a long time looking, Marlow leaned back and rubbed her eyes. The room was beginning to empty of tourists, who trudged off looking worn out by their days. Marlow planned to stay until night, and then what? She had no idea what she would eat, where she would sleep, how she would escape the gaze of everyone on the street who had heard about the hunt.
She had at least a few more hours to kill before it got dark. She decided to try another tactic. She told the hologram to give her her mother chronologically. She went back to the beginning.
A vaguely troubling series of images kept resurfacing: shots of angry young people behind metal bars on a city block, and a visual Marlow didn’t quite understand—a short burst of text, next to a little square photo of a young woman, and under that, a photo of an apartment building’s double doors. Marlow squinted at the words. Twitter, she realized. This was Twitter, the thing Floss had told her about. This is where that skank who hurt Paulina lives, if anyone wants to drop by and beat the shit out of her. C’mon world. Don’t hold back. After that: an address.
The skin on Marlow’s arms went taut and cold when she read that. She dug into her bag for the paper from Grace and turned it to the side Grace had written on, then realized that she didn’t have a pen. She rummaged through her bag for something to scratch with, pushing the folded swimsuits and prenatal vitamins to the side. Then she felt something she hadn’t packed: a clear vinyl case. Alone in the dark, Marlow smiled. This always happened. Despite the fact that Marlow never wore anything but a smoothing balm on her face, Floss was always tucking makeup into her bags or her bathroom drawers, as if Marlow might become a new person entirely if Floss only found her the right shade of something.
There was an eyeliner pencil in the kit. Marlow uncapped it and copied the address down, squeezing it in beneath Grace’s printing. 303 W 21st St.
The black tip of the pencil crumbled as she wrote. FACE BY FLOSS, it said in copper-colored letters on the side. Her parents’ home was crammed with boxes of these old products—mascaras fully fossilized before they could be opened, serums that had long unclotted themselves into thick layers of oil and sediment. All Marlow knew about the line was that it had launched to total silence a year after the Spill. The basement had been filled with back stock for as long as she could remember, her old bikes leaning against the crates stacked to the ceiling.
She put the slip away. She was on the earliest page of search results, lined with the very first glimmers of her mother becoming someone. Marlow reached forward to tap the earliest story. Up popped a soft-focus photo of Floss brushing her eyebrows just the way Marlow always saw her do it: mouth open, eyes stretched wide. The headline read: “Sooo What Does The World’s Most Expensive Brow Gel Actually Do? One Instagram It Girl Finds Out.” It was strange, Marlow noticed, her eyes drifting down to the space beneath the headline: the name of whoever wrote the piece was missing. After “By,” there was only a bar of white space, like something had been erased. Next to it was a tiny headshot of a half-smiling woman. The nameless author, Marlow thought. She leaned closer to the story, the tip of her nose dipping into the hologram. The woman looked familiar.
Marlow went back to the red-carpet photos of Floss and found the woman almost immediately. There she was—next to Floss, but not really. The woman slumped in the shadowed edges of the pictures, waiting and holding two purses while Floss pouted in the center of the shot. She was thin by normal measures, but her waist was still thicker than Floss’s, and she was paler, almost gray-looking, next to Marlow’s mother. She seemed, Marlow thought with a stab of pity, like nothing but a point of comparison—a reminder, recurring in dozens of photos, of how dismal normal looked next to beautiful. “Floss Natuzzi and guest,” read some of the captions. “Floss Natuzzi and friend Orla,” read others. Marlow found a video clip in which the woman briefly stood with Floss on the carpet. Floss, twinkling in a gown made of champagne-colored scales, put one of her hands on the woman’s shoulder and cupped