Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  I must have partially blacked out, because when I opened my eyes, after what seemed like a blink, Benoit was gone and the flashes had stopped. I was lying on the floor, breasts exposed, and my face was wet with tears. Gingerly, I raised myself on bent elbows and saw Benoit and Cate studying the computer monitors. Cate said something I didn’t quite catch and they both laughed.

  “Mickey?” Kiki loomed over me, appearing from I don’t know where. My headache had returned and I winced as she handed me a Styrofoam cup of water. “You did great,” she said gently, a chastened look on her face. “Benoit’s really happy.”

  “Thanks,” I said, then drained the cup and gave it back to her.

  She put a hand underneath my elbow and helped me stand. “Let’s go for look two.”

  I tried to shake her off because I was sick of the infantilizing way she was suddenly talking to me, but I was wobbly on my feet and actually did need her to lean on. She helped me into the robe. I felt the familiar weight of my phone knock against my thigh and was instantly calmed and more myself. I opened up Instagram as she led me towards the wardrobe trailer.

  Forty-two thousand new Views on the image I’d posted of Benoit and me. Dozens of Comments.

  U look fucking sickkkk

  So rad

  Holy shit woulda never recognized you

  Ummm guessing that’s Benoit cuz I know his tats and also you guys are the perfect couple.

  Couple goals.

  Love goals.

  Relief washed over me, swiftly turning into gratification. Any worry I’d had evaporated. I was loved. I was anointed. I imagined the “someone else,” whoever she was, seeing the photo, was seething with jealousy. Though my Blue Check was still pending, I was more certain than ever that after this shoot—especially after this shoot, especially if it went viral like the last one—I’d be Verified.

  You didn’t actually shave your head right? A text from my mother.

  No, I wrote back. It’s not real. Don’t worry.

  Below my mother’s name in my Messages app a blue dot lay like a bomb beside Julia’s name. I had ignored it earlier, but now, with new validation, allowed it to detonate.

  Get a life? That’s funny coming from you considering you basically stole someone else’s. You’re such a fake it’s crazy.

  Andy helped me into a seat and began unlacing my boots. Immediately, I felt everything loosen, followed by a stinging pain as the blood flowed back into my calves, which looked as though they’d been crisscrossed in red marker.

  “Oh god,” Kiki said. “We can’t shoot those for a while.”

  Are you seriously not going to respond? Julia had written again, almost an hour ago.

  I know you’re busy or whatever—

  A notification slid down from the top of my screen, a text from my mother: Phew! That would have been bad. Have fun! Love you, xo Mommy

  —getting famous, but it’s just sad to me because if you stopped pretending for like, one second, you’d actually be a lot cooler. But you’re so afraid of letting go of that control, you won’t ever—

  “Stand up for me, sweetie,” Andy said, helping me to my feet and stripping the leather underwear from me in one fluid motion. I looked down at my bald vagina. “Can you jog up and down a bit?” Andy asked. “It’ll help put the blood back into your legs.”

  So I jogged in place half-naked while he unbuttoned the rest of my top, and then I jogged fully naked, my vagina lips flapping to my disgust, until he slid a shredded silk chiffon sheath over my head, and still I kept jogging, trying to fight the growing unease that had returned swiftly now that I had read Julia’s message, now that I had tucked my phone away back in my robe pocket. I kept jogging in place all the way to set, up the creaking death trap of a staircase to one of the bedrooms on the second floor, where the overgrown black insects with their umbrella heads circled a bare mattress on the ground. The walls here had once been papered in a chintzy floral pattern that, as in the rest of the house, had been torn away to reveal planks of wood and plaster. It was even filthier than downstairs, and I coughed, inhaling a cloud of dust.

  Kiki directed me to sit on the mattress so my back was against the wall. I flicked away a spider with the back of my hand. Benoit entered wordlessly, carrying a stool, and began setting up his shot. After the lighting had been sufficiently calibrated, Benoit settled in: he ran a tongue over his lips, cleared his throat, and began another diatribe while he started shooting, something about the cruelty of human nature and about how that’s where the beauty really lies, in that capacity for cruelty, and I started to think about Gemma, and what had happened to her. Was she okay? She was probably okay. But if she wasn’t…What duty did I have? What if her family was looking for her, worried sick, what if her brother—or wait, was it her sister? Didn’t she have a twin? With a shudder of fear I realized I couldn’t remember—couldn’t picture their faces, didn’t even know where they lived or where she had grown up. A cold sweat broke out along my neck. I could feel my body vibrating. It didn’t make sense. How could I have forgotten? I became aware that Benoit had stopped taking photos.

  “Okay,” he said, standing up. “I think we’re ready.” I wasn’t sure who he was talking to until I saw Kiki scurry out of the room. Benoit paced around the small space, drinking coffee. Kiki returned carrying the Fisher-Price carrier like a purse in the crook of her arm. She set it down in one corner, well out of the shot, and began unbuckling the baby, who was looking around with wide, curious eyes. Cate appeared in the doorway with a filthy-looking canvas rag in her hands. Kiki pulled the baby’s cap off, revealing a head of tight black curls, then unfastened its onesie and slipped off its socks. The baby fussed, whimpering gently.

  “Shhh…” Kiki murmured.

  She removed the baby’s diaper and, in one quick motion, as if she wanted to handle it as little as possible, she lifted it naked from the carrier and passed it to Cate. The baby let out a plaintive wail as Cate wrapped it in the rag and advanced towards me. I cowered, pushing myself flatter against the wall behind me. I had never held a baby before.

  Cate squatted near the bed and transferred the sniffling bundle to my arms. The baby quieted down in my arms and stared up at me with beseeching eyes, but as soon as it saw that I was not its mother, its face crumpled. It opened its mouth and began to cry even louder than before.

  “What should I do?” I asked, almost screamed, looking up in obvious panic. I wondered where its parents were. I hadn’t seen anyone who looked like they could be related. But maybe it was adopted; maybe it was Cate’s for all I knew. Or—I thought with a shudder—maybe you could rent out baby models, just like you could rent out girls like me.

  Benoit shrugged comedically. “Don’t look at me!”

  Cate rolled her eyes. “It’ll calm down, don’t worry.”

  But it didn’t look as though it would calm down. It was heavier and warmer than I expected, and its cry was surprisingly powerful.

  “What’s its name?” I stammered. “Maybe that’ll help, if I call its name.”

  Cate laughed. “It’s not a dog.”

  “I know,” I muttered, shame-faced, as if my inability to comfort this poor child laid bare my myriad inadequacies as a model, as a woman, as a person.

  “Go on, rock it,” Cate said.

  “Okay,” Benoit said, clapping his hands together. “We can get started already? Yes?”

  Cate and Kiki left the room, taking the carrier with them; I had already been told the rest of the day was to be a mostly closed set. “Benoit wants it to be really intimate,” Kiki had said. I had no problem with closed sets, I might have actually preferred them, but the thought of being in a room alone with Benoit and the baby made me uneasy. I shook it gently in my arms, whispering for it to shush. The baby quieted slightly and I felt a rush of warm gratification.

  “Look up here, please.”

  I stared up at the camera, cradling the
baby closer to my chest. The flashes flickered rhythmically throughout the room. The baby whimpered. I wondered if the flashes were hurting its eyes—I glanced down at it—

  “Up here!” Benoit shouted through gritted teeth.

  “The flashes—are they okay—”

  “No talking!”

  I swallowed hard, trying to choke back my painful discomfort, as the baby stirred in my arms. The flashes continued.

  “Can you be a bit looser with it?” Benoit asked, after some time. “See if you can get one of its arms out.”

  I reached into the bundle and found one chubby arm. Its sure, strong fingers clasped my thumb and held fast there, and something inside me tightened and seized. I tried to bring the hand out of the blanket but as soon as I started pulling it, the baby started crying again.

  “I don’t think it wants to do that.”

  “It’s a fucking baby,” Benoit snapped. “It doesn’t know what it wants.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it.”

  I used my other hand to loosen the blanket, and gently moved the baby’s arm. I could see its small chest—so smooth and soft—going up and down as it heaved sob after sob, and I couldn’t believe that such a small vessel could contain all the vital organs, would grow into a man or a woman—I never did learn what its gender was—just like everyone else. Like me or Benoit, even. The thought pained me.

  “Can you let go of its hand? Your arm’s blocking the face.”

  I tugged my thumb out of its grip, and the baby—whose face showed the betrayal immediately, contorting as if cracked open—emitted a blood-curdling scream. It was so small, so helpless, growing hotter in my arms—I was wrenched with a profound and sickening wave of guilt.

  “Up here,” Benoit snapped, and I dragged my eyes up towards the camera in time for another flash to wrack the room.

  Gently, I tried to comfort the baby, rocking it from side to side and whispering for it to shush like I’d seen mothers do in TV shows, shh, shh, it’s okay.

  The baby kicked its feet and arched its back, pushing its head into my thigh as it let out another blood-curdling scream.

  “Please,” I whimpered, but Benoit could not hear me over the metallic shudder of the flash, or maybe he just ignored me. “Please,” I said again, and this time I was sure he was ignoring me.

  “Jesus Christ, just put it down if you can’t manage it.”

  “Put it down?”

  “Yes, yes,” Benoit snapped.

  Reluctantly I leaned over and placed the baby on the bed and was startled at how red its face had grown, blaring against the white of the mattress.

  “Are you retarded?” Benoit screamed. “Not in the shot!”

  I snatched the baby up quickly, instinctually.

  “No—put it down!”

  “Where?” I had to shout because of the baby’s crying.

  “Wherever!” He gestured impatiently at the floor, a few feet from the bed. “There!”

  I stared at the spot, which was as filthy as the rest of the house. Tiny pieces that looked like wood chips were scattered about it. I cradled the baby closer to my chest. Its face was soft and wet. I could feel the hard-soft of its gums as it thrashed open-mouthed against my skin. I wanted to run, to take the baby far away from here and never come back, but I knew I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t fuck this up. The Blue Check danced in my mind, even as terror rose inside me. Part of it was a visceral, bone-deep aversion, a feeling of wrongness, about placing the baby down on that floor, and the other part was the foreknowledge that I would do it anyway, I would do whatever Benoit asked.

  Benoit sighed dramatically. “Please stop wasting my time.”

  I stood up slowly and carefully, a feeling of dread roiling my stomach, making me queasy. I squatted over the spot Benoit had gestured to; I could feel his eyes boring into my back, while the baby went on crying. As gently as I could I placed the baby on the ground. I tried to wrap the blanket around its small body, but it kept flinging it away and waving its little fists in the air as it wailed.

  “Get back on your mark,” Benoit said. “We’ve already lost too much light.”

  I got back onto the mattress, my body shaking, hot and cold at the same time. Where was the baby’s mother? Why did they keep it so unsafe? Benoit was giving me directives but I couldn’t concentrate; all my thoughts were drowned out by the plaintive insistence of the baby’s wails. I pressed myself as hard as I could into the wall, as if I could disappear through it. The baby’s sobs sounded almost violent now, as if it were being strangled, and I kept looking over to make sure it was okay, that it was still in the same spot—

  “Kiki!”

  Benoit had shouted it down the staircase. He was close to the door. I hadn’t seen him get up.

  “Kiki!” he screamed again.

  Without the camera pinning me in place, I sprung up and scooped the baby into my arms and rocked it, did my TV-mom shh…shh…thing, only this time it didn’t feel scripted, it felt real in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time. The baby started quieting down, and I wondered what it was thinking. I thought about how I could have been anyone to this baby—it didn’t matter, I was a pair of arms that was comforting it, and that was enough. That was all there was. I thought about how this baby looked like a lot of other babies, but that there was something about it, even at such a young age, something ineffable that made it only itself.

  Kiki appeared breathless in the doorway a moment later. Benoit nodded at me, and she pursed her lips in displeasure. Without a word, she strode over to me and slid her hand between my arm and the baby’s back and lifted it out of my arms, and a devastating wrench twisted my insides as the baby’s scream pierced the room.

  “Get it out of here,” said Benoit, pressing a hand to his ear, and I watched Kiki walk briskly out of the room and saw her shiny, black-haired head descend the staircase. The baby never stopped crying; its cries only grew fainter and more faraway. A lump rose in my throat. I felt Benoit turn to me, glaring, but I could not bring myself to meet his eyes. I kept looking at the empty stairway.

  “Look at me,” Benoit finally said.

  I turned. His face was burning with such disgust, I shuddered.

  “What the fuck was that about?”

  My entire body went numb. I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out.

  Benoit laughed unpleasantly, hands on his hips, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what was happening, what I was putting him through. “You know, you girls are all the same,” he began, fixing me with hard eyes. “I give you opportunity and you respond with shenanigans. The games. You have no idea how many of girls, almost exactly like you, I’ve seen before. And you wanna know where they are?”

  I swallowed. A face, her face, swam before me—the overlarge eyes, the soft blond curls, everything so familiar to me and yet somehow elusive. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone, and all that was left was my body vibrating with longing. Yes! I wanted to know. Where was she? Tell me! I shouted, only it was just inside my head. On the outside, my head jerked back and forth in a nod.

  “Nowhere!” Benoit took a moment to relish the word. Then he jabbed a finger at me. “They are nowhere because they try to pull something like this on me.” It was almost an admission. He was talking about her, I knew it. I imagined her in my place, and my stomach flipped. Of course he had done it—whatever it was.

  “Is that what—” I started to say and then froze. My mouth went dry, bile climbing up the back of my throat. I could not remember her name.

  “What what?”

  “Your ex—” I said in a rush, unable to recall the Bulgarian term either. “Nice friend? Lady friend? You know what I mean.”

  He gave me a strange look, and I searched my mind desperately, but it was as if a white screen had descended, an oppressive blankness I couldn’t see through nor grasp, everything just sliding, down, do
wn, down when I hit against it.

  “What is her name?” I almost shouted it.

  He flung my hands away—the hands I had raised without realizing, the hands that trembled in anticipation, as if I could pull the answer from him—and growled in disgust.

  “Jesus, have you gone mad?” he shouted, but I was too busy blindly probing that white screen, hitting upon its emptiness again and again and again, to respond.

  “Okay, this is too much,” he said, the corners of his mouth twitching in anger, his hands flying up. I thought he was going to hit me. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, took one deep breath, slipped his aviators from his jacket pocket, and put them on. It felt like that was his true self: nothing but cold mirrors for eyes. “I am going to go downstairs for a coffee,” he said, enacting a stern dad voice. “And when I come back, you better have gotten your shit together.”

  I nodded.

  He stared at me, or I thought he was staring at me, since all I could see was the reflection of the room in his glasses, one long streak of light. “You know, without me you’d be nobody,” he said finally. “I want you to think on that. Nobody.”

  The word reverberated through my body as he left the room, and I listened to the staircase scream with each step of his descent. Nobody.

  Blindly, instinctually, my hands sought out my phone from the pocket of my robe, which was hung over a chair in the corner. I clicked on Instagram, in search of soothing metrics, and red bubbles, numbers that kept going up, the indisputable reassurance that I was who I thought I was. Or, if not that exactly, that I was at least someone. Someone who was Liked. The screen opened up into a colorful vista, someone’s sunset or colonoscopy, I didn’t know—I only saw the numbers at the bottom of the screen as my thumb alighted on that black heart, making it shudder and reveal its contents: 70K new Views, 175 new Followers, 1225 Comments.

  I slid my thumb over my screen, watching the names fly up and disappear and new ones appear. It was more than I had imagined, more than I had dreamed of. A thrill ran through me, pure excitement. I could feel myself grinning as I began to read the Comments that had flooded in. At first, I didn’t notice what the Comments were saying; I was only scanning and registering them as they slid up my screen. But then the familiar shape and size of a certain word began to appear with such frequency that eventually its meaning connected itself to the form.