Follow Me(10)

“There you go,” he said with a condescending sneer.

I flipped him my middle finger and stepped back into my apartment. He was still watching me as I slammed the front door. My hands shook slightly as I twisted the lock until I heard its angry, satisfying click.





CHAPTER SIX





CAT


After the unpleasantness that summer at Camp Blackwood, my parents sent me to a doctor who diagnosed me with social anxiety disorder. I resented the diagnosis at the time—there was nothing wrong with me—but as the panic I sometimes felt around my peers began to diminish with treatment, I was forced to admit the doctor might have been right. Eventually, I realized that, while my anxiety might’ve been more extreme than most people’s, it wasn’t unusual to feel unsettled at times. Lots of people feel tension around social interactions, and everyone gets nervous occasionally. Even people like Audrey, who hid her fears behind false bravado and a biting sense of humor, experienced anxiety sometimes.

If you’d just met Audrey, you’d think that she was unflappable. It wasn’t until I shared a room with her in the sorority house that I realized her carefree persona was just that: a persona. I started to recognize her tells, like the way her cheek sucked slightly inward when she chewed on it and how her true emotions would show briefly on her face before being remolded into a smile. I was loathe to admit it, even to myself, but I found comfort in knowing that even someone like Audrey wasn’t perfect. She was a real person just like me under all that flash and charisma.

You had to know her to see the cracks in her veneer. For example, when she realized she’d rented an English basement, concern flickered through her blue-green eyes for a fraction of a second. She blinked it away so quickly that most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but I did. That was part of being a best friend.

I didn’t need that minute slip to know she was anxious, though. Sometime around three that morning, I’d been walking to the bathroom when I heard a voice coming from the guest room. I eased open the door and peered inside. There was Audrey, stretched out on the bed with eyes closed and mouth moving. I strained to hear what she was saying but it sounded like nothing more than gibberish. I was turning to leave when she clearly said, “I’m scared.”

I knew little about somniloquy, my entire experience limited to the times Audrey talked in her sleep during college. Her nighttime utterances were usually indiscernible, but often included some variation of the phrase I’m scared. At first, I thought Audrey was having nightmares, but I later realized they corresponded with a particularly stressful time: midterms, finals, the weeks leading up to graduation. That was the only clue that Audrey was nervous; she hid her anxieties well. I would have sold my soul for a poker face half as good as hers.

I wished that for once she could allow herself to be a bit vulnerable and admit that she was scared. She didn’t have to stay in that basement apartment with its window opening onto an alley and its sketchy upstairs neighbor. She could move into my guest room instead. I could help her. Back in college, Audrey had offered me a hand, had given me hope when no one else did. Her friendship saved me. She had guided me through a tough transition, and I was determined to repay the favor in kind.





CHAPTER SEVEN





HIM


Like all of Audrey’s followers, I knew she moved to Washington, DC. I’d seen the announcement during one of her Instagram Lives. I had been so captivated by her pale, freckled shoulders, visible from underneath a white, spaghetti-strap dress, and the way that her beautiful red-gold hair curled around them, that I almost missed what she said. For days, she had been teasing “exciting news” and I’d guessed she had a trip planned—the last two times she’d done a Live reveal of “exciting news,” it had been for trips to London and Miami. So when her glossy lips revealed that she was moving here, my brain short-circuited. I rewatched the Live twenty times or more, my pulse thundering more loudly and powerfully each time, until I realized that it was true: Audrey would soon be here.

I marked my calendar with her moving day, and I began checking her Instagram every hour, often more frequently, hoping for updates. My bones rattled with anticipation as the days until she arrived dwindled to three, two, one. And then she was here. Her Stories showed her buying coffee at Columbia Brews, a hipster coffee shop near Logan Circle, and captured a team of men in matching T-shirts carrying boxes into her apartment. The evidence was indisputable. She was really here, and I could think of nothing else. With every inhalation, I knew we were breathing the same thick air. With every sunrise, I knew the sun was creeping across our rooms at the same time. With every passing second, I wondered if she was nearby. She obliterated every other thought, leaving me a stammering mess during dinner with my family, an ineloquent scatterbrain on work emails.

I couldn’t go on like this. She was in my city, within my grasp. I had to do something.





CHAPTER EIGHT





AUDREY


Capturing the scope of the Hirshhorn’s monumental building—an elevated, concrete wheel rising among the other, more sedate museums on the Mall—was impossible from my phone. After a few failed attempts, I settled for snapping a picture of the distinctive sculpture by the entrance: a black ’92 Dodge Spirit being crushed by a boulder with a painted-on face. I tagged the location, added an animated heart, and uploaded the image to my Stories.