Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  CANCEL

  Cancel this B

  Um, ok. CANCELED

  CANCEL

  CANCEL

  CANCEL

  My stomach lurched.

  No, no, no, I thought frantically. There had to be some mistake, a misunderstanding. Cate and Benoit were geniuses, this was fucking JOY Magazine, what was wrong with everybody, why were they being like this—

  Blackface in 2019 r u fucking serious?

  How could they say that? I was just really, really tanned. Wasn’t I? Wasn’t that what Kim had said? I could make them understand, I could make them see—

  She is literally ripping Karma Black wow

  My hands trembled with rage. It wasn’t my fault! I was just doing what I was told, I was just doing what the market wanted! How could they be so stupid, overly sensitive, naïve—

  So sick of fashion brands coopting black culture to sell expensive shit.

  Disgusting example of a long history of appropriation

  @KarmaIsaBitch: Um, wtf is this.

  She had also reposted the image of me to her own Stories with a long caption. I felt the ground give way, the tide rushing in.

  This is so deeply disturbing to me, Karma’s caption began. This photographer @HansBenoit asked to shoot me. I said sure, and asked how much he’d pay me. He said it would be FOR FREE. Well, I was not about to get down with that slave fuckery. So I said no. Next thing, he’s hired a WHITE MODEL and made her look like me??

  I was still constructing counterarguments in my head, pleading for leniency with some unseen God. The problem was that even back then, lost as I was in the morass of narcissism and self-delusion, I knew deep down they were right, though it would still be some time before I fully understood. Even though it hadn’t been my decision, even though I was just doing what I was told, I can see now how self-serving my willful ignorance had been, my lack of thoughtfulness. It was the same complicit ignorance that had allowed my mother and me to luxuriate in the proceeds of my father’s shady doings, the same deadly carelessness with which I had gotten into that car blackout and killed my neighbor’s dog all those years ago. I wish I could say that I would have realized this on my own, even if what happened hadn’t happened. I’ve tried to make peace with this personal failing. My therapist says that while, on the one hand, it’s true I chose to be ignorant, it’s also true I was raised to it. Men like my father and Benoit—men I thought I needed to survive—encouraged it, fostered it, wouldn’t tolerate anything else. In the moment, though, all I could feel was desolation—that I’d been caught, that I’d let myself be caught.

  My phone screen lit up in my hand with another notification, another blistering comment pleading for cancellation, for the termination of my existence. I had always done what my followers wanted and now would not be different. Hands shaking, I went to my Instagram profile settings, searching for an exit, a gun, a way to disappear. My frantic eyes could not navigate it—or maybe the app had made it deliberately difficult to delete the account. I opened up my web browser and, heart racing, googled delete Instagram account, typing so fast it was as if my fingers were moving independently from my brain. I found the right link, I logged in. Are you sure you want to permanently delete your account? A brief, shuddering moment, and then I clicked Yes, my stomach free-falling into emptiness.

  She had also deleted her account. She had also disappeared.

  I pressed my fingers against my skull, hitting it over and over, as if I could knock it into some clarity. I knew now that she had been discarded, forgotten as if she had never existed at all, and then replaced. And I—I had helped it along, destroying her even as I poured myself into her mold, believing it would bring me power, never realizing that the mold was itself inconstant. I would never find solid form if I always sought relevancy; that wasn’t what Benoit and his ilk wanted, they wanted me to remain malleable, pliable, a nobody, so they could shape me into whatever role suited them. I had betrayed her for nothing, and now I was being betrayed in turn. Her, her, her. I still couldn’t remember her name, why couldn’t I remember her name? I beat my palms against my forehead. I didn’t remember her name, but she haunted me. I didn’t remember her name but I saw her—I saw her clearly, and suddenly she was standing under a red sky at the pier with Benoit beside her, and of course, it was Benoit. Benoit was responsible. He must have done something. Benoit pushed her—or no, I had pushed her, or—

  I remembered what Benoit had said about the shoot. How he had laughed about “outrage.” How he had said he wanted to shock people. Anger seethed inside of me. I felt suddenly cold and sober. I wandered over to where Benoit had left one of his cameras on the stool. I picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy, and I hefted it in my hand. I tilted it up and looked into its insect eye, peered at a tiny version of myself which stared back out of a long tunnel. I ran my thumb over the hard metal rim of the lens.

  “What’re you doing?”

  I turned to see Benoit standing in the doorway. His face was unreadable behind his aviators, but his voice was irritated. I froze.

  “Put that down!” he snapped.

  I swallowed and took three steps back, side-stepping the mattress on the floor.

  “You knew,” I said, surprised by the solidity of my voice. “You knew what would happen.”

  Confusion, then rage, rippled over Benoit’s face. “What the fuck!” he screamed.

  “Is that what you did to her too? Did you drive her to—”

  “Who?”

  “Her!” I spluttered. “The girl…the one who…her!”

  Benoit took a few steps forward, and I retreated in tandem until my back was against the wall.

  “Give me that to me now,” he said, holding his hand out for the camera.

  “I just want to know her name!” I was sobbing now. “Just tell me her name!”

  Benoit lunged for the camera and I moved it behind my back, holding it tightly in my right hand. His face contorted into rage, as familiar to me as my father’s, as he tried to wrench me from the wall, only to push me back into it—hard.

  I could feel his hot breath on my neck now, see his gray spittle, something beginning to tick inside me as he used his forearm to press me against the wall. He was so enraged he’d forgotten all about the camera, and I let it hang by my side, pressing it into my thigh.

  “You disgust me,” he said. He moved his forearm so that it was against my neck, and continued to press, choking me.

  “Tell me,” I said again, my face wet. “Please.” The please came out a whisper. The ticking was so loud now it drowned everything out. Pain shot through my ears. Everything was too loud, too close.

  Benoit laughed. “What’re you going to do, huh?” Tick, tick. “You think you can do anything? You are nothing, you understand?” Tick, tick. “And you’ll be nothing—” My head hurt with all the ticking, I felt sick, I wanted to make it stop, needed to make it stop—

  I didn’t even realize I had swung the camera around until I felt it connect—hard—with the back of Benoit’s head, sending a ripple up my arm. He fell forward and I pushed him away. He staggered back, tripped over the side of the mattress, spun around, then crumpled to the floor, landing with a thud. I only hesitated a moment. Then, positioning myself over his body, I brought the camera down again, and again, and again.

  * * *

  —

  The rest is a blur.

  I remember walking quickly and quietly down the rickety stairs, wild-eyed and covered in blood. No one seemed to notice anything was amiss. Leone, who was on her phone in the hallway, glanced up at me and nodded. I looked around for the baby, who I had been sure was close, had to be in the house, but he or she was nowhere to be found. I forced myself to walk down the brownstone stairs calmly, taking measured steps, past craft services, past the trailers, but there was nothing to worry about. Everyone on the crew was bored, waiting, either hiding out in a trailer or stooped over
their phones.

  I’m not sure how long I wandered around after that. I was barefoot, covered in silt and bits of Benoit’s blood. No one on the street seemed to notice either. A man on the street told me to smile. Another called me G.I. Jane. I hummed myself something that I didn’t even recognize. Up ahead, I saw a green oasis and walked mindlessly towards it. Benoit would not be found for another hour.

  * * *

  —

  The girl runs a hand over her buzz cut, a sly smile on her face. There is an artful smudge of dirt across her cheek. She is looking directly at the camera, and in her pupils the white space around the phone is reflected. She touches the dirt on her cheek and winks. “Oh, the glamour of fashion,” she says. Behind her, trees blow in the wind.

  * * *

  —

  The girl sits on the edge of a fountain, Bailey Fountain, according to her caption. A thick white spray of water shoots out behind her and lightly caresses the bronze bodies of Wisdom and Felicity. Mist falls on the girl’s face, and she half closes her eyes and tilts her head back, as if in ecstasy. Then, with some difficulty because it is difficult to balance with her hand still holding the phone, she bends forward and splashes water all over her face.

  “I’m really obsessed with being clean,” she says. “If I have stuff on my skin for too long it drives me nuts. Obviously, in my line of work it happens, so I always keep a pack of these in my purse to use on the go.”

  With that, she uses the sleeve of her bathrobe to scrub at her skin. When she looks back up at the camera, her lashes still wet, she is mottled: her face is pale and white, while her neck and temples remain dark. She is smiling wide. Then, apparently having just noticed the nose ring still in her nostril, she extracts it with a thumb and forefinger and flicks it easily away.

  * * *

  —

  Now she is dancing in the fountain, tilting her head back as the streams of water cross behind her, just barely misting her still-wet face and body. Her feet, bare and pale, hop and splash in the shallow water. She is singing something, but it is difficult to pick out what it is.

  * * *

  —

  The girl lies sprawled out on the grass, basking in the sun, one hand tented over her eyes, one of which is squinting.

  “I think true beauty is about being real,” she says. “Authenticity. That’s the most beautiful thing in the world to me.”

  * * *

  —

  A no-nonsense marquee advertising pancakes, eggs, and free refills beckons from a diner across the street, tucked between a hardware store and a dry cleaner’s. The camera flips: the girl is walking, a little out of breath, in the direction of the diner. She makes a show of looking at her wrist, which is naked.

  “It’s never too late for breakfast,” she says.

  She pushes through the glass door of the diner.

  * * *

  —

  In front of me was more food than I’d eaten in months. I’d ordered the Lumberjack Special: two pancakes, a pair of sunny-side-up eggs (yellow eyes staring up at me), home fries, sausage, and a vomit of beans. I ate the pancakes first, not even bothering to cut them up into small pieces like I normally would, but just shoveling them in almost whole with my fork, until I tired of my fork and began using my hands. By the time I got to the sausage, my hands were coated in grease and there were pieces of egg stuck to my chin. Sweat beaded my brow. I was becoming short of breath. I drank a tall glass of water and ordered more pancakes. The waitress—stern, Eastern European expression, matter-of-fact, braid down her back—was too busy or dulled by the city’s absurdness to notice anything amiss.

  I liked the diner. It was cozy. The dingy windows gave everything an indistinct gossamer glow, and it smelled like the inside of our Suburban growing up after a long drive to our cottage: a smell of stagnation, restlessness, inevitably. I used to think about how we were transporting air on those trips, trapping it and then releasing it only hours later, when the trip was over, we all got out, and something else in my life had ended. I never slept on those trips even though my mother said that as a baby, the only way she could get me to quiet down was to strap me into a car seat and drive around. But that was before, when it was enough to know I was in motion, and I didn’t have to think about where I was going.

  Round two of the pancakes arrived and I poured more syrup than was warranted onto them. Once I’d finished, I dipped my fingers in the syrup and licked it off. I ran my tongue along the circumference of the plate.

  Now it was growing dark out. I waved over the waitress and, feeling entirely sick with myself, ordered another stack of pancakes and a large jug of water. This time, she did eye me, slightly unpleasantly. I realized I was beginning to smell. She disappeared into the kitchen, and I looked forlornly out the window. It was then that I saw her, walking purposefully down the street in yoga pants and a tank top, a Whole Foods bag swinging at her hip, and at the sight of her dear face, a spark flew inside my chest, and I remembered her name. Gemma. Gemma! How could I have forgotten? My face was streaming with tears of joy as I ran out into the street in just enough time to see her round the corner up ahead and disappear out of sight. I took off at a run. But when I turned the corner, she was not there.

  “Gemma?” I called out. “Gemma, is that you?”

  A hand landed on my shoulder, and suddenly I was back in the diner. It was well into the night, and an average-looking man was stooped over my table, peering into my face.

  I frowned, waiting for him to say something moronic, to tell me to smile, but he only asked me what my name was. I was in such a state of confusion that I couldn’t think what to say. I looked at my hands, which were trembling and covered in syrup, filth, blood. It was very quiet. The waitress, my waitress, stood a ways off, an anxious look on her face.

  “Are you Michaela Jones?” he asked gently. “Michaela Jones, née Heffernan?”

  I did not want to answer the man—in fact, I had no intention of saying anything—but the sound of my name provoked a strange reaction (I thought I heard something breaking) and I started to sob. The man nodded slowly and sadly as if he understood all, and for one delirious moment I thought I’d finally found a trusted confidant, that he’d take me with him to his two-story home in Staten Island to live a normal, mundane life and all would really be well—and then I saw the two officers, summoned through some invisible signal of his, enter through the diner’s swinging front door, dressed smartly in their matching navy and matching badges and matching stern, implacable expressions, and soon I was being lifted; professional, tender hands caressed the recesses of my being and then I was guided, flanked by two pairs of strong arms, out the door.

  EPILOGUE

  THEY HAD ME plead temporary insanity. I kept telling them I wasn’t insane, that I’d meant to do it. I was glad I did it and would have done it again if I could. But nobody listened. They just patted me on the head, told me I was a good girl and didn’t mean what I was saying.

  “You’re lucky he didn’t die,” Saul said. “Now shush.”

  He had stepped in as my lawyer almost immediately after I got arrested—we Heffernans are a real family business for him. I remember seeing his shiny bald head as he waited for me in the visitor’s room at the Brooklyn city jail ahead of my arraignment. He had a thick moustache and black eyebrows, and the top of his head looked exactly like an egg in an egg cup, ringed as it was with that coarse salt-and-pepper hair of his. I tried to fire him. But he just laughed, said, “I don’t work for you, I work for your father—you’ll have to talk to him, he’s the one paying my bills.” Then his face went all soft and he inched his hand closer to mine, though not touching me since that’s verboten in the visitor’s room, and he shook his head sadly. “You poor girl.”

  I was too exhausted to fight it. They’d kept me up all night in an interrogation room, asking me why I’d done it: What did he do to you? He obviously did something to you. If y
ou’d like us to call in a female officer…If there was assault, we’d have to administer a rape test…All I wanted to do was drink the ice-cold Cokes they kept bringing in at my request, and relish the feeling of sugar coating my teeth, the taste of needless calories. I had the strange thought that maybe it had all been worth it just so I could get to drink a fucking Coke again in peace. In prison, where I assumed I’d be living for the indefinite future, nobody’d care if I got fat.

  They brought up that rape thing again and I looked at them for a long time, then opened my mouth and let a burp roil through me and blare in their concerned faces.

  “I need another Coke,” I said, after we’d all recovered—them from disgust, me from laughter.

  “That’s the sixth one you’ve had already.” This from the patient cop, the one I’d thought might take me to Staten Island one day.

  “I can’t think without a Coke.” I enunciated every word slowly and exactly.

  “You’re going to have to tell us something if you want another Coke,” the other cop said.

  “What led up to the attack?” the nice cop asked gently. “Did he do something to you? You can tell us.”

  “It wasn’t what he did to me,” I said finally. “It was to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  I put the empty Coke can to my lips and tipped my head all the way back. The ceiling was made of those godawful papery tiles. I almost felt bad for the detectives that they had to sit under it all day. A drop of cold sweetness hit my tongue, but only a drop. I sat back upright and put the Coke can back on the table, resigned.