One night, as Orla killed time out of frame, she looked down the press’s side of the carpet and saw the laminated paper she used to stand on—LADY-ISH.COM. There was a set of delicate, neon-polished toes covering the name that had replaced hers, and Orla followed them up to the rest of a girl who must have just finished college. Only recently had Orla come to accept that there was now a whole class of people living and working in New York who were several years younger than her, that they were not interns who had overstayed their summers—they were here to stay and grow up and compete.

Orla walked toward the girl from Lady-ish. “Hi,” she said, feeling radiant, generous.

The girl looked up from scribbling on her notepad. She had enormous black-rimmed glasses, perfect olive skin, and nude lip gloss, shiny and pearly, the kind Orla would have thought was out of style. Self-consciously, she touched her own lips, which were a thick red Floss had talked her into.

“Huh?” the girl said. She studied Orla. “Oh. Right. You’re on Flosston Public. The bookish one, right? Orla.”

It was her brand, but Orla still flinched at being called bookish. Not knowing what else to do, she trilled, feeling fake, “I love Lady-ish.”

The girl broke into a knowing grin. “I guess you do,” she said. “You worked there a long time.”

Orla bristled. “Right,” she said, reddening. “It’s a great place to start out.”

The girl shrugged. “I went to Yale,” she said, as if this explained multitudes. “I won’t be there that long. I’m writing a play. About— Well, I shouldn’t say too much. My agent wouldn’t want me to. I swear it’s like her full name is Polly ‘Top Secret’ Cummings.”

Orla nodded, teeth frozen. The girl had to be bluffing, she thought. There was no way she was repped by Polly Cummings. Polly was a lioness of literary agents, one whose name Orla had known since high school, when she checked a guide to the industry out of the local library. Her senior year, she had mailed Polly a short story she had written, the same one that now made up most of her manuscript. She remembered the day she got the response from Polly’s office. Gayle had come running out to where Orla floated in their aboveground pool, waving the envelope—Polly’s response came by mail, because it was only 2005—“Polly Cummings wrote back!” “I see promise here. Keep going!!—P,” said the Post-it on top of the packet Orla had mailed. Beneath the Post-it was another sheet, a half page of typed feedback. Now that she knew how these things worked, Orla understood that the letter had been written by an assistant—this was back when people Yale Girl’s age were expected to be assistants, not self ordained playwrights. Yale Girl was full of shit, Orla ruled. But something must have crossed her face, doubt or envy or fear, because Yale Girl smiled suddenly, like she had won a race between them. Just before she turned to see who else was coming down the line, Yale Girl looked at Orla with pity in her eyes. “Anyway, good luck,” she said. “I mean it.”

Orla was already shuffling away when she realized: the bitch hadn’t even bothered asking her a question.

Excerpted from Followers by Megan Angelo. Copyright © 2020 by Megan Angelo. Published by Graydon House.

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