Followers. Megan Angelo

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      One morning, as Floss and Orla napped off hangovers, the doorman rang the white phone on their wall. Orla picked herself up off the sofa and got it. “Be right down,” she mumbled automatically.

      “No deliveries, Miss Orla. It’s Sunday,” he said. “Your mother and father are here, okay?”

      “Okay,” Orla said. She hung up, and flew across the floor to Floss, who was curled on the love seat, one breast easing free of her black satin nightie. Orla squatted down. “Hey, my parents are here. Can you...?”

      “Your parents?” Floss was awake immediately, gathering herself, making a break for her room. “Why?” she said harshly, over her shoulder.

      Orla flushed with anger—not at her roommate, but at her parents, for puncturing their world. Orla was steering the tides of celebrity; she didn’t need her mother to bring her Tupperwares of plain grilled chicken breasts, which Gayle would unbag while saying, “You need your protein, and I know you won’t go to the trouble yourself.”

      Orla opened the door. Gayle and Jerry snapped their heads toward her as if she’d startled them, two pairs of eyebrows clutching toward each other with concern. This was how her parents had been greeting her since the days of them meeting her at the school bus: like they had spent all day discussing her worrisome behavior.

      “Surprise!” her father said, grabbing Orla by the shoulders and kneading them.

      “Hel-lo,” her mother murmured, in her strangely formal way, reaching around Orla not so much to hug her but to lightly tap the base of her neck. She was wearing a hunter green long-sleeved shirt and an aggressively plaid vest. Orla’s father wore beaten khakis, the black sneakers he passed off as dress shoes, and an old suit shirt with a drooping collar. When his dress shirts wore out, instead of getting rid of them, Jerry demoted them to casualwear.

      “You should have seen us getting down here,” Gayle sighed, smoothing back her dyed-cranberry bangs. “We sure stuck out.”

      “You mean because it’s eighty degrees out?” Orla said, eyeing the vest. But she knew what Gayle meant. Orla came from Mifflin, Pennsylvania, a town smack between New York and Philadelphia—growing up, she had gone to the zoos in both cities on field trips. Mifflin had been nothing but fields strung together by farms until the 1980s, when families like Orla’s descended, slapping up vinyl siding everywhere. Their neighborhood had sidewalks and young trees and a superfluous name, embossed on a concrete block at the turn-in: Hidden Ponds. (The one semiboyfriend Orla had ever brought home from the city had stood in her driveway, looking at all the short grass and macadam, and said, “They hid those ponds pretty well.”) Still, Orla’s parents pretended they had nothing to do with suburban sprawl. They did imitations of people who worked the earth. Gayle stomped around in rain boots all year and wore clothes she ordered from a catalog that had a mallard on the front. Her father puttered and fussed over their half-acre lawn and four tomato plants as if it was his job. “Frost tonight,” Orla could recall Jerry, a CPA, saying wistfully throughout her childhood, as if they might not eat. Gayle would call Orla in from the yard for dinner by ringing a large bell she had nailed to a beam near the back door. “6:00 p.m., supper’s on!” she’d shout. The kids in the adjacent yards would freeze, kickballs in hand, and blink at Orla. “Why does she do that?” one of them asked Orla once as they tugged at a tangle of Barbies. “So I know what time it is,” Orla said. The girl pointed at the CoreStates Bank on the other side of the cypresses at the back of the development. The bank’s tall sign blinked 6:01 at them in red. “The rest of us just use that,” she said.

      After depositing the chicken breasts in Orla’s fridge, Gayle looked around the apartment, surveying the flattened boxes piled at the door. “What’s all this?” she said.

      Orla handed each of them a glass of water. Her dad pulled out his hankie, dipped it in, and wiped his balding head. “I don’t know,” Orla said. “They’re my roommate’s.” In her room, Floss was soundless, not even her phone daring to chime.

      Gayle lifted the flap on one of the boxes, trying to read the label.

      “Mom,” Orla hissed. “I said they’re not mine.”

      “Just СКАЧАТЬ