Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  Everyone is watching.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, she wakes easily with the sun. The sky is a spotless blue. It is already very hot. She takes a screenshot of the weather app on her phone. It is ninety-eight degrees.

  Gemma goes for a walk along the beach. She is wearing a nude one-piece that she received in the mail last week. She had not ordered it. A brand had sent it to her, after she had posted a still of Bo Derek in the movie 10. She has not seen 10, but it is on her list of things to watch, when she has time. For your own 10 moment, the designer, or more likely the PR manager, had written on the card that came with it. It was then that she’d realized it had been some time since she’d had a beach vacation. She knew she needed to relax. Get out. Just for a little. She booked the trip that afternoon. Gemma is on vacation, in part, because of a free swimsuit, and a savvy PR strategist. Not that anyone would know that.

  Gemma lies on the sand, and the swimsuit blends into the sand and her skin, making her appear otherworldly, a mermaid washed up on the beach, naked as the day she was born. She splashes into the sea, exhilarated by how the water’s cold knifes into her. She dries off with a yellow-and-white-striped towel and curls up on a cushioned chaise longue. She spends the afternoon like this. Drinking ice water with sliced cucumber and lemon. Rubbing Supergoop sunscreen oil up and down her long limbs until they shine. Turning onto her front. Turning onto her back. She stares out at where the ocean meets the sky in a solid, unbroken line. The sun’s glare is hard and sharp along the waves’ edges. She is awed by how flat everything looks. It reminds her of a computer screen. It makes her feel peaceful.

  Then the sun is setting. Gemma wraps a towel around herself and walks along the shore. Everything looks dipped in gold. In the fading light, Gemma holds sand in her fist and lets it slowly slip through her fingers until there is nothing left.

  Tomorrow, she will return to the city.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know when exactly the idea took hold of me.

  It was almost a week after the shoot with Benoit. My mother had called, sounding disturbed, and, by the time I was finished speaking with her, I was standing outside of Gemma’s apartment.

  It was a nice building. Red brick with a green awning, and vines that grew up its sides. I knew Gemma was there. She’d gotten home a few days before from her relaxing beach vacation, a much-needed breather. And then, of course, she’d said, as if her body had been waiting for a momentary slowdown in order to fully break down, she’d gotten sick with the flu. The poor dear had been holed up inside since. But today, she’d posted a Story of herself sipping tea and promising that she would venture out, if only for a little, this afternoon.

  Since the shoot with Benoit, I’d been out of sorts, too. A feeling had taken root inside of me, a dark roiling that I tried to ignore. The person I’d been during those hours spent in the myopia of Benoit’s camera slipped away, as if she never existed. I considered the shoot a failure. I told no one about it, and no one remembered to ask me, even though it’d been all I’d talked about in the days beforehand. I bought a jar of Jolen bleach and painted my eyebrows till they stung, then paid a hairdressing student eighty dollars for a perm—I couldn’t keep painstakingly curling my hair everyday like Jack had done at the shoot. It wasn’t a great perm, but it was serviceable, and it was better, certainly, than how I looked before. Still, the feeling of dread persisted. I told myself it was the heat. It got all the way to 104 in the city that week. Otherwise, everything was the same. I went out every night—always the same people, the same places and conversations and questions. Are you a model? From LA? Where in the city do you live? Want a vodka soda? I started giving all the wrong answers, openly false and absurd, and watching their faces as their brains short-circuited. It didn’t matter. No one was looking for a sensible or thoughtful response, only an answer to recognize you by, the same way birds call out to each other, mechanically singing the same songs in order to identify their species.

  During the day, I stayed inside with the lights off, drinking white wine diluted with soda water, pretending I wasn’t really there, or imagining myself on the beach next to Gemma. I watched a lot of Law & Order: SVU, with my laptop growing hot on my stomach so that I had to put a pillow between its scalding surface and my skin. On my phone, I scrolled through endless online shopping sites, flicking my finger so that grids of empty garments, or grids of empty-eyed models wearing those garments, slid by. I would add everything I liked to my virtual shopping cart, and then, while Stabler and Benson chased down pedophiles, I’d painstakingly edit the cart, deleting items I deemed frivolous, re-adding them later, swapping out colors and sizes until I was dizzy. I couldn’t afford anything, and knew I would never buy any of it, but it was comforting to know the clothes were there, and that if I wanted to, I could purchase them simply by moving my finger. I found that in this way, it was like I already owned them. Besides, organizing my virtual wardrobe had the aura of productivity. It’s a kind of self-improvement, I thought. I’m making myself better through buying things. It was while I was debating the relative merits of a black cowl-neck camisole and a Lurex tank top very much like one I already owned that my mother had called.

  I had forgotten about our weekly date.

  This was what the call was about.

  “I guess I’ve been a bad mom,” she’d said. “I guess that’s why.”

  “You haven’t been a bad mom,” I said, trying to be calm, though she was already hysterical.

  “But I have! I guess I should just commit suicide!”

  For some reason, I got out of bed and put my shoes on. “Mom, I just forgot, that’s all. I’ve been busy with work.”

  “It’s just so hurtful. Raise a child just to have them abandon you. Sometimes I wonder what it was all for.”

  “I haven’t abandoned you.”

  “Your father says he hasn’t talked to you in a month.”

  “It’s not my fault I miss his calls!” I grabbed my keys and threw them into my purse.

  “I guess we really screwed up as parents.”

  “I’m trying to spend less time on my phone, okay? For mental health.”

  “Your father is in jail.”

  “I know!”

  I was outside now, walking fast, my heart hammering in my chest like I was fleeing the scene of a crime. I cringed against the sharp sunlight. My armpits were already slick.

  “And what am I supposed to do? Just be alone all the time? Just disappear?”

  “Mom, really, I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t easy, you know. I’ve got things to do. Who do you think is handling your dad’s court case? Who do you think is doing everything? Do you think I like getting in my car every Sunday and driving two hours to visit my husband in jail alone? You think that’s easy for me?”

  I sighed. “How about I go with you next time?” I said, knowing that was what she had been after all along. It felt like the tide was taking me out, like I was standing on the wet sand and everything under my feet was being pulled away.

  “Next week?” she asked, as if it were a challenge.

  “Sure.”

  My mother went all quiet, like she did every time I capitulated to her, as if she were somehow disappointed. “That’d be nice,” she said finally, smoothing her voice out like she would a white linen tablecloth. “Thank you.”

  We went over some logistical details, and eventually said goodbye. I felt a gust of cold air as someone opened the door to Gemma’s apartment building, and relief washed over me. I was back on solid ground. I knew there was a doorman (she sometimes ’Grammed one of them, Joseph, helping her with her boxes, the free swag brands sent her regularly) but he must have been sitting inside—I could just make out the beginning of a small lobby through the glass double doors. I knew about the coffee shop across the street, too. La Coqueta. Gemma
went there every morning for her oat milk latte. It had a slim natural-wood bar along the window that faced the street.

  I took up position on one of the café’s rickety, artfully distressed stools. My oat milk latte arrived in a rough-hewn pewter mug without a handle. I took six photos of it bathed in the natural light from outside, but I couldn’t really focus, I was so jittery, and the pictures all came out lame and not worthy of the Grid, though I uploaded one to Stories. It was too hot to hold even once I sat down (those handleless mugs are really quite stupid), so I had to lean over it and take little hiccupy sips, and still it scalded my tongue.

  I focused my eyes on her front door and began my vigil, glancing down at the infinite scroll in my fingertips for only a few seconds at a time.

  Thirty minutes later, my phone died. I cursed myself for having been too drunk to plug it in the night before. I asked the guy behind the counter to charge it for me, in a super sweet voice, like it was a big favor he was doing me, and he acted all noble about it, like, I thiiiiink I can make that work, sure, when all he had to do was unplug his phone and plug mine in. He was at 85 percent. I saw. Some people are just selfish.

  I sat back down. I would wait for her, however long it took. Hours, days, I had the time. But just ten seconds later, my eyes began darting around, looking for a screen, something to grasp onto, like flies that have been trapped inside and keep hitting the wall over and over again, even though the window is open and it’s right there, you fucking idiots. Intellectually, I knew my phone was plugged in—but still I reached for it in my bag when I wanted to know the time. I bit my lip, took a deep breath, and tried to fix my eyes on the green awning again. I remembered that there were free samples of a brownie up by the register. Keeping my eyes fixed outside the window, I walked up to the counter. I took a sample and then asked the selfish barista for a glass of tap water, and when he turned around I grabbed two more. He handed me the glass and I sat back down. With my back turned to him, I put one of the squished brownie bits to my mouth and nibbled at it, trying to take as long as possible to eat it. When the samples were all done, I drank the glass of tap water. Then I got back up and went over to the bar, careful that no crumbs remained on my mouth.

  “You mind checking on my phone?” I asked the guy.

  “It’s been, like, five minutes,” he said irritably. I thought it’d been at least twenty. He flipped it over anyway, and showed me the blank screen with just the picture of the empty battery.

  “Oh, okay, sorry, thanks.” Dick, I added in my head, and sat back down.

  When I was little, I could sit alone for hours, just amusing myself with what was in my head. I was alone a lot. Or I was with my parents, which amounted to the same thing. I liked to make up stories about the various objects in the room. Sometimes I became so attached to, say, a lone and withering helium balloon left over from one of my parents’ parties that I’d beg them to let me keep it, and then I’d spend the next few weeks caring for it like it was an ailing pet. I could make up entire plays in my head, complicated operettas with subplots and surprise twists. I used to believe that the world was speaking to me through objects, signs, and noises—at long dinners, I liked to crawl under the table and interpret its hidden language, like, If my dad coughs in the next thirty seconds, it means that he loves me. My dad had a bad smoker’s cough in those days and was always coughing.

  I tried to do that now, to entertain myself. I tried to think of my mind as an empty space, and reminded myself that I could make it as big as I wanted to and fill it with whatever I fancied. Inside, I was free. But all I kept seeing was Benson and Stabler, and I was thinking of the last pedo they caught and how he had a thing for tiaras, and I was just realizing now that the whole episode was actually a reference to the JonBenét Ramsey murder, and did her brother really do it? Yes, probably, I thought, he did, even though I knew nothing about the case and had only followed it on the covers of tabloids. I tried to hold on to this thread of thought, this prechewed TV plotline, but even it splintered and got lost in the ether. How many of the stories in my brain were there because some marketing exec thought it’d play well with the 18–25 female demo? Then my heart leapt because the door to the apartment building opened and out walked a tall, blond woman. Gemma! I hurried outside, without even bothering to go back and grab my phone. I speed-walked across the street, trying to look casual, but when I got closer I realized it wasn’t her at all; instead, it was some other blond girl who looked a lot like her and was wearing a blouse identical to one that Gemma owned, a white blouson-sleeve shirt with ruffles up and down the front from this indie brand that was started by three sisters in California. Everyone had that shirt that summer. I’d bought a knockoff of it at Zara just the other day.

  I went back into La Coqueta, dejected. I asked the dick barista to refill my water glass. In fifteen minutes, I told myself, I could take my phone back. Surely, I thought, I can entertain myself for fifteen minutes, and then I felt a mounting sense of panic as it started to become clear I couldn’t. I left the coffee shop and bought a small bottle of vodka at the liquor store on the corner, then filled the paper cup from La Coqueta nearly to the brim and shoved the bottle into my purse. I resumed my watch at the window seat in the coffee shop. The liquor had taken some of the edge off, but it wasn’t until I got my phone back and held its cool, rectangular body, o beloved icon!, in my palm that I began to feel calmed. I ran my fingers over it and before I could even sit back down, I had opened up Instagram. There was nothing new on Gemma’s page, but still I studied it, continuously sipping the vodka so that my upper lip started to tingle from the astringent. Already, I was beginning to feel a dullness at the center of my forehead. The harder I tried to find meaning in her profile, the more it slipped from my fingers. Earlier that morning, the porthole in the top left corner of her page had been ringed in pink ombré; now it was gray, signifying that I had already watched her Stories. The last photo on her grid was unsatisfying: a bowl of raspberries balanced on the ledge of a balcony overlooking the ocean. Love a hotel that pays attention and knows it’s the small things that make guests feel at home. Thank you @ShorehouseMontauk. Beside her name remained the indelible blue check mark, the symbol of everything I desired. It only reaffirmed what I was doing here. My thumb hovered over the rectangular button inscribed, suggestively, with Message. I brought it down lightly and Gemma’s profile slid away, revealing the transcript of our last communication, which I had already memorized. Beneath the pale gray bubble of my last message, in smaller letters, was the word Seen. I usually consider that a rebuke, since it only appears when a person has read your message and not responded to it, but for some reason that day I found it soothing, as it gave Gemma’s presence a tangible quality. I felt my body flush with warmth, though perhaps that was mostly owing to the vodka. Gemma had looked at the very same page I was looking at, and she was out there somewhere now, probably with her phone in her right hand, just as mine was. I thought for a moment. The girl I had seen coming out of Gemma’s apartment was not Gemma, but it had looked a lot like her and theoretically it could have been her. I could have seen her from behind or from farther away and if I hadn’t run up to her in time, I would have still thought it was her—in effect, it was the same as seeing her, like the time I’d seen her at La Boîte. A wild idea had occurred to me. I started typing: Your mirage gets around! Pretty sure I just saw you on W.12th—La Coqueta is my favorite coffee shop on the planet, best oat milk in the city I swear. Any recos where I should go next? Before I could think better of it, I hit Send.

  Then the most extraordinary thing happened: the body of my text shifted upwards and the word Seen appeared. Gemma, right this minute, was reading my message, she was touching the screen upon which my words had appeared, and the awareness of her corporeal reality was so overwhelming I had to dig my nails into my forearm to keep from losing all sense of myself. Then I could see that Gemma was responding. The platform let me know she was Typing…right this
very minute, furthering the impression of intimacy and immediacy, her fingers pressing against her screen as if she were touching me. I almost felt exposed, as if she were watching me. I glanced around the room and, even though no one was looking, I affected a carefree, cool demeanor, pretending to be dreamily staring out the window. When I looked back at my screen, she had written: Ha! That was actually me this time, not a mirage—me & Pancakes just popped over to Generation Records. It’s worth a gander.

  She signed off with a series of emojis in the shape of shooting stars.

  Immediately, I googled the record shop; it was on Thompson, a seven-minute walk away. I clambered to my feet, chugged what was left in the cup, and was out the door within the minute. I wanted to run but I was a little unsteady on my feet, which were suddenly leaden, and anyway, I was worried she might catch me doing it if she was already on her way back. As I walked, constantly scanning the street for signs of her, my skin prickled with the awareness of her presence. I could feel she was close, and when I pushed through the stickered door at Generation Records, it was with a hard bubble of excitement rising in my chest.

  But, of course, she was not there. I looked carefully among the stacks, walking up and down the aisles, my head swiveling left and right, but she must have already left. Oddly, though, the exhilaration I’d felt on my way over remained. At the time, I attributed it to adrenaline. Now, I wonder if it wasn’t due to some presentiment of what was to come, or rather, what was already underway in that other reality, the one that existed up in the Cloud or in my phone, and ran parallel to my flesh-and-blood existence. I should have felt irritated and disappointed then, but instead I stepped out onto the street feeling hopeful—maybe it was the booze, maybe it was a sense of destiny. Or maybe it was the back of a familiar-looking blond head I’d seen go by across the street. I couldn’t be sure it was her—I’d only caught a glimpse, a hazy impression of blond shoulder-length curls and a certain gauntness as she’d rounded the corner—but I followed in that direction, hoping, praying, for the best.