by Piper Lennox
“It’s Catherine again,” Georgia sighs at her trilling phone. “What do I tell her?”
“I really don’t want to do an interview.” Understatement of the year. I think I’d rather get a televised colonoscopy à la Couric.
“Maybe it’ll be better to get a jump on things,” Georgia whispers, before taking the call.
I know what she means: not just get a jump on quashing rumors...but to beat Wes to the cameras. Give my side before he can spin his.
I don’t want to believe he’d do that.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to believe a lot of things.
“See if PopNova will move it to the day after tomorrow,” I whisper to Georgia, who relays my tentative acceptance to our agent, who shouts through the earpiece to me that she loves me and won’t make me do any interviews after this, pinky promise.
Georgia holds it back to her ear. “Okay, so yeah, we— What?” She furrows her brow, then blinks. “Oh. No, yeah, that makes sense. Just...weird, I guess, but whatever. Yep. Bye.”
Slowly, she pulls the phone away and ends the call.
“What?”
“They only want you for the interview.” Her teeth sink into the corner of her lip. “I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m not being some jealous bitch over here about it. I just....”
I wait, unsure, for once, of how she planned to finish her sentence. That was my first thought: that she was a little jealous. Georgia loves interviews exactly as much as I hate them.
“What if they ask you something you don’t want to answer? Or they start getting mean?”
“I can stand up for myself,” I tell her, and can’t even be mad at her scoff because I say this in the softest, bruises-like-a-peach voice there is.
“Is that what you meant by ‘overbearing?’” She grabs the belt loop of my jeans, keeping us together as we melt into the crowd pouring down the subway stairs. “Am I too protective?”
“Sometimes.” I steer us through the bodies to the platform, which is usually the role she takes. Human shield, navigational system, and verbal cattle-prod to keep the world’s obstacles out of my way. I bet she’s letting me take the lead on purpose.
Letting go of my jeans, she fishes through her purse for some mints; we’re meeting Rylan at our place, then going to dinner. On him. He invited me personally via text, too, instead of through Georgia. If I wasn’t so happy she’s happy, I’d be bitter about how close to perfect he is.
“I don’t do it because I think you’re weak,” she says, shouting as the train charges into the station. “I just do it. I don’t even think.”
My nod is more of a sarcastic “sure” versus actual agreement.
“For real, Clara, I don’t.”
“It might not be a conscious thought,” I tell her as we slide into some empty seats beside a guy with more cabbage than I’ve ever seen in one grocery bag, “but you do think of me as weak and timid. This...startled little doe. At least sometimes.”
For two stops, she’s silent. The guy with the cabbage gets off, along with the smattering of people around us, until the back of our car is almost empty.
“Not to point fingers,” she says, “but that’s kind of on you.”
“What? How?”
“You’re not shy, but you’re too quiet when your voice matters most. Like, yeah, sometimes I speak before you get the chance, or I’ll talk for you without realizing it—but there are plenty of times I hold my tongue to give you the chance, and then you just clam up.” From the way her ears redden, I know she’s getting mad.
“And you can be really—and I mean this in the least offensive way possible, not that there is one—but you can be really insecure at times, then brave as hell during others. Your confidence only comes out when you think you’ve got nothing to lose.” Her eyes bounce to mine, then back to a smear of dried gum on the floor. “Not when you should be fighting for what you deserve.”
Brave as hell. Wes said that about me once, too: when I told him the origin of our pixie cuts.
But Georgia’s right. Letting her cut my hair wasn’t confidence. I’d felt backed into a corner with no other real options, unless I wanted shaggy, uneven hair forever.
I’d had nothing to lose. Especially once she cut that first lock of her own hair, passed me the scissors, and ordered me to fix it for her.
“I guess you’re right.” My fingers adjust the edge of my hat. It’s a thicker, larger knit beanie than my others, to hide the bald patch that spread like a serpent to the back of my scalp. Last night I had a nightmare it wrapped from one ear to the other, becoming a gruesome crown everyone recoiled from, but then swiftly pretended they didn’t notice. Then, eventually, they pretended they couldn’t even see me.
When we step aboveground again, clearing the stale air of the train from our lungs, I stumble. “Ow, son of a bitch.”
Wedged into the front of my sandal is a bottle cap. Ginger ale.
“You haven’t asked me about Wes.” I close my hand around the cap and feel the imprints of the crimped edge before dropping it into my pocket. Her footsteps slow, until we’re walking side-by-side underneath the construction scaffolding near our home. “But I know you want to.”
“Guess that’s me being insecure.” Jaw shifting, she aims a vague smile at the ground. “I’m scared you’ll tell me what I think you’ll tell me.”
“Which is?”
“That you fell for him.” The smile’s gone.
“Maybe I did.” I blink the mist from my eyes. God, I’m so tired of crying. It’s another thing I envy about her: I’ve seen Georgia cry maybe five times in adulthood, and one of those was when she broke her nose during our final field hockey match in high school, so it doesn’t really count.
Stoic, Mom always called her. Funny—she said it like it was a bad thing, or a mixed blessing at best, because she never knew what Georgia was feeling. It was the same way she called me sensitive, for the opposite reason. I’ve always shown the world my hand.
That’s why my secrets mattered so much. They were the only cards I could hold close.
We pause outside our building and kick the chalk nubs left behind from the kids upstairs, until the only thing we can think to do is crouch and draw.
“It’s true,” I tell her, while I finish off what I think was meant to be a barn, and she scribbles balloons around a birthday cake. “The rumor about him blackmailing me.”
“Please tell me dating him was some elaborate honeypot thing to screw him over.”
My smile’s sad, but realer than I expected it to be. “It wasn’t. Believe it or not...I was actually attracted to him.”
Not “was.” Am.
Always will be, if fate decides to uphold its reputation of being so cruel.
The truth simmers in my throat like bile. I don’t swallow it down, for once.
“We hooked up, the night of the masquerade party. I really didn’t know it was him, though. Not until later.”
“I know.”
“Yeah,” I nod. Of course she knows. Like millions of other people, she’s read the email.
Searching my face, and probably reading my mind, she shakes her head and sits cross-legged on a giant chalk spiral. “No, I meant I’ve known. I knew the day after it happened.”
The red chalk slips from my hand and rolls, sounding like a glass test tube. “You knew? How?”
“I saw you sneak off with that guy in the mask during the party.” Sticking her thumbnail between her teeth, she chews it a moment before remembering the chalk dust there. She spits against her shirt hem and grimaces, then laughs, “Actually, I followed you when you snuck off. My instinct was to get all protective and stop you two. But then I saw you guys going to that cabana and I just had this thought, like... ‘Would I want Clara to stop me, right now?’ So I just made sure you were okay...and then I left.”
I’m shocked. And impressed. “That must have been really hard to do.”
“It was. I didn’t sleep until the front desk guys b
rought you upstairs.”
“I don’t even remember that.” My mental images skip straight from falling asleep with Wes, to waking in my suite bright and early when Georgia vomited into the wire mesh trashcan by her bed before realizing she was, essentially, vomiting into a sieve.
“I was so pissed he didn’t bring you upstairs himself. But obviously I couldn’t say anything.”
“Because you were hungover?”
“No,” she laughs, flinging a purple fragment at me, “because I wanted to let you have that secret. The whole ‘boy in the mask on the beach’ thing, it seemed right up your alley. I figured if you wanted to tell me about it, you would.”
“When did you find out it was Wes?”
“Same moment you did.” Anger darkens her face. “When he dropped that mask in the lobby, and you freaked the hell out—I knew it had to be him.”
She gets to her feet, holding out her dusty hands for me to grab. I smile my thanks as she pulls me up, but I’m not just grateful for that.
“You were giving me space,” I say, feeling like I just discovered the combination to a lock I was convinced got rusted shut.
“Told you,” she smiles, a touch of sadness on her lips. “I really do try to be less...Georgia, so you get a chance to be Clara.”
I smile back. For the first time in days, my heart doesn’t feel cracked when I do it.
“Of course,” she goes on, folding her arms and leaning against the brick wall under the lobby window, “I got real damn Georgia about the whole thing afterwards, when I saw how much he’d screwed with your head.”
“Is that why you started commenting on his videos?”
“All right, so it wasn’t exactly mature of me. But it did make me feel better, in a petty kind of way.”
“Noticed your comments got a little nicer, the last few weeks.” I fold my arms too and join her. “Any particular reason?”
“I got brunch with Rylan one morning and saw you walking into Wes’s building.” She peels a hangnail and flicks it to the sidewalk. “I assumed you guys were, like…secretly dating, or something. And even though I was mad you were hiding it, I figured I might as well try to not hate him.”
“Now that must have been difficult. Being nice to him for my sake. Even if it was anonymous.”
“There’s no way he doesn’t know Kawaii43 is me,” she snorts. “I hate admitting it, but he’s smart. I bet he figured it out as soon as I posted my first comment.” Georgia toes the edge of a blue balloon she drew. “And if not, he definitely figured it out when I called him an asshole in my last one.”
There’s the cracked-heart laugh again. Not because I disagree with her assessment—just because, for a few weeks, I let myself forget how deeply I believed it too.
“So.” She draws a breath. “Do you really believe his whole ‘I got hacked’ thing?”
“No. I wish I could.” I wish it more than I wish my email never reached him at all.
Georgia taps my chin with her fist. “Cheer up. You’re not the first girl to get fooled by a gorgeous face.”
It wasn’t just his face, I think. It was his voice, his smile, those carved muscles and carving wit.
His brokenness, and the lines of glue where he put himself back together, that I could only see when I dared to get close.
It was all of Wes Durham that I fell for, that fooled me—that still holds a grip on my soul like the tug of a balloon back to earth.
Rylan is late, which is very unlike him. Which is why I’m not surprised when Georgia explains that she texted him to hang out at the corner for a while, as soon as I brought up Wes. She told him we’d need a few minutes. Just us.
“Thank you,” I tell her. “Not just for that, but...for all of it. Giving me that space.”
“I kind of regret it now,” she laughs sadly. “If I’d stopped you that night at the party, none of this would have happened.”
“Maybe it’s okay that it did. At least it got you and me talking. Because you’re right—I would’ve taken all that stuff to my grave, otherwise.”
“I do think you’re brave,” she adds, readjusting my hat for me. “Going through all this, I mean.”
“It’s not all that brave when you don’t have a choice.”
“That’s the brave part: gritting your teeth and moving forward, and seeing it as the only option.”
“Isn’t it?”
Fiercely, so sure of herself in that way I’ve always wanted to learn for myself, she shakes her head. “You could wallow in it and shut the world out, but you’re not.”
“In case you forgot, that’s exactly what I did.”
“For a few days. Then you dusted yourself off—even if it required some prodding from me—and here you are, facing the music. You’re still sad and angry, which is okay, because the situation still sucks. But you’re not letting it take over.” She pats my face, somewhere between a wake-up slap and a buck-up motion of encouragement. “You’re still here.”
Ahead, Rylan peeks around the corner. We laugh and wave him towards us.
I give them a moment to say hello in the sloppy, lovesick way they’ve adopted since their return from Greece, then fall into step beside them as we walk to the restaurant. The entire time, I drift in and out of their conversation and mull over what Georgia just said.
Always, I’ve thought she was braver than me because she never showed her fears.
I look at her now, swinging Rylan’s hand in hers. I can’t remember the last boyfriend of hers we hung out with on a regular basis. I can’t remember the last one who could say “I love you” and get her swooning, instead of bolting.
Her fear of commitment wasn’t panic-inducing. It didn’t keep her up at night. But it was a real fear, all the same. One she had to stand up and face if she was ever going to get rid of it.
But first, she had to admit it existed.
Maybe bravery isn’t overcoming our fears...but just revealing that we have them. Showing up and living with them.
Proving to the rest of the world that, for all the wounds and bruises those fears leave—we’re still here.
Thirty-Seven
One after the other, the screenshots fill my phone screen.
Every last one cranks my blood pressure higher. The unknown number put scary good thought into this, because the messages are arranged from what would embarrass me the least, to what would shame or enrage me most.
First is Clara’s email, photos of us—the stuff that’s already been leaked, I assume so whoever this is can prove to me they’re the hacker.
Following that are shots of the In Progress folder on my desktop, filled with unfinished song files and lyrics. They’re all shit, aside from my rough draft of “Clara Rose.”
Next are some search histories from a few months ago, but those really aren’t so bad. I’m not the first guy to Google “deep throat orgy,” and I won’t be the last. Sure, I’d rather that stay a secret, but if and when it gets out, I’ll live.
Unknown: Say yes to the reunion or I release it all.
Wes: Who the fuck are you?
Unknown: Does it matter?
Huh. I guess it doesn’t.
Truth is, it could be anyone. I’ve pissed off enough people in Hollywood who’ve probably had stars assassinated for far less.
Maybe it’s a costar. They’re all angry at me for turning down the special.
Veda Jacoby, in particular, might pull a stunt like this. She lacks the intelligence, but not the money and connections. She’s also got a great motive. Playing Maisie Chase was the unquestioned height of her career.
It could be the guy who played my older brother. Rumor has it he burns his residuals up in a spoon and direct deposits it into his veins. Needing cash isn’t an interesting motive, but I know it’s a damn powerful one.
Hell, it could be an overzealous fan-turned-stalker. Around the third season we had that guy sending my TV-mom his toenail clippings and Photoshopped albums of the two of them getting married in Hawaii, s
o I guess anything’s possible.
It could be my own mother, I think, feeling my stomach turn at even entertaining the idea…then again, when I realize it’s not that far-fetched. After all, she stole from me and Delaney, and I’ve seen her do some low and dirty shit to people who stood in her way.
But that was all before she got clean. Sure, she’ll never win Mother of the Year, and we’ve still got more issues than every newsstand in this city—but she loves me. No way she’d do this.
Unknown: Maybe this will help your decision. Just sent these to a few friends.
More attachments flood my inbox.
They’re photos of Delaney from her visit on my birthday, and a few taken in her earliest days of the diagnosis. Sprinkled in are emails between myself and the cancer center where we did her transplant.
Fuck.
My eyes burn, but not half as much as my chest. I throw my phone into the couch cushions and pace, Bowie whining at my heels because he must sense I’m about to break down.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
Yet again, I’m all too aware that this is how I made Clara feel. I deserve every bit of my own medicine getting crammed down my throat right now.
But, unlike her, I’m not so sweet and kind-hearted that I can’t believe this is happening. I know what people are capable of. I’ve seen it.
I mop my face with my shirt and grab my phone.
Wes: You’re bluffing.
Unknown: I don’t bluff.
They text a link. I click.
Sure enough, the photos and emails they just sent me are already out there, getting passed around an image board almost as fast as celebrity nudes. It won’t be long now.
There is one silver lining, however: this idiot’s helping me more than they know. Mom would never release Delaney’s secret. One possibility down.
Wes: You fucking asshole.