I turned back to face Shannon. “What?”
“Tell me what you’re thinking! About”—she gestured wildly here—“all of this!”
I sighed. Tried to think back on the speech. Something something coastal cities. The world, so clearly losing its way. Nuclear families disintegrating, and the children—the children,my mother gasped in memory,the children, thechildren!—and the women, and certainly the men, but Doug had spoken so quickly, and the speaker system, echoing and reverberating in on itself, had warped everything so quickly.America,Doug roared in my head still.America,America—how long havewe—how long tillwe—America—oh, whereare You?
It was a combination of a thousand conversations I’d heard throughout my life. The only difference, in my mind, was that it had been dumbed down a bit, and maybe sharpened at the tip.
“He’s going to win, Natalie,” Shannon said, when I didn’t say anything. “You do realize that, right? That he’s going to win?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s a performance, Shannon. It’s political theater. Not real.”
“How is a political election not real?”
“I don’t meanthat,I just mean”—I gestured at the crowd around us—“all of this. The showmanship. The bravado.”
“Do you honestly think there are no consequences to performance?”
“Listen. You’ve known from the very start who my father-in-law is—”
“Right,” she snapped, “but the person I haven’t known is you.”
I paused. Looked at her.
“These people are talking about the same bullshit Caleb talksabout,” Shannon said. “All that crap about rats. And then what Doug said onstage, about returning to the ‘days of Yesteryear.’ He was practically quoting your Instagram captions word for word.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said immediately, and I didn’t. I’d noticed how Doug was changing his messaging to fit the atmosphere of Caleb’s forums, of course I’d noticed that—but I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t even considered, that he would ever be plagiarizing from me.
He couldn’t possibly.
“I’ve never been more certain in my life about anything,” Shannon said. She was frustrated now, speaking more loudly. A few people nearby were starting to whisper and point in our direction as she added, “This isbad,Natalie. This iswrong.”
Calm her down,Online Natalie intoned,de-escalate,right as a teenage girl said behind me, “Ohmigod, that’s freaking Yesteryear Ranch!”
My stomach turned. I was exhausted. This had already happened twenty or so times tonight. Still, I rearranged my expression, then turned around to face another fan, my sensors flashing red.Battery low.
Hello!Yes—oh, you’re tookind—thank you so muchfor—no, thankyoufor—
When I turned back around, Shannon was gone. I was alone in the crowd, more and more people recognizing me, saying my name—It’s YesteryearRanch!—asking for a picture, touching my hands and my arms and my waist, closing in—
“Excuse me,” I said brightly, my throat closing with fear, “if I could just—I really just need to find my children—”
A lesson it had taken me much longer to learn: sometimes the love of strangers is much more terrifying than the hate.
I hadn’t realized how many parking lots there were at the rally, and I got lost for fifteen minutes. By the time I saw the van parked halfway across the correct parking lot, I was teary-eyed from so muchattention, so many grabbing hands. My body felt sore to the touch. I was half-panicked and half-relieved about Shannon’s disappearance. Maybe it was for the best, the relieved half of my brain suggested. I’d been wanting to fire her since she arrived, and surely we could find another producer of her skill level. But the panicked half of me railed back: she had complete control over our content by then, not just password access to the account itself, but access to all our scheduling software, our business email, our photo-creation files. She was capable of locking me out of my own account. She could post a message, or a video. She could ruin my life in five seconds. A handful of clicks.
She would never do that.
But technically speaking, she could.
Then I saw Shannon seated in the middle row, already buckled, arms folded while the nannies buckled the kids in all around her.
“Shannon,” I said quietly, leaning against the open car door. “Can we talk?”
She unbuckled herself and crouch-walked past me. “Excuse me,” she muttered. “I’m feeling carsick.” She crawled over the median and into the passenger seat, where I usually sat. Caleb gave her a surprised look but didn’t say anything.
“All right,” Nanny Louise said from the back seat. “We’re good to go.”
I hesitated. Should I tell Shannon to get out of my seat? No. Too confrontational. I crawled into the front row of seats, next to the nannies. As Caleb started the engine, Shannon turned to look at him, her face silhouetted by the cheap yellow light of the parking lamps overhead. “Caleb, will you tell me more about the forums?”
