Followers. Megan Angelo
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you remember the year Aunt Diane gave us all those strange gifts? Your dad got the turkey fryer?”
“I liked that,” Jerry said tonelessly.
“And you got those black pearl earrings,” Gayle said severely to Orla, “but they weren’t real pearls.”
“I don’t have a shopping addiction, Mom.” Orla began the strenuous mental exercise of trying to come up with a restaurant that was inexpensive, close enough to walk to, and stocked with normal bread baskets, not focaccia or olive loaf or anything that might make her mother say, derisively, “Ooh la la.”
“Because it’s in our blood. That’s all I’m saying.” Gayle sniffed.
Ten minutes later: “Ooh la la,” Gayle said as the waitress set down the bread basket.
Orla sighed. “But it’s just rolls.”
Gayle pointed at the dish next to the basket, which, instead of wrapped pats of butter, held a pool of oil and herbs for dipping.
“How’s the job?” Jerry said to Orla. “Working on anything interesting?” Jerry had no idea what Orla wrote about, and they both preferred it that way. He could keep telling his coworkers that Orla was “a culture writer” if he didn’t see things like “How to Copy This Socialite Goddess’s Distressed Booty Jean Shorts in Just 13 Steps.”
Gayle, who liked to share Orla’s posts on Facebook, flapped her napkin at him. “Jerry, that’s girl stuff,” she said, like Orla’s job was a box of tampons. “She doesn’t want to talk about that with you.” Gayle pinched a piece of bread between her thumb and forefinger. “Anyway,” she said. “Guess who I saw the other day? Catherine. And Danny.”
Orla’s heart tripped. She made a show of chewing for a moment, then, when she trusted her voice to come out right, said: “And how are they?”
“To be honest with you,” Gayle said, “they seemed extremely unhappy.”
Orla could feel the blotches starting up her chest. She prayed Gayle wouldn’t notice. She could never be sure, then or now, how much her mother knew about then. Or now. “What do you mean?” she said. “How could you tell?”
Before Gayle could answer, Jerry knocked his fork off the table with his elbow and looked at Gayle helplessly. Instead of signaling for the waiter, Gayle got up, approached the wait station, and retrieved a new set of silverware. “Well,” she said, unwrapping the utensils for Jerry, “they made quite a scene at Chick-fil-A. Maybe it’d be nothing in these parts.” She looked pointedly at two men holding hands across the corner table. “They were fighting, and she...”
“She what?” Orla jumped in, forgetting to act like she didn’t care.
“She was screaming,” Gayle said. “At the top of her lungs.”
“Catherine was screaming?” Orla pictured Catherine, with her slicked-back soccer-girl braid, always pulling at Orla’s arm as soon as they got to a party, whimpering Let’s go, I know the cops are gonna come.
“Evidently,” Gayle said, “she wanted Danny to pray with her over their meals. And he wouldn’t.”
Jerry swallowed and laughed to himself without looking up.
Orla had noticed a religious tinge to Catherine’s online presence, the last time she browsed. This was the term Orla clung to—browse had a light touch, a whiff of the happenstance—as she bored through everything she could find on Danny, sucking her ice cream spoon in the light of her laptop. She recalled an Instagram photo of a sunset, shot from Danny and Catherine’s backyard, just a few miles from her parents’ house, and the photo’s caption: When something beautiful happens and you just can’t help but thank Him. #nofilter.
Gayle watched Orla carefully as she said: “When he got her calmed down, she said, ‘This is why I can’t be with you anymore.’”
Orla’s fingers itched. She needed to get rid of them, get back to the apartment, get online. Since she and Floss began working together, she had been spending fewer nights looking up Danny. But it didn’t really matter how much time she spent clicking around his life, how many times she entered his name into a search box or how many days she managed not to. She was always waiting, still.
Jerry shook the empty little cylinder and called out, “Salt?” The waitress came over to refill it and got trapped in Gayle’s signature rant on allergies (she did not have any; she just wanted to establish that she thought people invented them these days. People needed to toughen up about peanuts and gluten, that was all). The waitress looked to Orla for aid, but Orla was glad for the distraction. She let the letters on the menu blur in front of her and thought about Danny, the last time she ever spoke to him.
They were at a party, the night before high school graduation. The party was at the home of a kid named Ian, whose parents were never there. Neither, usually, were Orla and Catherine. Gayle and Jerry never had to police Orla’s whereabouts; her best friend was frightened of everything. But they were graduating, Orla insisted to Catherine, and they wouldn’t want to look back and remember that they had spent the last night of high school making Cheez Whiz nachos and rewatching Austin Powers. “We’ll bring Danny,” Orla added, feeling bold. “Danny won’t let anything happen.” Finally, Catherine gave in.
Danny drove them. Catherine slid into the front seat, and he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. He made sure her seat belt was clicked in right. Orla watched from her place in the back—behind Catherine, where she could see him.
It was simple: Orla had always loved him. She had loved him since the first day of ninth grade, when she and Catherine, allies from middle school, sat next to each other in English. Danny sat in a desk on the other side of the room. His arms were pale and muscled, folded across a wordless gray T-shirt on a day everyone else had picked their clothes like their lives depended on them. When he twisted around to look, at the teacher’s urging, at a how-to chart on bibliographies, his dark blue eyes locked on Orla’s pale brown ones, and that was what she would always remember: the way he was willing to stare, when so many boys nearly wet themselves from eye contact. Orla looked at him, and he looked back at her, and she wished the teacher would never shut up about how to cite sources.
Afterward, Catherine turned to Orla in the hallway, red as an angry infant, and said, “Did you see him?”
And Orla said, “I know.”
They were talking quietly, because he was behind them, all of them shuffling toward next period, struggling to hold the map of the school in their heads. Catherine turned quickly, as if she needed to do it before she lost her courage. Her braid grazed Orla’s face, a quick, bristling lash. “Hi,” Catherine said to Danny. “Do you know which way Upper B is?” Danny glanced once at Orla, then nodded and started speaking to Catherine. Simple again: Danny and Catherine started dating that weekend, and never stopped.
Orla could have raged or cried or sabotaged them, but she was strangely content to orbit them instead. For four years, she joined Danny and Catherine for movies and camping trips and felt only shallow pangs when they went into one tent, and she went into the other. She dated plenty of his friends, was always happy to take on another for the pleasure of Danny leaning against her locker, grinning, his hand on her shoulder as he joked, “Be nice to this one.” They spent high school in the same carpeted basements and starry parking lots, under the arms of different people. And as Danny and Catherine synced up their applications to state schools, Orla never tried a thing, never made an advance, never confessed. She was already writing him into the story of her life later on. She had it all planned: she was going to be a New Yorker, an author with chic glasses and a grip on what to do with her disorderly hair. At seventeen,