Fake Plastic World

by Zara Lisbon

  On the other end of the spectrum, there is love that is bred from profound understanding. This is the way I love Lana Del Rey. You might think I love Taylor Swift more than I love Lana Del Rey, but you’d be wrong. I am obsessed with Taylor Swift, but I am satisfied by Lana Del Rey. She makes sense to me. Almost too much sense. I see myself in her. I see her as a better, enhanced, evolved version of myself. I knew her in a past life and I will know her in the next one. This I know. And this is pure love. Pure love is warm, it holds you. Obsessed love is cold, it locks you out. Both are real. Both rule my life.

  It was obsessed love that brought Ruby into my life.

  My mom thought Ruby was trouble, but she said Ruby could keep me company as long as we stayed in the house. Ruby brought me crystals and tinctures. Aventurine and bloodstone for luck and energy, passionflower and valerian tea to heal my nerves and anxiety. None of it worked, but having her there had a calming effect. When I asked her why she was being so good to me, she said, “Because I trust you. You were probably the only one of Eva-Kate’s friends who wasn’t using her. Plus, I know she loved you and would want me to take care of you.” But that made me feel a lot worse.

  Ruby, only three years older than me, had seen every episode of Law & Order: SVU. I’d never even seen one, and this horrified her. So we started at the beginning and worked our way through season one on my laptop. I didn’t think I’d be able to handle the gore, the disturbing perversions, but it turned out I could. Actually, there was something oddly comforting about the whole thing, something about those brutal and savage sex crimes packaged so cleanly into forty-minute episodes that helped soothe me to sleep way better than aventurine or bloodstone or passionflower or valerian ever could. I hoped that didn’t make me some kind of creep or psycho. Ruby told me not to feel guilty.

  “There’s a reason SVU is going into its twentieth season,” she said. “People fucking love it.” So it wasn’t just me.

  I tried to figure out why the name Detective Olivia Benson sounded so familiar, and finally realized during “Wanderlust” (season one, episode five). In 2014, Taylor Swift went on The Ellen Show and told the world about her new cat, who she named after her favorite character on Law & Order: SVU, Detective Olivia Benson. “I sit in my apartment and watch hours of that show,” she’d said in a Teen Vogue interview three years earlier. “So I sort of feel like me and Olivia are BFFs.”

  It wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t just the vast SVU fan base, but it was also Taylor Swift. If Taylor Swift watched hours of these lurid storylines, then there couldn’t be something wrong with me for doing the same thing. Or at least nobody could say there was.

  So I watched through a new lens. The Taylor Swift has seen this lens. All I kept thinking was how outrageous it was; all along, this whole time, sweet, adorable Taylor Swift has been binge-watching a show about New York’s most elaborately cruel sex crimes. The thought was so outrageous to me I had to laugh. Then I had to explain it all to Ruby.

  “I mean, she’s Taylor Swift, she doesn’t live here in this world with us. She lives in a protective bubble designed to shield her from all that is grim, to keep her safe and pure. She doesn’t know about rape and murder, she doesn’t know about incest or pedophilia or kidnapping or torture or even death. Except it turns out she does. She does, and she binge-watches it!”

  “What an epic reveal,” said Ruby. Of course she wasn’t as excited about it as I was, but I think she understood. Taylor Swift knows about death. She isn’t immune to the world’s iniquities after all. She may have four or five multimillion-dollar homes to hear about it all from, but she hears about it.

  * * *

  One week in and we needed a break from the nonstop tragedy of Law & Order: SVU. Ruby made popcorn and valerian tea and we watched Bring It On in the living room after my mom had gone to bed.

  “You know, I’ve never once seen a cheerleader in real life. I wouldn’t be even a little surprised if they turned out to be mythical.” She handed me my cup of tea, some of it spilling out onto her silk pajama sleeves.

  “Oh, they’re real. Unfortunately,” I assured her. “You’d have seen one by now if you’d ever set foot on a school campus.”

  “School.” She rolled her eyes. “Gross. My greatest accomplishment in life was dodging that bullet.”

  “Have you really never gone to school?”

  “No.” She sipped her tea. “I did go to school. For a while. Once upon a time. But let me tell you all you need to know about school, Justine. The last time I was there, just three years ago, there was a Hemingway imitation contest. You had to submit a piece of writing in Hemingway’s style. I submitted an actual Hemingway poem and got first place.”

  “What do you mean?” I laughed. “How?”

  “I submitted a poem actually written by Hemingway and none of the teachers noticed. It went like, ‘If my Valentine you won’t be / I’ll hang myself on your Christmas tree.’ Can you believe that?”

  “That was the whole poem?” I thought it had to be the dumbest thing I’d ever heard.

  “Yeah.” She giggled. “I guess I can see why they thought a kid wrote it. But still, I can’t waste my life in an institution like that. I mean, I don’t know which is worse, the fact that they couldn’t recognize Hemingway’s work when they saw it, or the fact that they came up with the contest in the first place. I mean, please, Hemingway? He’s the easiest writer to imitate. Fuck that. Fuck Hemingway.”

  It was our eighth night together, I counted, when Ruby fell asleep before me. I used my phone to google “what kind of cat is Detective Olivia Benson.” It turns out she’s a purebred Scottish fold, which cost about one thousand five hundred dollars to buy from a breeder. I swiped through hundreds of pictures that night. Olivia licking Taylor’s MTV Video Music Award, Olivia on Taylor Swift’s couch, Olivia in Taylor Swift’s shoe, Olivia posing next to Taylor Swift’s 1989 vinyl, Olivia in an accidental yoga pose, Olivia slouched grumpily on a paisley armchair, Olivia as a newborn kitten on Taylor Swift’s lap, Olivia on Taylor Swift’s shoulder in a Coke commercial, Olivia on a car ride, Olivia as a giant cardboard cutout, Olivia as a giant unicorn (aka Caticorn) in a DirecTV commercial, Olivia asleep on Taylor Swift’s private jet, Olivia perched on Taylor Swift’s arm as she’s leaving her New York apartment.

  At first the images were a sweet dulling of the anxiety sharpening and sharpening like a shiv in my side, but as I went on I realized this cat was living a categorically better life than I was, or than I ever would, and the anxiety morphed into a blue knot of melancholy that pulsed in me like a second heart. I had always been like that. Jealous of anyone and anything, even a cat.

  I clicked on the picture of Taylor Swift leaving her apartment and was taken to an article about the many homes she’s purchased over the years. In 2009, at the age of twenty, she bought a 4,062-square-foot penthouse apartment in Nashville for $2 million. Vulture described it as “whimsically girlie” with a style that resembles a “shabby-chic Alice in Wonderland.” In 2011 she bought a Cape Cod–style home in Beverly Hills for $3.97 million. The 2,826-square-foot house includes four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a tennis court. In 2013, she bought an 11,000-square-foot Rhode Island mansion for $17.75 million. She paid for it in cash. In 2016, she started renting a $40,000 a month townhouse in Manhattan’s West Village while she renovated the two penthouse floors in Tribeca. She bought the penthouse floors from Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson for $20 million. I did the math and found that when all is said and done, Taylor Swift has spent $44 million buying homes across the country. And that’s not even counting the two she bought for her parents.

  I tried to make myself feel happy for her, but instead I just keep thinking that I might spend the rest of my life behind bars—showering with strangers, squatting pantsless in front of guards to make sure I wasn’t hiding drugs inside my body—while Taylor Swift moved into her two-story penthouse that she bought for $20 million from Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. By the time I pu
t my phone down, the sun was starting to rise. The sun also rises, I thought, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  On the tenth night in a row we hung out together, Ruby was covering my body in crystals, the curtains open so that the crystals could be charged by the moon, when suddenly she said, “I wonder why she texted him that night.”

  “Who?” I asked, trying to stay very still so the crystals wouldn’t fall off me.

  “Dr. Silver. He said the night she died she texted him and told him to come over. But when he got there nobody came to the door. I wonder why she asked him to come over. Were they … I mean, if Eva-Kate had been sleeping with an older man, we would have known about it. So that can’t be it. Do you think she was like, scared, or something?”

  There had been the voice mail left by my mom. Eva-Kate knew I’d heard it. Was it me she’d been afraid of? Afraid that I’d found out? No, that didn’t quite make sense. What would Dr. Silver have been able to do about that anyway? I wondered if I should say any of this out loud, tell Ruby about my mom and Eva-Kate, but I decided it didn’t make me look good. It gave me a reason to be mad at Eva-Kate, and I couldn’t afford anyone seeing me in that light.

  “Nobody came to the door,” I said instead. “But the house wasn’t empty. London had to have been there if she saw him come over.”

  “Right, London.” Ruby’s head bobbed. “London had to have been there. How else could she have known he came by?”

  “You said Olivia couldn’t have done it because she faints at the sight of blood, but what about London?”

  “London’s a tough bitch. Tough and dumb. I just don’t know why she’d do it. No motive.”

  “Dr. Silver said the top three reasons people kill are revenge, jealousy, and greed. I read once that the fourth is power. Maybe London was tired of being bossed around, talked down to.”

  “I don’t know, is that really reason enough to murder your friend?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged, and the two rose quartz stones resting on my collarbones clattered to the floor. “It is if you’re crazy.”

  “Was London crazy?”

  “I don’t know.” I sat up and let all the crystals fall away, then pulled on my robe. “I didn’t know her long enough.”

  “I didn’t really know her either,” said Ruby. “I knew her the least of Eva-Kate’s friends. Frankly I think she was Eva-Kate’s least favorite.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “She was the least interesting.”

  It was true. I hadn’t been particularly interested in her either. I was now.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Ruby. “It had to be Debbie. Or Liza. Or maybe both. That’s why they ran.”

  “Rob’s gone too, now,” I said. “I don’t know what I think anymore.”

  Ruby sighed. “Did you ever feel like…,” she said, then paused, massaging her jaw. “Did you ever feel like you didn’t know the real Eva-Kate? Like, even when she was in her most vulnerable moments, there was still a whole sea beneath the surface that she refused to show?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But, you know, she didn’t think she had anything real beneath the surface anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh.” I scraped nervously at my cuticles, wanting to go back in time. I had assumed anything Eva-Kate told me she had also told Ruby, but maybe I’d been wrong. “I mean, nothing. It’s just this one time she mentioned that because she’d been in front of the spotlight for so long, you know, performing her whole life, that the real her had been like, banished, or something. She was worried she’d never get it back. She worried she looked like a real human girl, but that anything real about her had been dissolved.”

  “‘Fake Plastic Trees,’” Ruby said then, nodding. “She always said that song was about her.”

  “Do you think she was right? About herself, I mean.”

  “I didn’t know her like you did,” I offered. “But no, I don’t. Maybe something fundamentally real and true about her had been cut off or warped by fame, but it was still there. She had pain, you know? So she had a soul.”

  “Did she have pain, though? Or was she just a really good actress?”

  “She was a really good actress,” I said. “But not that good. And why would she pretend to be in pain if she wasn’t?”

  “Duh,” said Ruby. “To seem more real.”

  “If she was really a shell of a person pretending to have human emotions, that would make her a sociopath.”

  “Well, she might have been. Maybe that’s what got her killed. Maybe she was having too much fun manipulating people just to feel alive and finally someone had enough of it. Maybe she was toying with Dr. Silver for sport and he just lost it.”

  Was she toying with me for sport? I wondered. Toying with my mom? Was what I read in her notes the truth or just a sociopath’s fabrication?

  “Justine?” Ruby asked when a minute had passed and I hadn’t responded. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” I shook the thoughts loose from my mind. “I just have this tendency to … it’s just really easy for me to lose sight of reality. I get disoriented.”

  “I get that,” said Ruby. “Who’s to say what’s real, anyway? Once I stayed up too many nights on Crimsons and was convinced that all of what we see on Earth is a hallucination. I started scratching at the walls as if actual reality lay behind it.” She laughed. “After I broke a few nails I tried to check myself into the psych ward.”

  “Tried?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “The doctor who did my intake made me go home. Apparently I wasn’t psych ward material. He said I just needed to sleep. I’m glad they didn’t admit me. Apparently life in a psych ward isn’t as glamorous as you’d think.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “I spent some time at Bellflower, actually.”

  “No way.” Her eyes lit up. “Why?”

  “I’m not really sure. I think it started as some kind of manic episode. I didn’t sleep for a while, I don’t know how many days exactly, and then I got it in my head that me staying up was the only thing keeping the Earth in orbit. I thought I had to stay up to make sure the sun rose in the morning and set at night.” I covered my mouth, it sounded so ridiculous, even more ridiculous out loud than in my mind. But Ruby just nodded.

  “That’s wild,” she said.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” I said. “I’ve never told anybody before.”

  “Big deal.” Ruby shrugged. “We’re all mad here.”

  “I had a girlfriend there,” I blurted, some kind of floodgate opening up inside me. “At Bellflower. Annabel.”

  “Oh?” I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or judging my outburst. “Where is she now?”

  “She’s dead,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. I guess it just felt good to share.

  * * *

  On the eleventh night I woke up around 3:00 A.M. and found Ruby packing her crystals into a Gucci Mini Marmont backpack. Her hair was tied back in a silk headscarf and she had her shoes on.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “The natives are getting restless,” she said. “I have to get back to them.”

  “The natives?” I rubbed my eyes.

  “You know, Zander and the others.”

  “Hey, Ruby?” I sat up.

  “Hm?”

  “Are they, like … enslaved to you?”

  She laughed quietly and hooked a self-conscious finger over her top lip.

  “To be enslaved is to have no freedom of choice,” she said. “They want to be with me. They’re boys who need to be controlled in order to feel safe. And I need to be in control in order to feel safe. It’s a good arrangement we have. Symbiosis. See? I told you I don’t need school.”

  Then, just like that, she was gone. In the morning it was as if she’d never been there at all.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE PEOPLE VS. JUSTINE CHILDS: ALL THE JUICY DETAILS

  The thing about fame is that
people care about you. Even if they don’t know you, they care what you’re doing or not doing, who you’re dating, where you’re going, what you’re going to do next. In fact, the less they truly know you, the more they care about those things. You become relevant, a subject of thought and speculation in the homes of people you’ve never met. I’d wanted that gift for so long but didn’t see how I could ever get it. I didn’t know a second-degree-murder charge would do the trick. There wasn’t a single tabloid cover on the stands without my face on it.

  I walked behind Jack Willoughby up the courthouse steps, both my parents following close behind me. I wore a royal-blue Prada skirt suit that Ruby let me borrow, with Manolo Blahnik shoes that rubbed against my heels as I walked, building blisters. Flashbulbs burst in every direction, microphones were thrust into my face, popping out from the crowd. I heard my name shouted over and over and over again, until it blended together, a mantra in my mind.

  “Justine! What about the fingerprints? How do you explain the fingerprints?”

  “Justine! Over here! How do you feel knowing you could go to jail?”

  “Justine! What will you do next if you’re found innocent?”

  “Justine! When did you plan to murder Eva-Kate Kelly?”

  “Justine! What do you have to say to your fans and supporters?”

  “Justine! Who are you wearing?”

  “Justine! What would you say to the people who think you’re guilty?”