“And I keep myself surrounded with energized, imaginative people who aren’t afraid to be brave. When you experience loss, the easiest thing to try to fill that space with is fear. All my best employees are fearless.” His eyes seemed to dart over to Fiffany for a brief shared glance. “That’s a rare thing.”
EVERYTHING AT THE DINER TASTED A LOT LIKE FRENCH FRIES. FRY grease was the prevailing flavor note. It was the smell that clung to Hazel’s clothes and followed her home. Her bedsheets smelled like fry grease because of the nights she came home and felt too sad to do anything but go lie in bed. Her motel room was a relief because she could walk on all fours. That felt the most natural. In the morning she crawled into the shower and had no idea how she’d ever taken a shower standing upright before. In hindsight, taking an upright shower seemed like running a marathon. There was one small section of tile near the floor that she kept pretty clean with a sponge, because while the water streamed down onto her head she liked to sit by the drain and rest her cheek against the wall there. With the water streaming down she could close her eyes and pretend she was a type of plant. All she had to do was sit there, indefinitely, and sometimes feel water. The drain creeped her out a little—it was hard not to wonder if Byron had found her and placed a camera inside it. Something harmful might come up through its holes one day.
Byron and Fiffany finding Hazel while working together as a power couple and executing her jointly would be even worse than Byron alone killing her. That would be just like middle school, with the popular girl winning once again. It was wrong and gross to still feel like marrying Byron had been an accomplishment, but Hazel did—it had been a win that a weird girl like her technically shouldn’t have gotten, according to social rules. Byron’s wife should’ve been Fiffany from the start. But it had been Hazel, and however sick a victory that was, it would be erased if they killed her as a pair and used her murder as a bonding opportunity, like a game of doubles tennis.
It was this thought that made her climb out of her shell a little and go use one of the Internet computers at the library. Of course she couldn’t check her e-mail or any other account as her old self. She also didn’t want to do a search for Byron or Fiffany or her own name, even though Byron’s was probably searched for by hundreds of thousands of people a day; anything that might place her needle in a haystack for one of his algorithms to find had to be avoided. So she just scanned front-page headlines of news sites and gleaned what she could from occasional mentions. Byron and Fiffany were definitely an item now. Had they been together before she’d moved out? Should she care? She supposed it was telling that what saddened her about that thought was not Byron having sex with Fiffany, but an ego sadness. She hated the thought of him having cheated on her with Fiffany while they were still married, being with both of them at once and comparing the two, with Hazel losing in every category. And with Fiffany aware that they were competing while Hazel was ignorant.
Not that she would’ve traded in her futuristic microfiber sweatpants for silk underwear and tried to swoon and seduce Byron back if she had known. But maybe she would’ve had a little more pride and awareness, for her own sake. Maybe she wouldn’t have snuck gas station candy inside the compound and eaten it in bed and occasionally forgotten the wrapper. Once Byron had rolled over and foil from a chocolate bar had come loose from the sheets and stuck to his cheek. He’d reacted like that scene in The Godfather where the man wakes up to find the severed head of a horse. She’d tried to downplay this indiscretion with comparison to an affair—“At least it wasn’t a condom wrapper,” she’d joked, but Byron didn’t find humor or relief in this statement. “They’re different causes of terror,” Byron said. “But equal vulgarities.”
The other people she really wanted to look up online, Jasper and Liver, didn’t exist online. Hazel found herself with no one to try to care deeply about. She didn’t want to develop feelings for anyone new in case Byron found her, or them.
She had an idea that one safe way to interact with people would be to make a fake social media account for an imaginary cute pet, like a guinea pig or a puppy. But even this seemed possibly too risky. What if the account became super popular and then was exposed as a hoax, the pictures all borrowed, and a nationwide hunt to find the deceptive human responsible for the account ensued? Maybe one of the biggest fans of the account, pre-exposure, would coincidentally be a librarian at the public library where Hazel used the Internet, and when chat rooms of angry scorned hackers determined the location of the computers where the account was checked and maintained, the librarian would offer to comb through video-security footage, checking against the times of the posts and discovering her. The whole Internet could know who she was and she wouldn’t know that they knew until she walked in to do another update and the librarian and a mob were there waiting for her.
Better to just look at cute animal images without making them a deceptive vehicle for interaction with other human beings.
WHEN BYRON AND FIFFANY MARRIED SIX MONTHS LATER, THEIR WEDDING was a far more public, promoted affair than Byron and Hazel’s had been. Instead of technology they were actively selling their love story; if the public bought that, they’d buy whatever Byron was going to peddle next.
It was what Fiffany said, or didn’t say, that made it so excruciating to listen to her talk in interviews. Every statement she uttered was a sentence Hazel herself could remember saying, some of them highly peculiar in context. Asked where they were thinking of going on their honeymoon, Fiffany said, “When I’m near a pool in a dry bathing suit, I have a phobia of the people whose suits are already wet. I’ve moved past it but I always have this fear that if I accidentally brush up against one of their arms, my suit will suddenly be wet too, saturated with pool water even though I haven’t been in the pool, which seems so frightening to me.” “I guess you’d rather not go to a tropical location then?” the reporter said.