by Kelly Harms
And my mother loved us both for it. There was no question that Jessica was the answer to all of our prayers. She was beautiful where I was plain, she was vivacious where I was sullen, she was adored by all who met her where I had only been adored by my father and him alone. Mothering her, as I did then, was the highlight of every day. Mom beamed when she saw us together. She took us around everywhere and said, within hearing, “Paige has been invaluable,” and people started to ask her if I could come over and babysit their own children on Friday and Saturday nights. I would agree but insist on bringing Jessica along, and no one ever seemed to mind. After all, Jessica would play with their kids and laugh and laugh and befriend every child in the neighborhood, and by the time she was four, she began carrying her own doll around everywhere and “babysitting” it, saying when she grew up she wanted to be just like me.
Then, that same year, there was a catastrophe. It was implosive, and our family would never be the same afterward, and yet to anyone else in the world, it was probably impossible to notice. It happened at the neighborhood bistro, where Mom had taken Jessica and me to lunch one day. It was a school day, but some woman Mom knew from college back East was in town. Mom wanted her to meet her “amazing daughters.”
We had gone together to a nail spa and gotten our “tips and toes” done. We sat with Mom in the salon, drying our nails while she got a blowout. I read a Highlights magazine to Jessica, gingerly turning the pages with the pads of my fingers to preserve the perfect sheen of the polish. She laughed and laughed at the “That’s Silly” page. It was a line drawing of an ice cream parlor full of patrons, but everything in it was slightly awry. There was a penguin instead of a human serving ice cream. In her baby voice, Jessica would point at something and say, “You don’t eat ice cream, Octopus! That’s silly!”
Leaving the salon, I felt absolutely beautiful. Jessica already skipped everywhere, but her bounce was extra high. She pointed to a car painted a garish shade of pink and said, “That’s silly!” I buckled Jessica into her car seat, and she said quietly, “Thank you, Mama Paige,” and I put my finger to my lips, hoping it would remind her, Don’t say that when Mom is around. I winked at her, and she nodded. I thought we understood each other.
We sat in a square around a four-person table at the café. Mom had given me some advance instruction on behavior and dressed me up—I was not in my usual baggy jeans with a college tee on top but wearing a knee-length dress with tiny little flowers on it. Jessica was wearing a dress with the same print but in a much more flouncy style. Mom was wearing shorts in the same print and a white button-down shirt tied in a knot at the waist. I remember she whispered as we walked in the door, “Girls, think effortless.”
But as we were eating with Mom’s college friend, a woman who was slightly thinner than my mom and had slightly higher breasts and was wearing an engagement ring just the tiniest bit larger than Mom’s was, Jessica leaned over to me and said in a voice that probably felt sneaky to a four-year-old but was blaring to everyone else, “I have to go potty.”
My mom started to push back from the table, as though she were used to such requests. I froze. I felt what was going to happen before it did. I tried to shake my head at Jessica. But fate was written. She said to my mom loudly, “I DON’T WANT TO GO WITH YOU! I WANT TO GO WITH MAMA PAIGE.”
My mom just laughed. “Sister Paige,” she corrected gently, and she put her hand on Jessica’s forehead and smoothed away some of her bouncy blonde hair from her eyes. She turned to her college friend and said, “How lucky am I that they bonded like this? I am just so blessed.” And then she turned to me, where I was still frozen. “Better hurry along, Paige, honey. We don’t want an accident.”
And it was over. I took Jessica to the bathroom. We came back to the table. Mom told Jessica to come and sit on Mommy’s lap. A cab driver came in the front door, and Mom told me he was here to take me to school. She wasn’t going to let me miss math class, was she? Not when it was my favorite hour of the day.
I went to school in that expensive pink-and-purple dress, and the kids all made fun of me, because it was so different from my usual garb, and when you were as unpopular as I was, you certainly couldn’t be allowed to win for trying. When I got home, my mom introduced me to Jessica’s new nanny, a stern woman with a thick French accent whose job it would be to give Jessica the gift of a second language. In a move that can only, in retrospect, be called Machiavellian, Mom signed me up for swimming lessons at the public pool, and since I had never set foot in the water before, I was made to parade in my swimsuit past all the experienced swimmers my own age to the shallow end of the pool to join a class of six-year-olds with nose plugs and unicorn floaties. Jessica and I started passing like two ships in the night. She was moved into her own bedroom and was allowed to decorate it to her liking, which made her giggle and laugh and dance. She started speaking pidgin French.
If she missed me, I couldn’t tell. As for me, perhaps it was well past time for me to realize I was not this child’s mother. At sixteen I probably should have been texting and driving or drinking and driving or doing something else equally dangerous to try to differentiate myself from my parents.
Maybe that is why, to make up for lost time, I took a large collection of my mother’s Ambien and tried to put myself to sleep.
Jessica was only four years old that day. I don’t remember her coming to the hospital during that time, and it’s exactly as it should be. The universal family opinion was that, though the family record with mental health was not great, Jessica was a happy kid who had been spared the whole mess.
And so far as I know, that opinion prevailed all this time.
That means right now people in that family are having all kinds of feelings. Doubt. Guilt. Recrimination. Anger. I remember each one cycling through my father when I was recovering from my own suicide attempt. I imagine Jessica, who is alive because of a cautious stranger named Consuela, is on the receiving end of all that and more. I imagine she is feeling deserted, lost, and maybe a little relieved but still very, very ashamed. Maybe she is feeling thwarted. Maybe she is feeling furious.
Think how furious she would feel if she knew there is one other person in the entire world who knows what it is like to be her, and that person is cowering in her apartment two states away rather than showing her frightened, panicky face and explaining why she didn’t teach her little sister how she learned to survive this too big, too crowded, too noisy world.
My phone pings, and I decide to “compartmentalize” this line of thinking immediately. Until someone forces me to do otherwise, I will try to keep my distance.
That is, after all, the entire secret to my success.
I cross the little apartment to get my phone.
Last night in my searching, I created a Pictey notification for any time @Mia&Mike puts up a new post. My thought was that maybe I could keep a loose eye on the comments, see when my sister resurfaced on them, and know that she’d made it through to the other side.
The downside to this plan is that now I’m subjected to a lock screen notification that reads,
@Mia&Mike put up a new post! Will you be the first to comment?
No, Pictey overlords, I will not. But I will look at it, thanks to your very effective use-reinforcement engineering. I swipe to the post.
It’s a picture of a gorgeous chuppah covered in fresh blooms, a flower-covered podium, a couple of white chairs with more flowers, and a path of rose petals leading to the middle of the scene. In the background I see a clearing on a mountainside, a riot of wildflowers, a clear sky. The caption reads:
#Apologies. Deepest heartfelt apologies are due today.
Have you ever promised something deeply from your heart, only to learn that to deliver that promise would betray someone you love?
I find myself in that dilemma now, dear readers, because I’ve promised you total access to my wedding day, but I find I just can’t give it to you after all. Tucker has bravely shared that he needs the
events of this day to be just between us, and I’m going to honor that need, even though it means I will only be posting a few wedding pictures today. #ToughChoices Please forgive me! This photo, taken first thing this morning, is beyond the beyond for my wedding wishes. Those peonies! I can’t wait to walk into that fairy-tale dream of a scene and say #iDo. And by the time you see this, I will be doing exactly that.
Now, I’m sincerely hoping Tucker’s going to agree to post many more photos down the line, so please stay tuned. And don’t be angry with him, my friends. Not everyone wants to put down their yoga mat in front of the whole class, even if they have a gorgeous half-moon pose and excellent form. Some people want to roll out in back, where they might feel more private, more authentic even. That’s how they #honor themselves. That’s what we’re all about here. Today, honor yourselves. Let me know how it goes. xoxo Mia
PS: thanks to the amazing Wild Bloomery for the stunning peony display, the abundance of perfectly pink roses, and the bouquets, which I’ll show off in another post soon. #Sponsored #WildBloomery
I put down my phone and wish I could throw it across the room. What a self-centered, navel-gazing, cliché-abusing joke of a human being. If I had a bottle of whiskey, I think I’d drink some right now, because whiskey is what angry people drink on TV. How can Mia Bell do this to Pictey? After all the ways they’ve prepped for traffic today and all the algorithms made just for people like her. It’s all utter nonsense. What the hell even is half-moon pose?
This woman has Picted every single moment, instant, beat of a heart on Pictey for as long as I’ve worked there, and she has never, ever turned off the camera. For goodness’ sake, she even posted on the day she buried her damn dog. It nearly crashed our servers.
Why would this attention whore—it’s a distasteful term, but what else can she be?—marry someone who wants to stand in the back of the yoga class? Whatever the hell that means. Why wouldn’t she just say, Dear affianced, get your butt up here and support this because this is who I am and I already told half a million people this damn wedding was going to be online? And why would he have rolled with the whole thing until the wedding day? His username is @TuckerlovesMia. What exactly did he think he was getting into here?
I almost go to the comments and post exactly that. I know I’ll get at least ten thousand likes if I do. But then I stop myself. Something isn’t right about this. Something is just off. I look at the caption again. What is nagging at me?
I sit up. Turn up the brightness on the phone screen. Huh. That’s it. I turn it back down and look again. There’s something missing. It’s the lighting. There’s a #nofilters certification, and the pic doesn’t look tampered with. It’s not that. It’s that there’re no shadows. The shadows from the chuppah are straight down, and the same with the chairs and podium. And they’re short too. Maybe a tenth of the height of the actual chairs. This photo, taken first thing in the morning, she wrote. But if it was taken in the morning, where are the shadows and the bluish, pinkish light of the early hours? This photo looks like it was taken ten minutes ago.
I grab the pic, drag it to my laptop, and crack into the photo tagging to try to find the file metadata. It’s there; it’s all there. Of course it is. These influencers never scrub their metadata, even though if they don’t want to be stabbed by a stalker, they really should.
But today she should have scrubbed it for a different reason. Because the photo shows exactly the moment it was taken. Not at nine a.m. or even ten, but at 12:11:48 p.m. on this very day. Roughly thirty minutes ago, and twelve minutes after her wedding was to have started. Further, the GPS shows the post was from the sparsely populated foothills near County Highway AB. Which is, according to Google Maps, an hour drive from the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, where the whole thing was supposed to go down.
This picture isn’t from her wedding. It’s not even from the same zip code.
In other words, this entire post is one big fat whopping BS lie.
MIA
#Bouquet shots! I mean, how stunning is this? I know banana-leaf wraps are practical, but the way the florist instead wove together the long stalks of prairie grass to make the ultradetailed hilt of the bouquet is #tooperfect and celebrates the natural beauty of this place. The calla lilies are sourced from an organic farm in Chile where workers are all paid a living wage and treated with equity. Thank you to #WildBloomery again for this stunning display.
Oops! Gotta run! They’re calling me for our portrait. Sooooo wish you could see it . . . soon I hope! xoxo Mia
Because I believe in the power of a good fait accompli, I put up three wedding-related Pictey posts to my feed before I call Tucker.
When he picks up, he is frantic.
“Mia? Mia, are you ok?” he asks me, and it’s such an idiotic question I just laugh. “You got my message, right?”
“What message?” I ask. “Oh, you mean the text ending our engagement without explanation? Yes, I got it.”
“You didn’t reply,” he says glumly. “And then I saw your post last night, and I wasn’t sure what was going on.”
“Generally I don’t text back to utter morons,” I say and too late remember that I sort of need a favor here.
“You’re hurt,” he says.
“Of course I’m hurt! What did you think I’d be? Thrilled?”
“I thought you’d be relieved, honestly. We’d let this fantasy go on far too long.”
“It wasn’t a fantasy to me,” I say. I’m not sure how much truth is in that. Maybe it wasn’t so much a fantasy happening on my end as a willful ignoring. “I thought we were getting married. I thought we were going to buy a house and have kids and build a life together.”
“Build a lifestyle brand, more like,” Tucker says.
“What do you mean by that?” I snap, favor utterly forgotten.
“Mia, come on. Really? You made me sign a prenup. You were going to buy a house that I would be living in by your grace.”
“That’s not how it would be,” I say. “I tried to explain this to you. It’s not my fault you came in with debt and I came in with savings!”
“The prenup was beneath me. I should never have agreed to it.”
“So you want me to just share everything with you half and half?” I ask, feeling stupid as I do. But let’s face it: some part of me worried he might be just a tiny bit more interested in my followers than in me.
“Yes, I do! Well, I did. That’s marriage,” he says bitterly. “Sharing.”
“Tucker, if the roles were reversed, if you were the influencer with so much unrealized income, no one would blink when I signed a prenup. You’re just bent out of shape because I stand to make so much more money than you do.”
He laughs. “Of course you would think that,” he says. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. What else could I think, when he frets over getting the best of me in a divorce before we’re even married?
“Well, I don’t want to be used for my success, and if that’s so crazy, I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought it was me you wanted, not all the perks.” Maybe not thought so much as hoped, I admit to myself.
There is silence on the phone, and I don’t know what it means, so I decide it must be meaningless. Finally Tucker says quietly, “Are you doing ok?”
I could think of all the ways I don’t feel ok, but what good would that do me? Instead, in this space in the conversation, I am able to find my way back to what I need from Tucker, now that he’s failed me so spectacularly. “I have some obligations,” I begin. “I made a commitment to some sponsors regarding this wedding. Actually, we made a commitment.”
“I know,” he says. “And I’m truly sorry.”
I blink away something moist in my eyes. I have had time for crying. This is not that time. “I need your help,” I say. “I need to find a way to smooth this situation over and soft sell it to my followers. I’m counting on the income, you see. The deposits have been so expensive . . . I’m thinking I might need to . . .�
�� I let my voice fall away from the rest of that sentence.
“You’re faking our wedding,” he says flatly.
“I think it would be more like just glossing over it,” I say, because I have to hear trolls call me a fake ten times a day, and it just hits a little too close to home right now. “I’d post some scenery, the flowers, that kind of stuff, from my mom’s house, where it’s private. And then I’d post about other things for a couple weeks, use the archives a bit, do some callouts and sharable posts, and then announce a separation later, some Sunday afternoon when no one is at their desks, and try to just slide in that we’ve gone our separate ways.”
Tucker pauses. “Blowing up the wedding in a live feed today would draw more traffic,” he says, like we’re talking about other people’s lives. Sadly, I’ve already thought of that.
“It would be bad for you, Tucker,” I say plainly. “You’d need security for a while, probably. I’d be worried.”
“You could say it was mutual,” he says.
“It wouldn’t fly, not with all my planning posts so fresh in their memories.” Not to mention the fact that as soon as he looks on Pictey, he’ll realize I already started the process. “Besides, if we blow it up, we might be in breach of sponsorship contracts. What kind of bakery wants to be affiliated with a doomed wedding?”
“You didn’t cancel the cake?” he says.
“Did you?” I reply.
Tucker sighs. “All that is your thing, Mia, not mine.”
I press my lips together. If Pictey and the @Mia&Mike brand and the wedding are “my thing,” then what, exactly, does he think he’s entitled to outside the prenup? I try to stay with the breath, which is what I’m always telling my followers to do in tough moments. It turns out I’m panting, and staying with the breath is only making things worse. I’ve been giving bad advice. No surprise there.