by Holly Rayner
I awoke the next morning before Shannon and made my way downstairs into the kitchen. Wanting to surprise her with breakfast, I was disappointed to find the refrigerator and cupboards as empty as if they had never been used.
Figuring I could make it to the store and back before she woke up, but not wanting borrow her car without asking her first, I called a taxi. Then, while the coffee brewed in the kitchen and the first salmon-red rays of sunlight stole into the house from behind the brocade curtains, I sank down into one of the velvet armchairs in the sitting room and waited for my ride.
During the night, I had gotten an email from Hakim with an urgent, somewhat ominous-looking headline: “Umar you really need to see this.” Hoping that it was nothing serious—he had a tendency to send me cat videos that sat in my inbox unopened—I clicked on the link. It took me to the front page of the Woodfell Beacon, which boasted of being Woodfell’s premier news and entertainment source for over 150 years.
In bold letters at the top of the homepage ran the headline: “One-Hit Wonder Pop Stars—Where Are They Now?” Just below was a collage of five famous faces, Shannon’s prominent among them.
Unable to quell my curiosity, I skipped straight down to the bottom of the article, to the section sub-headed “Shannon O’Neill.”
A native of Woodfell, twenty-five-year-old Shannon O’Neill scored a surprise hit two years back with her earworm single “Small-Town Girl.” Hailed as the song of the summer, the song hovered near the top of the charts for five weeks in late spring. The moment you finally managed to get it out of your head, you would turn on the TV or car radio and have to suffer through it all over again.
The smash success of O’Neill’s debut single, which was even featured in a season two episode of teen drama “The Bel Air Girls,” led to speculation that she would join the pantheon of pop music icons. But when both of her subsequent albums failed to place on the charts, O’Neill was forced to give up her high-end lifestyle and return home to Woodfell in degrading fashion.
So what happened?
“Personally, I don’t think she was cut out for the pop-star life,” says a fellow Woodfell native who attended school with O’Neill and declined to give her name for fear of retaliation. “Whatever success she had with that one song was purely by accident. If you look at the great pop stars of the recent past, they consistently topped the charts through a combination of genuine talent and tireless effort. I’m afraid Shannon has neither of those qualities. She’s not the sort of person who could rise in the industry by dint of her showmanship or songwriting abilities. She’s more like an old woman who lucked out and won the lottery.”
And what is O’Neill up to now?
“There are all kinds of rumors circulating about her,” says a source who asked to remain anonymous. “I heard that she works at a local diner and sometimes stands outside in the parking lot after work hours singing for pennies.”
“I heard she’s become a shameless grifter,” says another. “If you go to her website, there’s an agent listed, but if you search her name, no agent of that name exists. I emailed her once and got a reply from someone sounding suspiciously like Shannon.”
“She disappeared a few weeks back,” adds the first source. “And then pictures started showing up on social media showing her in a foreign country. I guess getting rejected in her home country forced her to seek refuge overseas, where no one realizes what a big loser she is. I wonder if those people realize they’re being taken advantage of. I bet they do. Shannon’s as lousy a con artist as she is a musician.”
Near the bottom of the final paragraph was a picture of Shannon posing with Kalilah and her friends on the night she had arrived at the palace. Kalilah looked utterly thrilled; she had one arm around Shannon’s back and was holding her close as if afraid to let her go.
Shaking with rage, I flung the phone down into the chair. She had lied to me—all this time, she had been lying to me. And there had been so many moments when the whisper of a suspicion reached me and I brushed it off: stories that didn’t seem consistent, bizarre lapses in memory, the time someone called Mrs. Tessmacher “Ginny” at dinner even though her name was Edith. But of course Shannon couldn’t be lying to me, I kept telling myself. What possible motive could she have to lie to me?
But now it was so clear to me, and I wondered where the lies ended. Did this house even belong to her? Was her family really her family and was Shannon even her real name? Ten minutes ago, these questions would have seemed crazy, paranoid. But now, it was only sensible to wonder. She had told me she was a celebrity, told me she lived in LA and had only returned home to see family, told me she was writing a song for a movie. And none of that, none of it was true. It was lies all the way down.
I wasn’t going to stay here a minute longer than I had to. I wanted to go home, home to my daughter who had probably already read the article, just as she read anything she could find online about Shannon. I had no idea how I was going to spin this one. How to explain to your daughter that her most beloved icon was a con artist who had been exploiting you and your family for her own gain? And what was it she had wanted, exactly? Was it the money? The romance? Or, as the article had suggested, was she just trying to boost her profile in one of the few places in the world where her name was still golden?
I was still trying to decide how I wanted to frame this for Kalilah when I heard the light patter of footsteps on the stairs and Shannon stepped groggily into the room wearing her cat pajamas and bathrobe.
“How’d you sleep?” she asked.
I didn’t see any reason to skirt around the issue. “Hakim just sent me a really, um, fascinating article. I didn’t realize your hometown printed scandalous exposés on its own citizens.”
Shannon’s face paled, and I knew in that moment that the article had been telling the truth. “What did you read?” she asked. “What did it say?”
Resuming my seat in the chair, I began scanning the article again. “It says that you’re a fraud. That you hadn’t been out of Woodfell in ages before you traveled to Sabah. That you sometimes busk outside a local diner, where apparently you also work?”
“Okay, first of all,” said Shannon with a look of distinct panic, “I know the woman who wrote that article. She’s no friend of mine—”
“No, apparently not.”
“She and another girl, Katie, are in cahoots. They’ve been trying to destroy my reputation since day one. They would be absolutely thrilled if they knew they had ruined our relationship with their fake reporting.”
“So, is it true?”
Shannon shut her eyes and winced. She looked like she was coming down with an especially painful migraine.
“Is it true what they said, Shannon?” I repeated.
“Which part?” she asked in a voice no louder than a whisper.
“Oh, I don’t know… How about the part where you hired someone to pretend to be your agent? Or the part where you work a low-paying service job and couldn’t possibly afford a house like this? You really are a small-town girl, Shannon. That’s probably the only true statement you’ve ever made to me.”
“Okay, first of all,” said Shannon, drawing deep breaths, “I didn’t hire anyone to impersonate my agent. That woman is my best friend.”
“What’s her name? I’m guessing it’s not Edith Tessmacher. Come to think of it, I think I remember hearing that name in a movie.”
“It’s Ginny,” said Shannon. She was staring hard at her moon slippers. “Ginny Ashmole.”
“I see.” I remembered her mentioning a Ginny last night. She had acted like I should have some idea who that was, but I had had no idea. “You got her to lie for you, too.”
“She didn’t want to, believe me.” Shannon was standing behind one of the winged chairs, clutching the sides tightly as if afraid of being seen. “She tried to talk me out of it. My whole family did. This is on me, not them.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I wanted you to like
me? I don’t know. I just… I played myself up during our first conversation over the phone and I didn’t know how to stop. I wanted to come clean, but I didn’t want you to hate me. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I wish you hadn’t found out like this.”
In other circumstances, that look of despair might have moved me to pity. But she had played the role so skillfully, I could never be sure where the performance ended and the real Shannon began. She could be lying now, feigning contrition because she didn’t want to lose me. Not knowing the real Shannon, I couldn’t know for sure.
“Look, I don’t know what you read in that article,” she said again, “but you should know it was written with the intention of making me look as bad as possible. Katie traffics in lies and exaggerations, it’s her whole shtick. She got kicked out of a nail salon for gossiping.”
“Oh, then you have something in common.”
Shannon visibly crumpled as if she’d been punched in the gut. “I’m not like her, I promise. Before I met you, I hadn’t told a lie in my life. That’s why I was so bad at it.”
“Really? Seems to me like you were pretty good at it. Did you even really like me, or was that part of the act? Where do you actually live?”
“In an apartment,” said Shannon, “with my cat.” Sensing my skepticism, she added, “Look I can prove it.” She reached into the pocket of her robe and produced her phone. “I have pictures if you don’t believe me.”
She handed me the phone and I scrolled through her photo album. There was a small apartment not much bigger than this dining-room, with yellowing wallpaper and a lumpy thrift-store sofa. “This is where you live?”
“I spend a lot of time at my parents’. They’ve been trying to talk me into moving back in and honestly, I don’t know why I haven’t yet. Too proud, I guess.”
“Are you just squatting here for the weekend?” I handed the phone back to her. “You know what, I don’t even want to know. I don’t want to be culpable, and I’m sure you would just feed me some BS story.”
I crossed the room into the kitchen, passing her on the way out. Shannon hesitated briefly, then nervously came skulking after me like a dog at the heels of its owner. “Where are you going? We’re not done talking about this.”
“What more could you possibly have to say to me? There’s no explanation that could make this better, and if you came up with one, I wouldn’t believe it. I can’t trust anything you say anymore.”
Shannon drew a deep breath to steady herself. At the back of the counter by the sink, a couple of handmade elves in red caps leered at us from a spice rack.
Ascending the stairs to the guest room, I quickly and heatedly stuffed my clothes and toiletries into my one suitcase. Near the foot of the bed, I found the pair of boxers I’d worn the previous day, and suddenly, I felt disgusted after everything we had shared. I wished I could have gone back to last night and warned myself, or to weeks before, and saved myself from ever writing that first email. Between the regret and the betrayal, I couldn’t stand it a moment longer.
When I returned downstairs, luggage clunking behind me on wheels, I found Shannon sitting at the kitchen table in a near-catatonic state. She sat with her shoulders hunched, her hands shaking as if trying to warm herself.
“You don’t have to go,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to look at me.
“I don’t see that I have a choice. I don’t even think this is your house. When are the real owners getting back?”
Shannon confirmed my suspicions with a resigned sigh. “I wish I could afford a place like this. I’ll probably never be able to now. You’ll get the money back, I promise—every penny you gave me.”
“I don’t want it, Shannon.” Her name sounded distasteful on my tongue. “The damage is already done.”
“Please take it.”
“It’s just pennies to me. Do you really think I’m upset about the money? If so, you’re more clueless than I thought.”
Shannon looked stung by the insult, and the sight of her discomfort gave me a malicious glow of satisfaction. I wanted her to feel the weight of her betrayal. I wanted to hurt her as much as she had hurt me.
Outside I could hear the low murmur of an engine making its way up the long drive. My phone buzzed on the chair: the cab driver letting me know he had arrived.
“My ride’s here.”
I don’t know what I wanted from her, exactly. Maybe for her to find a way to convince me to stay. Maybe to offer some explanation that would be both credible and redemptive. But Shannon went on staring at the salt shaker like a woman frozen in time. It would probably take her a week or two to realize what she should have said in this instant. But by then I would be long gone.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” said Shannon. “No one feels worse about this than I do. I hope you know that.”
“Well, maybe you should have thought about that before you used me like you did.”
“I didn’t use you,” said Shannon, looking stung by the accusation. She slumped back in her chair with the look of a person who was only just realizing how badly they had screwed up. “At the end of the day, all I really wanted was for you to like me. To look me in the face and tell me I was beautiful and that you wanted me. I had a million fans and none of them could do what you did to me.”
“I wish I could believe that.” Coming as it did on the heels of this latest revelation, her appeals to my sympathy struck me as cloying and hollow.
The car horn sounded outside. The driver was getting impatient.
“You could stay for another hour or two and we could talk through this,” said Shannon. “Don’t run off before we’ve had the chance to talk about it.”
“We’ve talked about it plenty.” A third buzz. “I don’t have anything more to say to you. Now or ever.”
Shannon’s face turned a ghostly shade of pale. It seemed to have just dawned on her that I had already made up my mind and was as good as gone. The only thing left for me to do was to walk out the door.
And I did.
Chapter 18
Shannon
Umar was gone. He had booked the first flight out of Columbus and was already flying over the Atlantic on his way back to Sabah. Shortly after he left, I rallied my remaining strength and sent him an email apologizing for the pain I had caused him. Then, having hit “send,” I climbed into one of the velvet-upholstered chairs in the sitting-room and cried until I fell asleep.
When I awoke, it must have been midday and the pink-infused light of early morning had transformed into a darker shade of rose. It took me a moment to remember where I was: the rag dolls on the mantelpiece blurred and merged themselves into grotesque shapes.
For a split-second, I wondered where Umar had gone and what I was doing alone in the dark house. Then it all came flooding nauseatingly back: Adele’s article and the argument we had had just before he walked out. I had watched from the window as he stormed up the drive toward the waiting taxi, half-expecting him to turn around and announce that he had changed his mind. Even after he had left, there were moments when I thought I heard the tread of his worn boots on the steps outside. But he never came back, and soon, I was embarrassed to discover that I had been crying, and wondered whether he had noticed.
It was Sunday afternoon and I had until the next morning to vacate the premises, but I wasn’t planning on staying for an hour longer. I gathered my clothes off the floor and stripped the bed, leaving a sizable tip for the cleaning crew when they came in the morning. I had spent my last night in a mansion, at least for the foreseeable future. With a dismal feeling, I wheeled my suitcase down the stairs and through the front door, then drove the rest of the way home to my apartment.
I hadn’t been home in several days and the apartment looked even smaller and shabbier in comparison to the stately homes I had been spending my days in. I steeled myself as I came through the door, half-expecting Eva, my cat, to spring down from the top of a cabinet purring and wanting to be fed. It t
ook me a moment to remember that I had left her with Ginger for the weekend. Stowing my suitcase in my room without bothering to unpack, I sank miserably down onto the couch.
Realizing that I still hadn’t told Ginger about our fight, I decided to text her. Any distraction would be preferable to just sitting there wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my day.
So, I said, I’ve got some bad news.
I didn’t have to wait very long before my phone lit up.
Oh no, he’s already seeing someone.
Worse than that, I replied.
And he never told you, said Ginger. He’s been lying to you this whole time, hasn’t he?
Reverse that and you’d be very close. He found out that I’ve been lying to him.
The phone fell silent for several minutes, as if Ginger was still overcoming her surprise. And…? she said finally. How did he react?
Well, he’s gone if that tells you anything, I replied. He couldn’t get away from me fast enough.
Crap. Let me finish eating lunch and I’ll be right over.
When Ginger showed up at the apartment twenty minutes later, she found me lying on the couch with a box of tissues.
“Hey,” she said gently. “I brought you my leftover nachos and carnitas tacos from lunch. And a large soda. I thought you might like some comfort food.”
“Just set it down on the counter,” I said. “I’ll eat it later, when I’m angry.”
I heard the gentle patter of paws on the carpet indicating that Ginger had brought Eva with her. A moment later my little cat sprinted up onto the couch and blinded me in a flurry of scratchy nose-kisses and approving purrs.
“Hey, Eva-bear,” I said, taking her up in my arms. “Did you have fun at Ginny’s? Were you in cat heaven?”
Eva let out a low meow and proceeded to lick my face again.
“So, what happened?” asked Ginger, deftly moving my legs and seating herself at the other end. “You two seemed to be doing so well together.”
