Fake Halo

by Piper Lennox

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  As I leave, she settles into the beanbag with a magazine and the value-sized Dr. Pepper she got at the airport, probably just because Mom would have a heart attack if she saw her drinking that. My sister’s diet in California is as controlled as the rest of her life: nothing but macrobiotic meals and nutrition shakes that make me gag just smelling them.

  I still wish she’d nap, but at least she’s relaxing for a while. It’s good enough.

  The knock on the door sounds strange without Bowie’s bark or clattering sprint following it. I open it a few inches and find Clara.

  “Shit.” I drag my hand down my face. “I forgot to tell you not to come over.”

  She recoils with a weird smile, like she thinks I’m pranking her. “Why?”

  “I have company, remember?”

  “Oh, right. The germaphobe.”

  I don’t correct her.

  Her eyes linger past my shoulder, studying something before she asks, “Where’s Bowie?”

  “Took him to a kennel for the weekend.”

  Her eyebrows raise. Incrementally, but still—enough for me to tell she’s judging. “Your friend doesn’t like dogs or germs?”

  “Dogs have germs.” Down the hall, I hear Delaney moving. I shrink the gap in the door. “So...see you Monday, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Monday.” Clara shrugs, like she knows this is a good thing, but still can’t make sense of it.

  Before I can close the door, she puts her foot in the way. Her shoes today are black flats with small black bows, probably the only normal ones I’ve ever seen her wear...until I look closer. The beads in the center of each bow are little plastic ears of corn. With faces. Good Lord.

  “Here.” Her hand squeezes through the gap, passing me a bag. “I guess you’ll see him before I do.”

  “Huh?” I step back and open the bag. Inside is a chew bone and set of tennis balls, Bowie’s favorite thing on this planet. The day we cleaned the apartment, Clara couldn’t stop laughing at all the half-mauled tennis balls we swept out from underneath the bed and sofa.

  “Oh, wow.” I look up. “Thank—”

  She’s already gone, nothing but perfume in her place.

  “I’m really glad you called.”

  Stabbing into my fruit bowl, I smile at Ewan and tell him, “Figured a change of scenery was due. Maybe some conversation not interrupted by barking.”

  Breakfast with him feels like it happened by accident, even though I initiated the entire thing. Seeing a woman’s purse on the counter when Wes answered the door gave me a weird feeling I didn’t like. Not jealousy, exactly—but something I knew needed fixing. Fast.

  As soon as I heard Ewan’s voice, I felt better. What did I care if Wes had a girl at his place for the weekend?

  The place I helped him clean, top to bottom, so he could celebrate his birthday with some girl who couldn’t bear to be around his dog.

  I didn’t care. So he had a girl. Big deal.

  I had Ewan.

  When the pitcher of mimosas he ordered arrives, I knock back half of my first glass like a shot. He laughs and scratches his neck.

  “I was going to toast, but....”

  “I’m sorry.” I dab the orange juice off my mouth and nod at him, holding up my glass. “Go ahead.”

  There it is, that charming smile I needed. Straight into my veins, the antidote to everything Wes-related.

  “To first dates.”

  I smile back and tap my glass to his. “So...this is a date?”

  “To be honest,” he whispers, leaning across the bistro table, “I consider this our third. Even if the first two mornings don’t count...they do, to me.”

  After a moment, I lift my glass. “To third dates, then.”

  We clink.

  “Just so you know, I always kiss a girl by the end of the third date.” For all his smiles, I see a twinge of insecurity. “I hope that’s not too forward to say.”

  It is, but I like it. He’s honest. Real. Ewan is as effortlessly charming as Wes is infuriating.

  Stop thinking about him. Even if it’s negative, Wes doesn’t deserve any more of my brain capacity today. Or ever.

  So when Ewan reaches over to hold my hand, telling me I’m beautiful, I make myself get lost in it. After the meal, when he scoots his chair to my side of the table and puts his arm across the back of my seat, I lean into it.

  And when the mimosas are gone and it’s just us on the restaurant’s patio, waiters bustling inside to prepare for the lunch rush, I close my eyes the second Ewan leans forward to kiss me.

  I focus on the butterflies in my stomach, the tingle in my limbs, and the zing of orange juice on his lips...instead of wondering what the hell Wes Durham is doing at this very moment.

  Sixteen

  “Shit. It’s Mom.”

  I glance at Delaney’s phone screen, then crane my neck overtop the crowd. As soon as there’s a gap, I grab her hand and pull her through, right into the first taxi we find.

  “Hey, Mom,” she chirps, while I hold a finger to my lips when the driver looks at us. He motions to the meter; I motion ahead, which loosely translates to, I don’t give a shit where you take us, just stay quiet.

  “No, I was watching a movie. Yes, at home, Mom. Where else would I be?” She elbows me with a smile, but I’m too tense to do one back.

  Sneaking out to New York, while Mom watches Adler do some fashion shoot in Paris, will earn my sister a lecture.

  Me helping her sneak out to New York will get my ass handed to me.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to it. Delaney promised she’d be careful, but so far I’ve had to force her to use hand sanitizer four times, nudge back two people with a cough because she totally failed to notice them, and knock a guy’s cigarette’s out of his hand when we were in SoHo because he kept breathing smoke right in her face. Fucking prick.

  I know I can’t keep her in a bubble, and I honestly don’t want to. By this point, I don’t even need to.

  But, like I said: old habits. And I’m definitely not the only one who’s guilty of it.

  “...and kale chips,” my sister finishes, bullshitting her food log to our mother with ease. In reality, we had pizza. That was one rule I happily let her break. She ate that food like it was edible gold. “Do you need photos of the trash can? My dirty dishes?”

  I hold my breath. Risky move. Mom keeps Delaney at such close range, she might actually call that bluff.

  “I will. I know. I know, Mom, you don’t have to tell me a hundred times. Okay—love you too. Tell Adler hi for me. Bye.”

  Stabbing the end call button, she melts in her seat and stares at me. “She’s ridiculous.”

  “She’s worried.” Not half as much as I am, probably. All I want is to get Delaney out of the crowds and this questionable cab, back in the safety of my apartment, but I know she won’t go for that.

  For my own sanity, I decide to change the subject. Partially. “Did I hear you right? ‘Say hi to Adler for me’? You can’t be serious.”

  “What? I like him. And he makes Mom happy.”

  “He’s my age. It’s gross.”

  “He’s thirty.”

  “Okay: five years older than me. Still gross. If she was dating a twenty-one-year-old, you’d see my point.”

  Delaney rolls her eyes and asks the driver to take us to the Greenway, whichever part is closest. She wants to walk along the Hudson before we grab dinner.

  “Whoa.” Scrolling her phone, she stops and sits up, showing me. It’s the one I made Clara promise she’d link to, and its views have doubled since yesterday. Damn, those girls work fast.

  I play dumb. “What?”

  “784,000 views? And look at all these new comments.” She pulls her phone back and scrolls more, thoroughly confused while she reads, “‘Who else is here from Hurley Twins?’ ‘Came here because of Clara, great vid.’ What the hell’s going on?”

  I shrug an
d keep my mouth shut all the way to the river, letting my sister figure it out on her own. By the time she realizes the Hurleys linked to her video, we’ve arrived.

  I hold the door for her, pass the driver some cash after she gets out, and follow her to the nearest bench.

  “It’s this one, apparently.” She shows me the Hurleys’ description on their latest upload. Sure enough, it has a link at the bottom to Delaney’s video. She scrolls back up and hits Play, telling me, “Sorry, I’ll put my phone away soon—I just want to see what the deal is. Why would they link to me?”

  “Guess they liked your review.” I pretend I’m not watching by glancing at the shimmering surface of the water more than her screen.

  Not surprisingly, Clara did the shoutout alone. Georgia must have been biting her tongue somewhere behind the camera. I bet it killed her, letting Clara do that.

  I wonder what Clara told her to get away with it.

  “Huh. That’s so weird.” Delaney clicks her phone off. “I mean, it’s really cool and nice of them—but I figured they didn’t like me.”

  Time to play dumb again. It’s unnerving, how good I am at that. “Why wouldn’t they like you?”

  “Because I’m your sister.” She laughs, the sound skittering down to the water. “No, but for real...I don’t know why. I just get this weird feeling from Georgia, every time we’ve run into them. First there was Comic-Con, then VidCon…the Summit, the basketball game—”

  “Georgia’s got issues. Don’t take it personally.”

  “I’m probably just being paranoid or something.” Delaney shrugs. “Whatever, doesn’t matter. I’m just glad they liked the video enough to recommend it. I’m, like, so afraid people are going to somehow notice I’m posting pre-filmed content on older products, but I guess no one can tell.”

  “You’ve been laying low for a while,” I remind her. True, she posts something to YouTube or Instagram just about every day—but they’re all from her stockpile. Back when she looked healthy.

  I hate that it’s all I notice, sometimes, even when she’s on the upswing. The thinness of her wrists. The thinness of her hair. Everything about her has faded.

  But not her laugh. Not that smile and shimmer in her eyes when she’s happy.

  Like right now, when she hops to her feet and tells me to get going—we’ve got a lot of walking to do.

  I can’t sleep.

  I refresh my video. The views keep climbing.

  “Back Home,” my song featured at the end of my sister’s video, is over a year old, but it’s now my most-watched upload ever since I started this channel during my sixth month out of rehab.

  The numbers aren’t crazy impressive. Nothing I’d write home about. Especially to Mom, whose opinion amounts to, “If it was good, it’d be on the radio.”

  But the needle’s definitely moving—and all thanks to one little nudge from Clara.

  This has happened only once before: the month after the costume party, when some paparazzi caught me talking to Clara at a charity basketball game. I can’t even remember the conversation. Georgia had stepped on my heel as they left, so we argued for a while. A camera caught that, first.

  Then I pulled Clara back as they walked away, watching her sister get ahead through the crowd, before I steered Clara behind a pillar and asked why she hadn’t emailed me back. I’d only sent her four damn messages, one every single weekend.

  “How’d you get my email?” she’d whispered, shifting her jaw as she angled her chin higher. Trying to play everything just so cool.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I told her, thinking, Maybe don’t leave it tied to your old social media accounts—the ones she had for just her, before she was inextricably linked to her twin on every last platform. I couldn’t believe it didn’t bother her: never getting to be herself, always just half of a brand.

  The rest of the conversation escapes me. The next day, a bunch of entertainment gossip rags and crap blogs had two photos: me and Georgia arguing, then grainy zooms of me with my head ducked low, whispering intently to Clara’s darkened glare.

  It didn’t go viral, exactly, but it got way more traction than I ever expected. My video views spiked. I got comments ranging from how cute Clara and I would be together, to how I should leave her alone because clearly, she wasn’t interested.

  In a reverse of this same trickle effect I’m seeing right now, my sister’s channel and Instagram got a boost, too.

  I power down my phone and put it in the nightstand. It’s the only way I’m going to stop checking this shit and get some sleep.

  Thing is, it’s not my own views I can’t stop looking at. It’s not even Delaney’s views, or the nice comments people are leaving on her video.

  It’s the comments on the Hurleys’ upload.

  What a coincidence Clara’s linking to a video with Wes Durham’s sister in it...not to mention one of Wes Durham’s songs.

  Wes and Clara would be so cute 2gether. Like if u agree.

  There’s more going on.

  Turning off my phone isn’t good enough, apparently. All night, while I keep one ear out for Delaney down the hall, I see those comments on the backs of my eyelids.

  Seventeen

  “I knew it would do this.” Georgia stabs her phone screen and scrolls, lightning-fast, through the comment section of our last upload. “Posting that link stirred up that shit from the basketball game, all over again. Look at this—everyone pissing themselves wondering if you and Durham are secretly dating.”

  I turn away, back into the endless aisles of makeup, when she looks up from the phone to catch my reaction. Other than boredom, I refuse to give one.

  “Let them wonder. It always dies down. Remember when all that stuff went around about you and the dude who got kicked off Survivor?”

  When I look back at her, she gives me a raised eyebrow. Okay, bad example: she was screwing that guy, even if only for a month or so.

  But my point is valid, so I reiterate it. “A few weeks, and everyone forgets.”

  “Why were you so bothered by it back then,” she asks, following me to a lipstick display, “and not now?”

  “Because we have more important things to focus on.” I test a pink on my hand, then hold it out for her inspection. “Too pale?”

  Finally pacified, she takes a breath and squints at it in the impossibly bright lights. “Depends,” she says. “Your side or mine?”

  “I guess yours.” Rue Royale decided the best angle for our product lines was to split them in two: more natural looks to represent Georgia, with all the bold and daring shades of eye shadow, lipstick, and hair dye assigned to me. I hadn’t been crazy about the idea, since we occasionally switch things up—but it does make for a nice hook.

  We’re browsing for our meeting with Sasha tomorrow, who finally caved to my requests (and Georgia’s demands) that we personally choose the colors for the lip kit being released later this year. It’ll have six stains in all—three daytime looks on the “Georgia” side, and three bold ones for “Clara.”

  “This one’s better.” Applying a faint purplish color to her own hand, Georgia looks between the two. “Ooh, can you combine them?”

  “I’ll try.” We buy the lipsticks and head out into the dusk. On the subway, Georgia watches while I try to blend the shades on a page in my sketchbook.

  “They’re too waxy.” I flick off the clumps forming on the paper. “I can try my watercolor pencils when we get home, though.”

  “I really like the color you did on this,” she says, pointing to the corner. I sketched an eye there earlier, after my brunch with Ewan. He walked me to my subway station and held my hand, which somehow felt more forward than our kiss. We made plans to meet up again tonight, and he kissed me goodbye. Drawing was the only thing that could steady my hand on the ride home.

  “Maybe we should add a green shadow to the palette,” Georgia says thoughtfully, tapping her finger against my drawing. “Your side, of course.”

  “It could g
o on yours,” I offer, because I know—much as she loves the angle of “chill versus bold,” as Sasha put it—green is her favorite bright color to wear. Her earrings today are emeralds, in fact, and match the ring on her thumb.

  “Nah, that’s a Clara look.” Slowly, she smirks. “They can name it ‘Saturday Night In.’”

  We lose it, laughing so hard more than a couple people glance our way. In addition to our very different styles, Rue Royale also loves the fact our personalities don’t “match” them, and decided to name our shades accordingly. Sasha called it a twist.

  Example: a light pink on Georgia’s side of the palette is called “First Move,” while a neon pink on mine is currently titled “Shy Girl.”

  Our favorite, though, and the one that made us laugh hysterically in the middle of Rue Royale’s lobby, was “Friday Night In,” a sparkly silver shadow on my side. My homebody tendencies couldn’t even be offended. Georgia couldn’t get over how much of a callout it was.

  “‘Entire Damn Weekend In,’” I add, and Georgia’s in tears holding her side by the time our stop arrives.

  Sunday night, I get a text from Wes.

  “Don’t forget tmw.”

  I’m tempted to respond, “What, like you forgot to tell me not to show up on Saturday?” but I don’t want to actually start a conversation with him. I’ve done a halfway decent job of forgetting he even exists, this weekend.

  “I know,” I write back, instead. Then I return to my conversation with Ewan.

  Ewan: I did something that feels crazy. Please don’t think I’m crazy.

  Clara: You sending flowers to my door this morning kind of already did that. :) My sister was wildly impressed, tho. So points there.

  Clara: ...