by Zara Lisbon
“You actually want to be her friend. I’m not used to this. She gets so many star fucker girl groupie type people hanging on to her all the time, and she lives off that attention so she’s more than happy to let a few of them tag along here and there, even though she knows they’re just using her. Or at least I think she knows. So yeah, I thought that’s what this was, you hanging out with Eva-Kate to advance your own career.”
“I don’t have a career.” I laughed sourly. “I’m sixteen! And I’m not using her for anything. I genuinely like her.” I had to walk toward him so that I could get back to the lobby door, but he put his arm out to stop me. When he did so, I saw a small zigzag design imprinted on his forearm, the same one that Zander had on his wrist:
“You don’t get it,” he said, flicking his cigarette to the cement. “She’s not who you think she is.”
“Then who is she?” I quipped. “Michael Corleone?” His arm brushed against my torso and we locked eyes. For a moment all I could think about was how jealous Riley and the others would be if they could see.
“She’s a puppet,” he warned me. “And the puppeteer. The world would be a better place without her.”
“That’s…,” I muttered quietly. “That’s not true.”
“It is true. And I’ll tell you one more thing that’s true.” He stroked the back of his hand against my cheek.
“And what’s that?” I gulped, suddenly unable to move a muscle.
“I’d really like to kiss you now.”
“What?” I jerked my head away, then stumbled backward. “What? Why? You’re dating Liza and you just—are you insane?”
“I don’t know…” He smiled. “Can you define sanity?”
“You’re insane.”
“Why? Because I want to kiss you? Is your self-esteem really that low?”
“You don’t even know me, and…” And you could kiss any girl, I wanted to say, so why me? I tried to quiet the voice that told me this made me special, the voice that was enjoying every second of it.
“You’re refreshing, I know that much about you. You’ve lived a grounded life before meeting Eva-Kate, I can see that, and I like it. It’s like a cool breeze.”
“That’s bullshit,” I countered. “There’s no way my boring, average life makes me appealing to you.”
“Boring and average is underrated, Justine. You don’t know what you have till it’s gone.”
“How do you know my name? I didn’t tell you my name.”
“You’re Eva-Kate’s newest golden girl, Justine. Word travels fast.”
“So then, that’s what you like about Liza? She’s separate from your world of fame? She’s uncorrupted by fame?”
“That’s part of it.”
“You like fame virgins? You think somehow we’re better people? Sweeter?”
“Fame virgins”—his mouth curled in amusement—“are better people. You know that when you’ve been around fame long enough.”
“If Liza’s such a great person, then why would she date her sister’s boyfriend anyway?”
“Because it wouldn’t make any difference to Eva-Kate! Eva-Kate hated Liza long before I came around, and nothing Liza ever did could change that. Finally, she gave up, she got tired of being mistreated, and she agreed to give me a chance.”
“I have to go,” I said, feeling disoriented. “Thanks for the … words of wisdom. I guess.” I walked quickly through the lobby, eagerly wanting to get back to Eva-Kate, to get reoriented. I didn’t like Rob, and I didn’t trust him. I regretted taking the time to let him get in my head.
Eva-Kate intercepted me at the indoor water fountain.
“We’re leaving,” she said, moving full speed ahead. “I’ll call an Uber.”
“Wait, wait.” I held her back. “Rob’s out there smoking.”
“Wish I still smoked,” she said, looking around for another way out. “I’ll ask about a back exit.”
“Don’t you want to stay for the fireworks?” I asked, trying to be just the right amount of mildly funny.
“I can put on my own firework show for ten thousand dollars,” she said. “Getting the hell out of this nightmare is priceless.”
CHAPTER 15
WE WERE THE KNIFE
Living at Eva-Kate’s house began to feel like home. My room was down the hall from hers and overlooked the canal with its freshly painted paddle boats and canoes bobbing in the breeze, its honeysuckle vines and jacaranda trees in full bloom, fallen purple petals floating in the green water below.
With nothing to do and nowhere to be, I spent the days sleeping on and off, just like a cat, just like I’d always wanted, curling up wherever the strongest sunbeam landed. I took long bubble baths in the deepest tub I’d ever seen, curtains drawn and candles lit, sipping from a glass of whiskey, taste-testing the bottles in Eva-Kate’s prodigious collection one by one. I quickly found that the smokier-tasting the scotch, the more I adored it, and the older the bottle, the more I felt I was strolling through a decadent heaven of my own design.
Photos of us together circled the internet, and my Instagram following shot up to twenty thousand overnight. Star printed the picture of us leaving the Roosevelt, me in a bandage dress and Tom Ford knockoffs scowling at them as Eva-Kate waved, and beneath it the caption read, “Is EKK’s new BFF a dark influence?” People magazine printed a blurry picture of Eva-Kate leaving Rite Aid with me at her side and the caption “EKK’s late night ice cream run with mystery friend.” Kids from school who’d never spoken to me came out of the woodwork. When I wasn’t “babycakes,” Eva-Kate started calling me Mystery Friend, and sometimes Dark Influence. We laughed at the absurdity: me? A dark influence on her?
“It’s funny, ’cause you’re such a babycake,” she’d say. “Such a sweetheart.”
Just like Rob had said.
So they thought I was a sweetheart. I wondered what they’d say if they knew the truth.
In the evenings, around five or six, Eva-Kate would burst through my door with a whirlwind of plans. She’d jabber eagerly, stumbling over her words, outlining the places we’d go and people we’d see that night. But we would never be more than thirty minutes out in the world before the plan started taking sharp turns and sudden twists. Tearing up Sunset in her periwinkle Audi, Eva-Kate would get a call or a text or a rush of inspiration and we’d be headed in the opposite direction faster than I had time to figure out what was happening. Whatever her original plan was, it would be a distant memory by the end of the night; the blueprint never even resembled the memories we built. If the plan was to get drinks at Tower Bar, then hit up a party at Justin Bieber’s house and wind up at the Nylon magazine pool party on the rooftop of the Standard hotel, we would actually drive halfway to Tower Bar but change directions and go to Musso & Frank for dirty martinis and meatball subs, then meet Josie and Olivia and London at Soho House West Hollywood and end up skinny-dipping in Harrison Ford’s daughter’s indoor pool. Or if the plan was to get acrylic nail extensions adorned with two-hundred-dollar nail art, then go dancing at Playhouse, we’d end up getting drunk at home, then Ubering to Dave & Buster’s for grilled cheese and arcade games. If the plan was up, we went down. If the plan was down, we went up. And if the plan was a newly ripened peach, we were the knife, slicing it up into tiny pieces and feeding it to the birds.
I never could keep up. By 10:00 P.M. my eyelids would start to droop and I’d battle the desire for a place to rest my head. Every time new characters were introduced to the play of our night, I’d tense up, become so acutely aware of each one of my words and movements that I couldn’t make myself speak. My self-consciousness was almost crippling, but the heightened stimulation of potential and possibility made it worth all the discomfort. No matter how socially anxious I’d been, no matter how many times I told myself I’d never put myself through it again, halfway through the next day I’d be thirsty for the adrenaline, counting the hours until I’d be thrust back into the lawless realm that existed outside myself.
Luckily for me, Eva-Kate’s extended entourage mistook my stiffness and my silence to mean that I was aloof and unimpressed. And so they asked for me again and again, vying to win my warmth and approval. Little did they know I saw them as demigods and goddesses, that I perceived each and every one of them to have had a golden nugget of je ne sais quoi embedded in their chest plate at birth, a blessing for the chosen ones that I would never, ever have.
But soon enough I started to learn which substances would help me forget all my imagined shortcomings. Soon after that, I learned that pretty much any substance would do the trick. When Eva-Kate saw my energy fading, she’d feed me tiny lines of coke out of the palm of her hand, like she was a mama deer and I was her fawn. When we’d walk into a new scene, dozens of new eyes on us, and Eva-Kate could see me start to freeze, she’d unscrew her silver Tiffany’s flask and hand it to me. Her initials were engraved into the fine, polished silver. She kept it stocked with Lagavulin 16, just for me.
With Eva-Kate and her arsenal of potions at my side, I learned to relax. I let go of dread and learned to go with the flow. I closed my eyes and put my hands in the air as she sped recklessly along Mulholland with the moon roof open and the windows down. I posed giddily for anyone who wanted a picture, developing my own signature pose: demure and submissive, eyes low, hand on one hip and a coy smile on my whiskey-stung lips. I flirted clumsily with movie directors and record producers dangling shiny opportunities on a hook. I knew their offers were empty, nothing but tried and true attempts to take me home. But I didn’t care; it wasn’t them or their lies that I wanted, it was the thrill of conversing with people who spent money like it was blood, guaranteed to regenerate over and over ad infinitum. It was the high of being included where I’d always secretly suspected I belonged: on a modern-day, nonfiction Mount Olympus, in a realm of passwords and access codes, of red rope and red carpet, of exclusivity and people so accustomed to exclusivity they hardly recognized it anymore.
My favorite nights were the nights we’d stumble home at dawn and Eva-Kate would take my hands, whining, “I don’t want to be alone, come keep me company.” And she’d pull me down the hall to her room, where we’d woozily recount the highlights like biblical lore, so buzzed off the night we were oblivious to our own exhaustion. She’d blast the Velvet Underground—her declared favorite—from the Crosley turntable and we’d dance to the sounds of Nico’s apathetic drawl and Lou Reed’s strung-out strums, performing for the security cameras all night long until our muscles gave in and we’d collapse onto her bed, where she’d trace the lines on my palm, pretending she could read them, or she’d have me massage her back with her kyanite crystal Reiki wand, asking me to press harder and deeper, saying don’t hold back, stop holding back, don’t be afraid to hurt me, so eventually I’d do as she said, and found that making Eva-Kate whimper in pain could be almost as gratifying as making her smile. Sleep would sneak up on us abruptly so that the next morning we’d wake in odd positions, as relics from the night, and laugh.
* * *
One night was different than all the rest. A Wednesday. Five and six o’clock went by without Eva-Kate bursting through my door. I started drinking at seven to take the edge off my growing anxiety—a tall glass of whiskey with a splash of Coke. Then another. I thought about going over to her room, but was that what Mystery Friend would do? Dark Influence? What about Whiplash Girl Child? I didn’t think so. So I scrolled through IKWYDLN, awestruck and giddy over the dozens of pictures of me with Eva-Kate. Me with Eva-Kate dancing under a broken disco light, me with Eva-Kate sharing an oversized tuft of cotton candy, me with Eva-Kate laughing on the rubberized floor of a bouncy castle, me and Eva-Kate in the Roosevelt Hotel pool wearing matching neon bikinis, me and Eva-Kate posing with various Jenners and Kardashians, me and Eva-Kate posing with Ashley Olsen, me and Eva-Kate posing with Jennifer Lawrence, me and Eva-Kate posing with Miley Cyrus, me and Eva-Kate posing with Nick Jonas, me and Eva-Kate posing with a six-foot-tall inflatable Furby made from Mylar and ripstop nylon. I looked good in the all-consuming light of a flashbulb, and the best part of it all was that Eva-Kate’s entourage trinity—Josie, London, Olivia—were hardly there at all. It was like they’d been replaced. By me.
It was eleven by the time Eva-Kate showed up at my door, and she wasn’t buzzing with her usual jumbled plans, or buzzing at all. She was pensive and downcast.
“Hey,” she said, leaning her head against the doorway, “do you mind if we stay in tonight? I’m just not feeling it.”
“Of course,” I said from my horizontal position on the bed. “I don’t care what we do.”
“Wanna hang in my room? I’ll make drinks.”
“Obviously,” I said, swinging my legs off the side of the bed.
“You da best, babycakes,” she said, blowing me a lazy kiss.
Eva-Kate’s room was rustic chic, distressed hardwood floors with a cowhide rug, exposed brick walls decorated with black-and-white photography, a silk gauze canopy hanging over an iron-framed bed.
“Before I forget,” she said, getting onto her knees and reaching under the bed. She pulled out two packages, both with my name on them. “These came for you. I don’t know what’s in them but they’re from Hot Toxic, so it’s probably hair dye.”
“Why would they send me hair dye?” I got down on the floor next to her to examine the shipping labels, make sure I wasn’t hallucinating my name printed out in bold caps lock.
“They want you to be their Instagram spokesperson,” she said. Hands-free, she got back onto her feet and closed the door.
“Wait, what?” This made more sense as a hallucination, so I was inclined to believe it was. “Why would they want me as their spokesperson? You’re the one with dyed hair. I mean, you’re the one with the following. This doesn’t seem real.” I wondered if she could tell I meant this literally, that I was actually insecure about the nature of our current reality.
“Course it’s real. I didn’t want to do it, so I said you would. You have like a hundred thousand followers now, you were gonna start getting hounded for sponsored posts soon anyway. You don’t mind, do you?” She moved to the dresser, lighting a line of lavender-scented candles.
“Mind? No, I’m … I’m kind of speechless.”
“Well, don’t get too excited, they’ll probably just pay like two thousand for a post since you’re kinda new or whatever.”
“Two thousand dollars? Are you serious?” I took a deep breath and tried to control my elation. In my sixteen years on Earth I’d made a total of five hundred dollars, money I’d scraped together from babysitting and birthday cards sent by relatives I’d never met. “Two thousand dollars is more than enough for me.” I smiled graciously, keeping myself from bursting into ecstatic laughter by visualizing what my childhood rabbit looked like three days after she died. This always worked when I had to fight laughter or manufacture my most somber face.
“That’s cute,” she said in earnest. And then, with a gentle stroke of sadness in her voice, “I’m happy for you.”
“Are you okay?” I asked as she slowly made her way to the antique bar cart on the other side of the room.
“Honestly? Not really.” She took out two glasses and filled them halfway with Lagavulin 16.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing is working.” She measured out two tablespoons of grenadine and dumped one into each glass. “The crystals, the hypnosis, the Reiki, the feather work, none of it. I’m still heartsick.”
“Over Rob?”
“Sure, yeah.” She poured a small splash of seltzer into the glasses and screwed the caps back onto their respective bottles. “But it’s so much more than that. It’s my life, it’s just so … sad. Was I really put on this planet to be a pretty puppet for the masses to speculate about? They all think they know me, but the joke’s on them because they can’t possibly know me if I don’t even know myself.” She handed me my glass and clinked hers against mine. “Cheers, babycakes. Tell me if you like it, it
’s my own version of the Irish redhead. I don’t use Sprite so it’s mostly whiskey and grenadine. When I die they’ll call it the Eva-Kate.” The drink was deep magenta red and looked slippery in the glass. She sat down on the bed next to me.
“Cheers,” I said, and dove into my drink. “You know, I don’t think you need to know who you are. I don’t think anybody really does.”
“It’s different for me.” She shook her head. “It’s not just that I don’t know who I am, it’s that I don’t even know if I am. You know, I was fine before, I wasn’t all morbid and existential until Rob broke things off and went after my sister.”
She leaned her head back onto the wall so that all I could see was the white pillar of her exposed neck, the vague veins and vessels that swirled through like marble.
“That would make anybody existential and morbid,” I told her. “This drink is dope, by the way. Way better than the bottled ones.”
“This is a good batch,” she agreed. “It’s all about the proportions. In another life I was a Prohibition-era bartender. Or, like, one of those beautiful hostess women. I wish I was in this life, actually.”
“You wish you were a hostess? Like Liza?”
“Just another one of the many ways she’s hijacked my life.”
“Don’t you think you’re a little bit too good for that? And by a little too good, I mean majorly and dramatically too good.”
“You mean because I’m a celebrity? Sad to say that doesn’t make me too good for anything. And if I had a down-to-earth blue-collar type job like a hostess, then people would respect me. I’d be one of the people, a real girl.”
There was that real girl fantasy again. What did it mean for Eva-Kate?
“I’m sorry, I have to laugh.” I was charmed by the fact that a hostess was her idea of a respectable blue-collar job. “You think hostesses get more respect than you do? You’re a TV star, Eva-Kate, the whole country respects you.”
“They don’t. They think I’m this dumb, talentless child star who never deserved fame in the first place.”
