Fame Adjacent

by Sarah Skilton

  [HollyD]: Kat1976, you’re clearly an observant individual. It’s true we only ever alluded to it. (Diego: “Let’s go home, everyone.” Everyone: “Yeah, let’s go back to the place.”) There was a mild controversy over the fact that the characters were orphans/runaways who lived at the zoo; fear of actual child copycats kept the legal department up at night. We did have permission to shoot on location, but only after the zoo closed for the day, because it was too difficult to get release forms signed by every visitor who might appear in a shot. Mornings were out because that’s when they sprayed the place down. So all the exterior shots took place at night. We had to run into frame, record our lines as fast as possible (usually in one take, flubbed lines be damned; you’re welcome, drinking-game players) before the sun went down. It was sort of guerrilla-style filmmaking.

  10

  At my second therapy session with Lisa, she covered her desktop computer with a crocheted blanket and repositioned the couch so it faced away from the screen. It worked; I was better able to focus on our conversation. I sank into the brown pleather couch with a sigh.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Before you found out about the show’s anniversary special, you had a healthy relationship with the internet?”

  If I’d been drinking something I would have coughed. “I wouldn’t go that far, but a much better one. I could still function. I could still get work done.”

  She peered through her bifocals at a sheet of paper. “You wrote on your intake form that you lost your job because of internet use. As a writer?”

  “No—that came later.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Sorry, I know it’s a bit confusing. First, I left my job as a nanny.” She tilted her head curiously, and I rushed to add, “Nothing bad happened. It was just time.”

  “So, you left the nanny position and became a writer?”

  “Well, I’d been doing freelance on and off for years.”

  “What sorts of things did you write?”

  “Articles for online magazines, a few print—mostly obscure, niche publications.”

  “And was that…able to pay the bills?”

  I cleared my throat. It didn’t take a genius to question the profitability of “obscure” writing.

  “Well, I was living at my sister’s house, so I didn’t have to worry about rent or groceries or anything. It was—the girl I nannied for was my niece. Is my niece. I was planning to move out when…” (I gestured with sweeping arm movements.) “…this happened.”

  She nodded encouragingly so I kept going, tripping over my words as I attempted to explain myself. “The truth is, leaving the nanny position had me thinking back over my other jobs, and it hit me that I’d never had any other jobs. I booked Diego and the Lion’s Den when I was eleven, and I stayed for all five seasons, then I graduated high school and went on my gap year.”

  “Oh? How’d you spend it?”

  I looked down, cringing. Why had I called it a gap “year”? It had been seven. “In Hollywood, going out for parts. When I hit the quarter-century mark with nothing to show for it I decided it was time to become San Diego State’s oldest freshman, but that didn’t last long before the, uh, nanny thing opened up, so…”

  I lacked an identity. I had no core. I was a mushy apple all the way through; no seeds inside to plant something new.

  “It makes sense that when you quit one job, you’d think back to the job you had prior to it, to the life you had, and you’d wonder, ‘What if…?’ Did you find yourself revisiting your past? Your former castmates?”

  “Yup.” And let’s leave it at that, shall we?

  “How so?” Dammit.

  “I set up a few Google alerts, and it sort of…spiraled. As I’m sure you can imagine, they’re written about frequently.”

  “You’re not in touch with them, though?”

  “It’s been a few years. Anyway, within a week, I discovered the anniversary announcement. No one noticed I was missing from it.”

  “That must have been extremely frustrating.”

  “I had to channel my feelings somewhere. On a whim, I set up an account on Reddit and started an AMA thread.”

  “What’s AMA?”

  There was a reason so many alcohol counselors were recovering addicts: so they wouldn’t need shit explained to them. How was Lisa going to treat internet fiends if she wasn’t versed in their culture?

  “It stands for ‘Ask Me Anything.’ It’s a subreddit thread.”

  “Got it.” She jotted this down.

  You’re welcome, Reddit-related patients.

  Then I chastised myself. Relax. The treatment’s free, and you get what you pay for.

  “I explained my situation—that I was on a show in the ’nineties with a bunch of people who went on to become famous—and offered to answer any questions people had. It was something to do while I figured out my next move.

  “At first the collective response was WDGAF, and the usual ‘pics or it didn’t happen.’ And of course, someone asked what kind of soup I like.”

  Lisa seemed perplexed. “I’m not sure I…”

  “WDGAF. ‘We don’t give a fuck.’”

  “Right, and the soup?”

  “I know, it’s dumb, there’s this one guy who always asks that. Anyway, after a few days of crickets, someone posted a link to it at the Daily Denizen—that’s a fan site devoted to Diego and the Lion’s Den—and the floodgates opened. I was inundated with questions.” An involuntary smile slithered onto my face as I reminisced about the initial rush of attention.

  Lisa picked up on it. “How did that feel?” she asked.

  “Good. Really good. People were talking about the show with such fondness, sharing their memories of watching it after school and how crazy it was that so many big stars got their start on it. They were dying for information, and they LOL’d at everything I said. It was nice to be at the center of it all. I found my old scrapbooks and TV Guide clippings and scanned a bunch of photos. At one point it was Reddit front page.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “Yeah, it was. At first. But it used to be I had a life of some sort. I’d get up early every day, go for a jog before it got too hot, shower, eat breakfast, write for a few hours, break for lunch, work on a freelance assignment—and then go online. There was a whole reward system at play. Around three I might pick up Lainey from school—my niece—and help her with homework or make dinner with her. But once I quit, and all I had was the occasional magazine article to write, there was nothing stopping me from being online all day, so I decided to answer them all. Unless it was a repeat question or blatantly inflammatory.” I swallowed. “I blew two deadlines and didn’t even notice; just completely forgot about them. And after that, there was no reason to stop, you know?”

  My eyes misted up and I coughed into my hand.

  Lisa’s face was open and relaxed, and she gave me time to continue my train of thought, but when I didn’t, or couldn’t, she prompted me with, “When did you realize you needed help?”

  “Renee, my sister, brought my parents over and held an intervention. If they hadn’t I’d probably still be staring at my computer. One of them saw an article about Prevail! and thought it would help.” I perked up slightly, remembering how I’d marked my desk calendar and circled the date of the anniversary in a red circle, the way characters always did in movies. “The timing’s actually great—I’ll finish this program, get cured, and be home with two weeks to spare before the anniversary.”

  “And you’re determined to…disrupt it in some manner?” She spoke in a carefully neutral tone, like a hostage negotiator.

  “Why, do you have to report my intentions? I’m just going to talk to them. And any reporters milling around. I won’t be violent.”

  “What do you think that will accomplish? Sorry. Let me rephrase: What would you like it to accomplish?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “The only thi
ng I want it to accomplish is saying, Eff you. I’m not dead, and you can’t erase me. I get that they’re on a whole different level, but the fact that they didn’t invite me? That they didn’t even let me know about it? It’s…” I clenched my fists, the tendons along my wrist popping out. “Unbelievable.”

  Lisa was quiet, mulling things over. Her eyes flitted to the wall clock and back to me. I followed her gaze; we had gone five minutes over our allotment.

  “We’re done for today,” she confirmed, “so this is off the record, so to speak…”

  A low, heavy feeling settled in my belly.

  She turned her back and conducted a search on her phone, which was basically like snorting lines in front of a coke addict. I envisioned myself snatching the phone from her hands, locking her in her office, and running down the hall, phone raised high like a trophy kill. The other patients would make me queen if it meant internet access for all.

  Lisa’s chair swiveled back around. “Is this you?”

  In a clear violation of my Individualized Internet Treatment Plan three-week rule, she flashed me a glimpse of her phone screen. A photo culled by Google image search showed me sandwiched between J. J. and Brody at Brody’s twenty-seventh birthday party at Soho House. In the picture, I’m smiling and blushing, being hugged on either side and kissed on the cheeks simultaneously by the guys, who’d just been named number one and number seventeen on Celeb.com’s “30 Most Powerful Hawties Under 30,” respectively. Given that my identity was unknown, it caused paroxysms of rage to detonate throughout the fandom. The twitterati referred to me as a “random skank-ho.”

  Random? I’d huffed.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I muttered. “Did you think I was making it up?”

  “No, no…I wanted to make sure we treated the correct underlying condition. We weren’t sure at first, if you felt a fan-related kinship to the group or if you truly knew them. It would be tempting to claim that you were friends with so many prominent, very, very famous people.”

  “Right,” I deadpanned.

  She shut down her phone. Then, eyes gleaming, she planted her heels on the carpet and propelled her rolling chair closer to me.

  “What was it like to work with Brody?”

  11

  I would never live it down.

  At group therapy the next week, people were still speculating about the possibility of an encore performance from my first day.

  Or at least, one person was.

  “Who wants Holly to sing ‘Copacabana’?” asked Thom, as he did every day, swapping in new titles each time.

  “This is not the Holly Danner Variety Hour,” Lisa remarked, as she did every day. She sounded only slightly irritated; she was no longer sore I’d declined to tell her anything about Brody. To her credit, she’d apologized for her unprofessionalism and promised it would never happen again.

  “Agreed,” I told Lisa. “It’s someone else’s turn.”

  The pervasive meat loaf smell of our hospital wing had been replaced by something treacly and sweet I couldn’t identify. Ice cream? Cotton candy?

  I didn’t know how many people were in the overall program (rumor had it the Trump-Twitter group was the largest, and totally sequestered), but my group therapy consisted of six. It was a relief to hear about other people’s fuckery. In my current state, I could barely remember their names but had zero problem memorizing their addictions.

  First up was Wikipedia Avenger, who was in agony speculating about the damage his opposite number—an honest-to-God archnemesis—was doing to his entries while he was trapped at Prevail!

  The next person to speak was a woman around my age who referred to herself as a Popaholic. She used to pick at her skin and hair until she discovered popping videos on YouTube: people popping zits. Apparently, there were hundreds of channels devoted to this, and she found that, by watching the videos, the urge to pick her own skin was reduced. The downside was that she became inured to the pops and needed more and better videos to achieve the same sedating effect. Soon she’d ventured into tumor removal, cyst draining, and hard-core surgeries. She was terrified to find out what came after that.

  Twitter Fiend didn’t hold my attention for long. He averaged three hundred tweets per day, blah, blah, blah, he retweeted articles he hadn’t read (didn’t we all), shot off competitive tweet threads in the hundreds, and had been blocked by countless accounts. Twitter itself finally put him on probation and he decided to give treatment a shot while he’d lost access.

  Then, of course, there was Thom. In contrast with the others, I remembered his name fine, but still had no idea what had brought him here. It had been over a week since our cafeteria chat.

  Abruptly, Lisa clapped and stood. “As some of you know, today is a special day. Marjorie has reached her first milestone.”

  Murmurs of excitement filled the room.

  Just kidding; none of us reacted. Lisa would have to do a lot better than that.

  Whoever Marjorie was, she was celebrating three weeks of treatment.

  “Which means…” Lisa did a drumroll on the tabletop. “After group today, she will be going online.”

  Now we cared. All eyes swiveled toward Marjorie. We deemed her suspicious and undeserving of such a reward.

  “It’ll be a letdown,” Thom said, leaning back in his chair. (Did he learn nothing from my attempted maiming?)

  “Thom,” Lisa warned, “we’ve talked about this.”

  I was afraid she’d make us repeat the Prevail! mantras but she was as eager to move on from that quasi-rebellion as the rest of us.

  “I’m saying, I’ve had access for two weeks now. It’s not that great. You know what’s great? The hike we took last Saturday at Elm Creek Park. And swimming in the pool.”

  Couldn’t argue with him there. From my vantage point, swimming had been very worthwhile.

  “Listening to music,” he continued. “Having a goddamn conversation. You know, things people did before the internet.”

  I thought about how he and I were the only people who spoke to each other at dinner eight days ago.

  “Moving on,” said Lisa. “For the newcomers, please remind everyone what brought you here, Marjorie.”

  Marjorie looked to be in her forties, and she had a sad, droopy mouth. Pliable. Maybe with a tiny push, it could change shape, recover from its sadness. She wasn’t a fan of the spotlight. Her soft face calcified with fear and her hands twisted together in her lap, as though trying to pin each other down before they mimicked the motions for mouse movements and clicks. Once she got started, though, her feelings fueled her voice, which rose in volume and strength. “My main problem was Instagram,” she said, her eyes wet.

  “What about Instagram?” Lisa asked.

  She blinked. “The other moms.”

  “How so?”

  “At first, it felt like friendship. Long distance, maybe, but still friendship. Until I noticed they’re all perfect, and I’m not. Holidays are the toughest. Everyone’s dressed in designer costumes, coordinated, frolicking in the autumn leaves, dancing in the pumpkin patches, eating homemade ice cream, or making seasonal arts and crafts…” She winced, as though she’d been pelted with the crafts. Which was probably how it felt for her. “They have so many kids, four, five, even six sometimes. I only have two, and I’m lucky if I can get them to school on time with their underwear facing the right way.” Her voice cracked and reemerged as a whisper. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. My photos come out blurry, or someone’s closing their eyes or running out of frame and even with all the filters we never look good. Maybe I’d be better off on Pinterest.”

  “No!” the rest of us yelled.

  “Why do they have to be so perfect?” she asked, bewildered. It hurt my heart to see. She reminded me of Renee when she was in the midst of postpartum depression.

  A dewdrop of a tear slid down her cheek, drawing attention to the shimmer of blush across her cheekbones. It was clear she’d put effort into her appearance, had got
ten dolled up for today’s milestone.

  “Newsflash: They’re not perfect. They’re liars and frauds,” said Thom.

  “Thom…” Lisa repeated.

  “She needs to hear this.” Thom swiveled in his chair so he faced Marjorie. When he spoke, he was forceful but kind. “A lot of those accounts are making money. They get paid to post, in ad revenue, clothing, and products. It becomes their job to promote an ‘aspirational lifestyle.’ The dads are usually Ivy League grads who buy expensive photography equipment and use their MBAs to build a business with their family as the brand ambassadors. The way they present themselves online is not real. It’s painstakingly crafted, well lit, and not spontaneous. They have time to do this because it’s the only thing they do all day. And they try to pass it off as real so you’ll buy the stupid shit they’re wearing and the stupid gourmet meals they’re making together in the kitchen. They make money every time you view their videos or ‘like’ their photos. Their kids are posing for content, and while it’s impossible to say whether they’re enjoying it, I know for a fact that your kids are running around and taking blurry photos because they’re having fun.”

  Marjorie looked hopeful for about a millisecond, then doubts overtook her again. “Are you sure? Because sometimes they’ll show a messy room or something and hashtag it ‘real life’ or ‘parenting fail,’ and—”

  “Just as staged as the perfect stuff,” Thom interrupted. “Only more insidious, because it’s there to make them seem down-to-earth and relatable, so you’ll believe their life would be attainable if you’d try harder. But it’s not. It’s really not. And that’s okay.”

  Lisa’s assistant from the University of Minnesota wheeled in a tray of party food that consisted of a frightfully cheerful cake and mugs of lukewarm decaf. I wondered if the cake was the source of the sickly-sweet smell I noticed earlier. Spread between layers was raspberry jam instead of icing. Lainey called that a “fake-out.”

  After we ate, Marjorie left the room with an Internet Supervisor to an undisclosed location where she would presumably gorge on Instagram for fifteen minutes. I hoped she wouldn’t, though. I hoped she went to a different site, or FaceTimed her kids or something. She seemed like a good egg.