broken face. “Done,” she said. “You’re officially famous on your own. You didn’t need Aston. You didn’t even need clothes.”
“Yay,” Floss had said. A moment later, a box popped up on Floss’s phone, telling her she’d been suspended from Instagram. So Orla gave Floss her laptop and her password. Floss logged into Instagram as Orla to watch the reaction unfold. When Orla went to bed, Floss was still up on the other side of the wall, drinking Moët and refreshing the mentions.
* * *
Now they sat in silence as Melissa read the reports out loud. No outlet seemed to have the full story, but each one was still breathlessly brandishing what they could find. It was up to them, in the quiet apartment, to put it all together.
Anna Salgado was seventeen, and lived on Staten Island.
She had been having a rough time anyway. Everyone, from her own crying parents to the sober-faced reporters, was quick to point this out. She had not been asked to the prom. She had tried to ask someone herself, a boy she had liked since freshman year. He told Anna he already had a date, then rushed to ask someone else: Anna’s best friend. He invited the girl over hasty text, accidentally copying Anna on the chain. But neither he nor Anna’s friend realized she was there, that she could see her best friend writing back But aren’t u going w Anna? and the boy responding Uh NO. He added an emoji, a little yellow face with full, rosy cheeks and a double chin. It was the shorthand kids were using to call each other fat.
Anna told her parents she wasn’t going to prom because it was a tool of the patriarchy.
When they asked her gently, the night of, if she wanted to go to California Pizza Kitchen—her favorite restaurant—she said no, thanks. She would read in her room. That evening, as Anna gripped her phone, scrolling through shots of her friends in their gowns and barrel curls, something arresting poked through all the posed shots: Floss, naked. Anna stared at the dimples on Floss’s thigh, at the outrageous curve of her hips, and felt a kinship. Floss looked nothing like the skinny girls at Anna’s school who monopolized the boys’ idea of hot.
Anna was inspired. She must have decided she wanted to make a tribute, her own version of what Floss did. She stripped herself down, propped her phone on a stack of dystopian paperbacks, and stood as Floss had. She had never sucked her cheeks like that before, her mother pointed out later—for a second, she didn’t know it was her daughter in the picture. Anna hesitated, but only for a moment. Then she posted the photos on Instagram.
Like every tragedy, it was all in the timing. Anna’s naked body lasted ten minutes online—longer than it should have, longer than Floss’s, perhaps because the chaos Floss set off had left the platform scrambling, behind. If everyone Anna knew hadn’t been in the same place, pausing from their sweaty, sex-adjacent dancing to hunch over their phones and laugh, the photos might not have spread so quickly. If her classmates hadn’t been wild from adrenaline and malt drinks bought by older cousins, their comments might not have been as harsh. If the school lock-in that followed the prom hadn’t been so boring, their teachers trying to tempt them with cornhole and Jenga, they might not have lingered on the story so long, ravaging Anna’s social-media accounts long after her shots had been wiped.
And then there was the comment Floss made.
“Comment?” Floss reeled her head back when Melissa said it. “I didn’t leave any comment.”
Melissa was looking at the empty champagne bottle on the counter when she said, “Yes, you did.”
Someone had screenshotted the picture of Anna before it had been pulled down. Loving Floss Natuzzi for repping REAL Latina bodies, Anna had captioned the shot. I want to meet her in person one day! #queen #naturallyperfect #womensrightsarehumanrights.
There had been dozens of comments, but the screenshot homed in on two in a row.
yungrebel2016: kill yourself THOT you look so fat
orlajcadden: this is floss and i agree. you should!
Orla stared at her name, sitting somewhere she had not put it, next to words that were not her own. She had forgotten that Floss had used her account the night before, after her own was suspended because of the nudes. The comment had been liked two hundred eight times.