jingle of the theme music wafting from the room. “I’m not their assistant,” she said to Mason, sharply. She picked up her laptop from the counter and flopped down to work on the couch, where she assumed she would be out of the shot. Hair and makeup had taken over her bedroom.
This was the truth: she rerouted her whole life by picking the couch instead of the love seat.
“We’ll send a cleaning lady to take care of the mess, first thing in the morning, I promise,” Mason said.
All night, they threw the flour, setting and resetting the shot, coughing as the air filled up,