Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  Copyright © 2021 Hayley Phelan

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Like me / Hayley Phelan.

  Names: Phelan, Hayley, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210152893 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210152966 | ISBN 9780385696739 (softcover) | ISBN 9780385696746 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8631.H45 L55 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover and book design: Emma Dolan

  Cover image: Javier Diez/Stocksy

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Amit

  PART ONE

  FROM THE BATHROOM, where I was perched in front of the toilet, I could hear Gemma Anton laughing. Gemma was on her way to a party. Not now. Last night. I’d left her on my bed, imprisoned in the two-by-six-inch screen of my phone, as she was goofing around and singing to Bob Marley in the back of a taxi. Her giggle reverberated through my shitty studio’s thin walls in a tinny, mechanical loop.

  I was kneeling in a pose of abject submission, my forehead pressed against the cool plastic seat of the toilet, hands clammy against its sculpted porcelain. This was how I spent most of my mornings that summer—the summer that concerns us, the summer that Gemma disappeared—hunched in my bathroom, waiting for the bile to climb. I had convinced myself that I’d developed insomnia and needed to drink at least two bottles of wine, or the equivalent, to fall asleep. Although what I called “falling asleep” was what medical professionals would probably term an alcoholic blackout. I often woke fully clothed, reeking of cigarette smoke, the chemical aftertaste of cocaine in the back of my throat, with only the dimmest idea of how I’d gotten there. Of course, I slept worse and worse, and drank more and more, and somehow failed to see the connection between the two.

  At nineteen, I was already well trained in the school of hangovers. They were worth it, too, I thought, for those few blissful hours asleep, swimming in the inky black void, falling through nothing. So, on this particular morning, I did not hesitate to act: I bravely lifted my head and, bracing myself with one hand, delicately probed the velvety flesh at the back of my throat. It was like fitting a key into a lock with the lights out. I closed my eyes, feeling for the give, and then—click—it came in a gush: relief awash in soured vodka soda.

  Satisfied with the purge, I leaned back and surveyed my reflection in the shallow oval of milky pale water below me. I tore off two squares of toilet paper and cleaned my fingers, tossed the refuse into the bowl, and flushed.

  Standing up, I stretched my arms towards the ceiling. Beautiful little fireflies, the kind that signal intense dehydration and hunger, danced in front of my eyes. Reaching past the shower curtain—depressingly mass-market white, mildewed on the bottom—I turned on the shower, pushing it as hot as it would go. The rushing sound drowned out Gemma’s laugh and calmed me, making my scalp tingle. I stripped naked, leaving my clothes in a puddle on the floor, and examined my body in the full-length mirror, waiting for the steam to fill the room. I ran my hands along the length of my sides, pinched the skin on my stomach, tapped my hip bones, running my inventory. All the products were in place: flat stomach, skinny arms, ribs that protruded ever so slightly, white skin. I thought of my body as a tool, something I owned. I could rent it out if I wanted to—which is more or less what I did. For all that talk about selling one’s soul, no one seems to be in the market. It’s the body that everybody wants. The body is a currency everyone can understand.

  The steam clouded over the mirror and swallowed me. I stepped into the shower, closed my eyes, and finally lost sight of myself. I felt empty and pure.

  * * *

  —

  I still remember the very first image I saw of Gemma, staring out at me from the kaleidoscopic grid of my Popular page on Instagram. I had moved to New York City six months before, and it was only just beginning to become obvious that the lucrative modeling career I’d been promised would never materialize.

  The image was a close-up of her face against a black backdrop. The first thing I thought was: This girl looks a lot like me. I, too, was blond and thin, with overlarge pale-blue eyes and a wide, round forehead. It was unnerving, as if I were looking into the face of an intimate or family member whose name I couldn’t place, and who had shown up somewhere they weren’t meant to be. But once that brief instant had passed, her face seemed to bloom and I saw that though our features were similar, the effect they gave in Gemma was somehow far more captivating. In the image, she was wearing gold, sculptural earrings, and her white-blond ringlets had been pulled into a bun, laying bare her impeccable bone structure. Her head was tilted to one side, and one hand rested lazily on top of her head, two fingers pulling gently at the tender skin of her left eye, which peered out at me frankly. They were intelligent eyes and had a naked quality to them, framed as they were by pale, white-blond eyebrows. That was one of the differences between us. The eyebrows made her look Nordic, pure, childlike. Her pose was almost surreal, a Cubist flourish to the kind of portrait we’ve seen ten hundred times before. Her skin was perfect. Freckles dotted her nose and cheeks. Between her slightly parted lips, you could see her strong white teeth, which had a small gap between them. There was a nobility about her bearing. I can’t quite explain it, but there is something about Gemma. She just looks like a someone.

  I had once overheard a client explain to the casting director that had brought me in for a go-see: “She’s too bland. Too safe, not enough personality.” What he meant, of course, was that my look had no personality. And the thing was: I agreed with him. I knew I was attractive. I wasn’t dumb. But for a long time, I’d felt there was an indefinite quality to my face, like it was a blurred outline that some other girl could fill just as well. Perhaps it’s a function of the job: my face is a blank canvas on which any fantasy may be projected. Then again, it probably goes back further, to growing up the only child of P.T. Heffernan, erstwhile king of the North Shore, the Bernie Madoff of Illinois, as the local press dubbed him. For the record, we were never as rich as the Madoffs, not even close. But we were certainly wealthy—and my father was certainly a crook. It’s possible that being raised by a fraud imparted a certain veiled quality to my expressions. In any case, the fact remains: people see many things in my face, but what they never seem to see is me.

  Gemma, on the other hand, is different. Once I’d seen her, right away I started Following her on Instagram. Soon, she was everywhere. On billboards. Magazine covers. All over Instagram. I watched her Follower count rise to 20K, then 50K, then pu
sh past 100K. I was completely riveted. I probably clocked an hour or two every day on her feed, poring over her photos. It was intoxicating watching her perfect life unfold, this stranger who looked so much like me; I suppose it made me feel as if my dreams were within reach, like I, too, could be famous, rich again, and loved. Instead, things continued to look grim for me. I knew if they didn’t change, if I continued to get passed over for those big-name jobs, if I couldn’t scrape together more than a few thousand Instagram Followers, Jason, my agent, would eventually—with sugar-sweet apologies—drop me. And then politely but firmly inform me that I owed thousands of dollars to the agency, interest in loans that I’d unwittingly accepted. Part of me resented Gemma, of course. I was jealous. But I didn’t hate her—it might be difficult for you to believe that now, but it’s true. I didn’t hate her. I was fascinated by her; I thought if I studied her closely enough, something would be revealed to me, a way forward, a way to not be who I was. By that summer, when this story begins, I’d been in New York two years. I didn’t have a high school diploma. And if I had to move back in with my mother, I thought I would probably die.

  Any sensible person would have gotten a day job; I could have become a barista, or waited tables part time. Then maybe none of this would have happened. But I wasn’t a very sensible person back then. I had been bred for the easy life. And because I was pretty and white and had once known what it was like to be rich, I felt entitled to it, as if I were recapturing what was once mine, rather than taking what I didn’t deserve. Besides, I had met Julia and Blake—my best friends at the time—shortly after I moved to New York City, and they had shown me how to get on in the city with very little money. It involved rich men and copious amounts of alcohol. We thought it was a bargain.

  * * *

  —

  After I felt I had sufficiently sweated out most of the alcohol from the night before, I gave myself one final blast of cold water—I’d read somewhere it decreased the chances of developing cellulite—and stepped out of the shower. I wrapped a towel around my hair and again positioned myself in the mirror. I cleared a space in the fog, just where my head was: my reflection showed a ghostly face floating in mid-air. One of my great hobbies at the time was picking my skin. I was prolific. But I had a casting that morning, and couldn’t afford to go in with a splotchy face—I desperately needed the job—so I resisted, fleeing the bathroom and heading for the kitchen, which was also the living room and the bedroom. Everything in my life fit into a cramped 350-square-foot space. It was pretty bleak in there: blank walls, dust in the corners, a mattress on a box spring, an IKEA dresser. The one thing I liked about my apartment was that its only two windows faced a brick wall. No one could see in.

  I filled up a glass of water from the tap and guzzled it. I looked at the clock on my microwave: I had thirty minutes before I had to leave for the casting. As if drawn like a magnet, I went back to bed, back to Gemma, where I’d left her, imprisoned in her little rectangular box, maniacally reenacting the night before. I picked up my phone and watched the rest of it unfold.

  Yes, Gemma had gone out last night, I didn’t know where. She’d worn a silky camisole, silver, that dipped and pooled beneath her impressive clavicle; if you looked closely (and I always did) when she lifted her glass up, as if to cheers the thousands of strangers that watched her Stories, you could see the faint outline of her ribs on the front of her chest. As her gesture became grander—the arm sweeping around in an exaggerated, grandiose arc—it seemed that it was the bones themselves that moved, furtively, under the skin. Automatically, my hand lifted to my own chest, feeling for the same bones. I pressed my thumb against her body, pinning it against my screen so it went motionless, and raked my eyes over it, looking for more information. She had not tagged the brand of the blouse or anything else she was wearing, which frustrated me.

  I’d gone out last night, too, as I did every night, with Julia and Blake. I can’t now recall how the three of us met, nor what initially drew me to them; I suppose, like most things in my life then, the friendships evolved largely out of a sense of convenience. We liked each other enough, each of us could take down a bottle of wine without beginning to slur, and we enjoyed doing the same sorts of things, had the same sorts of priorities. Julia was what I came to call rich-adjacent: she’d no real money of her own, but because her father was a well-liked studio musician who occasionally played with famous people, she’d grown up around enough wealth that she felt accustomed to it, entitled to it. Yet she was also enormously resourceful; out of all of us, she was the scrappiest, the most shameless, a fantastic liar, always finding ways to make money. She had three thousand Followers, and even though I knew she had bought a few hundred of them in the early days, most of them were legit, and either way it was still three times the amount of clout I had online.

  Blake, on the other hand, poor dear Blake who went to great pains to disguise her freckles and orange-red hair with self-tanner and $300 highlights, was one of the most insecure, aimless people I’ve ever known. Not that you’d be able to tell upon meeting her: much like her natural physical appearance, she hid her rampant insecurity under layers of self-invention, adorned herself with all manner of baubles and decoration. She was brash, she was loud, she was often irritating, particularly when she was drunk or coked up, which was often. She only had two hundred Followers, though you’d think by the way she posted—Here’s a pro health tip I swear by: try adding coconut oil to your coffee! or I absolutely love rainy days! What’s your favorite kind of weather?—she had closer to two million. It was an embarrassment I found hard to stand sometimes.

  Since it was Tuesday, the three of us had gone to Parlor, as we always did on Tuesdays, and, as we always did, we sat at Joe’s booth and pretended to listen to what the men were saying to us in order to fuck us while we steadfastly consumed all their booze until the only mixer left was cranberry juice, which we would not drink, and then we’d turn down, ever so slightly, the wattage on our pliant smiles, and look bored, and then they’d order another bottle of vodka, and we’d ask for more soda, please, and do it all over again. We weren’t prostitutes or escorts or anything as tawdry as that, but the fact of the matter was that Joe—one of the biggest club promoters in the city, a squat, bald-headed guy from Long Island with a goofy sense of humor—relied on us to join him and whatever group of rich men he was entertaining at the time at whatever club. We didn’t have to do anything with these men, per se. We were simply decoration. But sleeping with one or two could be useful. Money would always find its way to us.

  I peered more closely at Gemma’s Instagram—it was difficult to tell in the photos, but it seemed she might have been at Parlor last night, too. I turned over on my side and tucked my knees into my chin. I had never seen Gemma in person, even though I often saw later on social media that we had been in the same place at the same time. She had ended her night with pizza at Artichoke; there she was, under the vaguely sinister yellow light particular to one-dollar-slice places at three in the morning. She held the pizza aloft and let its floppy tip dangle tantalizingly close to her bottom lip. Her mouth was open. I could see the wetness of her pink tongue. Normally, she said something funny or witty or self-deprecating, but this time she’d only put up an emoji of a crystal ball, a hieroglyph whose meaning I could only begin to parse. Was it an in-joke? A pop culture reference I didn’t get?

  I thought about what I had eaten during the day yesterday: two boiled eggs and a cup of tomato soup. I often didn’t eat a proper meal until nine or ten p.m., when Joe and his benefactors would take a group of us to dinner before the club. Last night, it was Mr. Chow—one of my favorites. After I polished off my plate of noodles, and devoured a good portion of the crispy duck, one of the men had looked at me appreciatively and said: “Man, it’s so sexy to see a girl that can eat!” These kinds of idiots, who I privately despised, and openly derided the next day with Julia and Blake, were my main source of nutrients at the time. They
probably kept me alive.

  Gemma didn’t need to bother with such buffoons. She had been with Hans Benoit, the famous photographer, for almost two years. Benoit had taken last night’s pizza photo, too. I knew just by looking at it. Whenever he shot nightlife or candids like this, he always used a high-watt flash that blew everyone out, making the girls look like the girls you see on missing persons posters and the men look like they were wild-eyed and on more drugs than they probably were.

  I lay back in bed and took a few photos of myself naked, half wishing there were someone to take them for me. Benoit took photos of Gemma constantly. Gemma in the shower, tufted in soap suds. Gemma asleep in the late afternoon sun. Gemma eating cereal on the couch. Even Gemma pissing, her cute white panties making a garland around her ankles, a sheepish grin on her face. That’s what I thought love was: someone who constantly wanted to take your picture. My mom was like that with me when I was little. She had about a dozen photo albums, completely filled with snapshots of me and hardly anyone else. Now, though, I get so annoyed with her asking me to pose, she hardly takes any photos of me at all. She’ll still tell me I’m pretty all the time, though. I’m so jealous, she’ll whisper, stroking my hair or eyeing my body, which is the highest compliment coming from her.

  I studied the nudes I’d taken of myself. I didn’t look bad. I selected them all and clicked Hide so no one could see them in my photo roll but I could still visit them privately, peer at my body—you never know when you’ll want to evaluate it again, it’s good to have on hand. Then I began scrolling through the last few photos in my camera roll. There was one of Blake and me before the night really got started, walking arm in arm on the sidewalk on our way to Parlor. I was wearing Levi’s Premium Wedgie Fit jeans in Charleston Moves in Medium Wash, a Stelen Open-Back Spaghetti Strap Camisole in Ivory, Topshop Oversize Gold Hoop Earrings, and Steve Madden Kandi Black Slip-On Loafers, which, if you squinted, looked like Gucci. Blake wore the Reformation Christine Dress in Lemonade, and Converse Low-Top Sneakers in Canvas. We’d found an empty champagne glass tucked neatly beside the staircase of a brownstone, and, tipsy and giggly, I had scooped it up and toasted it towards the camera. After we’d taken the picture, I’d tossed it on the street and watched it shatter.