Fake Halo

by Piper Lennox

  Most people don’t. It’s such an overused trope that even diehard fans write it off as predictable, which it is. But I always thought it was my funniest performance.

  “We would be in tears laughing,” Clara finishes quietly, “every time we watched that one.”

  Heat sweeps across me. Why am I embarrassed?

  And why, when anyone else praising that show just pisses me off, do I love that Clara’s doing it right now?

  “You must have been a big fan,” Mom nods politely, flashing her veneers. “If you ever make it out to Burbank—that is, if my stubborn son ever decides to visit his family again—I’ll have to show you the memorabilia cabinet in our study. There’s some props, an original script...oh, gosh, I think we even have one of those lanyards from the Fan Club! Wes, honey, do you remember those?” she laughs. “It was that hideous bright pink with—”

  “With a bright yellow strap,” Clara pipes up, even though her voice is so quiet the chatter around us should drown it out, “and ‘Chasing the Chases’ printed all over it.”

  Mom falters a bit, then laughs. “You were in the Fan Club?” To me, she stage-whispers, “Hang on to that one, darling. So, Clara, were you at any of the fan events? Maybe we met you and didn’t even realize it.”

  She says it almost as a joke, but Clara nods. Mom leans forward in amazement. I freeze in complete shock.

  “It wasn’t actually a fan club event. It was the Coast Awards, a year or so after the show had ended. But all the old VIPs from the Chases club got discounted tickets, to stand outside along the carpet while celebrities went in.”

  Try as I might, I can’t remember the show she’s talking about to save my life. Then again, it would’ve happened when I was deep in my scientific study on how comfortable a human can get at rock bottom. My memories from those years are gapped at best, and flat-out hallucinations at worst.

  “Anyway...I got to meet him.” Clara looks at my mom, not me.

  “Bet that wasn’t pretty,” Mom laughs, trying to make it sound bittersweet. In reality, she’s just numbed herself to all my darkest years. They remind her too much of her own.

  And the way Clara shrugs her shoulders and pushes her plate away...I get the feeling she’d like to numb herself to it, too.

  Twenty-Three

  The rest of the meal passes in a haze. When the waiter brings our check, I pass him my debit card without checking the total. I just want to get out of here.

  “Thank you for lunch, honey,” Mom says, between the no-contact kisses she does on either side of my face when we’re on the sidewalk. I return her hug and tell her to have a safe flight home; she’s leaving early tomorrow, once Adler finishes yet another photo shoot. Funny how she harangues me for not visiting, yet she’ll take any excuse to live in a plane instead of her house.

  As soon as her taxi leaves, I turn and follow Clara.

  “Thank you,” I breathe, pushing back my hair while every muscle melts. “You made that so much easier than facing her alone. We usually end up arguing.”

  “No problem.” She pauses. “Thanks for lunch.”

  I feel my brow sink as I look at her. “I didn’t know you were such a huge fan.” My mouth spits out the correction as fast as humanly possible: “Of my mom, I mean.”

  “I’m not.” Clara touches up her lipstick at the crosswalk. “While she was giving you hell, I had my phone pulled to her Wikipedia page under the table. Figured if I kept her busy talking about herself, she’d forget to criticize you.”

  My laugh is so loud, a bunch of people look back at us like they’re debating whether to cross with us or hang back. As soon as the road’s clear, she and I start to the other side.

  “Well, that was...fucking masterful, if I’m being honest.”

  “It was nothing.”

  We’re quiet until we’re a few blocks from the subway. “Subway or cab?” I ask, fully expecting her to choose the former. With as much as she loves the subway, you’d think she just moved here yesterday. The novelty wore off for me about ten minutes into my first trip, when a guy sneezed so directly on my neck I wondered who paid him to do it.

  Without answering, she hails a cab.

  I wait about seven blocks before deciding to get it over with.

  “Did we really meet before?” I ask. She looks at me. “At the Coast Awards?”

  “Yep.” She draws a serrated breath and pins her hands between her knees, lips drawn in. “I asked you to sign a poster, and you....” Her trailing sentence blends into a laugh, but it’s so jittery even the driver glances back here. “You said, ‘Why? Are you dying or something?’”

  Blood fills my ears. “I said that?”

  “Yeah.” Swallowing so hard it hurts my throat just to hear it, she adds, “You asked if I had cancer. And when I said no, you asked why my hair was so short and thin.”

  “Shit...Clara. I don’t even remember that, I was on so many fucking pills. I’d never—”

  My mouth snaps shut, knowing it’s just an excuse. Completely true...but completely useless, anyway.

  “You would have been...sixteen?” I ask.

  “Seventeen. It was about two years before we started our channel. Look, Wes, it was forever ago. I was way too old to get upset about it.”

  The hitch in her voice tells me she still did. I wish I could trade with her: that she could have the blissful ignorance of that day my prescription lobotomy granted me, and that I’d have to carry this memory around with the vividness she obviously does.

  “Besides,” she says quietly, “you went to rehab the next year, so I was like, ‘Okay, that makes sense, he was high on pills.’ I know you didn’t mean to say that stuff.”

  “That doesn’t make it okay, Clara.”

  The steel in my voice seems to shock her, but we don’t speak again until we’re back at the apartment.

  “Ewan?” I ask, when her phone pings in the elevator and she instantly smiles. I love seeing her smile.

  I fucking hate that it’s because of him.

  “What if it is?” She texts him back, then drops her phone into her bag with a flourish.

  “I don’t get what you see in him.”

  Besides the fact he doesn’t treat her like a personal assistant, didn’t insult her when all she wanted was a simple autograph, and doesn’t question her taste in men every chance he gets.

  “He’s nice.”

  “He’s dull. You don’t deserve dull.”

  Clara tilts her head. “What do I deserve, then?”

  “Someone even half as interesting as you are. That crazy accent is the only remotely noteworthy thing about him, and it’s not even cool. It’s a headache.” I try to stop my next jab, but can’t. “You really want that garbled mess moaning your name when he comes? You want to top off what’ll no doubt be the most vanilla, stationary sex of your life with him butchering your name like that?”

  Getting her to laugh feels so damn good, I almost let my brain forget the whole awards show incident.

  It’d be easy. Bury it, never mention it again.

  Easy, but wrong.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Clara looks up from Bowie when we’re in my place, watching me shut the door behind me. “For insulting Ewan?”

  “For the awards thing. What I said to you...it wasn’t okay. And the fact I can’t remember it feels even worse. But I can promise you one thing with absolute certainty—I didn’t mean it how it sounded.”

  “You can’t promise that if you don’t even remember it.”

  “Yes, I can. All the pills fucking obliterated my filter, but I still would’ve held my tongue if I’d meant it as an insult.”

  “All the stuff you used to spew at paparazzi begs to differ.”

  “An insult to a fan,” I correct, leaning hard against the sofa and staring at her. “I swear, Clara, I was just asking to ask. Even if it didn’t sound that way. I know myself. I wouldn’t insult a fan. And I wouldn’t make a joke about cancer.”

  Her eyes loo
k glassy in the light, but she blinks before I can be sure. “Let’s just drop it. Okay?”

  I nod, but I can’t drop it. Not until I’ve made it right, or at least one percent better. “Is that why you’ve always hated me?”

  “It’s why Georgia has always hated you,” she smiles, ruffling Bowie’s ears before standing. “She holds grudges forever.”

  “For once, I think I agree with your sister. I wouldn’t forgive me, either.”

  “Honestly...it wasn’t like it shattered me, or whatever. I had some stupid little celebrity crush growing up, that was all. So getting to meet you in person was, like...a nostalgia thing, not a legit ‘fan girl’ moment. It sucked, but it would have sucked a lot more if it happened when I was younger.”

  I can’t help my smile. When she perches herself on the edge of the sofa, I hop over the back and join her. “You had a crush on me?”

  “I had a crush on Charlie Chase. Not really the same thing.”

  Slowly, I feel my smile dim until I’m just plain forcing it. “Guess you’re right.”

  Her text notification sounds again. She ignores it.

  “Leaving old Ewan on Read, huh?”

  “He wants to cook me dinner tonight. I don’t know what to tell him.”

  “Maybe that he can fuck off back to Narnia, or wherever he’s from.”

  Her smile returns, sideways and small. “Damn, he really gets under your skin, doesn’t he?”

  “Conflict of interest. He wants to fuck you, I want to fuck you—we can’t both get what we want. That makes him my competition.”

  “Hardly. I actually like him.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Keep chipping away at my ego.”

  “You’ve got plenty to spare.”

  I sit back against the cushions and smile, shaking my head.

  “Do you really think he wants to sleep with me?”

  While she picks at a stain in the fabric, I laugh, “How could he not? Look at you.”

  Her eyes meet mine briefly, all the blood pooling in her face again.

  “I’ve only had two real boyfriends in my life,” she says, a moment later. “Both dumped me as soon as we slept together.”

  “You must be really bad at sex.”

  She kicks me, suppressing her smile and waiting until I’m done laughing to go on. “It was because of the hair-pulling.”

  “I thought you’d never told anyone about the trich.”

  “I haven’t.” A beat later, she does a double-take. “You know what it’s called?”

  “Might have pulled up the Wikipedia page for it at some point.”

  Clara draws her knees close, until she remembers she’s in a skirt and crosses her legs far too primly for my liking. I’d prefer to turn that skirt into a belt.

  “Only Georgia, my mom, and my therapists know about it. And you. But those guys saw enough evidence to get scared off.”

  “Like what?”

  “Brace yourself, but the eczema on my legs that doesn’t look like eczema? It’s not eczema.”

  Hand over my heart, I gasp. Clara laughs and sighs at the same time.

  When she grows serious again, so do I.

  “Since I pull out my leg hair, I get a lot of ingrown ones when they come back. And then I dig those out, not really noticing or caring what it does to my skin in the process: I just feel this urge to pull the hair out, no matter what it takes.”

  “A few scabs seriously scared those guys off?”

  “Well, there were also all these little…habits. Spending forever in the bathroom. Never staying the night, because I didn’t want them seeing me without my makeup. Never going to the beach with them, or the gym. Stuff like that.”

  “Was it really that noticeable? I mean...I never would have noticed, if you hadn’t told me.”

  She didn’t tell you. She made a typo. One I’m certain she still regrets, because God knows I didn’t make it easy for her to forget it.

  “If I didn’t have my makeup on, yeah. Back then. Right now my focus is kind of limited to my legs and scalp. It moves. Sometimes I’ll go months not doing it much at all, from anywhere. Then other times...I don’t know, stress gets to me, or boredom, and it’s this cycle I can’t break for a while.” Carefully, she touches her hat. “Right now I’m waiting for the hair on this side to grow back. I’ve got until fall.”

  Slowly, the reason why dawns on me. “Because of your hair care line.”

  “Rue Royale probably doesn’t want to gamble on a girl with bald patches selling hair dye and conditioning masks,” she laughs, but it’s so bitter and broken, I can’t even smile.

  “So what was the deal with those guys, if they didn’t actually know about the pulling? How do you know they dumped you over it?”

  “The first one broke up with me because I got a pixie cut, and he decided he ‘just couldn’t feel attraction to a woman with short hair.’”

  “You’re kidding me.” Sure, everyone’s got their preferences—but for one thing, Clara’s stunning no matter what her hair’s doing. I never was a fan of the girls-with-short-hair thing, either...until I saw her.

  Well: until I saw her and was clean enough to actually remember it.

  And for another, even if you hated pixie cuts with all your heart and soul—how could you dump a girl you cared about over something so trivial?

  “Maybe if I’d warned him I was doing it,” she shrugged. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. So much of my hair was growing back in different lengths, and it was bugging me, which made me pull it out more...so one day Georgia was like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just cut it all the same length.’ So I let her do it.”

  “That’s brave as hell. I’d never let my sister cut my hair.”

  Her shoulders sink into the cushions. “I was terrified, at first. We were in the bathroom about to start, and I got to hyperventilating, crying, all that. Then all of the sudden, Georgia took a big section of her own hair...and she cut it. Right down to a couple inches. She handed me the scissors and said, ‘Now you have to fix my hair. Cut it all short. And by the time you’re done, you’ll love it so much you’ll be begging me to do yours the same way.’”

  The tears in her eyes are no match for the smile she gives, sharing this memory. I get her a tissue. “You’re making it pretty hard for me to keep disliking Georgia, you know.”

  Her laugh breaks through the tears. “Her heart’s a lot bigger than her mouth. You guys could actually get along, if you both weren’t so stubborn.”

  “In a perfect world.”

  “Anyway,” she goes on, waving her hand, “my second boyfriend saw some of the marks from the ingrown hairs around my...” She reddens. “...area, the morning after we slept together, and assumed I had an STD.”

  “So in other words, he had no fucking idea what an STD looks like.”

  My joke doesn’t relax her. “I let him believe it. It seemed easier than telling him the truth. Less embarrassing.”

  “Weird logic.”

  “Yeah, well—I’ve got a weird brain. I don’t know why I keep pulling out my hair, but I really can’t stop.”

  On her lap, her fingers tense into fists.

  “You’ve got no idea what it’s like to hate your own hands so much. And your own mind. When I get in that...that trance, where it’s all I can do until something external makes me stop? It’s like I’m not even me.” Her bottom lip shakes a little. It takes everything I have not to steady it, somehow. “I’m just the illness.”

  Bowie, hearing her sniff, flops his head into her lap and whines. He’s good at that: sensing when someone is upset. As soon as she smiles and pets him, the tears drying a little, I remind myself to get him a treat later.

  “I do know how it feels.”

  Clara glances at me, until Bowie hops up to lick her tears. Laughing as she shoves him down, she asks, “What?” then throws a tennis ball to get him away for a while. In the dog-free silence, she gets serious again, waiting.

  “Hating your own brain, and your hands, fo
r doing this thing you know is wrecking your life?” My fingers run along the seam in my pant leg. “I know what that’s like.”

  “Pills,” she half-asks, nodding when I do.

  “Well,” I say, inhaling as I stand and stretch, “I can tell you one thing: I would never dump you over that stuff.”

  “You,” she counters, propping her head in her hand against the armrest, “wouldn’t date me to begin with.”

  “Never say never, princess.” After she rolls her eyes, I ask, “Is that why you don’t want to go to dinner at Ewan’s? You’re scared he’ll want to go all the way and see something he doesn’t like?”

  She uncrosses her legs, then does them the other way and brushes off some invisible lint instead of answering.

  “Clara.”

  “I don’t know, okay?” she snaps. Her fingers twist together, fidgeting with her rings. “Maybe if I make things go slower with him, you know...let him get to know me before we do that, he won’t....”

  I wait, but not long. “He won’t care about the trich? You aren’t some thirty-day trial, Clara. A guy shouldn’t have to fall in love with you before he accepts a flaw that, honestly, isn’t that big a deal.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “To you. A guy who’s worth your time should see past it immediately. He should be able to know, within five minutes of meeting you, that there’s a hell of a lot more to you than that. And if he can’t? He doesn’t deserve you.”

  “I don’t need dating advice from you, Durham.” Clara stands and yanks her bag onto her shoulder, heading to the door with stabbing strides. I still beat her there and block the exit.

  “Don’t call me that. And it’s not advice, it’s fact. You being scared Ewan will reject you over this proves me right: you can do better.”

  “How kind of you to worry over me. I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with you just wanting to fuck me.”

  “Why do you think I want to fuck you, even knowing about the hair stuff? It’s because I don’t care.”

  She tries to shove past, but I back up against the door and plant myself there. I don’t want her running out of here, right into Ewan’s arms.