In the basement, they ducked into a private room. It had a huge TV with blurry footage of people dancing and was soundproofed with ugly padding in burgundy and blush. A binder of laminated pages, songs and their six-digit codes, stuck to a ring-stained table. Floss picked up the binder and flipped through it, jabbed a code into the remote.
The song’s intro began, all simpleton chords and synthetic drums. It was familiar, either a song Orla knew or one that sounded like everything. She was hardly listening, anyway. She was thinking of how Floss had said the word secondary that afternoon, the consonants bitter and violent. Orla gathered her anger back and tried to believe she could do it—she could say to Floss, right now, I heard you, why would you, after all we, you bitch.
The song went on and Orla remembered it. It belonged to a star who she had since forgotten was once famous for music, one who went on to play in a reality romance and make midpriced shoes for chain stores. The lyrics came up on the screen, blue rippling across them in time, and Orla found she still knew every word. She remembered herself during a lazy middle-school summer, using Catherine’s landline phone to call a video request channel called The Box, pressing in the digits for this overdone ballad. Catherine wringing her hands, Orla rolling her eyes and telling her to relax, that her parents wouldn’t notice the charge.
Then Floss began to sing, and Orla’s thoughts fell apart. Floss’s voice, the real one, the one she abandoned so often in pursuit of something put-on, was phenomenal. It was deep, and ribbed, and searingly on-pitch, demolishing notes out of standard human reach. Floss pushed her hair into a knot on top of her head, carelessly, as if she was fed up with it keeping her from something.
Orla was thinking of Floss’s faceless mother, doubting her daughter’s talents, when she blurted, “You’re so good, Floss, God. Wouldn’t you have rather been a singer than a...?”
Floss waited for her to finish and smiled sadly when she didn’t. “I tried to be a singer, at first,” she said. “But how do you be a singer? It’s not like what we’re doing. There’s no formula.” She shrugged. “Maybe if the show gets big enough, they’ll let me do a single.”
“You could have tried harder,” Orla said. “You still could. We could forget the other stuff.”
The song was over. Floss put down the microphone and picked up her drink. She stuck the little red straw in the corner of her mouth. “I don’t want to,” she said. “It just isn’t a practical dream.”
* * *
Several Saturdays later, after three subsequent episodes of Flosston Public had aired to a growing audience, Orla had plans with her mother. Gayle was coming into the city to see Jersey Boys with some of her friends from Zumba. It was not the first time for any of them. Orla was hungover, but she forced herself to try to write beforehand. She held down different keys, creating little pictures in her manuscript that began as procrastination but sort of started to seem like something, perhaps a meaningful graphic that could be worked into the story. Orla highlighted a crude sailboat she had made of lowercase r’s and called up its word count. Thirty-nine. Not bad.
Orla could tell from the moment she saw her that Gayle had more news about Danny. Her mother practically glittered when she was holding fresh gossip.
Orla herded Gayle and her friends onto the C train, then the B train. She led them aboveground and toward Mulberry Street. They ambled down the sidewalk five across, mortifying her, and succumbed to the first Little Italy loudmouth who beckoned to them from his doorway. They sat down and ate pasta drowned in sludgy red sauce. Everyone but Orla declared it “heavenly.”
Orla tried to settle herself into a place of indifference. The more she wanted to hear about Danny, the longer Gayle would hold back. So Orla smiled as one of her mother’s friends performed a long retelling of an episode of King of Queens. When another asked Orla if “they still call it the Big Apple,” she treated the question thoughtfully. When a third screamed and knocked back her chair, claiming to have seen a roach—it turned out to be a tile scuff, but the woman sniffed that they should still get a discount, for the scare—Orla apologized on New York’s behalf. Finally, the