Chapter 2
Summer Camp drops Eve as their spokesperson.
The famous actor backing the brand thinks there is too much weird publicity around Eve these days, so she’s out.
Bing bang boom. Eve goes on Instagram holding the day’s New York Times, as if she is in a hostage situation, and says, “For the love of god, can you all please stop saying I am a deepfake, body double, or clone?”
This only makes people more certain she is a deepfake, body double, or clone. Gigi says, “Well, duh.”
When people see Eve out on the streets, they take incessant videos.
These videos then end up on Instagram, where people say that this couldn’t possibly be Eve, because the real Eve was fatter and/or skinnier, and she used to have a scar on her elbow.
(The scar is a big talking point. Eve does not remember ever having a scar on her elbow.) Eve wants to start wearing wigs and sunglasses when she goes outside, but her manager insists it will only make things worse if she acts like she has something to hide.
“It’ll blow over!” everyone says.
Yes, but what if Eve’s career blows over first?
There are three leading theories as to why Eve’s team is pretending she’s still alive even though she’s (obviously) dead:
Pattern needs Eve alive for their marketing purposes. (Chloe is offended.)
Eve’s label is trying to drum up intrigue to earn streaming money now that Eve can’t take her cut. (Eve is pretty sure these people overestimate the size of her cut.)
Eve’s parents killed Eve and are covering it up for nefarious businessperson reasons. (Where do they think Phillip and Cecilia got a bus?)
The potential silver lining in all this is that Eve’s streaming numbers are going up—but not enough to make up for the loss of Summer Camp, or the mascara brand, who quietly terminates their agreement with Eve after Eve accidentally calls one of their top influencers a can of beets.
“How do you accidentally call someone a can of beets?” Shannon asks.
“She made a post about how maybe I’d been a hoax all along,” Eve says. “I reached my breaking point.”
“Yeah, but a can of beets?”
“Insults are hard.”
More than the slow-creeping dread that her career is ending, though, Eve cannot handle the solitude.
She thought she was okay with being alone.
She never minded not going into an office or having a night by herself.
But the loneliness is becoming incessant.
Even when she is surrounded by other people, she feels like she is not actually there—like she is on the other side of a veil neither party can cross.
Which is how Eve decides she will record an album.
She wants to provide proof of life, but she also wants to create.
She wants to record the album in public—how could it be fake?
—and she wants to record it in Prospect Park.
Prospect Park feels right because it feels like the person Eve has become—a ramble of earthy Brooklyn rather than Central Park’s just-so-ness.
Also, because Eve has always wanted to write the kind of music that people would listen to outside—walking to a first date, or at a picnic, or playing volleyball in the meadow with friends.
Eve also wants this to happen in Prospect Park because Prospect Park was where she and Danny went on their first date.
She calls Clay, and he calls Eliza, who is in town from Chicago, and the three of them spend about twenty minutes hashing out the details.
Twenty minutes is not long enough, but also?
Eve feels like maybe it’s exactly the right amount of time, like maybe everyone’s just been overthinking, like maybe the point is just the music.
So they meet on the outskirts of Prospect Park.
It’s been raining nonstop all winter and all spring, but the forecast shows a break around noon, so they hunker down at a bagel place in Park Slope.
Eve takes tiny bites of her bagel—everything, lightly toasted, plain cream cheese—to make it last. Finally, at noon, the rain clears, they gather their things, and they run for the park.
Eve unrolls a blanket, and Eliza sets up a cajón for percussion while Clay checks the microphones. It’s going to be a little fuzzy, the sound. The rain should hold for two hours. They anticipate bird noise and ambulance sirens, but they’re just going to go for it and see what happens.
And then they go for it.
Eve sits on the blanket, immediately damp from the grass, and plays her acoustic guitar.
Clay sings backup and takes Eve’s guitar when Eve needs someone who is, frankly, better at guitar.
Eliza leans over the cajón and drums out a beat with her knuckles, the heel of her hand, the flat of her palm.
Sometimes, she hits the box with one of her rings, and it makes a crisp, metallic ting.
They play PRELAPSARIAN start to finish. Eve makes a few changes. Slows down some songs, speeds up others. She changes a few lines, including a rhyme that has always bothered her. “You make me feel light/My cold water on a hot night”? Jail.
Some people stop to listen, but most people just go about their business.
They think these are just three friends having a jam session—which, frankly, they are.
Of course they are. How could Eve have forgotten?
The album feels like an existential thesis: I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.
These are the things that feel real to Eve: big parks in big cities, writing songs, sitting with her friends, being in love with Danny.
When she sings “HONEY LOCUST,” she thinks of playing it for Danny and telling him that a part of her has loved him all along—she has proof.
POSTLAPSARIAN, that’s what she’ll call it.
Prelapsarian, meaning: before the biblical fall of man.
Postlapsarian: after Eve and Adam ate the apple and got banished from Eden.
There is something transgressive and perfect to Eve about recording her POSTLAPSARIAN in the garden.
They make it all the way through the album twice just as the first raindrop hits Eve’s hand.
“Go, go!” Clay says as they flip the clips on their guitar cases. Eve throws the blanket over her shoulder—it is soaking wet—and they run from the park laughing like they are escaping some great crime.
They head back to Williamsburg to celebrate.
They order slices at L’Industrie and Eve and Clay debate Eliza on the merits of Chicago pizza.
Shannon and Petra meet them after, and they all go back to Eve’s apartment and have a beer.
It’s the first time in a long time Eve has felt present, all there.
When everyone leaves, Eve shuts the door and scrapes her hair into a bun.
She pads around the apartment blowing out candles and gathering glasses.
She checks her phone—she texted Danny a few hours ago to ask how his day was going, but he didn’t respond.
Eve texts again—just saying hi! Then she hesitates, her thumb hovering above the logo, and opens Pattern.
Current relationship score: 94. It got up to ninety-seven before the holidays and has been ticking up and down ever since.
There was a brief resurgence when Danny told Eve about his dad, but the last month it has been on a downward trajectory.
It’s annoying, the ninety-four, because Eve knows how the number is calculated.
They haven’t been in the same place, and Danny has been sad, and Eve has been lonely.
The fact of the diminishing relationship score feels unsympathetic to Eve—because she feels, on some level, like she and Danny have always been a hundred, and she resents not being able to get Bug to agree.
Danny still hasn’t responded to her text, so she writes to Bug instead:
Eve: danny is taking care of his dying dad and i want to be there for him but i don’t know how to. i love him. i’m worried about him
Bug: Oh, friend. I’m so sorry. This must be so difficult—for Danny, of course, but also for you. Have you expressed this feeling to Danny?
Eve: yes but i think he’s pretty overwhelmed right now and i don’t want to add to it. i want to be supportive, but i also want to give him the space to be with his dad
Bug: What a complicated tapestry of emotions you’ve described! Thank you for providing me that context. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is accept that not every difficult moment or feeling can be “fixed”—and you just have to be present with no agenda. Does that resonate with you?
Eve realizes that if Danny is not reading these conversations, they are a waste of time—because Eve cannot help but perform for Bug.
That’s the trouble with screenshots of complicated conversations, with day-in-the-life social media videos, with creating art that goes instantly to streaming: Everything is a performance. Even when there’s no audience.
When Eve releases POSTLAPSARIAN: Live from Prospect Park, a TikTok account claiming to be Eve Olsen’s Number One Fan makes a video saying that she will not give this AI slop any of her streaming dollars, and real fans will join in her boycott.
It goes immediately viral, buoyed by real fans who join the boycott and by internet commentators who think these Eve Olsen fans have lost the plot.
Neither group of people listens to POSTLAPSARIAN.