Followers. Megan Angelo

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      After an hour of enjoying being alone in the apartment, Orla got bored and went to the office, walking directly into the sun as she moved east on Twenty-Third Street, toward the not-old, not-new Gramercy building Lady-ish shared with dentists and accountants. She wanted to get a jump on her posts for the week. Sage had been dead six days. The slideshow of celebrities walking into her funeral had gotten nine million clicks and counting, but the pace was tapering off. Orla’s follow-up, a trend piece on a hat three stars had worn to the services, had done about twice that, despite everyone on the internet pretending to be horrified by it. SO INAPPROPRIATE! a Lady-ish reader had screamed in the comments, echoing Orla’s original thoughts on the post. Ingrid had only said, “If we didn’t do it, someone else would have.”

      Orla liked the office on weekends—the half-light, the natural coolness it took on when jittery bodies weren’t packed along the tables. She sat down and closed her hand over her mouse, nudged her computer awake. She was scanning social media, looking for actresses who might have cut their hair over the weekend, when she saw Ingrid’s office door sliding open out of the corner of her eye.

      “Hey,” Ingrid said when she reached Orla’s desk. Orla looked up. Ingrid’s hair was even greasier than usual. Her boss had a six-step lip routine involving liners and glosses and setting powders, but she seemed to only wash her hair roughly once a moon cycle. “How was your weekend?” she said, like it was already over, and without waiting for an answer went on: “Can you cover a red carpet tomorrow? It’s this what’s-her-name who’s going to be there, her publicist’s always bothering me, and we need to keep the publicist happy because she also reps that—you know, that YouTube girl, with the harp?”

      “Tomorrow?” Orla rolled her eyes sideways, grasping for an excuse.

      “I just thought you might have some extra time,” Ingrid said meaningfully, “now that the Sage stuff is going away.”

      Orla nodded. She would do it. The year before, a handsome European prince who was constantly falling down outside clubs got sober, joined the armed forces, and largely disappeared. As a result, one Lady-ish blogger lost her job. Orla was determined not to lose hers—after all, if she lost it, she would never get to leave it. And this was something she fantasized about constantly: her quitting Lady-ish after selling her book, just like her Tinder-star colleague. In the fantasy, she carried a box of her things, though she didn’t have things at the office. Her desk was just a two-foot section of a long cafeteria-style table shared by nine other bloggers. No one had drawers or plants or picture frames—they barely had supplies. “Where’s the pen?” one of them would cry out a few times a day, and whoever had it last would send it skidding down the row.

      She knew she wasn’t the only one who dreamed about quitting. When she and her colleagues sat in the conference room, watching Ingrid run her laser pointer over a screen filled with top-performing headlines (“You Won’t BELIEVE What This Megastar Looks Like WITHOUT Her Extensions”), Orla would think about how every one of their minds was somewhere else, lusting over their next moves, reminding themselves they were better. Better than this job, and better than the girl in the next seat doing it, too. That last part was important. Orla believed it fiercely: she would be gone someday, on to greater things, and the next girl down would still be in her chair. She better still be in her chair. Someone had to stay to be who Orla was before.

      But before what? That was the question in her mind at dawn, when Florence slammed over the threshold and woke her, and at night, when she lay staring at her phone while she should have been writing or sleeping. More than anything else—to be an author, to have a boyfriend, to learn how it felt to breathe without being forty thousand dollars in debt—she wanted the answer to the question. She was living in the before of something, and she was getting tired of it. The dangerous thing about the way she felt, Orla knew, was that she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to happen, and she didn’t care that she didn’t know. Almost any change would do.