his mouth, washed it down with a swig from his water bottle, and charged out onto a baseball field. His mother looked on sagely from the bleachers. A tagline layered over the image addressed the mother: “What if your son’s best self was his only one?”
“This pill us grown-ups are talking about, Hysteryl,” the man said, “is like—Well, you know how you get upgrades for your device, for the system that runs your home functions? Think of Hysteryl as an upgrade for your feelings. And our feelings sure do have a lot of bugs, don’t they?”
The adults laughed, and Marlow imagined clunking all their heads together. The headband slipped down to her eyebrows for the thousandth time since the day began. She pushed it back again.
“Hysteryl is made especially for people your age,” the man went on. “It’s made to grow with you. We here at Antidote envision a future in which your entire generation, having on-boarded Hysteryl as teenagers, becomes the happiest, most well-adjusted, most confident generation of Americans ever.”
The network exec turned to Marlow and waggled her eyebrows happily, like the man was outlining dessert options.
“But new things can seem scary,” the man went on. “People always have their reservations about change, even when change is the best thing for them.” He looked down for a reverent moment, pressing his lips together. He ticked off a list on his fingers: “My college roommate, the week before graduation. The youngest in the family I grew up down the street from. My mother’s favorite student.”
Marlow straightened in her seat and tucked her chin down, the way children were taught to do when adults talked about the Spill.
“If we’d had Hysteryl back in the twenty-teens, the twenty-twenties,” the man said, “they’d still be here.”
From beneath her lowered lids, Marlow saw the exec jut her elbow into the writer’s. The writer nodded and rapped on the table.
“Maybe all people need is a story,” the writer said. “To see the way this drug can help a child. A child they already know and love. To follow her journey from rage and insecurity to—” the writer waved one hand through the air “—happiness. By Hysteryl.”
The man nodded. He thought about it. He smiled and swiveled his chair toward Marlow. “Has a nice ring,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”
Marlow turned to her mother. She wondered what sort of deal Floss imagined they were coming here for. Not this, she had to believe—not her own veins as a venue for product placement. She sat back and waited for her mother to yell, to call them a pack of lunatics.
But then she heard, to her horror, Floss reciting the sentence she had practiced in the bathroom that morning, as she brushed on what only she would call “a subtle look for day.”
“We feel lucky you would even consider Marlow for such an opportunity,” her mother said, covering Marlow’s hand with hers. “I think it sounds amazing.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Orla
New York, New York
2016
When Orla came into the living room, Craig was handing out bagels prepared in batshit combinations. He pressed a blueberry with scallion into Orla’s hands. Two everythings with raisin walnut sat on the couch, in the wide space between Floss and Aston, who had crept into 6D sometime after Orla went to bed.
“What’s going on?” Orla said. “Who’s dead? What the fuck?”
Melissa looked at Craig. “Craig, we have to tell them now,” she said. “Do you think you can stop with the bagels?”
Craig was staring at a chocolate chip bagel with a neon strip of lox between its halves. “This isn’t right,” he muttered. “This isn’t what I ordered.”
Melissa sighed and turned away from him. “We got word about an hour ago,” she said, “about a really unfortunate incident.” She looked at Floss and Aston and Orla. “What we all need to remember, as the next few days unfold, is that Floss intended her photos to be a celebration of the female form. An empowering message of real beauty to real girls everywhere. Right, Floss?”
“No.” Melissa held up her hand. “Orla had nothing to do with the idea. That’s gonna be important.”
Orla set her bagel down next to the television. “Of course I did,” she said. The ideas were always hers. Didn’t they all know their roles by now?
Three minutes. That was all it had taken for Floss’s naked pictures to crash Instagram. Floss wasn’t even dressed yet when Orla reloaded the feed on Floss’s phone and the screen gave her a gray,