You Are Not Alone

by Greer Hendricks

  Detective Williams sighs. I can picture her at her neat desk, in one of her plain suits, her forehead creasing into waves.

  “You really think Amanda’s mother wants a letter from a woman who watched her daughter die?”

  I swallow hard. If that’s all the detective knows, she can’t arrest me.

  “I thought about it later. And, um, I decided not to send her a note.”

  I hear Detective Williams exhale again. I have no idea if she believes me.

  “You’re not still hanging around Amanda’s friends, are you?”

  I can’t pile on another lie. “I’ve seen them around a few times. They’re really nice.”

  “I’m telling you to let this go, Shay. Understand?”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “I hope I don’t have to talk to you again.” Then she hangs up.

  It feels like a near miss; Detective Williams doesn’t know that I actually went to Mrs. Evinger’s house. That I stole a package from her porch while she slept a few feet away.

  Then I remember the flowers. If Detective Williams talks to Mrs. Evinger, will she mention a mysterious visitor who came while she was sleeping? Nausea roils my stomach and I cover my hand with my mouth, fighting it back.

  Maybe I should call back Detective Williams right now and confess everything. She might take pity on me. And Jane could confirm that the necklace belongs to her.

  I could even give Detective Williams the bloody scalpel and towel.

  I pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers, trying to sort through it all. I can’t just tell her all of this. She could arrest me on the spot.

  I need help.

  * * *

  On Monday morning, I’m up and out the door by seven A.M. After I spoke to Detective Williams, I spent the rest of the weekend trying to find a lawyer who could give me advice. One of them actually responded to my call yesterday, and I scheduled a one-hour consult with him.

  My new floral scarf is around my neck, and my new bag is slung over my shoulder with the envelope tucked inside. If the lawyer agrees it’s a good idea, I’m going to deliver it to the police.

  I’m twisting my key in my door to lock it behind me when I hear, “Good morning.”

  I turn around and see Mary, my neighbor across the hall with the little gray cat.

  Before I can reply, she gasps and puts a hand to her chest. She looks like she’s seen a ghost.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  She stares at me, her face draining of color.

  “Shay,” she finally says. “I—It’s just that you look so much like…”

  The name explodes into my brain as she says it: “Amanda.”

  That night when I’d been house-sitting and I’d gazed into the mirror, wondering who I reminded myself of without my glasses and my hair up … it was she.

  No one would ever mistake us for twins, but the resemblance is undeniable. At least it is now, with my lightened hair, shorter cut, and contacts.

  I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before.

  I don’t know what to say to Mary. It must be so eerie for her.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally mumble. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  She takes a step closer and reaches out, as if she wants to touch my hair. “The color … your scarf … when I saw you before, you looked different. Didn’t you have glasses?”

  “I did—I do. I’d just gotten out of the shower so I had them on then.”

  I flash back to how I’d looked that night, in a hoodie with my hair up in a ponytail and my tortoiseshell frames covering part of my face.

  Mary gives herself a little shake. She bends down to pick up a newspaper and tucks it under her arm; she must have just opened her door to grab it. “You surprised me, that’s all,” she says, but she gives me a wary look as she goes back into her apartment. I hear the lock click.

  I quickly reopen my own door and hurry inside. I rush into the bathroom and take out my contacts, placing them in the little plastic case the optometrist gave me. I find my glasses in the medicine cabinet, put them on, and grab an elastic band to gather my hair into a low ponytail. Then I unclasp my Fitbit and shove it under the sink.

  I lean close to the mirror, breathing hard.

  If you really want a makeover, you’ve got to let us help! Jane and I live for this stuff, Cassandra had told me.

  I totally see you in this color, Jane had said, handing me a tear sheet of a model in a shampoo ad to give to the hairstylist—the one the Moore sisters brought me to. Cassandra had asked him to shape my eyebrows, too.

  When I’d mentioned I’d been toying with the idea of contact lenses, they’d squealed, Do it!—and pushed me to book an appointment.

  They knew Amanda so well.

  Could it simply be a coincidence that all of their suggestions make me look more like their dead friend?

  Even if it wasn’t their intention, they must see it.

  Amanda’s style does suit me; I know I look better now. Just as her apartment is perfect for me.

  So why are my hands shaking?

  I cancel my appointment with the lawyer, eating the $260 fee.

  How could Detective Williams understand all the strange things I’ve done? I’m friends with Amanda’s friends. I snuck onto Amanda’s mother’s porch and stole her mail. I’m living in Amanda’s apartment. I even look like her.

  It’s safer that I leave it all alone.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  VALERIE

  Two years ago

  “MISS?”

  Valerie turned around, expecting the silver-haired gentleman who’d placed his lunch order to modify it. Instead, he snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “I just figured out who you are!”

  She stood there in her black slacks and crisp white shirt, the tray she’d used to deliver his iced tea aloft on her upraised palm.

  “Law and Order: SVU. Am I right? I never forget a face!”

  Valerie smiled and affected her best thick Brooklyn accent. “‘Put back the Doritos, kid, I saw you stick them under your coat.’”

  The customer laughed, then his expression changed. Valerie knew what he was thinking: another failed actress serving BLTs on Sunset Strip.

  “I’ll be right back with your sandwich, sir.” She hurried off.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d been recognized, but it was years since it had happened. In her late twenties, she’d won a small recurring role on a daytime soap opera that went off the air due to low ratings, and she’d enjoyed signing autographs—once—for a pair of middle-aged women who were touring the studio lot.

  It was hard to accept: That single-season part was the zenith of her career.

  Too young, too old, too short, too tall, too pretty, not pretty enough, not quite right …

  Her story wasn’t exactly original: At the age of seventeen, she’d stepped off a Greyhound bus with only two suitcases and a few hundred dollars in cash, determined to make it in Hollywood. But Valerie wasn’t only chasing a dream; she was running even harder from her past.

  Arf-arf!

  No matter how many miles spun under the wheels of the cramped Greyhound bus that reeked of the meatball sub the guy a few rows up was eating, she could still hear echoes of the taunts that had followed her as she’d walked down the long school hallway lined with lockers on both sides.

  Heard you like it doggie-style! one of the football players had shouted while the guy who’d betrayed her—the asshole who was funny and popular and had seemed so normal—smirked and accepted a high five from the idiot football player.

  It didn’t stop there. Not that day, or week, or even the next week. The taunts and whispers spread through their high school like a virus.

  Someone—she didn’t even know who—threw a dog treat at her head in the lunchroom. She had the role of Rizzo in their school’s production of Grease, but she abruptly quit. She knew the moment she walked onstage, the barking would begin, just as it did when she was called on
in class.

  She couldn’t tell anyone the truth—that it hadn’t happened that way at all, that their buddy was a liar and a bastard, that she was still a virgin.

  Who would believe her?

  No one. Not even her own mother, whom she’d tried to tell first.

  She couldn’t bear to remain in high school.

  So, California. It was all the way across the country. No one knew her there. It was a chance to start fresh—to show everyone who she could become. She worked as a nanny, a personal trainer, in craft services, and as a bartender while she tried to earn her SAG card. She lived in small apartments with two or three other girls crammed in to split the rent—except for the year she turned twenty-one, when she was briefly married.

  As marriages went, hers wasn’t bad: Valerie lived with Tony rent-free in his one-bedroom while he slept on the couch. Tony, who was born in a small town outside Madrid, paid Valerie five thousand dollars, mostly in tens and twenties he’d saved from tip money, and got his green card. She kept a few fond memories and his last name, Ricci—which put even more distance between her and her past.

  Valerie had a knack for accents and a formidable memory for her lines, which helped her land an agent. But as her twenties slid into her thirties, her opportunities diminished. Her most recent job had been in a local commercial as a young mom with a laundry problem, which didn’t even cover her rent for a month.

  Her agent hadn’t phoned with so much as an audition in weeks.

  Valerie scooped up the BLT from the kitchen and grabbed the pitcher of iced tea with her free hand. The restaurant charged for refills—a ridiculous rule—but she freshened the silver-haired man’s drink and said, “On the house.”

  “Thanks, sweetie.”

  When she cleared his table a little later, she found a twenty-dollar tip and a scrawled note on his receipt: Hang in there.

  Maybe he’d sensed she was thinking of giving up.

  The problem was, she had no backup plan. Her bank account held less than a thousand dollars. She’d never attended college. She was living in a small apartment with two other women who were also trying to make it in the business—just as she’d done when she’d first moved to L.A. The only difference now was that her roommates were nearly ten years younger than she was.

  That evening, as Valerie sat on the edge of the bathtub soaking her tired feet in hot water, she gave herself a deadline: Her thirty-fourth birthday was three months away. If she didn’t have any leads by then, she’d find a real job. Maybe she’d stay connected to the business as a personal assistant to someone who’d actually made it in Hollywood. She dried her feet, reached into the medicine cabinet to sneak a little of her roommate Ashley’s expensive face cream, and fell into bed, exhausted from her double shift.

  Six weeks later, Valerie’s agent called. She’d won an audition for a supporting part as a traumatized woman in an independent film by an up-and-coming director.

  Valerie read the 116-page script in one sitting, then immediately flipped to the first page and began highlighting her sections.

  She wouldn’t have many lines. Most of her emotions would play across her face.

  She rehearsed every chance she got, creating an elaborate backstory for her character as she rode the bus to and from her restaurant job, and envisioning her scenes in rich detail as she lay in bed at night. She strategized about what to wear to the audition, finally settling on black jeans and a plain black T-shirt: a simple background canvas that wouldn’t distract from her acting. She carried the script with her everywhere, like a talisman.

  She poured everything she had into the three minutes she was allotted to channel the character in front of the casting director and the producer. It felt as if the emotions she’d kept tamped down for so many years—the fury and pain and bitterness that had consumed her in the weeks before she quit high school—had finally been uncorked in the small, plain audition room.

  It wasn’t as if this part had been created for her, Valerie thought. It was as if she had been created for it.

  Valerie saw the producer glance at the casting director and give a little nod just before she left the room, and she knew she’d earned a callback. She walked outside, into the bright California sunshine, tears still dripping down her face.

  Her roommate Ashley was practicing yoga in the living room when Valerie’s agent delivered the news that she’d made it to the next round, and Ashley heard Valerie’s excited squeal. Blond, leggy Ashley was twenty-six—the part called for a woman in her midthirties—and Ashley looked more like a surfer girl than a haunted single mom. She and Valerie almost never competed for the same roles. Still, Valerie was evasive about the details, more out of a superstition about jinxing herself than wariness.

  The director would be at the studio for her callback, which was scheduled for the following Tuesday at nine A.M. Valerie would have a full scene with one of the actors who had already been cast. She became her character in the days leading up to her second audition—dressing like her, walking like her, and thinking like her. She even had a nightmare that reflected her character’s trauma.

  But Valerie never made it to the studio that Tuesday. Before she had a chance to win the part, she learned it had been nabbed by another actress: Ashley.

  * * *

  A week later, Valerie broke her lease and flew cross-country, reversing the journey she’d made at the age of seventeen. It wasn’t just that she now wanted to get as far away from L.A. as possible. She was running toward something again.

  Her instincts told her to seek out Cassandra and Jane. Even though she’d only seen them a few times since she’d fled from their hometown, they were the touchstones of her childhood. The memories she held of them seemed like the only good pieces of her past: the three of them lying in a row on Valerie’s bed, flipping through Tiger Beat magazine. Making batches of dough for chocolate-chip cookies—but usually eating most of it raw out of the bowl. Grabbing a hairbrush as a microphone and leaning in close together while they sang the lyrics to Madonna’s “Holiday.”

  Plus, she had nowhere else to go.

  She knocked on the door of Cassandra’s apartment and saw the shock in her eyes. Valerie knew she looked terrible, as if the trauma she’d endured had wreaked havoc on her body, stealing the color and vitality from her face, sharpening her limbs, and aging her. She moved slowly and wearily. A car wreck survivor, a casting director observing her might think. Or someone who barely escaped a terrible natural disaster.

  She sat between Cassandra and Jane on the couch, a vodka and soda untouched in front of her, as the words poured out of her: about the customers who yelled at her when the kitchen got their orders wrong, about the assistant director who’d slid his hand up her skirt, about the casting directors who’d looked Valerie up and down, then spoken a single word: No. Some of them wouldn’t even bother to say anything at all.

  Then Valerie took a deep breath and began to talk about her gorgeous, perky roommate, Ashley, who’d wished Valerie luck when Valerie had gotten the callback and then stolen her part.

  “I woke up the day of my audition feeling so tired and heavy it was almost impossible to move,” Valerie had said. “I could see the sun peeking through my shades. It was too bright to be early morning. I reached for my phone on the nightstand, where I always kept it. But it was gone.”

  Valerie told the rest of her story; she’d gone over it in her mind so many times by now that she could almost see herself running into the kitchen and checking the clock on the microwave. It was 9:07 A.M., seven minutes after her audition was supposed to begin, she told Cassandra and Jane.

  Her missing phone held all the pieces she needed: Its alarm had been supposed to wake her up; its calendar contained the studio address and directions to the audition room. She couldn’t summon an Uber, as she’d planned—or even call to say she’d be late. “My mind felt so thick and muddy,” she told Cassandra and Jane. “Like I’d had way too much to drink the night before. But I only had a singl
e glass of wine.”

  By the time she borrowed a neighbor’s phone and reached her agent, she was hyperventilating. “Calm down, I’ll see if they can get you in later today,” he’d said.

  “But my chance was gone,” Valerie told Cassandra and Jane as sobs racked her body.

  Later that afternoon, Valerie continued, her roommate Ashley arrived home. And a few hours after that, Valerie finally found her phone wedged between her mattress and box spring, with the ringer turned off.

  “I was so naïve,” Valerie had said, her voice raw. “I thought Ashley was a good person. But she fooled me. She’s an actress, after all.”

  “She stole your phone?” Jane had said. “And could she have put something in your wine, like a sleeping pill?”

  Valerie had shrugged. “I just wish someone could make her pay for what she did.”

  “I wish someone could, too,” Cassandra had said, meeting Jane’s eyes.

  The sisters’ plan was hatched that very evening. Cassandra and Jane had spent their careers cultivating media contacts, and they knew more than a couple of celebrities.

  The stealth campaign they launched against Ashley was one of the most relentless and effective the Moore sisters ever conducted: whispers into the ears of some of their clients, off-the-record calls to entertainment reporters, the dissemination of horribly unflattering pictures they hired a photographer to surreptitiously take, including a series of Ashley appearing to be sneaking into the married director’s trailer. Ashley’s career crashed before her movie ever had a chance to launch it.

  The immense satisfaction of seeing the effects of their vigilante justice opened the sisters’ eyes to the sweet power of revenge.

  Soon they began to notice atrocities everywhere. There were so many horrible misdeeds in the world. Why should innocent people suffer while perpetrators roamed free, continuing to amass victims?

  Their way is more effective than the unpredictable and often disappointing legal system.

  It’s a lot faster—not to mention cheaper—than therapy.

  It’s more intoxicating than a runner’s high.