“There are no other men, Wes!” I wanted to add, I’m not a slut who sluts around with five guys at the same time! Only two! I cringed. There was nothing I could say.
“Except for Brodie,” he muttered, saying it for me. He rolled his eyes, refusing to look at me.
I winced. “Maybe this was a bad idea, Wes.”
“What, tonight? Or me in general?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. I had no idea what to do or say to make this better.
Maybe there was nothing I could do.
Wes slowly stood and ran his hand through his damp hair before staring down at me. “Maybe you need to figure things out. But I’ll tell you one thing. Brodie is a bad idea. I’m a good idea.” His voice had a quiet conviction, but it was tinged with disappointment and maybe a hint of doubt.
Was he judging me?
Judging Brodie?
For a split second, I wanted to rush to Brodie’s defense. I wanted to say he wasn’t always like this. He was misunderstood. He helped autistic kids. He’d saved me from Lester Whatever. And he’d fixed my door like he’d promised. But that sounded pathetically naive. I barely knew Brodie. And, he was the one who punched Wes without a second thought. Wes had merely defended himself. Did Brodie think he owned me? After one kiss? And, did he punch his way out of every problem? Or just when it came to women?
I didn’t want to think about it.
Confused, I gave Wes a pleading look.
He closed his eyes and said, “I have to go. Don’t worry about the diamond. I’ll take care of it with Abram.” There was sadness in his voice. He sighed and turned away. “Maybe I’ll see you around, Chelsea.”
He didn’t call me Sunflower.
He took a step toward the pool gate.
All of this felt like an ominous and tragic ending.
No, I wouldn’t let things end this way. I shot to my feet and reached out for Wes.
At that exact moment, he stopped and spun around to face me. “One other thing.”
“Yeah?” I said hopefully, clutching the towel around my shoulders.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s paint all over the back of your dress.”
“What?!” I gasped, twisting to look. He was right. My ass was covered in a thin haze of ass-shaped dried paint. It must’ve happened when Brodie knocked me into my front door.
“I don’t think Madeline will need it back. Do whatever you want with it.” He turned and walked toward the pool gate, stopping long enough to fold his towel and hand it to Mrs. Wiser, who he thanked graciously before walking toward the front gate of the apartment building. After he pushed through it, it slammed shut automatically on its spring. A resounding clank rattled the ironwork.
I’d heard that sound a thousand times since moving in.
Never had it sounded so dismally final.
A perfect ending to a perfect evening.
Chapter 24
My phone woke me the next morning.
“Yeah?” I said sleepily.
Chelsea screamed over the phone, “Jane! Did you watch the Oscars last night?! Oh my God! Please tell me you watched the Oscars!”
I was at the Oscars. “No. Why?”
“I tried calling you last night to tell you to turn it on, but you never answered your phone.”
“Sorry. I turned it off by accident.” Actually, it had been in Wes’ tuxedo jacket all night on mute. He’d given it back on the way home in his limo. But thanks to Brodie, I’d dropped it during their fight and the screen was now cracked. Stupid Brodie.
I rubbed my eyes. “What time is it?”
“Nine-thirty.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I am at work. I have meetings all day starting at ten, so I called you while I had time. Okay, do a Google search for ‘mystery woman in red dress takes Oscars by storm’.”
“Do I have to do it now?” I groaned, my eyes still closed. I knew where this was going.
“Yes! You will flip when you see the article. Just do it, Jay! Please! Google it!”
“Okay. Hold on.” I typed in what she’d said, being careful of the broken screen. “What do I click on?”
“Click on the Yahoo News article. It should be near the top.”
I did. After the page loaded, I scrolled down. Sure enough, a picture of me posing on that red carpet stage alone. Captions saying, Mystery woman Chelsea Johnson, a total unknown, sweeps Wesley Callaway and everyone at the Oscars off their feet. More photos of me with Wes on the red carpet. And at the Vanity Fair after party. Fantastic.
Now there was proof.
And it was all over the internet.
“Did it load yet?” Chelsea asked with high excitement.
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you freaking out?”
“Yeah, freaking out,” I deadpanned.
“She has my name and looks almost exactly like me! Can you believe it?! I have a bona fide real-life double!”
“Doppelgänger.”
“Doppel what?”
“Gänger. Your double. Specifically, your evil twin.” That was an understatement. Fake Chelsea Johnson had already caused more trouble than an army of evil twins riding through town on a regiment of evil horses while setting fire to every house in sight. What more could Evil Chelsea accomplish by the end of this phone call? I could only imagine.
“Hey, do you still have that cold? Your voice sounds off.”
“Oh, right.” I faked a cough. Nope, just have a different voice box in my neck. Nothing to worry about.
“Anyway, isn’t this crazy? Me having a double?”
“Do Mom and Dad know?”
“Yeah! They were the ones who told me to turn on the Oscars! You need to call them, by the way.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Who do you think she is?”
“Who?”
“My double. Do you think she’s related to us? I mean, how could she not be? Some distant cousin or something?”
Ha ha. Exactly the lie I’d been telling people like Mrs. Wiser. “Do we even have distant cousins?”
“We do now,” Chelsea said. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could track her down? I mean, how weird would it be for me to meet her face to face? Like finding out about the long lost twin you never knew you had. I wonder if we have the same birthday?”
“Probably not,” I groaned.
“How do you know?”
Because our birthdays aren’t the same. “Trust me, Chelz. She doesn’t.”
Something about her excitement was just too much. I’d had it with all of this. I was tired of the lying. Look where it had gotten me? I was out of a job and had guys attacking each other because of me. Wes, Brodie, and that stalker guy at Ralphs, Lester Whatever. And I wasn’t even me! This beautiful thing was for the birds. I was sick of it. After mere days, I didn’t want to be a supermodel anymore.
I just wanted to go back to being me.
Chelsea said, “I wonder if she has a Facebook page? Duh! Why didn’t I check before? Hold on a second while I do a Facebook search and see what comes up.”
“She’s me, Chelsea.”
“What?”
“I said, she’s me.”
“Who?”
“Your double. The fake Chelsea Johnson. She’s me.”
“Very funny,” she said absently. “Hold on, I’m searching the Chelsea Johnsons on Facebook right now.”
“She’s me,” I said with some irritation. “The girl on the red carpet is me, Chelsea.”
“Uh huh,” Chelsea said.
“Put me on FaceTime.”
“Hold on. I’m still searching Facebook.”
“Chelsea! Put me on FaceTime, God damn it!”
“All right, all right! Relax.” A moment later, her face appeared on my iPhone screen. “Hold on. There must be something wrong with my phone. I’m still seeing myself.”
“Chelsea! You’re looking at me!!!”
She blinked several times. “Wh
at?”
I turned my phone around to show my entire bedroom, then back to my face. “See! This is me! You’re in your office at work! I’m in my apartment! And I look like your evil twin!”
“Ha!” Chelsea just stared at the phone, not believing it. I could relate. It took a moment or ten to sink in.
“Chelsea, watch my mouth. This is me talking to you. Your sister Jane.”
She frown-smiled. “Is this some kind of a prank?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, I know. Is this some new app that swaps faces? Because I’ve used those and they work pretty well.”
“Jesus Christ, Chelsea! I’m not an app! This is me! I look like you now!”
“How? That’s not even possible, Jay.”
“I don’t know how! It happened last week! Are you getting it now?”
“Jane, I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Me neither, Chelz. But this is me. I don’t look like I used to.”
“Wait, are you serious?” She still didn’t believe me, but she was starting to consider it.
“I’m deadly serious. I’m also like 5’9”. I’m taller than you. And no, I didn’t get plastic surgery since you were here a week ago. Nobody heals up to perfect in seven days.”
She stared at me through the phone, her eyes searching my face for almost a minute. “No… No.” She shook her head, blinking nervously.
“Yes, Chelsea. Yes.”
“This is impossible.”
“Was impossible.” I waited while she thought about it.
“But… how?”
“Magic? I don’t know. I thought I was dreaming when I first woke up like this. But nope, I turned into…” I half smiled and laughed, “into you. Kind of.”
She squinted and brought her phone close to her face, examining my image. So I held my phone closer to my face and moved it around slowly so she could see me from every angle. My phone may have been cracked, but hers wasn’t. She could see my image perfectly. “This isn’t surgery. It isn’t a mask. Or an app. It’s me.”
“What the hell, Jay?”
“Exactly.”
<<<<<<<>>>>>>>
Just like with George, I spent over an hour on FaceTime with Chelsea trying to convince her I had actually changed into someone else. Fortunately, I knew so many details about Chelsea, things going back to when we were little, it wasn’t as hard to convince her. Once she finally believed me, I brought her up to speed on how I’d been deathly ill for almost five days before waking up like this, how I’d lost my job, kissed Brodie and Wes, and their fight.
“Have you told Mom and Dad?” Chelz asked.
“Ha! Are you kidding? They’d never believe it. You barely do.”
“True. Wow, Jay. It just doesn’t make any sense. Like, it’s scientifically impossible.”
“I know, right. It’s like, ever since I woke up with this ring on my finger, I—”
“Wait. What ring?”
“This one.” I held it up to the phone.
“Where’d you get that? That looks expensive.”
“I thought I told you.”
“No.”
I took a deep breath. “Remember after speed dating how none of the guys emailed me for my number?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, that’s when I went for a walk and stumbled on Wes’ grandmother’s mansion. That’s where I found the ring. In his grandmother’s vanity.”
“Did you steal it?”
“No! He didn’t even want it.”
“Let me see it again.”
I held it up to the phone.
“Why would he not want that? It looks like it’s worth a few grand at least. More if that’s twenty-four karat gold.”
“I think it is. But it didn’t look like this when I got it. It was like, I don’t know, some cheap brass ring you’d get at a flea market for fifty cents.”
“Huh?”
Memories of Wes’ estate sale came flooding back.
The only reason I’d kept the ring was as a memento of the moment when the handsome rich and powerful Wes Callaway had been nice to a little nerd girl who’d lost her way and found his grandmother’s mansion in the middle of nowhere. I started to tear up thinking about it. That had been a special moment. More special than going to the Oscars looking like a supermodel and meeting all those celebrities and having my picture taken a thousand times just because I was beautiful. That didn’t matter. None of it did. What mattered was that moment where a handsome stranger had been nice to little nerdy me. That was real. That was something I wanted back.
I wanted to be me, not beautiful.
I sniffed away tears, “I want to be me again, Chelz.”
“Yeah, but how?”
“It’s the ring. I think it made me this way.”
“How does that make any sense?”
“I don’t know. It just does. There’s no other possible explanation. It has to be the ring.”
“So, what, you take it off and change back?”
“I think so. But I have to leave it off. It took me five days of torture to get to here, so it’ll probably take five to get back. That’s logical, right?”
“What if you take it off and you don’t change back?”
I cringed. “It’s possible. But the only way to find out is to try.”
“Won’t it make you sick again?”
“Probably? But for all I know, this stupid ring is giving me cancer anyway. I’m probably better off without it.”
“How do you feel right now?”
“I feel great,” I smiled.
A worried look tightened Chelsea’s face, “Maybe taking the ring off is a bad idea.”
“Only one way to find out.”
Chapter 25
Two days later, I woke in excruciating pain. I’d taken the ring off after talking to Chelsea.
In preparation, I’d stocked up on water and extra-strength Tylenol, which I kept near my bed. I’d already taken half the bottle and it hadn’t helped. I was starting to worry I’d poison myself on painkillers before this was over.
I’d never been hooked on heroin or painkillers, or been addicted to cigarettes or alcohol, or been through withdrawal symptoms of any kind, but something told me mine were as bad as they could ever get.
For the past two days, every waking moment, (which were few because the pain was as intense this time as it had been the first time), made me want to put the ring back on. Not to be beautiful. Just to make the pain go away. I didn’t have the fever and cold sweats that people got with regular withdrawals, but my body felt like it had been run over by an army of charging elephants.
I wasn’t exaggerating.
My body literally felt shattered.
My bones, my muscles, my joints, my skin, my hair, my nails, every microscopic inch of me burned with fiery pain.
Was this worth it?
It didn’t seem like it.
If being normal meant being in this much pain, why not stay beautiful?
No.
I was seeing this through.
I was going back to being me.
<<<<<<<>>>>>>>
My bedroom was dark when I woke again.
I didn’t know what day it was.
The only thing that mattered was my splitting headache and my stabbing need to pee. I crawled to the bathroom, barely making it. After, I climbed to standing and leaned against my bathroom sink.
I flipped on the lights.
And immediately regretted doing it.
My face looked lopsided. Like it had been crushed in a vise or run over by a dump truck. I didn’t look like supermodel me or even regular me. I looked…
Deformed.
I gasped.
Had something gone wrong?
Fear seized me.
Was I going to look like this forever?
What if I did?
Oh no oh no oh no!!
But the reality of it stared right back at me.
I looked horrible.
As another blast of pure pain exploded in my skull, one thought spun through my head like a washing machine on spin cycle:
Deformed.
—deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed deformed—
Chapter 26
A gentle chime woke me.
The soft light of dawn trickled through my blinds.
I picked up my phone.
The screen was blurred.
I squinted my eyes, trying to see. No use. My good vision was gone. I fumbled around on my nightstand for my glasses and found them right where I’d left them. I slid them on and could read my phone.
A new email.
I didn’t want to deal with email right now.
I set my phone down and stared at my bedroom ceiling. Lifted my glasses. Everything blurred. Put my glasses back on. Everything was sharp once again.
My body didn’t hurt anymore.
Actually, I felt fine.
But how did I look?
Did I want to know?
What monster might be waiting for me in the mirror?
Considering my self-esteem had never revolved around my looks, I climbed out of bed and walked to my bathroom with purpose. Whatever I looked like, I’d deal with it. I’d made it this far in life looking like an ugly duck, so I could make it the rest of the way.
Standing in the dark bathroom, my hand hovered over the light switch, poised to flip it on. I couldn’t bring myself to look.
But I had to look.
Out loud I counted, “Five. Four. Three. Two…” I cringed and squeezed my eyes shut. “Here goes nothing…”
Flipped on the lights.
Peeked through one eye.
Then the other.
My plain old face was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Relief.
I was me again.
Me!
If I Were Beautiful (If I Were... #1) Page 23