The Follower Kate Doughty (general ebook reader .txt) 📖

Amber tilts her phone toward Cecily, who scans the texts. “Nice use of the winky face. Very strategic.”

Amber hits her in the arm with a throw pillow. “Shut up.” She stares at her phone, then back up at her sister. “It’s just . . . I’m no good at this kind of thing. What do I say?”

Cecily furrows her brow in confusion. She’s not sure how to step into this role—sure, perfect online Cecily has a ton of admirers, but online romance and romance in real life are two very different things. “You’re asking me? I mean, you could just ask her out.” Amber’s eyes grow wide. “Or, maybe it’s too soon,” Cecily says quickly. “Hey—I actually invited Bella over tomorrow night; we were planning a sleepover. Why don’t you invite Jada? She’s cool, it’ll be fun to hang out—and that way you’re not alone, but if you, oh, I don’t know, happen to slip off somewhere into this seven-thousand-square-foot mansion for some private time . . .” She shoots Amber a sly smile.

“Are you serious? That’s perfect.” Amber texts Jada, then flips to Instagram and makes up a quick post. “And . . . there we are. The sponsored post for the day. You look great.”

She does. Against the hardwood, Cecily’s hair fans out in a pale golden halo as she smiles up at the camera with a perfect smoky eye. She holds a hand to her collarbone, showing off bright red nails. The caption reads: New Floor, New Me. And soon—new everything! Fantastic nail color brought to you by RainbowMani.

It looks good, but does it look good enough? She scans it, looking for flaws in her makeup, her posing, her body. She finds so many. Is her smile big enough? Her teeth white enough? What if she didn’t blend her contour well enough? What if this post tanks?

It can’t. It has to be perfect. She has to be perfect. She shakes her head and tries not to feel a slow sense of dread as she realizes what that means. “Uh, I’ve got to go work on some new looks—About Face just sent me their new ice-cream palette, and I still need to do a video on that jelly highlighter I got last month . . . I don’t suppose you want to come and hang out with me in the creepy turret room?” Amber makes a face. “Ah. You’re too busy sexting your girlfriend.”

“We’re not sexting—”

But Cecily’s already forcing a laugh and heading toward the stairs. “If I see any ghost girls, I’ll scream really loud,” she promises, but it doesn’t come out as jokey as she’d intended. She tries to push down the rising sense of unease.

“I’ll come up as soon as I’ve finished editing this pic,” Amber promises. Then, her phone beeps with another message from Jada. Somehow, Cecily doubts she’ll be in the turret anytime soon.

Cecily reaches the third-floor landing feeling a lot less confident and a lot more anxious. She can’t stop herself from looking at the third-floor bedroom as she walks past Rudy’s message scrawled on the wall: This is my house now, bitch. She shakes her head and forces herself to continue toward the door to the fourth floor. Ghosts aren’t real, she tells herself. There is nothing up here. She needs to practice her makeup. She needs to be perfect, flawless if she ever wants to succeed in the beauty industry. If fighting off an irrational fear of this house is what it takes, she can do that, right? She’s strong enough, right? Right.

She takes a breath and reaches out for the handle. It sticks.

The door is locked. Again.

Cecily shudders and feels a new wave of fear. No way. They’d left it unlocked last night, hadn’t they? She could have sworn they had.

She tries the door again. Still locked. Shit. She rolls her eyes. It must be Rudy, right? Playing another stupid prank for some video. She looks around for a camera filming her reaction, but just because she can’t find one doesn’t mean it’s not there. She’s going to confront him about it.

She finds Rudy in his room, playing music from the cassette player and doing pull-ups on his Iron Gym. She glares at her brother. “Ha. Ha.” She says. “Not funny.”

He looks confused.

“Your trick with the door,” she says. “Locking it again.”

But he shrugs. “Wasn’t me.”

“Sure,” Cecily says, rolling her eyes and trying to shove away her feeling of dread. If it wasn’t Rudy, then who locked the door? “Whatever you say. What’s that music, anyway?”

“Beastie Boys,” Rudy says, transitioning into leg lifts. “I mean, I never thought I’d hear Beastie Boys on cassette, but here we are.”

“I never thought I’d hear anything on cassette,” Cecily admits. Then, she notices something—or a lack of something. “Why aren’t you filming this? You know how mad Amber and Mom would be for you wasting this kind of ‘content,’” she says, only half sarcastically.

Rudy shoots his sister a look, letting her know just how much he cares about making content for their mother. “As if you don’t waste content every other day. I know half the looks you do don’t make it onto the main account.”

He’s got her. Cecily avoids his eyes. He’s right—she had been withholding some of her best looks from the Cole triplets’ account on purpose. She tells herself that it is because she wants them to be perfect, but really she worries her mom won’t like them. No, that’s not true. It is because she wants to couple them with more scientific commentary, and her mom definitely won’t go for that. And what’s more? She kind of wants to post them anyway. But not on the triplets’ account.

From the way Rudy is looking at her, Cecily feels like he can read her mind. She shrugs and tries to play off her discomfort. “Well, Mom doesn’t always want every one, so . . .” She scans the room, looking for something to help change the subject. Rudy hops off the Iron Gym.

“Sure,” Rudy says. “And