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

that she’s crying until there are tears on the table. Amber appears in front of her and clutches her tightly in a hug. Cecily realizes that her sister is crying, too.

For a long, long moment, they remain like that.

And then there is nothing left to do besides continue deleting comments. Around four in the morning, Cecily removes a nasty comment before she realizes that it’s not their stalker but a real account, someone who’s been following them for years. It’s not the only one:

What happened to that girl? What are you censoring?

Why are you deleting comments if it’s not true?

Tell me it’s not true. #ColePatrol

I thought you were offline.

They are offline; they’re just trying to keep their account from being overrun with posts about the follower, about Alex Grable, about Bella.

Gossip sites keep reposting a photograph they’d somehow gotten from the crime scene: Cecily and Amber, standing in the tall, dark grass with the blue ambulance lights behind them. There is blood on their clothes. Cecily’s bandages are in full view.

It makes her sick.

Rudy joins them before dawn, but he doesn’t go online. Instead, he pores over the Frank Glenarm newspaper clipping and mutters to himself about the list of suspects. Occasionally, he takes breaks to finger though something on his guitar. His music is nice, Cecily thinks. Nicer than we ever gave him credit for.

“Rudy, we could really use your help with this,” Amber says.

Cecily nods. Amber is right. Even with two of them working at it, they can’t keep up with the barrage of nasty comments coming in.

“Who cares?” Rudy shrugs. “They’re going to hate us no matter what we do.”

Cecily knows he’s right. But still she keeps working with Amber to delete the comments.

Eventually, Rudy wanders off to his room to try and get some sleep. An hour later, Amber looks up, bleary-eyed, and tells Cecily that she needs to get some sleep, too.

Cecily agrees and collapses onto her bed. She doesn’t want to sleep; she doesn’t want to see Bella again. But it’s not long until the utter exhaustion takes over.

Later that morning, Cecily is awakened by the muffled sounds of her parents making coffee. There were no dreams of Bella, but the loss is still there. It pulses beneath her skin as she sits up. She can’t even look around her room without seeing Bella sitting on the end of her bed, playing with the figurines on her dresser, or lying on the floor next to Rudy, thinking of more follower theories.

Cecily grabs her phone and scans the comments. She’s surprised to see that there are no new messages from the follower. She pads over to Amber’s room to see if her sister is awake.

She is. “No new follower posts,” Cecily tells Amber, who nods. Of course, she probably checked her phone the moment she woke up, too.

Cecily sits in the corner of her sister’s bed, exhausted from only a few hours of sleep.

“Did you see all the comments from . . . everyone else?” she asks.

Amber nods. “They’re horrible.”

Both their phones are on silent, but they still light up with a constant stream of notifications.

Finally, Amber speaks again. “What are we going to do?” she asks. She sounds as tired as Cecily feels.

The “we” hits Cecily wrong; it stings. Without meaning to, she lifts a hand to her face then tries to hide the unconscious gesture—but she’s too late. Amber’s already seen. “Cecily, I’m sure that—”

Sure that what? Cecily can post online again? Slide right back into her place in the beauty community? Cecily shakes her head. “It’s bad, Ambs,” she whispers. “I—I can’t. People don’t want to see this.”

For a long second, Amber is quiet. “You know,” Amber finally says, “I thought that people didn’t want to see me, at first. And then—well, I think I changed my mind.” She swallows and looks at Cecily. “Maybe you’ll change your mind, too.”

Maybe it’s the sincere look on Amber’s face, or maybe it’s her flawless rose-gold waves, or the fact that Cecily notices for the first time that Amber already has makeup on, even though there’s no post scheduled for today. Whatever it is, Cecily finally snaps.

“Being fat isn’t the same as—as hideous scarring!” Cecily yells. She can feel her face heating, her non–scar tissue going red with rage. “You can go on a diet! But I can’t just lose my scars, Amber.” She sees the hurt in her sister’s face and knows that she has gone too far, but she can’t stop now—the words are already coming. “You have to be beautiful to be a beauty influencer, Amber! My career is ruined, and Bella—”

And just like that, Cecily’s anger vanishes, recedes into sadness like water leaking through cupped fingers. On Bella’s name, all of her rage splutters out, and suddenly she is sobbing again. “I’m sorry, I—”

She buries her head in her hands and stiffens as she feels her sister’s hand on her back. She’s ashamed of everything she just said and wonders if her sister will hate her now, too, like all of social media does.

But when Amber speaks, her voice is gentle. Kind. “I’m just saying that . . . there are other people with scars, too, you know? Maybe they’d like to see . . . someone like them, on Instagram.”

Cecily lifts her head to meet Amber’s eyes. “Maybe I don’t want to be someone like them.”

Amber doesn’t respond.

After a few moments of strained silence, Cecily gets up and returns to her room.

Later that afternoon, Cecily and her siblings are summoned to the sheriff’s office for another interview, but Cecily can’t help but feel like it’s the same questions about Bella, the follower, and the hit-and-run all over again. This time, her shaking sobs give way to something worse: complete numbness. She feels like a robot, repeating the words. Faking being human. Even Perry seems to know that this charade is useless; the deputy spends almost all of Cecily’s interview drumming her fingers on the