The Follower by Kate Doughty (ebook reader with built in dictionary TXT) 📕

full of paint; maybe they can use that for some kind of shoot later. He opens the second box. “Jackpot!” he cries. “Look at these.”

The box is full of cassette tapes. “Simon and Garfunkel—oh, awesome, Miles Davis. Good taste, whoever owned these.”

“Cassettes?” Cecily asks, opening and closing desk drawers. “Aren’t those, like, ancient?”

“Absolutely,” Rudy says, digging through them.

“How are you even going to listen to those?” Cecily asks.

“There might be a player in the box,” Rudy says, rummaging around. He digs one out from underneath the mound of tapes. “Yes! And it records, too—I could make my own mixtape, or . . .” His voice trails off. He’s never recorded himself playing guitar before. It definitely wouldn’t be content for Insta, but it could be fun.

“Sounds like a lot of effort to me,” Cecily says, ruining his train of thought. “Why not just record on your phone? I do like the desk, though. Can we move it?”

“Sure,” Rudy says. He doesn’t answer her first question. There’s something about recording his music on his phone that just seems too . . . permanent. Too easy for someone like Amber or Mom to find and post on the account. “Where to?”

Cecily sighs. “By the window. Now that you’ve put the idea in Mom’s head, I’ll never hear the end of it if I don’t set up in this room. Whatever. It’ll be fine.”

“Because there are no ghosts here and you are definitely not afraid of them?” Rudy asks.

“Yeah,” Cecily mutters, turning back to survey the rest of the room. “That’s exactly why.”

CHAPTER 6

Cecily

Even when all the junk is cleared out of the turret room, it’s still not ready to be a makeup studio if you ask Cecily. She puts her hands on her hips and examines the layout of the space. She’ll have to move the desk across the room to better take advantage of the lighting, and maybe install some ring lights. She sighs and leans back onto the desk, trying to collect herself. Amber and Rudy had left to unpack their rooms long before the turret was entirely clean, leaving Cecily to finish sweeping up the space. It really is a nice room—or it would be if she could stop staring at the window, imagining Alex standing there, silhouetted against the light.

Suddenly she is hyperaware of how alone she is.

There’s no way she can move the desk on her own, so she follows Rudy and Amber’s lead and heads downstairs to unpack her own bags. Cecily listens to them joking around as she procrastinates, redirecting to the kitchen to find Speckles. She takes him out of his cage and back to her bedroom, where she cradles him in her lap, stroking his light, spotted fur. She sighs, feeling the tension ease out of her. Rudy might roll his eyes and call Speckles a gerbil under his breath, but Cecily loves him. She stares into his soft, brown eyes and smiles. No matter what she posts or what she looks like online, he will always look at her just like that. She smiles and holds him close, breathing in the musk of his fur.

But she does have to unpack.

She lets Speckles hop around her room while she hangs her outfits up in the closet. Across the hall, she can hear Rudy giving Amber a rundown on some newspaper articles that he found about the murder-suicide. Cecily doesn’t join them.

She arranges her outfits in the closet, one by one. Some of them are gifts from sponsors, but most of the more expensive items she’d owned were resold on ThriftMark after they’d appeared in a photo or two—after all, the family has to give the illusion that Cecily Cole has an endless wardrobe. In reality, Cecily travels light, with a few base pieces augmented by whatever strange stuff her sponsors sent her to wear. She runs her fingers through a strappy number that any mom who didn’t double as a social media manager would have been scandalized by. It’s hard to police your daughter’s clothing choices when her image is the vast majority of your income.

Cecily takes a deep breath in and tries to calm the ever-present feeling of pressure. She listens to Amber and Rudy speculate and goof off as they clean, and she tries not to feel bitter. Bitter that they’re not being pressured to make posts all the time, bitter that the focus on her content means that Rudy and Amber are in fewer and fewer posts. Rudy hadn’t reported on internet drama in a while; he really only hosts the vlogs and livestreams now, and Amber—well, she spends most of her time behind the camera instead of in front of it.

Cecily knows that she should be happy, that she should feel lucky and popular and special to have such a huge internet following—and there are moments when she truly does. But those moments have been fewer and farther between as her family has sunk deeper and deeper into debt. She promises herself that when she’s done unpacking she’ll take a break to look at fan posts and videos to cheer herself up. That is the best part of social media right now.

For the first few years, Rudy, Cecily, and Amber managed the account themselves, slowly amassing followers by filming behind-the-scenes renovation things and other one-off videos like Rudy’s drama reporting, Cecily’s makeup, and Amber’s fashion segments. Then a house underperformed on the market, their mom caught their dad gambling away their children’s college funds, and suddenly the checks coming in from tiny sponsors became a critical part of their income.

Their mom dived in. From then on, Mrs. Cole made sure that it was “audience engagement this” and “post performance that” until their sponsors weren’t so tiny anymore. She cut Amber’s features, moved Rudy to a hosting role, and shined a spotlight on Cecily. Her little makeup guru, Cecily thinks sarcastically.

She misses those early days. Back when Amber was posting fashion videos weekly and Rudy was gleefully digging up and