pictures of the two of them with venomous affection—my best friend is hotter than yours. The edge of jealousy toward Danny was another one of these pantomimes, the kind that might have seemed genuine to the people in the cheap seats. But Orla, in the front row, saw them for just what they were: distractions sequined over the truth. Floss might have believed she loved Orla, but Orla knew Floss was only for Floss. She knew that Floss was the kind of selfish friend most women could only keep one of. The one they tried hard to love but had to hang up on twice a year, the one they told the rest of their friends about, in sentences that always began, “You know I love her, but...” Orla felt aware that it was risky, having this kind of friend as her only one, with no cushion of other contacts to help metabolize the crazy. But she had lived the alternative, too. She knew it was better than having no one.
It took a blizzard for Floss to soften toward Danny. The storm started up in the middle of the first Friday morning in April, shocking the city with more snow than had fallen all winter. It stranded them as a foursome—Orla and Danny, Floss and Aston—together in 6D, drinking rum mixed with instant cocoa someone found in an out-of-reach cupboard. The power went out, which was quaint. They talked and talked.
“My little liberal here thinks I’m nuts when I say the government wants our guns,” Danny said as Orla stroked his hair. “But someday they won’t just come after our guns. They’ll want to know everything about us, want to track our every move. It’s starting already.”
“No shit, man,” Aston said, spreading his arms as he jumped off the couch. “I have this super-rare Uzi at my house in Santa Monica, and it was such a bitch to register. Like, let me do me. I only bring it out at parties, anyway.”
“Oh, you two,” Floss said fondly. Orla’s heart leaped to hear Danny mathematically included in her tone. She smiled at Floss, who looked up from the spray of split ends she had been inspecting and grinned back. Men, her eyes seemed to say. Holding her gaze—me and my best friend, here with our boyfriends—Orla had never felt so content in her life.
The weeks went on: sex, takeout, events, sex. Photos of Orla and Danny had begun to surface, had made their way into the consciousness of home. It was too much for Mifflin to bear: Orla Cadden becoming ultrafamous-adjacent and then—get this—bringing the dude from American Cold Storage along for the ride. Twined together on the couch, Orla and Danny tracked Facebook chatter about themselves. They read aloud to each other from emails they got and never responded to, sent from classmates they laughed at. They weren’t trying to be mean; it was just that the existence of other people suddenly struck them as funny.
Orla was careful, though, to never let Danny see her inbox. Gayle emailed a dozen times a day. Orla ignored one message, then another, until there were so many that the idea of reading them overwhelmed her, like an assignment she would rather take a zero on than face. The subject lines piled up in desperate bold:
Have you lost your mind
This has to stop
Please talk to me
We are here for you
When Danny asked casually, after weeks, about her book, Orla started sitting at her laptop in front of him. But she was always stuck, always blocked, and she spent most of the time online shopping. She had learned to enter her credit card digits with a cadence that mimicked prose.
Sometimes, while she sat there, Danny would bring her her glasses. Orla had never explained they were fake. In the beginning, she had forgotten, and now too much time had passed. The truth was more embarrassing than it was important, she thought, so she kept it to herself.
* * *
One late afternoon as they lay in bed, afterward, their breathing beginning to normalize, Danny extracted his arm from behind Orla’s head and sat up. He grabbed his laptop from the windowsill. He got back into bed, set it on his thighs, and opened it so they could both see the screen.
He pulled up a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide read, in blocky font, MERCHANDISING PLAN—FLOSS NATUZZI.
Orla’s stomach puckered, a flicker of doom, as he cursed under his breath, trying to cue up some music. “What are