Followers. Megan Angelo

anyone think it’s weird the way she drinks that juice, someone else said. She’s like SAVORING the tiniest sips. I bet she’s on coffee and they’re CGI’ing shit.

      Marlow froze with her lips on the bottle. She waited a beat for the comment to clear, then tipped her head back and forced herself to take a giant gulp of her drink. She exhaled discreetly, to keep from releasing the telltale coffee char of her breath. Then she stifled a smile; her followers couldn’t smell her. Her heartbeat stuttered as it always did when she came up with another thing, though sometimes she could go years on end without adding to the list: Things I Have to Myself. The hour before 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., when the network broke for ad interruption. Dressing rooms and doctor’s office chambers and bathrooms, in her home and all over town. Her favorite was a toilet stall in the vegan gastropub downtown—as a teenager, she used a nail file to scratch mean things about some of her ruder followers into its enamel walls. And now: her smell. Something small, but hers alone.

      This was how it had gone, at Jacqueline’s parties, for nearly a decade: Marlow sat on the cantaloupe-colored sofa, against its right arm, her good side facing camera east. Ida slumped opposite her, on the daisy-patterned club chair, droning unbearably. Marlow had once liked being across from Ida, back when the woman was a bawdy, sloppy drunk. But these days, Ida was sober, and a stay-at-home mom, and she spent most of Jacqueline’s parties performing small dramas about her allergies. Marlow had seen Ida walk around an ottoman like it was a land mine, sniffling, “Oh, God, is that mohair?” Ida routinely flung herself across the room to close a window, whining, “Sorry, pollen, I have to.” Once, failing to detect Ida’s allergy profile from her device, a server bot had extended a tray of shrimp cocktail her way. Ida had gone to City Hall the next week, made a twenty-minute speech about her hives, and insisted that the network decommission—and dismember, Marlow recalled, with a scandalized chill—the offending machine.

      But tonight, Ida was missing, recast without explanation. A new girl—olive-skinned and sleek, formidably cheekboned, with bronze lipstick and black hair parted into pigtail braids—sat in Ida’s chair with her bare feet pulled up under her, like she had been here forever.

      Marlow looked at Jacqueline, who stood in the center of the thick sand-colored carpet, holding up something called a “scrunchie.” At these parties, Jacqueline pushed things that, according to her invites, changed her life: ab gadgets, smoothies, ugly quilted handbags. Marlow knew—they all knew—that none of these things had really changed Jacqueline’s life. The network chose the items based on sponsorship agreements. Then Jacqueline threw parties where she raised them up and gushed about them to her dozen in-person guests and her roughly nine-point-nine million followers—plus all of her guests’ followers, too. The items the network chose reflected Jacqueline’s core audience demo: married mothers across America, aged twenty-eight to forty-four, who tuned in while folding laundry around 9:00 p.m. on weeknights. Though Jacqueline fit squarely in with her followers—she was thirty-eight, with two daughters—she was always embarrassed when someone mentioned her demo. “It makes me feel so old and boring,” she told Marlow once. “It’s better than mine,” Marlow had said. No one would argue with that.

      “Where’s Ida?” Marlow called to Jacqueline, raising her voice above the scrunchie-induced oohs and aahs.

      Jacqueline ignored her. She pushed the scrunchie onto her wrist and waved her hand around for all to see. “And it’s supercute as a bracelet,” she said.

      “Jac?” Marlow repeated. “Is Ida on vacation?”

      The end of her sentence slipped under the clatter of something breaking on the ground. The women turned to see a server bot bent over the shards of a wineglass. Marlow watched the lilies in the coffee table vase twist in the same direction, their scarlet pistils stretching to train their tiny cameras on the action. She could swear the bot had dropped the glass to drown out the sound of Ida’s name.

      When she looked back at Jacqueline, her friend nodded once and dabbed at her lips. It was their signal for Tell you off-camera.

      An hour later, as Marlow passed the powder room, Jacqueline’s arm shot out of it and pulled her inside. “Ida’s gone,” she said, as she pulled the door shut.

      “Gone?” Marlow saw herself in the mirror. One of Jacqueline’s hair drones, its silver talons clacking near her ear, had pinned a ridiculous silk bow barrette into her dark waves.

      “Yup,” Jacqueline said. “Just up and left Mike and the kids. Blew right through the perimeter. Left the fucking state.” She walked her fingers on an invisible path through the air. “Check your map. She’s in Denver. And for God’s sake, Marlow—don’t mention her on camera again.”

      “But what about her contract?” Marlow said. “I thought she and Mike were doing the whole on-the-rocks thing this year.” She unlatched her barrette and massaged her scalp, ignoring Jacqueline’s puffed breath of protest.

      “They didn’t even stage a hunt for her, supposedly,” Jacqueline said, adjusting the pearl comb at her temple. She sucked her cheeks in and glared at herself in the glass. “How shitty would that feel? It’s like they don’t even care she’s gone. I honestly think the network was glad to get the chance to sub in that new girl. Diversity and all.”

      “Jacqueline.” Marlow spoke in a firm voice. This was something she had been trying to do more since she turned thirty-five—the age felt, to her, like a cosmic deadline for being strong and self-possessed. Complete. “Hunts aren’t real,” she said.

      “They certainly are,” Jacqueline returned, in a tone that trumped hers effortlessly, and Marlow let it go. Jacqueline was an incorrigible know-it-all. It was what Marlow loved most about her. Her friend’s brazen authority always made her feel safe.

      Jacqueline’s eyes flitted away for a moment. She nodded, but not at Marlow. Her device was telling her something. “Gotta get back out there,” she said. “Talk later.”

      Alone in the bathroom, Marlow twiddled the twigs in the diffuser on the sink and closed her eyes. Find Ida Stanley, she intuited.

      In her mind’s eye, California shrank and plummeted away, making Marlow’s stomach flip, like she was the falling thing. Her map shifted, streaking past hundreds of her neighbors’ symbols in a blur, and brought her down again in Denver. Ida’s symbol—the red stiletto that had always depressed Marlow—hovered over the city. There she was, proudly gone, in the state of—Marlow had to zoom out to remind herself what state Denver was in—Colorado. Marlow pictured Ida on a purple-flowered mountain. Sneezing.

      The black gem at her wrist nicked her gently. I have a message from production, came the voice in her brain. I should return to an on-camera space. I have now been off camera five minutes. I have lost seventy-eight followers during this off-camera time.

      Marlow watched herself blush with guilt in the mirror. It was as if the network knew what she was thinking about just then: what it would be like for her to leave, too.

      I have lost eighty-nine followers during this off-camera time, the voice followed up.

      Eighty-nine followers was nothing. Marlow averaged an audience of over twelve million. And that was why Ida could run, she thought, and get away with it, whereas she wouldn’t. Ida had, what—one, one-point-five million followers? Hardly a fan favorite, especially after she transitioned from the party-girl ensemble to a standard housewife arc. She didn’t even have a sponsor. Marlow, by contrast, was the most looked-at woman in the room, presented by a marquee partner: Hysteryl. Her followers—the people who observed every move she made—were spread across the rest of America and various races and age groups. What they had in common was that they were troubled. This was how the network marketed her: as the poster child for troubled, the Constellation star who got what they were going through. The network mined public data, looking for adults whose devices clocked too