Fake Halo

by Piper Lennox

  Unknown: Not too late to stop me. I’ve got one more left.

  Unknown: And it’s about you.

  Ah, another helpful clue.

  Whoever this is, they know me. They’ve seen how selfish I am, probably with their own two eyes—but they don’t know me well enough. If they did, they’d know I don’t give a single fuck what happens to me now.

  They’ve already hurt the two women I care about most on this earth. With Delaney’s diagnosis and Clara’s email out there, nothing’s left. Nothing that really matters.

  It’s over. And this poor bastard doesn’t even know it.

  More texts come through: their final punch. As soon as I read the messages, I know exactly who I’m dealing with.

  But, more importantly, I know exactly what to do next.

  “Try this one.”

  I make a face at the vegan pasta dish on Georgia’s plate, and the bite she jabs too close to my face. The pasta itself will taste fine, I’m sure; it’s the fake cheese I can’t stand.

  Still, I take a bite. We’ve had fun tonight, and for all the ways my soul’s still aching, it feels lighter, too. Clearing the air with my sister, finally confessing to all the lies and secrets, brought a hundred times more relief than the shiniest silver linings of the email leak. It feels even better than learning we won’t lose our contract with Royale, or running numbers and realizing we not only didn’t lose fans and followers, but gained them.

  I didn’t lose Georgia.

  In the end, all I lost was Wes. Ratio-wise, losing only one thing isn’t all that bad.

  Except that I didn’t lose a thing. I lost a person.

  “Shit,” Georgia breathes beside me, and stares over my head to one of the televisions embedded in the walls of the restaurant.

  I twist and squint through the dimness. It’s tonight’s episode of PopNova.

  They’re talking about Wes.

  “Can you turn up this TV?” Georgia calls to our waitress, but I don’t stay to listen about corporate policy and why all the televisions stay muted. I’m already drifting my way across our section, past the purses dangling off the backs of chairs and waiters balancing plates like extensions of their arms, until I’m standing right underneath the TV.

  Delaney Durham’s Secret Battle with Cancer

  Photos of Wes and his sister fill the screen.

  Delaney, emaciated and pale, hooked to machines at age twelve. In a wheelchair at thirteen or fourteen, hiding her braces behind her hand with a weak smile.

  In a bed at sixteen, wearing a face mask and giving the camera a resolute thumbs-up.

  Wes, gowned and ready for his marrow donation.

  My pulse throbs behind my eyes and shakes my vision. I almost don’t notice the closed captioning blinking across the bottom.

  ...hid her diagnosis, an anonymous friend of the family claims.

  The photos, along with emails between her brother and the doctor who performed the procedure, were uploaded to image boards early this morning.

  A representative for Wes and Delaney’s mother, Billie Durham, says the family will not comment on the breach at this time.

  “Did you know that?” Georgia’s whisper hits my ear like an icicle driving in point-first, even though I sensed her stepping up beside me before she spoke.

  “Yeah.” I swallow. “But no one else did.”

  Other files from Wes’s computer have made their rounds online and across televisions, in the days since my email got released. None were all that embarrassing: some rough drafts of songs, receipts from bills paid online. I figured it was him covering his tracks—fighting, for whatever reason, to make me believe his lie.

  But this....

  Wes would do anything to protect his sister’s secret.

  “He was telling the truth.”

  Georgia studies me a moment, then tugs on my elbow to guide me from the restaurant while Rylan pays.

  When we get home, she asks if I want company or privacy for a while. It’s a new practice, which is probably why she looks hurt when I tell her, “Privacy.”

  But that’s my newest practice: telling her exactly how I feel, and asserting myself for what I need, even if it means hurting someone’s feelings a little.

  After a beat, she nods. “Rylan and I are going for a walk, then. Call me if you need me.”

  I nod back and thank her, then shut my door. When I hear them leave, I take out my phone and slide against my wall.

  The story is everywhere. News of Delaney’s cancer appears on site after site.

  She’s trending on Twitter. Her Instagram followers increase with every passing minute.

  One of her uploads on YouTube now has well over a million views...and thousands of comments, ranging from cries of hoaxes and publicity stunts, to outpourings of support and encouragement, just like the ones I received on our videos.

  Delaney has what she’s always wanted—what she’s been trained to want—her entire life: fame. Followers. A spotlight pointed right at her, instead of fading off her mother and leaving her and Wes to shiver in the dimming edge.

  But she had to get it by revealing the one thing she guarded most. And I know better than anyone that trade just isn’t worth it. Especially when you didn’t get to make the choice yourself.

  I navigate back to her channel page, planning to click another upload and see what kind of comments she’s getting there—but a post at the top catches my eye.

  It’s a brand-new video, uploaded just thirty seconds ago. Yep: I’ve Got Cancer.

  The first thing I notice is that this isn’t her usual video. Instead of the faux-fur background she usually shoots against, she’s sitting in her bed, surrounded by stuffed teddy bears and sequined throw pillows, like a normal teenage bedroom.

  The second thing I notice: this isn’t stockpiled footage.

  This is from today, because she looks the way she did in the selfies Wes showed me. Her skin seems see-through under her eyes, and her thin hair pokes out from underneath a mint green bandanna. The thinness of her limbs drowns inside a Lilo and Stitch sweatshirt.

  Her eyes glimmer, though. That and her smile—bright and sparkling, like her mother’s—are what prove this is, in fact, Delaney Durham.

  “Hi, everyone.” She sniffs and gives a quiet, defeated laugh. “Well...it’s true. I have cancer. Well, I had cancer, but whatever. I figured I might as well clear the air now, before people start making things up about me. I can’t deliver the news how I want, but at least I can explain why I hid it. Maybe get some control back. I guess…I’ll start at the beginning.”

  I sink all the way onto my floor and hold the phone overhead as she details her treatments, the cancer progression, and how Wes donated his marrow.

  “Some people don’t like my brother,” she laughs, biting her lip, “and honestly? I get it. He’s closed-off, and he’s been...less than polite, to a lot of celebrities and paparazzi, in the past.

  “But I think the main reason people don’t like him is that he doesn’t do what anyone expects him to do. They want him making certain kinds of movies and music, or to step out of the spotlight altogether...they want him to be polite, and nice, and humbled by everything he went through.

  “People want him to be that teen heartthrob again.” She rolls her eyes, which makes me smile through the tears I’m fighting. “They want him to be Charlie Chase. But I want to take a minute and just—just tell everyone what he’s really like. Because I think the real Wes Durham is a lot more interesting. More real.”

  I roll onto my stomach and prop the phone in front of my face.

  “He’s smart. And hilarious, even if it’s sometimes kind of mean.” Delaney laughs again and pulls a pillow into her lap. “He is humbled by what he went through—but he refuses to apologize for it, except to the people he hurt directly. Like my mom, or me.”

  Or me, I think, remembering the pain I saw in his eyes when I told him we’d met before.

  “But his addiction,” Delaney goes on, “didn’
t hurt the rest of the world. It just pissed them off, because they didn’t like finding out he wasn’t who they wanted him to be. They wanted him to stay Charlie Chase. To pretend he was perfect.

  “I think it’s because we like pretending we’re perfect—that we don’t have any weaknesses, or flaws, or fears. So when someone steps out and shows the world theirs, we don’t like it. We want to keep believing the lies about ourselves. And people who refuse to apologize for being imperfect—they scare us. We wish we could be them, while feeling terrified that, one day...we will be.”

  I push myself up on my elbows and hold the phone closer. There’s a Polaroid of Wes taped to the wall behind her, and I find myself staring at it while she speaks, explaining to her fans why she hid her illness: she didn’t want pity, true. But she also wanted a space where she could pretend the illness didn’t exist.

  “Wes kept telling me I’d be better off just revealing it,” she shrugs, reversing the sequins on her pillow until it flashes from neon purple to blinding silver. “I guess he was right, because it does feel a lot better than I thought it would, not having to hide it anymore.

  “But he also never pushed me to tell, or made me feel bad about keeping it a secret. That’s the kind of person he is—accepting. And that’s why I love that he won’t apologize for being imperfect: because he doesn’t want anyone else to apologize for it, either.

  “When I first went through treatments and started losing my hair, I cried for days. I cried until I made myself sick. But Wes kept telling me I was beautiful, with or without it. That I was still me. And when it grew back and I hated how short it was, he told me all that again.

  “He didn’t stop telling me, in fact, until I really believed it: that I was still beautiful, and still me. Sick, yeah. Imperfect—definitely. But not ugly, or worth any less as a person than I was before.”

  Delaney pauses to wipe the tears from her face with her palms. I can’t find the strength to do the same to mine.

  “‘It’s just hair,’ he told me.” She sniffs and smiles through it, then tosses the pillow aside.

  She removes her bandanna.

  “It’s just cancer. Just an illness. Just one piece of who I am.” Steel comes into her voice that I’ve never heard before—at least, not from her. I’ve heard it in her brother’s words countless times, though, and in Georgia’s. It’s the tone of not caring what people think of you, anymore.

  The sound of refusing to apologize for who you really are.

  “And what Clara Hurley has,” Delaney adds, motioning off-screen as though I’m there in her California bedroom, “it’s just an illness, too. I don’t want to speak for her, because it’s not like we’re friends or whatever...but I think she’d agree with me on this. We were scared our illnesses were all the world would focus on.

  “It’s like Wes and the pills he used to do, or his role as Charlie Chase...or my mom being a child star. We’re so, so much more than those things. They’re pieces of us, and sometimes they’re small, sometimes they’re big—but they’re not everything.

  “So I guess...I guess that’s why I wanted to make this video.” She looks back at the camera and straightens her shoulders. “To remind everyone out there who’s watching that all of us are way, way more than what the world focuses on.”

  She smiles again.

  Then, with a sigh, she reaches out and cuts the video.

  Lying in bed that night, I watch Delaney’s video two more times.

  It’s true. Everything she said, but specifically the things about her brother. He says sorry for his actions—but never for who he is.

  Wes lives without apology. Without secrets.

  When I wake up the next morning, the latest entertainment headlines hit me. At first, they read like a language I never learned. None of it makes sense.

  Until, slowly—horribly—it does.

  Turns out, Wes did have one secret.

  “That must have been hard on you. Losing him.”

  “Actually, I felt like throwing a giant fucking party over it.”

  Every article puts them side by side: Burke and Wes as Bernard and Charlie, grinning like the father and son we were meant to believe they were.

  “Bernard Chase is, like, everyone’s favorite TV dad. Burke was the nicest dude ever.”

  The photograph flickers underneath my tears. Only now do I notice that awkward grip on Wes’s shoulder. His strained smile.

  All the pain, filed away behind his eyes.

  “No. He wasn’t.”

  Thirty-Eight

  Age 12

  “This your guitar?”

  I spun in my chair. Burke stood on the other side of my dressing room, hefting my Yamaha off the loveseat. I hadn’t even heard him come in. Or shut the door behind him.

  He was swaying. We weren’t supposed to talk to him about his drinking. The director sent out a memo to the cast and crew that all “concerns” should go through him, but I highly doubted they were getting passed along to Burke.

  Hell, my concerns didn’t even make it to the director’s brain, he dismissed them so fast. Like last week, when I told him Burke was doing coke with the extras. “You’re a kid,” he laughed. “You don’t even know what coke is.”

  Yes, I was a kid. But I was a Hollywood kid. We aged worse than dog years.

  So I knew blow when I saw it. Burke hadn’t even stopped when I entered the room. He made eye contact with me and did a line, laughing at the way I turned and ran.

  Now, as he strummed my guitar and nodded to the empty space on the couch, I joined him.

  Burke wasn’t nice. He’d never been nice. The public thought he was, but anyone who worked with him knew better. And given that his character was a wholesome, loving father, it was safe to say he was the best damn actor in the entire ensemble.

  Still, I wanted him to like me. Veda told me I shouldn’t care so much what Burke thought of me, because he was a horrible shitbag.

  “And you,” she said, tapping my nose with a blood-red fake nail, “just have daddy issues.”

  Maybe she was right. My favorite scenes were the ones with only Charlie and Bernard, because I liked how convincing his hugs and hair-tousling were.

  I liked pretending we weren’t acting.

  Burke picked out a sloppy version of “Freebird,” then some song I didn’t know. He grumbled about how “this fucking morality hour” was holding him back. It took me a minute to realize he was talking about our show.

  “Yeah,” I laughed nervously, because I was lying, “I hate it, too.”

  He tuned the guitar, even though it didn’t need it. “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.” We had a birthday cake on the set last week. I told myself not to get upset he’d already forgotten.

  “Twelve,” he repeated. His sour breath skated into the curve of my guitar and launched straight at my face.

  “When I was your age, I was bending girls over my vanity. Girls two, three times my age.” His teeth looked gray when he smiled, eyes halfway shut. He kept playing. “Hollywood’s so fucked up.”

  “I kissed Tallulah,” I told him, after a minute. “Not in a scene, but real life. She let me feel under her shirt.” I swallowed. Tallulah, the girl who, funnily enough, played my character’s childhood crush, made me swear not to tell anyone, and I’d fully intended to keep it between us.

  But with Burke, the words just fell out. I wanted him to think I was cool. Maybe even hang out with me off-set, the way he invited my on-screen brother and the extras to parties at his house on Carbon Mesa.

  He laughed. “You won’t be the last. Girl like that’s going to open her legs for anybody on the next rung. When she’s A-list in another five, ten years—you’ll know why.”

  Sweat pricked my underarms. I didn’t like him talking about Tallulah that way.

  “Play me something,” he ordered, and slid the guitar into my lap.

  I picked it up, resting it against my thigh.

  “No, don’t hold it like that.
Too rigid. Hold it like it belongs in your hands, Wes.”

  He adjusted it.

  His hand fell to my leg, between the back of the guitar and my stomach.

  “Don’t waste your time with that fucking cocktease.” His whisper felt like congealed soup on my neck. Wet. Thick. Rancid.

  The sound of his zipper scraped my skull clean. I couldn’t react. Couldn’t think.

  He took my hand off my guitar and put it on him.

  “Take my advice. Men know what men need. See? Bet you’ve never done this to anyone else in your life. But you’re already a pro. That’s it. Fuck.”

  My wrist was as frozen as the rest of me as he tightened his grip on my hand, tightening my grip on him.

  I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to look at it.

  I didn’t want to see his face when I yanked my hand away and jumped up, my guitar slamming to the floor almost hard enough to break.

  Burke stared at me across the room and kept touching himself. My pulse chiseled my brain in two. Something told me to run for the closed door, but I couldn’t.

  “Look at it,” he ordered, when I shut my eyes again. “Fucking watch.”

  My eyes squeezed shut even tighter. I shook my head.

  Don’t cry. The last thing I wanted was Burke thinking I was afraid of him. Even if I was.

  He stopped.

  “They’re replacing Tallulah.” The slurred words ambled through the air, but managed to hit me in my chest like a perfectly aimed shotgun blast. “I heard Bobby talking to the casting department. They want that kid from North and Back to take her place.”

  He’s lying, something in me said, but my instincts betrayed me. I opened my eyes and stared at his heavy, unfocused gaze, determined to ignore everything below them. Even his slack mouth looked wrong.

  “Why?”

  “Her mom’s bitching about the new contracts.”