by Ella Berman
“Hi, sister,” Esme says wearily as she squints up at me, clearly unimpressed by what she’s seen so far.
Esme’s friend has a shaved head and is wearing a beautiful, sari-like dress with one dangly cross earring. They both stand on the porch and look me up and down for a moment. I realize that I’m breaking all of Laurel’s rules at once in a bathrobe and the sheepskin-lined Crocs.
“Hi, I’m Blake,” Esme’s friend says politely. “Isn’t this the cult place?”
“I’m actually pretty sure it’s not a cult,” I say. “Although I’ve heard there are unholy sex parties every Tuesday night.”
Blake snorts with laughter but Esme glares at me.
“Can you help me with something?” I say, holding out my new phone. “I can’t even switch this on.”
“I can’t believe you’re nearly twenty-three,” Esme says as she takes it and presses an invisible button on the side. The screen changes from black to gray, and an Apple logo appears.
“She’s twenty-three?” Blake says, staring at me closely.
“I’m dressed like a disoriented person,” I say, looking down at the robe.
“It’s a thing. Apparently famous people are eternally frozen at the age they were when they became famous. Mentally,” Esme says to Blake, busily typing something into my phone. She exhales heavily, somehow exasperated with me already. “You’ve totally fucked this. I need to work on it for a little bit.”
“Who told you that about famous people?”
“A girl at school.”
“Were you talking about me?”
“God, no. We were talking about Justin Bieber,” Esme says, looking at Blake pointedly. “Anyway . . .”
“Okay, I know, I have to run,” Blake says. “Can’t wait to see what’s in store for me today. If I’m super lucky, my hypnotherapist might guide me back to when I was a fetus again.”
Blake air-kisses my sister and waves at me before ducking into the car. “I’ll be back from my mother’s womb in an hour or so!”
“Blake’s very funny. Are they a friend of yours from school?” I ask Esme, managing my pronouns clumsily once we’re alone.
“She lives two doors away, Grace. I’ve known her since I was eight.” Esme’s scathing-hot tone reminds me so much of my mother that I flinch. I’m pleased that neither of us seems to have inherited my father’s affinity for keeping the peace.
“Why is she in therapy?” I ask. “She seems happy enough.”
“I guess our particular part of Anaheim isn’t quite ready for a trans seventeen-year-old,” Esme says, peering past me into my house. “Blake’s mom tried to commit her when she found out, but her dad convinced her to try this conversion therapy place instead. Her mom is a total cretin. She’s lucky that Blake could basically have graduated high school in fifth grade if she’d wanted to, she’s missing so much school.”
“Has our mom met Blake?” I ask.
“Mom adores Blake,” Esme says, and I wish I hadn’t brought up Mom because a defensive silence stretches between us while I rack my brain for something else to say.
“You should call them, you know,” Esme says, folding her arms across her chest.
“Look, it’s complicated,” I say more sharply than I intended, because Esme’s face crumples for a second before closing off again. I feel guilty for a moment, but I’m still trying to adjust to this version of my sister.
I turn around and Esme follows me into my bungalow. I flick the overhead light on, but it doesn’t make any difference to the damp, desolate atmosphere in the room. I make a mental note to buy some sort of lampshade. I wonder if they sell them at Best Buy.
Esme looks around wordlessly.
“It’s kind of like a cave, right?” I say, and she raises her eyebrows but doesn’t say anything. “It’s very temporary.”
I pick up an empty packet of Kettle chips from the floor and drop it into the huge Dior shopping bag I’ve been using for trash, in the absence of a real trash can or any liners.
“Do you want to get ice cream or something?” I ask, because the presence of another person in my rental has highlighted to me that I need to buy some basics if I’m going to pretend to be a functioning human being. I take Esme’s shrug as affirmation and head into my bedroom to change out of my bathrobe, pulling on a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt with my Crocs. I can’t work out whether I care enough to put on some makeup too. I’m not sure what the chances are of getting photographed now, whether the paparazzi know I’ve moved or if they even care. I wonder if Laurel is exaggerating the threat to make herself more useful because this never used to be a problem for me: I used to give the photographers a couple of staged photo opportunities a year, and in return, they would leave me alone the rest of the time. In the end, I leave the house without putting any makeup on.
“Are you going to go back to work?” Esme asks me once we’re in the car and driving up to PCH. She inexplicably appears to be applying even more eyeliner.
“I’m still figuring that out,” I say, keeping my eyes on the road ahead. “Apparently I have to start from square one. Audition again.”
“Poor you.” Esme rolls her eyes, and I’m instantly embarrassed.
“I didn’t . . .” I trail off because I’m not sure what I didn’t mean to do. Appear ungrateful?
“No, it’s cool. I guess it’s true what they say, being beautiful makes you lazy. Thank God for us plain girls.”
My eyes automatically flick to my reflection in the rearview mirror, and I can feel the disdain dripping from Esme.
“I’d probably worked more hours by the time I was eighteen than most people do in a lifetime,” I say defensively.
“You’re extraordinary. You were supposed to tell me I wasn’t plain,” Esme says, her tone searing.
“You’re not plain. At all,” I say, too late. “You could do with a little less makeup though.”
I pull into the strip mall, swinging into an empty parking space outside the old-fashioned ice cream parlor I spotted when I was at the drugstore the other day.
“Not to be rude, but you could do with a little more. I saw that Best Buy pic. That guy really got you, huh?” Esme climbs out of the car and slams the door. I do the same, and we walk into the ice cream parlor together, except I pull back so that I can study her walk. It’s still the same as when she was a little kid: she’s always walked on her heels, leaning back slightly.
“He didn’t seem the type,” I say as we join the queue.
“That’s guys online for you,” Esme says airily, and it doesn’t seem like she’s not enjoying this. “Get any cretin behind a screen and they think they’re Ryan Gosling.”
“So it turns out,” I say. Silence again, this time stretching as flat and wide as the San Bernardino Valley. I pretend to be excessively interested in the ice cream flavors on offer.
“I’m getting Rocky Road. You?” I ask. Rocky Road was our favorite flavor before I left home, but now Esme looks at me like I’ve just suggested eating my own hand.
“I’m going to get a kombucha from next door,” she says haughtily.
I pay for my ice cream and follow her around Whole Foods until she finds the brand of kombucha she likes—the apple-flavored one made with stevia, not cane sugar.
The guy ringing up Esme’s drink is only a little older than her, and he’s cute in that baby-faced way that never lasts long. He will no doubt soften over the years to come, his features filling out to form something only vaguely reminiscent of his former self, in the way that has happened to most child actors I’ve worked with. Esme fidgets excitedly next to me anyway, and when I try to give her a fifty-dollar bill to pay for her drink, she bats my hand away, pulling out a credit card I didn’t know she had. I try not to smile when her cheeks turn pink underneath her mortician’s powder as she says good-bye to him.
We’re nearly ba
ck at my car when I feel a hand on my shoulder. The guy who was serving us has followed us out. Esme holds her breath next to me, and her obliviousness to what’s happening makes my chest feel tight for a moment.
“Did we forget something?” I ask, even though I know what he wants. In the past, it was rare for me to be found anywhere like this. Whenever I spent too long in a public place, I’d start to notice people staring, whispering, and then before long they would approach me with their phones gripped tightly in their palms. It was like something out of a zombie movie; everywhere I looked there would be another stranger sliding toward me, sometimes shyly but more often than not brazenly, hungrily, as if they owned part of me. I could never work out whether they did or not.
“No . . . I just . . . I fucking loved you in that hooker movie. I think I watched it every day for the whole of last summer,” he says, grinning widely as if to reinforce the point that he can see my naked breasts anytime he wants. “Do you think I could get a photo with you?”
Esme makes a frustrated sound and is stalking around to the passenger side of the car when he calls after her, waving his phone.
“Hey? Excuse me? Can you take it?”
Esme pauses, and I flinch when I see the expression on her face before she walks back to take the phone from his hand. For just a moment, my sister looks at me as if I orchestrated the entire exchange on purpose, just to show her how much better I am than her. The guy stands next to me, grinning cluelessly as Esme takes a couple of shots. After it’s done, she wordlessly holds the photo up for me to check, and, when I shrug, she hands the phone back to him.
“Lights of Berlin,” I say over my shoulder as I’m getting in the car. The kid squints at me.
“What?”
“Lights of Berlin. That’s what the hooker movie was called.”
* * *
• • •
It seems that neither of us is in the mood for conversation during the drive back to Coyote Sumac, and when I pull up outside the house, we both stay in our seats, staring out the windshield for a minute.
“Do you want to talk about the suspension?” I ask reluctantly.
“No,” Esme says, unbuckling her seat belt. “Can we just watch TV or something?”
I nod, relieved. Once we’re inside, we both sit down carefully on the sofa, and I turn on an episode of Friends for her. Friends reruns were the only thing guaranteed to be on in whatever country I was filming in, but Esme doesn’t appear to have seen it before. She watches quietly, her eyes tracking the characters and then occasionally flicking back to me.
“This show is entirely problematic,” she says, once the episode is over. “But I think I don’t care.”
I’m not sure what to say in response, so I just settle into the sofa for the next episode.
When Blake pulls up outside, beeping obnoxiously four times, I feel guilty about how relieved I am. Esme bends down and pats me gently on the shoulder like a family dog.
“See you next week.”
* * *
• • •
I wash the sticky ice cream off my hands at the kitchen sink, picturing my sister begging our parents to give her permission to come to LA for the afternoon with Blake. It would have taken a lot of convincing, given her suspension from school and their implicit mistrust of Los Angeles. When I was Esme’s age, I was living in a soulless hotel in West Hollywood between shoots, and strange men used to follow me up from the pool bar to my room, banging on the door and shouting until I was forced to call my manager from the bathroom to deal with them. The only other people I had contact with back then were either on commission or outright paid to be there, and I spoke to my parents maybe once, twice a month, until the conversation eventually dried up like the Los Angeles River. Like I said, I think I could feel jealous of my sister if I tried.
I turn off the tap and look out the window. The Pacific is glowing fire red in the afternoon sun. I slip out the front door and down the porch steps, drifting toward the water. When the sand becomes damp, I kick off my shoes and then wade into the cold water. There is something calming about the inevitability of it once I’m in, the water icy and my jeans weighing heavy on my hips. I hold my breath as I fully submerge myself, and then I just float on my back for a few minutes.
A small, curling wave approaches. I stand up in front of it, waist-deep with my arms stretched out beside me, my body covered in goose bumps. The water crashes against me, and a piece of seaweed hooks around my jeans. I think about what my sister might want from me, knowing that I will never be able to give it to her. My inability to deliver when it really matters has been my one constant in life.
Another wave starts to gather, this one bigger. It hits me at chest level, salty water splashing up and stinging my eyes. Soon it feels like I am summoning the waves, stoking them until they come faster and crack even harder against me so that I have to bend my knees to remain upright before they snap back into the sea.
For a moment, everything is calm and I face the horizon. I watch a monster wave gathering power until it looms five feet above me, hissing. I hold my breath as the wave crashes over me, and then I am plunged into darkness. Now I am just one other small thing among a million other things, spinning and twisting underneath the water’s surface. The water isn’t so blue under here; it’s blacker and murkier and I’m drifting and my lungs are bursting and it’s simultaneously the most alive and the closest to darkness that I’ve ever been.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When the second installment of the assassin trilogy wrapped, I was offered the lead role in a teen horror movie. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, the second shoot had been harder on me than the first, culminating in a monthlong stint in Beirut where I had to endure even longer periods of coolness from Able, periods that often spiraled into meanness at a dizzying speed. On top of the generally disorienting effects of my being sixteen, alone and far from home, Able had made it so I couldn’t even trust my own thoughts most of the time. I had learned to be quiet and still around him so as not to set him off, and by the end of the shoot I found I could read his moods better than I could read my own. Afterward, he had taken more convincing than before that I remembered how lucky I was, and he acted like the stuff we did in his trailer was just the price I had to pay for the power I had unfairly exerted over him throughout the shoot. I felt sick, guilty and exhausted most of the time, and I arrived back in California with what felt like gaping black holes in my psyche. I knew I couldn’t face my parents in that state, and when I lied and told them I needed to stay in LA for work, they didn’t put up a fight.
The horror movie wasn’t part of the plan we’d laid out at that first dinner, but I was desperate to fill each second of my time in between shoots, and my agent, Nathan, admitted that Able couldn’t do anything about it as long as I was available for the third assassin movie. Even then, even when I was still pretending everything was fine, I knew myself well enough to understand that I had to keep on running. I told myself that I was in control: I was taking the role as a sort of insurance policy, because even I was capable of losing Able’s goodwill, but I think I was showing off to him, too, trying to prove all over again how talented I was, how lucky he was to have found me. Maybe Able was right and he really did know me better than I knew myself. Maybe I was deeply fucked up in some irreparable way nobody else but him could see. All I knew for certain was that everything was always part of the same twisted game and I could never keep up with the rules.
In the end, I did the movie without Able against the advice of Nathan, my manager, Kit, and my publicist, Nan. They weren’t happy about it, but I was their star client by that point, and they couldn’t refuse me. I waited months for Able to tear into me about it, but he never commented on my decision in person. I told myself I was strong enough to handle the silent treatment, but I already felt guilty about wanting too much and seeming ungrateful. As always when I was apart from him, I also
felt complicated ripples of shame whenever I thought about the things we’d done.
The actor I was playing opposite in the horror movie, Elon Puth, had come up through kids’ TV, shooting five seasons of his own show, Elon’s World, before calling it a day to take on more challenging roles. I thought we’d have a lot in common, having both started out as young teenagers, but Elon was unpleasant when we met, his eyes scanning my face once before turning away dismissively. He had pale, dry lips and a chin that had the tendency to melt into his neck when he wasn’t in front of the camera, and we barely spoke outside of our scenes. I kept expecting the director, Mandy, to pull us aside and confront us over our lack of chemistry, but she never did, and she didn’t even seem to notice that we played our characters with a sort of hollowness, just daring each other to feel anything. I could tell from the moment I met Mandy that she wasn’t an auteur like Able, and that this was just a job for her, like it was for the people who graded the film or controlled the lights. The movie wasn’t ever a part of her, like it was for Able. I looked down on her from the start because of this, even though I hated myself for it.
I don’t know when we all realized that the movie was going to be a flop, but by the end of the forty-day shoot, the atmosphere on set was pitiful. Elon had only become more petulant as the shoot went on, and by the end he was flat-out refusing to try Mandy’s suggestions, occasionally even stealing my lines if he saw them landing better. The director seemed as jaded as the rest of us by then, and at some point she just seemed to relinquish control. I couldn’t even blame her: at that point we were all just trying to wade through to the end of the project.
