Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  Their argument might have gone over better had Benoit not been such a shitty witness. Twice on the stand he seemed to have forgotten my name. He insisted on wearing his damn aviators, claiming that because of his injuries, his eyes were extra sensitive to light. Though you could just make out a thin scar that ran down one side of his face, and though I could sense a certain frailness to his bearing, he looked perfectly normal otherwise. He’d started off hoarsely, seeming almost embarrassed, but when he’d been talking for long enough, his old bravado and cockiness snuck back in. I’d had moments, before the trial, where I’d felt bad for him. I’d imagined him taking the stand with a cane and a bandaged eye. But nothing had changed for him; actually, he was setting up for a solo gallery show in Berlin in a matter of weeks. His eyes still gave nothing, but were only shiny, implacable mirrors. Any pity I’d had melted away.

  “She begged me,” he said, recounting our first sexual encounter. “She said she loved me as an artist. I was naive. I believed it.”

  “And now?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Now I understand that she was just using me to get ahead in her career.”

  I knocked Saul’s thigh under the defense table when he said that. Saul leaned his head close, keeping his eyes on the stand, so I could whisper in his ear: “That’s complete bullshit! He was the one with all the power! At the very most, we were both using each other!”

  Saul nodded and moved his head away from me. I had wanted him to nail Benoit for that comment during cross-examination, but he mostly tried to avoid the topic. “Since we can’t one hundred percent prove it was rape, it’s best we don’t bring it up,” he’d explained.

  “It was consensual the one time, but the other—I mean, I had bruises.”

  “That’s too confusing for the jury to understand. Juries’ minds are binary—either you consented to sex or you didn’t, it can’t be both at different times.”

  Instead, Saul focused on my fractured mental state. He argued that despite my obvious psychological distress, Benoit ignored the signs and took advantage of my vulnerability to get me to agree to a perilous shoot in a dilapidated building that had not been permitted properly.

  “Did she ever mention this Gemma to you?”

  Benoit shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “She had, yes,” he said.

  “What did she say about her?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did she call her your ex-girlfriend?”

  “I believe she did, yes.”

  “So you do remember.” Saul flashed a small, ironic smile at the jury. “And was that true? Did you ever know a Gemma?”

  He sighed. “I mean, I meet a lot of people.”

  “But did you ever date a model named Gemma?”

  I saw Benoit hesitate a moment. His body jerked awkwardly to the left. You could see a flicker of a smile as he bit back a response like, I date a lot of models, too.

  “I don’t think so,” he said finally. “No.”

  I wanted Saul to press him on that. Why wasn’t he sure? But Saul wouldn’t have wanted to go there. Our whole case rested on the premise that Gemma was not real.

  “Is it true that you texted one of your colleagues saying that you believed, quote, ‘Mickey is crazy’?”

  “I was trying to be humorous.”

  “The text continues: ‘She’ll do whatever we want. She’s that insane.’ ”

  I hadn’t known about that. It stung.

  I was to take the stand on the last day. We had rehearsed extensively over the weeks before the trial, crafting a narrative as pitiable and believable as it was divorced from reality. I had been a girl unusually attached to her father. Traumatized by his wrongful conviction, devoutly loyal to him, I had taken it upon myself to earn what I could in order to support my family. An instant modeling success, I immediately began booking high-level jobs, despite my relative inexperience. Working almost nonstop, grossly underweight, my mental state frayed due to exhaustion, I was so emotionally and mentally depleted that I was unable to fend off what we called Benoit’s “attention”—a harmless, non-sexual word—and I, an innocent, helpless, hapless female (the most desirable kind of female), soon found myself “in way over my head.” My brain, in an effort to cope with the exhaustion, trauma, and immense pressure to succeed, latched onto the delusion that there was another young woman very much like me, who was in trouble. My mental state grew so weakened that I began to believe that this woman, who I called Gemma, had been murdered, and I even occasionally nursed a harrowing guilt that I’d done it. When Benoit badgered me that day, after several weeks of hardly eating or sleeping, something inside me snapped and I began to believe that he had been the one to kill her. I had acted then, in my confused state, out of the desire to protect rather than to harm.

  “But there was never any person named Gemma, was there?” Saul would ask.

  At this point, I’d be crying gently. “No,” I’d say. “No, there wasn’t.” I would go on:

  “I cannot tell you how much I regret that I let my mental state deteriorate to the point where a human being was hurt. Though my memory is very blurry of the day”—consistent with PTSD—“I know that I never would have acted that way had I not, in my own deranged way, been afraid for my life and the life of someone I thought I loved.”

  Saul coached me on diction, inflection, tone; the point was to appear remorseful but not too remorseful (which would indicate guilt), mentally fragile but not actually insane, to be pitiable, girlish, and above all, likeable. I was surprised how naturally it came to me, like sinking into a favorite chair already imprinted with the shape of my body: pretending. I’d forgotten how good it felt, being someone else.

  Right before court began that day, I went to the bathroom, even though I didn’t have to pee. I was wearing a camel crewneck sweater, navy slacks, and a small Cartier watch borrowed from my mother. The wig was itchy. I was nervous at the thought of having all those eyes on me. I didn’t really care what happened to me, but I didn’t want to disappoint the people who were clutching cardboard signs outside the courtroom. The thought of even one of them giving up on me felt like a jab in the gut, and I knew I had to put in a good performance for their sake—they’d be able to forgive a guilty verdict, but never a subpar performance. I stared at myself in the mirror, feeling the thud of my heart in my chest. I adjusted my wig, trying to scratch without scratching, and peered at the unfamiliar face in the reflection, barely suppressing a laugh. Pretending I was someone else was what had gotten me into this mess, but it was also what would get me out of it. I realized then that everybody was pretending, all the time, but that for most people, for the people we call “normal,” the pretending part eventually falls away and the act simply becomes their life. It’s exactly what Anna thought right before she threw herself onto those train tracks. I wasn’t about to be so foolish.

  I took a deep breath and walked into the courtroom with my shoulders back, head straight, and for the next five hours I didn’t just pretend I was some hapless victim driven to madness in the wake of PTSD, I believed it. I went through a dark tunnel and didn’t come out until I was stepping down from the stand, and Saul put a hand on my shoulder, and I realized my cheeks were wet and I’d been crying and it was all over. My mother and father were standing at their seats behind the defense table, and both of them hugged me over the little fence.

  “That’s my girl,” my dad said, his eyes twinkling. I wondered if he would have been as proud of me had the narrative actually been true. I suspected not. I realized that in the annals of the American court system, our father–daughter relationship, twice documented in our respective trials, would live on as one of the most intimate and cherished. I laughed a little, flushed and slightly embarrassed by the irony of it all, and my father, who seemed to be thinking the same thing, laughed lightly, too.

  Five hours later, the jury delivered a verdict of not g
uilty by reason of temporary insanity.

  I was shocked, frankly. Even though I could tell at trial that our side was doing well, I hadn’t really believed I’d be let off the hook so completely. My parents were gleeful. My mother wept as she hugged me. Even Saul put an arm around me and squeezed my wrist, a wide smile on his face. It began to sink in. I’d hardly thought about what I was going to do after the trial, not so much out of fear for what the verdict would be, but because the level of uncertainty blanketed everything in a thick layer of fog I couldn’t see out of. Now that I’d been proclaimed not guilty, visions of a quiet life flooded into my mind. The arrest and my confinement before the trial had humbled me, and I was almost startled to see how simple my desires had become. I didn’t want a lot of things for my future—I mainly hoped to get my GED and find some sort of work, nothing fancy, maybe as a barista or a bookstore clerk, which would leave evenings free to write. I planned to burn the wig.

  I had a big smile on my face when I left the courtroom that day—No interviews, please. Not now. Maybe later.

  I thought I was free. Finally free.

  At sentencing, the judge wanted to send me for a forty-five-day mental health evaluation whereby I would be released on my own recognizance, but Saul argued that since I had already been treated at a mental health facility prior to trial, I should not be obligated to undergo another internment. “What’s more,” he continued, “due to the Brazilian Flu epidemic, to place this young woman into the custody of a women’s state mental health facility would be to unduly expose her to the risk of contracting the disease. The forty-five-day stay may turn into a death sentence.” In the months since my arrest, the Brazilian Flu had burst forth from its home country like a thousand flies, and cases were now surging on practically every continent. Beyond its symptoms and the fact that it was highly contagious, little was known about the disease except that women, particularly those under the age of thirty, were disproportionately likely to contract it. The judge reluctantly agreed that the risk was too great, my privilege at work again. Even though I had bashed a man’s head in, as a pretty white girl, I was still a thing to be protected. Still, the judge feared a possible relapse, the repercussions of which could be severe, and he did not feel comfortable releasing me into my own care “for my own good.”

  After some deliberation, a settlement was reached. I was released into the temporary guardianship of my parents under Article 81 of New York State’s Mental Hygiene Law, which gave them complete control of my healthcare, finances, and living arrangements.

  * * *

  —

  It’s three years and several hearings later, and that “temporary” conservatorship has continued to drag on. My father and mother believe it’s for the best, and apparently the judge agrees: “You seem to be making progress,” he says. Owing to my public persona, I am considered particularly vulnerable to grifters and scammers. The arrangement, then, is for my “own protection,” I am told.

  Saul, one of my few friends these days, says I shouldn’t complain. “Your mother has made you into a star,” he says. She’s certainly tried, though I wouldn’t exactly call myself one, per se—I still have no talent, and if you asked anybody on the street, most of them wouldn’t recognize me, though my name might ring a bell. Mickey Jones is more of a niche brand, a cult icon. Most importantly, I am now a passive income stream.

  At MickeyJones.com, we sell t-shirts, hoodies, keychains, lip balm, posters, USB cords, shot glasses, eye masks, yoga mats, door signs, underwear, mugs, stickers, beaded bracelets, iPhone cases, water bottles, mouse pads, robes, pens, measuring tape, one blond wig, a mirror that comes with an overlay so it looks cracked (my mother’s brainchild), and sets of two matching blond dolls called Doppelgängers. My new Instagram, @TheRealMickeyJones, has 578K Followers. My bio reads Remember me? Yes, THAT Mickey Jones. Every morning I log onto the Cameo app and record messages for those who want to give their loved ones the kitschy thrill of seeing my face on a small handheld screen for a birthday or special occasion and are willing to pay $150 for the pleasure. Half my appeal lies in what one commenter described as my “randomness. Like, remember her? Lol.” The other half owes largely to the fact that I am still, I have to admit it, quite beautiful, especially from the neck up, where the fifteen pounds I’ve put on since trial have softened my features and made me appear more womanly. I trade in nostalgia, impermanence, whimsy, irrelevance. For my clients, I am the human embodiment of how much time has passed since I first entered their orbit of awareness, and how much things have changed. In considering my face, they are invited to fathom my transformation from relevant to irrelevant, and in doing so are reminded that what seems like a big deal in their lives today will likewise seem insignificant in just a few years. Most of all, I represent the Punished Beauty, the Insane Woman Tamed and Chastised, the female Icarus—I flew too close to the sun, and look how I burned! Look how repentant and servile I am now! Twenty-three and trapped at home with her parents, how normal and yet oddly sad! Everyone loves to comment on how “crazy” my eyes look in certain videos, or that the way I talk makes me sound like a hostage. They complain about it, but secretly they love it. Sometimes, I deliberately upload videos that make me seem unbalanced—ones in which I dance a little off-beat, or sing a song I made up. These are always my most popular posts. No one wants to hear me talk about Tolstoy or New Jersey’s snowy owl population, or hear about my monk’s life: up at dawn, asleep by nine. They want the crazy.

  I suppose it’s a comfort to my fans, who probably all work normal jobs and have to struggle to pay off debts, and scrimp and save to send their kids to college. I am the gentle assurance that all too often the price of beauty and fame is madness. And yet even still, many of them appear to want a chance at it.

  Almost every other day, I get a DM from a girl asking me how I got into modeling. What are my tips? Do I have a diet they could follow? The same girls will post something about me being a “tragic beauty. So so so SAD what happened to her!” They’ll send me pics of themselves, sometimes wearing t-shirts with my face on them, other times bikinis, or crop tops, whatever is the trend of the moment. Do you think I could be a model? they ask. Or, Will you follow me? Or, I want to be an influencer. Any advice? They all have the same empty look in their eyes, and the same desperate, self-conscious way of posing. Most of them aren’t much older than thirteen.

  I’m resigned to it, this life of mine. Sometimes I even think I’m happy. This is what I wanted, after all. Hundreds of thousands of Followers, millions of Likes. My mother says I deserve all the credit for what I have, what we have, now. “It’s your brand, darling,” she’ll say. “I’m just the manager.” As a manager, she is very hands-on, always making sure I respond to the right amount of DMs and Comments—not too many, not too few—constantly monitoring and evaluating my posts and keeping my Cameo page up-to-date. It surprised me, at first, how quickly she took to it, how easily she absorbed the algorithm’s mandates, but then, as she always likes to remind me, she did win the Miss New Jersey crown. She understands pageantry, contests, rules. And I figure, after all she’s been through, after what I’ve put her through, it’s the least I can do, to go along with it. I always wanted her to have a career, or at least a hobby—and now she does. It’s me—or, at least, the brand of me.

  My father is supportive but hands-off. He sees how much money we bring in, and since his real estate comeback has yet to fully materialize, he can’t really complain. My mother still defers to him everywhere else, but when it comes to MickeyJones.com, she’s the one in charge, we all know that. She negotiated this very book deal, sold it as a “frothy, lightly fictionalized memoir with never-before-seen photos.” Over several Skype sessions with my editor, my mother and I hammered down a narrative, one that adhered very closely to the one set forth at trial. They wanted me to use a ghostwriter—it would be easier, better, and one could be got for not much money—but in an act of self-assertion that surprised even m
e, I insisted that I write it.

  “The book is just so we have something to talk about online,” my mom reminded me, after I’d spent what she passively aggressively insinuated was too much time writing. “Just consider it one giant billboard for your digital channels.”

  I know it sounds risky, being so active online when that was one of my big triggers before. But with therapy and the encouragement of my family, I’ve been able to manage it okay. Most days, I don’t even notice the yawning emptiness that threatens just beneath the metallic shine of my iPhone screen as I respond to Comments and Cameo requests—that is, I didn’t, up until six months ago.

  One night, I was doing a routine sweep of Comments on my most recent video—I’m twirling around outside on the grass—and noticed a message from a middle-aged woman. You remind me so much of my daughter, it read. She worked briefly as a model, and I remember how tough it was on her too. Sadly, we lost Liz about five years ago. I miss her every day. I wish you two could have met. I wish she could have seen someone like you talking about your mental health struggles so openly and honestly, and known that she wasn’t alone. Thank you so much for all that you are doing. God bless.

  The message was not so unusual, but I was immediately struck by the woman’s last name: Anton.

  Of course, by that point, I knew, or I thought I knew, Gemma had just been a delusion. But even after all those years, hundreds of hours of therapy and as many pills later, there must have been a small part of me that believed in her still. I clicked on the woman’s profile. I scrolled down. Almost immediately, I was confronted with a face indelibly familiar to me, even though it was staring out from the head of a small, blond child. Liz at 8. Will never forget that mischievous gap-tooth smile of hers. She’d added several heart emojis. A strange fluttering beat against my chest. I scrolled further down. The woman’s daughter was named Elizabeth Gemma Preobrazhensky, but it was her. It had to be her. I saw the two of them hugging in a more recent photo: in it, Gemma was an adult, her smile wide and dazzling, her eyes squinting unphotogenically—a real smile. She looked different than I remembered, less beautiful, less polished, but it was her. I swear it was her. She had been pulled out of the Hudson River shortly after my arrest. I had the feeling of something giving way, like when I take the stairs too fast in the dark and accidentally miss one. I understood immediately that she had used her mother’s maiden name professionally, as I had also done. The realization opened up a vista of discovery for me. I spent the next several hours holed up in my room, well into the night, later than I’d been up in years, scrolling, googling, and piecing together what I could. Her life—her real life—unspooled before me: She had been born in Canada, the daughter of a Jewish Russian refugee and a Quebecois woman. The family had eventually made it to California. Her father was a high school teacher—not a professor—and though her mother liked to garden and make ceramics, her day job was that of an HR rep for a marketing company. She had three brothers, not four; in one picture on her mother’s Instagram she is standing next to a young man in a wheelchair who looks vaguely related, but he isn’t tagged. I think he might have actually been her cousin. She’d suffered from dyslexia and bulimia for most of her life. She’d struggled as a model, finding success only after years of casting calls—and then, for no clear reason, her career stalled. Her body was found, bruised and waterlogged, floating in the Hudson River. She was twenty-three, and $35,000 in debt. It was ruled a suicide.