Followers. Megan Angelo
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c’mon divorce, Marlow begged silently. Divorce, with temporary relocation to Anguilla and personal fitness trainer. Male.
She and Ellis sat forward on the sofa.
Congratulations! Marlow heard in her head. We will be having a baby this season.
Marlow broke the word down into syllables—bay, bee—and found she couldn’t make sense of the term in this context, the context being her life.
Egg storage for female lead Marlow Clipp, aged thirty-five, has reached its expiration date. More details about our baby design process and sowing celebration will be forthcoming.
Bay. Bee.
Marlow tried to picture herself in a hospital bed, Ellis at her side, an infant being lowered onto her chest. She couldn’t imagine them smiling at each other the way the parents always did in these scenes. All at once, Marlow got what this storyline meant. For the first time in her life on camera, she would have to act.
She looked at Ellis, to see how he was taking the news, and found him one step ahead of her. His eyes were wider than she had ever seen them, his smile unfamiliar, with too many teeth on display. He raised a hand and smacked his forehead theatrically.
He knew, Marlow thought. He’s not surprised. And neither was she, when she thought about it. When she remembered the Liberty deal.
Six months earlier, Ellis had come home with a new account. He was overseeing his first merger, he told Marlow proudly. Antidote was acquiring Liberty Family Planning, the company that had long overseen Constellation’s babymaking. Liberty was expanding across the country, and it was Ellis’s job to up their profile on the network, to convince Constellation fans that they should have babies the same expensive way their favorite stars did. The process had three stages: egg reaping, baby design, egg replacement.
“Huge for me,” Ellis had said that day, rapping a rhythm on the table. “Huge for us.”
Marlow had opened some champagne, feeling conspicuously wifelike. As she poured their drinks, she thought of her own trip to Liberty. It was where she and every other teenage girl in Constellation had their eggs siphoned out of them at eighteen, to be frozen until the network green-lit their pregnancy arcs. “This will give you total freedom from your biological clock,” Marlow could still hear the nurse saying. “Freedom to grow and achieve.” (Lazy writer guidance, there, Marlow thought later—Liberty’s actual motto was “Freedom to grow. Freedom to achieve. Freedom from your biological clock.”) The network worked closely with Liberty to plan the births of their stars’ babies—to prevent viewers from being torn between Jacqueline’s second C-section and the bursting forth of Ida’s twin boys, or to ensure that offspring could be quickly defrosted for couples the audience responded to.
Or for couples, Marlow thought, whom the audience had grown bored of. Whose stories were in dire need of a twist.
She got up and went into the master bathroom. Ellis followed her in, closing the door behind them. He seemed somewhere else entirely for a moment before he looked to her and grinned. “A baby!” he said. “Man, I can’t wait to be a dad. I can’t wait to tell the client.”
He said those two things, Marlow thought, like they were perfectly related, and equal in weight. She heard herself laughing, heard the way the drugs in her bloodstream smoothed desperation out of the sound. Her laughter sounded joyful. Normal.
Ellis thought so, too. “Hold on!” he said, waving his hands. “Save it, Mar. This is your authentic reaction to becoming a mother. You’ve gotta share it with your followers.” He opened the bathroom door and prodded her out, to where she could be seen.
Her followers were thrilled, of course. Followers loved babies.
The next day, Marlow and Ellis drove to the same blush-colored, circular building where Marlow’s eggs had been harvested. Liberty’s waiting room hadn’t changed. The furniture was all cut from that frosted plastic that had been everywhere in her youth, the past’s idea of future, all of it yellowing now.
“Have you decided on a gender?” the chipper nurse asked in the exam room. She handed them six genetic input kits, for each of them and their parents. They were to return them dirty, full of swabs and hair, so that the designers could begin sorting Marlow’s and Ellis’s gene pools, marking the things they wanted their child to have, striking the things they didn’t. This was stage two: design.
“We don’t know yet,” Marlow said, at the same time Ellis said, “A boy.”
The nurse smiled. “You don’t have to be coy,” she said to Marlow. “Exam rooms are off camera. There won’t be any spoilers.”
“I’m not,” Marlow said, aiming her tone at her husband. “We aren’t done discussing it.”
Ellis held his tongue, for the moment.
“This is a special case, of course.” The nurse flattened her hands on the desk, splaying her elbows as she looked at her tablet. “While Hysteryl is a miracle drug, it’s still not safe for baby’s development. So we’ll be weaning you off, Marlow, a bit at a time, before we replace your eggs.”
“She’ll still be the face of the drug,” Ellis broke in, as if this was the important thing, as if this mattered to the nurse. “She’ll be on a short cleanse, yes, but her campaign will go on. We’re testing some new ads that focus on the baby—like, what could be a happier ending for a troubled girl, growing up into a perfectly normal mother?”
Marlow watched the side of his face as he talked. His ears were red. He seemed so eager for the nurse’s approval. “You didn’t tell me that, honey,” she murmured. “I had no idea that marketing had already met to decide my happy ending.”
Ellis didn’t turn to look at her. “See how she jokes?” he said to the nurse. “She’s going to be fine.”
The nurse nodded uneasily. “Right,” she said. “Well, it’s incredibly important—” the nurse trailed off, like she was listening to something come through her device, then nodded and squinted threateningly at Ellis “—that Marlow avoid stress completely during this time. Because she won’t have her normal defense system in place.”
That night, the housekeeping drone whirred into their bedroom and set only half a pill on Marlow’s nightstand. Both of them looked at it. Ellis patted the blanket near where her leg was.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll just have to be vigilant about self-care. All you have to do is stay happy.”
A week later, Hysteryl was officially out of her system, the tiny dish beside her bed empty for the first time since she was fourteen.
“You’re feeling good? Good girl,” Ellis said, scrutinizing her over his coffee, when she came into the kitchen each morning.
And she was feeling good, at first. Then she began to feel strange, as if she was expanding, taking on new acreage too rapidly to keep up with her own topography. Feelings were returned to her like toys she hadn’t seen since childhood, and she held them awkwardly, unsure of what to do with them as an adult.
Pettiness—at least, that was the best word she could think of for the sensation—came over her like hunger, several times a day.
Once, in the middle of taking a bath, she stood up and sloshed naked into her bedroom, tugged Ellis’s snacks out from under the bed, and shoved every morsel down the garbage disposal. A few days later, she walked out of trivia night—a monthly outing with Ellis and their friends—after getting an answer wrong.
“What’s the matter?” Ellis said, his voice deadly even, when