Fake Halo

by Piper Lennox

  “Like what?”

  “Hurt yourself, I guess. Or get really drunk and go out alone...I don’t know.”

  “Maybe the fact you can’t think of one realistic example was your first clue I’d be all right.” Self-harm’s never been in my playbook. Mom just can’t fully grasp the fact compulsively pulling out my own hair, even if it bleeds, isn’t masochism.

  “To Mom’s credit, you don’t seem to be handling it well,” she half-smiles, nodding at the Ramen cups on my nightstand, my unwashed face, and—most telling of all—the drawn curtains. Heaps of evidence that the last week and a half has not been my best.

  I pick at the nail polish on my little toe, thinking of when we got pedicures together. It feels like months ago that we sat side-by-side in those chairs, giggling about Rylan and Ewan like two kids playing M.A.S.H. on a field trip.

  It feels like decades since there wasn’t tension between us, most of it undetectable to her. But I felt all of it. Every lie I told her, no matter how much I rationalized it as the truth, tripled this current now rising to the surface as she lies back on the floor and stares at my fan.

  Before I can open my mouth to start some rambling apology, my tears already forming, she asks, “Am I really overbearing and controlling?”

  “Georgia, I wrote that email during a subway ride.”

  She pushes up on her elbows. “And?”

  “And,” I stress, as I slide off the bed to the floor in front of her, “it’s not like I was going for a Pulitzer or something. My word choices, the way I described certain things...I wasn’t giving it much thought to accuracy, you know? I was just spewing it all out as fast as possible, so I could email it to Dr. Dune.”

  “Doesn’t really answer my question.”

  “You can be those things sometimes, but that doesn’t mean you are those things.” I drag my hand along the keychains clipped to my luggage, still packed. Shaking sand from my capris and rinsing pool water from my bralette feel as impossible as washing my face, right now.

  “I won’t lie,” she sighs, sitting up completely, “that email...it had me pretty fucking pissed for a while.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” She’d only ignored my texts, calls, and video chat requests for days until I gave up. The same way, I assume, Wes gave up trying to reach me.

  He stopped dropping by the building six days ago. Stopped calling five days ago.

  Stopped texting four days ago—except for a single message, every night at twelve: Goodnight, Clara.

  I never write back.

  “What were you pissed about specifically?” I ask Georgia, though I’ve got a pretty good idea: every single word.

  “All of it,” she laughs, like she’s read my mind.

  I chew my cheek until I taste copper. “So what made you not pissed, anymore?”

  “Realizing that email,” she says, brow furrowed while she braids the tassels of my rug, “was like—like you cracked open your head and just put it all out there.”

  Nodding, I stop biting my cheek and gnaw at my thumbnail, instead.

  “One night, when I was fuming and stomping everywhere, really being an insufferable bitch about the whole thing”—she smiles when I laugh—“Rylan asked me, ‘If someone scooped out your thoughts, raw and unfiltered, and slapped them into an email, wouldn’t there be a few things about Clara in it?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ And then he said, ‘Would they be completely true?’”

  Impressed, I glance at the door to the living room like I can see Rylan through it. “Would they?”

  “Of course not. Not how they sound in my head, anyway. Because some days I think, ‘God, Clara is way too easy-going.’ Or, ‘Clara’s too damn sensitive.’ Oh, Jesus, don’t give me that puppy dog look!”

  Her laugh shatters the staleness that’s accumulated since I began my new life as a shut-in. For a rookie, I’m shockingly good at this recluse thing, right down to the flinch I give when she crawls onto my mattress and drags me up by the elbow until she can hug me, my head on her chest like the lost kid I’ve become.

  “I’m just saying,” she giggles, “that I might think those things—hell, I might even really feel them, sometimes. But they aren’t totally true. Just like the shit you wrote about me in that email, I know it’s not really how you feel about me. Just a small piece.” She pauses. “But we should still talk shit out.”

  I windmill away and pull my pillow over my face. “No, we shouldn’t.”

  “Clara.”

  “Georgia.” While her fingers crane-lift the pillow off me, I stare at the film festival posters on the wall behind us. “That was an email for my therapist. As in, the professional who gets paid hundreds an hour to talk shit out with me. If I wanted to talk it out with you, I would have.”

  “Yeah, well, you never would’ve wanted to, because you would’ve taken that stuff to your grave. And look, if it helps? I’m not mad anymore. I just want you to know...if I ever do make you feel that way, you should tell me. Call me out. It’s not going to hurt my feelings.”

  “Even the part about us needing time away from each other? Distance?” I challenge, spitting my words into the air like a loogie I know is just gonna arc back and land in my own eye.

  Georgia’s hesitation answers for her, before she actually summons some words. “I’ll work on it. Don’t laugh, I’m serious! I know I need less alone time than you do, and less space. That’s just how I am. But it’s time I start remembering how you are, more often. Especially when it comes to our job.”

  I nod, even though this Band-Aid slapped on the wound isn’t what I wanted. All I really wanted was to talk to Dr. Dune until the feelings went away. But maybe that’s impossible.

  Maybe that’s why no therapist has “fixed me” to my liking.

  “Gotta say,” Georgia muses, as she gets up and observes the full layout of my new hermit kingdom, “you have not reacted like I thought you would.”

  “How did you think I’d react, with all my secrets plastered across the internet?” By someone I inexplicably trusted, despite all signs pointing firmly to, Girl, Don’t Fucking Do That.

  “Honestly?” She inspects a chewed-up pencil before dropping it back onto the sketch I started last night and couldn’t finish: the sunset over Theo’s infinity pool, everyone’s underwater forms shivering into the ripples until it looked like they were melting. Only their heads are in focus, inky silhouettes along the waterfall edge.

  “Yeah. Honestly.” My nerves are firecrackers ready to snap, but my curiosity is the flame crawling down the wick. Too late to stop it.

  “I figured you’d be relieved.”

  After all the silence, my laugh doesn’t sound right to me. It’s loud and rigid. “Relieved?”

  “You don’t have to hide the trich stuff anymore.” Her hands motion to my hat, then the makeup I’m not wearing. “I mean, I know it’s not like you’ll walk around showing everybody—but that panic you always get that someone will find out? You literally can’t feel that now. No one can find out, because they already know.”

  My stomach turns and I have to swallow the acid down, so it can damage my esophagus instead of the trash can or toilet bowl for the twentieth time this week. Reflexive vomiting is just one piece of proof my sister couldn’t be more wrong. Panic is alive and well.

  “Rue Royale’s going to drop us.” Tears sting my bottom eyelids, where I picked some lashes last night in my half-sleep.

  That’s how it all started, actually: an eyelash. Whatever malfunction in my brain I have, whatever blip in my DNA I’ve got that Georgia doesn’t, was set in motion with one tiny childhood sin.

  Our mother wiped a fallen eyelash from Georgia’s cheek when we were at Disneyland. “Make a wish,” she told her, and I’d watched with my six-year-old fingers dusted in churro sugar as Georgia squeezed her eyes shut, blew the lash off Mom’s fingertip, and smiled before biting into her mouse-shaped ice cream bar.

  That night, sunburned and wired from my nap in the car, I t
ugged at my bottom eyelashes until I felt a pinprick. A pop. Something indescribable that my mind was quick to memorize, and quicker to adore.

  The feeling stuck with me, but so did the sight of that eyelash between my fingertips. I liked the unexpected length: how much had been hidden beneath the skin, now revealed. I liked the white bulb on the end.

  It was completely innocent, but it destroyed me.

  So last night, when I became conscious enough to realize what I was doing, I looked at the lashes on my fingers and cried. I sobbed. I thought of each one as a wish I knew wouldn’t come true, so I didn’t bother making them. Instead of blowing them like dandelion seeds, I wiped them on the bed sheets.

  Sitting up now, I look at my bedding and try to spot them. Any of them. There are probably thousands, millions of hairs and eyelashes and brows in these fibers. In the rug. In our laundry, in the trash, in our sewage systems.

  In Brooklyn. In Santa Barbara. In Berkeley, where my mom vacuums and dusts our old room religiously but will never find them all.

  In the Hamptons—because even at my happiest, that high peak before the fall, I couldn’t stop myself.

  My sobs don’t shock me. They’ve become a new companion this week.

  They do shock Georgia.

  “Hey, look at me. Fuck Royale.” Her hand slides under my chin and pries my face up from my knees. “If they drop us over this, they’re idiots. We’ll take an offer from one of the others.”

  “What others?” I wrench away from her the way you’d cower from a slap, even though all she was trying to do was hug me. Right now, both feel unbearable. “No one will want us after this, Georgia. You think some other company will be dying to sell hair products from a girl who pulls hers out like she’s insane?”

  “I know it’s been...harder, this year. But once you get it back under control—”

  “There isn’t any. I don’t have control.” I look at my hands, shaking and tense. They ache when I clench them into fists, and burn when I push them into my eye sockets and cry some more.

  “It’s getting worse.” My whisper gasps itself out. It’s the sharpest truth.

  The only secret I had left.

  I hear Georgia draw a breath in the cracked-glass silence. She’s probably going to tell me what she always does: to remember this disease has seasons, that it waxes and wanes. That some days are bad, and some are good.

  Therapists love reminding me of this, too. I guess they think it’s a comfort, assuring me all downward spirals are temporary.

  The only problem? It reminds me all upward trends are temporary, too. No matter how close I get to cured, it always comes back.

  Maybe my sister does know this, though, because for once…she doesn’t say it.

  “If the products fall through,” she says quietly, “I don’t care.”

  If not for the waterworks clogging my throat, I’d laugh at her. Georgia was thrilled to learn companies wanted to slap our faces and names on products. I’d thought it was kind of cool, sure—but to her, it was a dream come true.

  Same with our channel gaining traction, and fans beginning to recognize us and stop us on the street. Same with our typical lives flipping to something unrecognizable, in the blink of an eye.

  I’ve ruined it all for her.

  “Stop.” Her hands wipe the tears off my chin and fling them to the ground like dirty dishwater. “We won’t lose anything except shit that wasn’t meant to be ours in the first place.”

  I hate that I immediately picture Wes.

  Georgia blinks the glassiness out of her own eyes and takes a breath that, somehow, makes me feel a little better. “Guess this is a bad time to tell you we’ve got a meeting with Sasha later this week.”

  My laugh-sob fills the space between us. “Terrible time.”

  “But at least we’ll know.” Ever practical, my sister shrugs and plants her hands on my shoulders, steering me out the door and into the bathroom. “For now, let’s get you out of this room and somewhere with good food and cheap wine. Shower, brush your teeth, fix your face.”

  When Georgia shuts the door and goes to talk to Rylan, I brace both hands on the sink and lean close to the mirror. Streaks paint it with every hard exhale I give as my body recovers from the crying.

  Though I’ve memorized it all, I take stock: thin brows, gaps in my lashes, and an arc of pale skin over my ear like a scar.

  It’ll grow back.

  It’s a season.

  The last few tears roll down my face as I touch the damage, then undress and look at the rest: bumps in my bikini zone, fresh pinpricks on my calves, and irritated skin under my arms.

  If Wes saw all this now, the worst damage I’ve ever done to myself...could he still call me beautiful with a straight face?

  The shower pummels me until it’s too hard to breathe, until all I can do is stand there and remember his hands churning body wash into bubbles on my skin, his whispered plans dripping down the tile. His fingertip penetrating the last virgin part of me.

  His breathless but confident voice, warning me that what I was about to experience would be unlike anything I had before.

  That he was about to claim not just this pivotal first...but everything else I had, too.

  I wish he’d warned me sooner.

  Maybe the first time we slept together. Maybe that day in his beanbag chair, when I became utterly addicted to him.

  No…he should have warned me long before all that, in the cabana.

  Then again, maybe he did.

  “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

  Thirty-Five

  “You look like shit. Better not be popping pills again.”

  I step aside, but still get hit by Van’s duffel as he shoves his way into my apartment. The door hits something when I try to close it behind him.

  It’s a foot, belonging to Fairy Lights.

  “Shit,” I tell her, “I’m sorry, F—” Oof. Her wince tells me I wasn’t fast enough at hiding the nickname, but we both smile like I was. “Juniper. I, uh…didn’t know you were there.”

  Her gaze shoots to Van, like she’s not surprised he didn’t tell me. “It’s fine. And call me Juni. Thanks for letting us stay here while the Transit gets fixed.”

  “Oh. Of course.” God, the poor girl looks like a tissue my cousin blew his nose in. A toothpick he used, then flicked out on the highway. It’s obvious she likes him—or used to—and yet here’s Van, strutting around like he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about her.

  Is this how I made Clara feel?

  The only redemption would be that I liked Clara, but that actually makes it worse. Who pretends to blackmail the person they like?

  “Are you?” Van asks, after I take Juniper’s bag and show her where the bathroom is. He kicks his shoes off and puts his feet on my coffee table. I shove them off on my way to the other end of the couch.

  “Am I what?”

  “Popping hydros and shit again. You look awful, dude.”

  Part of me knows Van is exaggerating. That’s his M.O. in life: make everything sound worse than it is. But I also know I don’t look great, right now.

  “Haven’t slept,” I tell him, automatically picking up a controller when he does. We start a game. It’s easier to talk like this.

  “How goes things with Hurley?”

  “Don’t. You know damn well how things are. Everyone saw that email.”

  Within two seconds, he’s drained half my character’s life because I can’t get my button-mashing up to par. Everything I try lately feels wrong, like my hands don’t know what to do now that they can’t touch her every day.

  “But no,” I add firmly, “I’m not back on my old bullshit. Probably had more beers than I should, the last few nights...but no pills, dude.”

  Van nods slowly, eyes glued to the screen. “Just wondering.”

  I’m not fooled. He really was worried. I wouldn’t be surprised if he broke Juniper’s van himself, just to have an excuse to come check on me.


  “Wes?” She appears in the hallway, shuffling her feet. “Is it okay if I take a shower? I didn’t get a chance before we left Theo’s.”

  “Yeah, of course. Towels are in the hall closet, extra soap under the sink if you need it.” Even I can hear that my voice is too kind. Why I’m suddenly feeling the need to mentally apologize on behalf of Van, I have no idea.

  All right, that’s a lie. I know exactly why I’m doing it: because I can’t get Clara to accept mine.

  “Heard you’ve been pretty shitty to her,” I say quietly, even though the shower’s blasting louder than our game.

  “Heard you should mind your own business.” Van whoops as he annihilates my character again. “And let’s not forget, I’m not the one who leaked a girl’s email to her therapist.”

  I punch him hard enough to bruise his arm. With any luck, it’ll black out that stupid paper airplane tattoo on his shoulder. “I didn’t release it, asshole. I don’t know how it got out.”

  “For real?” He sets a cigarette between his lips, readying to light it until I shove him to the balcony. We sit and slide the door shut behind us.

  “Someone hacked my computer. I need to find a guy who can trace that stuff, but I don’t even know where to start.”

  Blowing clouds into the skyline, Van laughs, “Bet Hurley didn’t believe that for one second, huh?”

  I sigh. “Nope.”

  Thing is, I can’t even blame Clara. Much as I wish she’d hear me out, I completely understand why she won’t. That screenshot of my browser is damning evidence.

  Then there’s the fact that—well, I’m me.

  “A bunch of people think it’s just a stunt you guys came up with,” he says, ashing over the railing like a barbarian.

  “Really, dude?” I snap, then slide him an empty glass I left out here. “And what do you mean, ‘stunt?’”

  “You know, for publicity. And some are saying you hacked her email, then blackmailed her or something.”

  He says it like it’s the most ridiculous option, but also like it’s the easiest one for him to buy.

  And that makes it ten times harder to explain, “I didn’t hack her. She sent it to me by mistake. But the blackmail stuff…yeah. That’s true.”