Followed Back

Since high school, Amanda Wagner has lived in the shadow of a stranger. An unexceptional student and part-time waitress, the most interesting thing about her is that, apparently, she looks a lot like a mysterious girl named Jill, an MIT scholar and soccer star who grew up in a wealthy neighboring town. To escape the persistent comparisons to her celebrated doppelganger, Amanda follows her boyfriend to Washington, D.C., after college, but her degree barely qualifies her for the most demeaning of unpaid internships, and her efforts to create a future for herself outside the service industry begin to seem futile.

Jill Torres has known who Amanda Wagner is, and the strange connection that they share, for years. Through a combination of fake profiles and some light hacking, Jill has followed Amanda's life on social media since they were teenagers, with more jealousy than Amanda could have imagined. Jill's unwavering self-discipline and her relentless pursuit to maximize her natural talents have led to her early academic and athletic achievements, but she struggles to translate these skills into dating and making friends. When the comfortable imposed structure of university ends, Jill finds herself alone in Boston, floundering as she tries to adapt to a set of rules for success that seem to have changed overnight.

Amanda's and Jill's lives run in parallel, with each unable to resist the urge to stealthily check up on the other's online presence, and yet each equally unwilling, for different reasons, to connect in person. The world after graduating college is not what either of them expected. The challenges they confront may be distinct, but their frustration and ennui is shared. Following each other across social media is a way to imagine what might have been-when it doesn't paralyze them with envy and self-doubt.