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

starts to cry. “It’s the account,” she says. “On the hair post. Over and over and over and—oh god, Cecily.”

“What?”

Amber shakes her head. She can’t say it; she won’t. She holds out the phone. With shaking, bloodied hands, Cecily takes it and reads:

Congratulations on hitting one million followers.

Looks like I hit the wrong rose-gold girl.

CHAPTER 26

Amber

Amber watches her parents talk to the police. They seem so far away. Here, in the station, her parents have the same strange color saturation and solidity of an exceptionally lucid dream or strange Instagram filter. But Amber knows that this is real. Her head is spinning; in the noise of the station, everything feels too loud, too fast, too frenzied in comparison to how Bella had been when they found her. Still. So still. With hair so bright—just like hers.

Every time she thinks she has no tears left, a memory finds her again. She alternates between periods of awful numbness and terrible, rib-shaking sobs. And Cecily? Cecily has barely been able to speak since it happened. She hasn’t released their dad, either. She’s still at his side, clutching his shirt with a grip that will leave winkles in the fabric once she lets go. Amber’s not sure if she ever will.

She watches as Officer Perry questions her mother, who is standing with her arms folded in on themselves and half a fist in her mouth as she nods. Officer Perry’s bun has come partly undone. The officer’s cuticles are red and bleeding. Her fingertips are ever so slightly stained.

Across the room, Sheriff Yang is consoling Bella’s mother. Amber hasn’t met the dark-haired woman, but the resemblance is too striking for her to be anyone else. She’s keening, wavering back and forth as if drunk. Yang adjusts his glasses—bifocals—and puts a large hand on her shoulder. She sinks into him. He looks surprised at the contact; for a second he is the most flustered Amber has ever seen him.

When she leaves, Mrs. DiNatori passes the triplets and gives them a look of pure pain that shakes Amber to her core.

The police take their parents into a separate room for further questioning. The triplets have already told the police everything they know. There is nothing left to do but sit in the front of the station and alternate between numbness and ground-shaking grief.

Bella had been pronounced dead at 10:57 that night.

Bella, who had been at their house just hours before. Who had hugged Amber and said that they matched. That they almost looked identical.

And then the follower. Amber can’t stop thinking about them, about someone driving down that road, seeing the bright flash of Bella’s hair in the darkness, steering the car toward the girl on the bicycle before they realized that she was too short, too pale, too slight to be Amber—

But by then it was too late.

It makes her feel sick.

The news that Amber, Rudy, and Cecily Cole had found one of their hometown friends dead by the roadside had spread like wildfire. Their follower count skyrocketed; everyone wanted to know what had happened, who did it. One of the bystander videos from the open house with Bella in the background had gone viral; their comment section was being overloaded with speculation and concern. And one other thing: blame.

One of the local high schoolers had found pictures of Bella—first grade, eighth grade, high school—and posted them with the caption, This is what happens when you hang out with the Coles. In the photos, Bella is smiling and happy, loved and unbroken. Amber can’t look at them. Instead, she spends hours alternating between crying and staring, unblinking, at the grimy police station laminate.

Finally, her parents emerge. “It’s time to go.”

“What—what did they say?” Amber asks. “What happened?”

Cecily collapses into their father, who wraps an arm around her shoulders. “They don’t know for sure,” Mr. Cole says. “But they’re not ruling out vehicular homicide, or a connection with our . . . incidents. That’s all they were able to tell me.”

The ride home is still and silent. An email comes in the middle of the night: Miracle Color has dropped the sponsored tutorial video that was meant to follow the hair dye post. Of course they have. How could they not? The Cole family is completely and utterly toxic.

Amber only wishes that she’d canceled it first.

For the first time in a long time, the Coles unanimously agree on what to do with their social media accounts. The next morning, Amber cries and shakes her way through crafting a post.

Bella, there are no words. Rest in peace.

Consider this account suspended until further notice.

CHAPTER 27

Cecily

Bella smiles at Cecily in the mirror. Cecily grins back and fluffs her hair, turning to look at herself.

“See?” Bella asks, nodding at Cecily’s reflection in the mirror. “Nothing to hide at all.”

But when Cecily looks back up at her reflection, the mirror isn’t there anymore—she’s not even in the bathroom anymore. She’s in the woods, and she’s alone, and she’s just about to scream Bella’s name when she trips over something. Someone.

Cecily screams and jolts awake.

“Are you all right?” Cecily whirls around, trying to get her bearings, and slowly everything slides into place. It’s the middle of the following night. Amber is sitting across from her, laptop open, face scrunched in concern. Cecily is curled up in a chair, where she’d dozed off by accident. Her phone is on the table. Before she’d passed out, she’d been on their account, deleting comments from their Instagram—comments that had been coming in a never-ending flood, ever since Bella—

Bella is dead.

It hits her like a punch to the gut, and Cecily finds herself gasping as it all comes rushing back: Bella’s body, in the woods. The police station. How she and Amber had worked for hours to delete hateful comments from their feed before she fell asleep.

And then her dream. Where Bella had been alive again.

Cecily doesn’t realize