by Zara Lisbon
“Why did you need to be alone with Ruby?”
“Don’t be mad at me, jeez. It’s not some big deal! Ruby does psychic readings and the room needs to be clear of any extra energies, otherwise it won’t work.”
“Then why couldn’t you just say so?”
“Uh, well, because I thought you’d think I was stupid for being into this stuff. And anyway, pessimism also gets in the way of a good reading.”
“I wouldn’t think it’s stupid,” I said grumpily. “I used to go to a psychic.”
I didn’t mention that this psychic was actually my first roommate at Bellflower. An illiterate girl named April who refused to take her meds and analyzed the lines in my palms at night. In exchange I read aloud to her about fruit bats from an issue of Zoobooks that she’d stolen from the common room. One time she told me that in a past life I was Abraham Lincoln. I told her that psychics are supposed to tell the future, not the past, and to that she replied, “Fine, then in the future you’re going to be Abraham Lincoln.”
“Well, I didn’t know that, did I?” Eva-Kate said then. “And I didn’t want to risk it.”
“What did she tell you? Anything interesting?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. She said you’re the only person I should trust.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, Justine? I’m the only person you should trust?”
“Yes, Jesus! What’s so crazy about that? Is she wrong?”
“No, not at all. She’s one hundred percent right. I mean, I don’t know about everyone else, but I do know I’m trustworthy. And that you can trust me.”
“Good, because she also said I should invite you to move in with me. And I agree.”
“Wait, what? Why would you even want that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I need people close to me who I can trust. Loyal people. And if Ruby says you’re the only one, then I’m really going to need you. And besides, I have so much empty space in that house I don’t know what to do with it all. I need new positive energies and memories to make it feel like home.”
“What about your friends? Josie and Olivia … London, aren’t they loyal?”
“Hardly,” Eva-Kate sighed. “Olivia and London are human parasites, and Josie … well, sometimes I just don’t know. And when it comes to loyalty, I don’t like not knowing.”
“Can I bring Princess Leia?” It was a dumb thing to ask, I knew that immediately, but I was at a loss for any other words.
“Obviously. I love that weird little dog; she brought you to me, didn’t she?”
“I guess so, in a way.”
“So is this a yes or a no? You can have the guest bedroom and you can wear any clothes you find in that closet; it’s all stuff I don’t vibe with anymore. Sound good, fam?”
“Yes, definitely yes.”
“Oh, and remember we have the party tomorrow.”
“What party?”
“Pool party?” she reminded me. “Taylor Swift?”
“That’s tomorrow?” I scanned the past week in my mind, trying to calculate today’s date. I realized the days since school let out had blended together in an indecipherable blur.
“Sure is, doll face. I only RSVP’d because you wanted to go, and you’re my plus-one so it would be pretty lame to bail on me.”
“I’m not bailing! Are you kidding me? I would never.”
Satisfied, Eva-Kate leaned back against the headrest and looked up at the moon roof, then pressed the button to make it slide open, uncovering tufts of cumulus clouds backed by ambrosial sunlight.
CHAPTER 12
SQUAD
Taylor Swift, Eva-Kate had said. Are you a fan?
This very simple question had baffled me for almost half my life.
I can’t say that I’m a Taylor Swift fan, exactly, but I also can’t say that I’m not. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t totally hooked on each and every one of her six albums, but it’s not as if you’ll find me at her stadium shows holding up a sign with I TAYLOR written in pink glitter, tears streaming down my face.
I find her lyrics to be naive, bordering on delusional, stubborn in their sentimentality, unapologetically confessional, all of it shameless. And she is, at least what she shows the public, a human representation of those lyrics. Both in business and her personal life she is unforgiving, bordering on petty, constantly walking the line between self-respect and abuse of power. And yet these things about her that make me cringe are also qualities I admire so much that they haunt me. When, in “All Too Well” (a lesser-known song from Red), she sings, “But you keep my old scarf from that very first week, cuz it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me,” I think: Wow, how overly confident, how nice it must feel to be so blindly trusting, to believe oneself to be unforgettable, whether true or not. And when, in “Shake It Off,” a hit from 1989, she sings, “It’s like I’ve got this music in my mind saying it’s gonna be all right,” I think: Wow, where can I get some of that music?
What I’m saying is, since I’m trying my best to tell this story as truthfully and as thoroughly as I can, I need to confess that during that summer (and, actually, the nine years leading up to it) I thought about Taylor Swift—her music, her look, her love life, the astronomic rise of her career—way more than makes logical sense. Does that make me psycho? Sure, I don’t know, maybe.
* * *
I was back at home after the drive up from San Onofre listening to Fearless, the 2008 follow-up to her first eponymous (and platinum) album released in 2006. I hadn’t slept in thirty-three hours. I’d surpassed exhaustion and was soaring with the illusion of limitless energy. I knew I should sleep, but my mind was reeling, bouncing from thought to thought, visual to visual—Eva-Kate’s periwinkle car, the diamond J on her Juicy Couture zipper, Dennis talking to her in the darkened hallway, Ruby’s fingernails, her crystals, the strange DIY tattoo on Zander’s wrist, the translucent green whiskey bottles lined up in a row, Eva-Kate dropping me off behind my parents’ house and telling me to pack a bag—so I’d stayed awake all night, lying in the dark looking up at a ceiling of glow-in-the-dark stars, nervous that if I fell asleep I’d wake up to find it had all been a dream.
I felt a million years away from that little girl outside of Rachel Ames’s trailer, like I’d finally vanquished her. I wanted to turn the volume all the way up, to get naked and dance to the contagious country pop, but now that I knew Eva-Kate could see into my house from her roof, I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being watched. Sure, I’d closed all the curtains and blinds, but after knowing her for almost two days I knew that if anyone were capable of having X-ray vision, it would be Eva-Kate Kelly.
So I kept the music low and my clothes on, humming along to the songs as I tossed my belongings into a JanSport backpack, ignoring the text messages from Riley that kept popping up on my phone.
We’re going to Swingers for milkshakes. Meet us there.
Are you coming?
Are you being weird on purpose or do you not realize you’re being weird?
Abbie says you’re a bitch.
Text us back, bitch. So we know you’re alive etc.
I turned the sound off and stumbled to my closet, filling my backpack with underwear and T-shirts and my collection of Bonne Bell lip gloss and the blossom-scented foaming face wash that was the only one that wouldn’t make me break out, a toothbrush, and my antianxiety meds I could never go more than two days without.
From the living room I packed a ziplock bag of food for Princess Leia and a full carton of Marlboro Reds I found in the cabinet above her food, gathering dust. I absentmindedly attributed them to being a relic of my father’s first midlife crisis in 2010 and tossed them into the backpack, hoping that arriving at Eva-Kate’s with my own cigarettes would help her to see me as an equal, or at least not as the cherub I imagined she imagined me to be. Zipping up the backpack, a sharp, silvery glimmer caught the corner of my eye. It was the overhead light ricocheting off the crystal doors of my
dad’s liquor cabinet. Inspired, I emptied a water bottle and surveyed my options. My eyes bounced from Grey Goose to Stolichnaya to Smirnoff to Jim Beam to Johnnie Walker to Jack Daniel’s. On the whiskey bottles I looked for the words SINGLE MALT but couldn’t find them, so I went with Johnnie Walker Red. The bottle slid easily into my backpack like a missing piece.
* * *
“Welcome home, babycakes,” Eva-Kate said when I arrived the next morning around ten. She was wearing a sheer cotton T-shirt and black interlock running shorts, her pink hair in disarray and yesterday’s makeup smudged around her eyes.
She’d told me to come by with my stuff whenever, and I figured going over immediately would seem desperate. So I waited out the night, watching season three of Jennie and Jenny, feeling myself drift in and out of sleep.
She took my backpack and handed it to a man—at least six feet tall and significantly built—wearing a blue button-down shirt rolled up around his bulging forearms. “This is Homer, head of security, he keeps the crazies out. Homer, this is Justine; will you take this backpack up to her room, please?”
“Nice to meet you, Justine,” he said. “And of course, Miss Kelly, right away.”
“It’s Eva-Kate, Homer!” she corrected him, teetering on the edge of flirtation. “Please, we’re practically family.”
“Whatever you say, Eva-Kate.” He smiled modestly and headed upstairs.
“I don’t like treating my staff like servants,” she said to me once he was gone. “Really creeps me out. Sure, they work for me, but I would so much prefer it if they didn’t.” She walked me into the kitchen, where she offered me a seat on a teetering bar stool and turned on an espresso maker.
“You wish you didn’t have people working for you?”
“It’s just not normal.” She wrinkled her nose and hopped onto the stool beside mine. “I’m seventeen and I have a staff. And I pay them a salary just to take care of me. Like advanced-level babysitters. My manager says I can’t fire them, that I need them, so I’ll sometimes say, Hey, buddy, I can fire you too, you know! But he reminds me that then a whole bunch of people would be out of jobs and I just feel too guilty to do that to them after all they’ve done for me. So I keep them on and I guess everyone’s happy. Except me, because I hate being treated like a porcelain doll all the damn time. I’m capable, you know? See, look, I can make espresso all by myself and everything!” She brought me a china teacup filled halfway with steaming, frothy espresso. Had I asked for espresso? Had she offered it to me? I didn’t think so.
“Thank you,” I said, taking it from her. “But I guess it’s still smart to have security, right? To keep the crazies out, like you said. And there must be a lot of them.”
“I guess.” She rolled her eyes, making herself a double shot. “But I have cameras all over the property and they’re being monitored constantly by the Elite Security central offices in Hollywood. They could press a button and have police here faster than you could say Jiminy Cricket. Who is Jiminy Cricket anyway?”
“He was the cricket from Pinocchio,” I said, imagining what it would be like to have a security team, to need a security team. “He represented Pinocchio’s conscience.”
“Oh, well,” she said, downing the piping-hot espresso in one gulp, “enough about that, we don’t have much time. Little Miss Swifty’s party starts at four and I’d say we should get there around five thirty.”
“That … sorry, but doesn’t that actually give us, like … many hours to get ready?”
“Yep.” She slid off the bar stool so that her shorts rose up, revealing the soft flesh at the very top of her thigh, so snowy white, even compared to the rest of her body. “And we’ll need every second.”
CHAPTER 13
IMITATIONS AND KNOCKOFFS
Heads turned to Eva-Kate as we walked into the Roosevelt Hotel lobby off Hollywood Boulevard. She wore a gold lamé halter minidress and six-inch heels with star-spangled straps, gold glitter eye makeup, and a gold tiara fastened with gold silk roses.
I caught my reflection in a mirror behind the reception desk and didn’t recognize myself. Eva-Kate dressed me from head to toe in items from her closet: an American-red Herve Leger bandage dress, art deco rings on every finger, black leather Chloé wedges with rose-gold rivets along the soles. She’d even called hair and makeup to give me smoky-red eyes and a keratin-enriched blowout.
I’d never walked in heels before, and so far it wasn’t going too well; I wobbled behind Eva-Kate, who had to grab my hand several times to keep me from toppling over. London and Olivia tried to stifle their laughter; Josie kept wincing, as if it were painful just to watch me. When Eva-Kate had said I’d be her plus-one, I naively assumed it would be just the two of us. I hadn’t considered that the rest of the gang had received their own invites. I wished I could make them disappear. They were tiresome accessories, useless as eight of my ten art deco rings.
Outside on the pool deck, the party was in full swing. Lean bodies in summer dresses and string bikinis, swim trunks and Speedos, moved around each other and with each other, seamlessly and gracefully like a choreographed dance. This was nothing like any party I’d been to, or even the ones I’d seen in movies. People here were practiced in their movements, they held their chins up high, they had reputations to maintain, they held their drinks like prized novelty items, not like devices of mental obliteration. Even with the sun bright and high, flamingo-pink lights shone up from the bases of palm trees, matching the cabana curtains on the opposite end of the pool.
“Closer” by the Chainsmokers featuring Halsey blasted from speakers suspended on all four corners of the deck. I counted fourteen flower crowns in just the first three minutes. Ordinarily this would be the type of situation to send me into a panic—the claustrophobia, the intrusive noise, the feeling of terminal inferiority—but Eva-Kate held on to my hand and Taylor Swift was somewhere nearby, so for once in my life I felt lifted above it all.
“Isn’t this song extremely two summers ago?” Eva-Kate asked me very seriously, as if I were the official record keeper of one-hit wonders. “I wish if they’d go retro they’d go all the way retro. Would it kill them to put on some Foo Fighters? ‘Everlong’ is a forgotten classic, totally timeless. This just feels stale.”
“Eva-Kate!” Spencer Sawyer jumped at us before I had a moment to answer, neon-green baseball cap on backward. He held up his camera and on instinct, Eva-Kate struck a pose. FLASH! It was broad daylight, there was absolutely no need for flash, but that’s how his photos got their ultra-bright hyperreal vibes.
“Get one with me and Justine,” she said, looping her arm around my waist, hardly acknowledging him at all.
“You got it,” he said, lifting the camera again. As he did so, Eva-Kate turned and pressed her lips against my cheek. I felt the kiss leave an oily mark and chose to wear it as a badge of honor.
“Where’s my insufferable girlfriend?” he asked, letting the camera dangle around his neck.
“I dunno, she was just right here. Probably went to the bathroom with Olivia. I’d walk on eggshells if I were you, she’s in quite the mood. Both of them are, actually.”
“What else is new?” he asked, and the two shared an amused, I’m-so-over-it kind of glance.
“Got us a table over there.” Josie came up behind us and pointed to an umbrella-shaded table next to the DJ booth.
“Let’s do it, then.” Eva-Kate wasted no time. “The sooner we’re seen, the sooner we can leave. And if we make a scene, we can leave even sooner.”
I didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want to make a scene at this party of all places, but I had no intention of doing anything that would go against Eva-Kate’s flow.
London and Olivia joined us with freshly applied makeup. They now wore matching green glitter eye shadow and so much clear lip gloss you could almost see the pool reflected on their pouty mouths. And Eva-Kate had been right, Olivia could not pull off a cloche hat.
“They do this matching makeup thing,�
�� Spencer said to no one in particular, snapping a photo as the two girls sat down. “It’s like so people know they came here with someone, that they’re not alone.”
“What?” London laughed. “That’s not true.”
“Yeah,” said Spencer, “it is. This psychologist on Dr. Phil said girls will do this to demonstrate they’re part of a tribe. So that other people know not to fuck with them. It’s an insecurity thing, goes back to cave people times. Can’t argue with it.”
“Ah yes, well, if Dr. Phil said it.” London rolled her eyes.
“Nothing like being mansplained to by a guy who sits on the couch all day watching Dr. Phil,” Olivia added.
“Hey, it’s the sitting on the couch all day that allows me to go all night long.”
“Charming.” Eva-Kate frowned.
A waitress in candy-apple-red booty shorts came by, balancing a tray of brightly colored drinks.
“Mojitos,” she said, setting the tray down carefully in the center of our table and gesturing showgirl style to the various colors. “These ones are blueberry, these ones are cucumber, these ones are … mango, and these ones are raspberry, ’K? I’m Desirée, let me know if y’all need anything else.”
“Thaaaanks, Desirée,” Josie singsonged while the rest of us reached for a mojito. Mine was blueberry. I was too queasy to drink from it, so I chewed lightly on the straw instead. Blueberries and shreds of mint floated through rum and syrup.
“Justine, you have some lipstick on your cheek,” London said, reaching over to wipe it off. Without meaning to, I jerked away.
“Don’t you want me to get it for you?”
“It’s okay, I’ll—”
“I like it,” Eva-Kate interrupted. “It gives her an air of mystery and nonchalance. Makes you wonder who kissed her and why she doesn’t care to wipe it off.”
“No it doesn’t,” said Olivia. “You kissed her. It’s very obvious that you kissed her.”
