Fake Plastic Girl Read online

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  To my grandmothers, Ellie and Doreen

  I’m an angel compared to some of my friends.

  —Lindsay Lohan

  Growing up I was always prone to obsession, partly because of the way I am, but partly because after feeling so lonely for such a long time, when I found someone or something that I liked, I felt helplessly drawn to it.

  —Lana Del Rey

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BODY IN THE CANAL

  Eva-Kate Kelly.

  Is this story really about a person with three first names? Could anything be more tedious than a person with three first names? I know you, I can imagine you rolling your eyes thinking you’re too good for a girl with three first names, let alone an entire story about a girl with three first names, but the truth is most likely that no matter who you are and no matter how hard you’re capable of rolling your eyes, Eva-Kate Kelly would love that you think you’re too good for her and her three first names, she would revel in the few short moments it took her to prove you wrong, she would chew you up and she would spit you out, she would impale you with the fire-green lasers that were her eyes, stare into you and then through you, so that you’d wonder if you ever existed at all. It would take you months to recover and you’d never really be the same again. That was the Eva-Kate I first came to know, anyway.

  * * *

  They found her body floating in the canal. Nothing would ever be the same after that. I mean, how could it be, right? One day she’s alive and thriving and the next she’s purple and spongy, lying facedown in mossy water. Gone. The headlines ran like ticker tape:

  HOLLYWOOD STARLET DROWNS IN VENICE CANAL

  SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD STAR OF “JENNIE AND JENNY” FOUND DEAD

  EVA-KATE KELLY STABBED TO DEATH

  THE DEATH OF EVA-KATE KELLY—A GAME TAKEN TOO FAR OR MURDER IN COLD BLOOD?

  The last one I hated most. What happened to Eva-Kate wasn’t a game taken too far and it wasn’t murder. It was something else entirely.

  CHAPTER 2

  DANGEROUS, DEVIOUS, DEVIANT

  In eighth grade, Ms. Norris told me I had a gift as a writer. She wasn’t the first person to say so, actually. In fifth grade, Beachwood Elementary published a short story I’d written about one half of a best friend necklace lost at the beach—“The Sand Locket”—in their monthly paper. In second grade, I won first place at the district poetry contest. My poem was a set of couplets expressing concern that one day technology could become so advanced we’d no longer have a reason to leave our homes. It was sappy, clichéd, and naive in a charmless way, but as far as the judges were concerned, it was the best four rhyming lines a seven-year-old had ever written.

  So Ms. Norris wasn’t the first person to appreciate my writing, but she was the first person to suggest one day it could make me famous. The suggestion was vague and probably part of some contract teachers sign agreeing to encourage X number of kids per year to aim for the moon/dream as if they’ll live forever and all that, but I latched onto it. All I had to do, she said, was find the right story to tell.

  Never in a million years did I expect to have such a story walk into my life and all but beg to be written down. And never in a million years did I believe I’d have an audience all but beg to hear my side of things. Yet, here we are.

  A lot of what you’ve heard out there about what happened that summer is fake news. They tell you that I was a girl obsessed, that I was dangerous, devious, deviant. They tell you about the psychiatric hospital like it was an asylum for the criminally insane, about the knife and the blood and my fingerprints. All of it to sell magazines, none of it true. I have to at least try to set the record straight.

  CHAPTER 3

  FEARLESS

  The story starts with Chasen’s.

  Chasen’s, as you may know, was a Beverly Hills restaurant for Hollywood’s elite. But as you almost certainly know, it was also the title of a 2009 rom com about some fictional events leading to the restaurant’s nonfictional closing back in 1995. The movie starred Rachel Ames, who was, at the time, the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Incidentally, she was also my mom’s patient.

  As a therapist, my mom—Nancy Childs, PhD—was strict about never revealing the identities of her patients, and it’s really not her fault that I found out. Or that I’m telling you about it now. But I was eight and it was a Saturday and we had just gotten in line at Ben & Jerry’s when she received an emergency patient call. Rachel Ames was in crisis and needed her on set ASAP. It’s not like my mom was going to leave me alone in Ben & Jerry’s, so what choice did she really have?

  That’s how I ended up on the set of Chasen’s, eight years old and dressed head to toe in glittery snowflakes—sans ice cream—from Gap’s winter catalog.

  “Dr. Childs, Jesus Christ.” Rachel Ames was trembling as we approached her standing outside a silver Star Waggon, her own name scrawled on the door in Sharpie. She wore a gold-beaded shawl over her bony arms and Tom Ford sunglasses so big they eclipsed her entire eye sockets, even the top part of her dramatically angular cheekbones. Tough but friendly-looking men stood five feet from her on both sides, arms crossed, pretending to be more machine than human.

  “What happened, Rachel?” my mom asked sweetly, calm as a light breeze with her seashell-pink cardigan buttoned up all the way. Suddenly overtaken by a spell of shyness, I hid behind her linen pencil skirt and pinched nervously at the fabric.

  “Benji’s cheating on me,” Rachel Ames said, her upper lip quivering. “He’s been cheating on me. This whole time.” That was Benji Laramore, her A-list actor husband of three years. Rumor had it their agents had originally set them up on a date as a publicity stunt, but surprisingly to all involved, it ended up being love at first sight.

  “Well, okay now.” My mom remained unruffled, not even vaguely fazed. “What makes you think—”

  “No, no.” Rachel laughed bitterly. “You don’t understand. This isn’t a theory. This is fact. And how do I find out?” She held up a tattered copy of Us Weekly and shoved the cover page into my mom’s face. I craned my neck and peered upward to read the headline: “Benji Laramore Leaves Rachel Ames for Dominique Le Bon.” Beneath it, a paparazzi shot of Benji and Dominique laughing gleefully on a park bench in Paris.

  Dominique Le Bon. Third- or fourth-highest-paid actress in Hollywood that year, but arguably the single most beautiful woman in the world. While Rachel Ames was pretty, an American golden girl—the good girl, no doubt—Dominique Le Bon’s beauty was extraterrestrial. Smoky cat eyes and luscious lips perpetually pouting in seductive discontent, a stomach so flat and breasts so round it would hardly be surprising to learn she wasn’t even human at all. And yet, she maintained that she’d never had any work done. And rumor had it she was telling the truth.

  “Oh dear.” My mom took the magazine from Rachel’s hands and studied the cover.

  “That’s right,” Rachel breathed, incredulous. “Not just
cheating, but in love. Divorcing me. And of course she gave Us Weekly the whole story, he’d never have the balls. I thought he’d at least have the balls to tell me himself, but I guess I was wrong. Either he doesn’t have the balls or he plain old doesn’t have respect for me.” A tear slid down beneath one Tom Ford lens and she dabbed at it with her shawl, then looked at me and froze, as if only just then realizing I was there.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Childs, I didn’t mean to say balls in front of your daughter.”

  “It’s not a problem, Rachel. This is a uniquely painful situation.”

  “Can she wait out here while we go talk inside?” She gestured to the trailer door. “I’m gonna say a lot more ugly words and I don’t want her to hear me talk like that.”

  “Don’t worry.” My mom patted her bulky leather handbag. “I have an iPod and noise-canceling headphones. She won’t hear a thing.”

  “Actually, I’d prefer it if she stayed out here anyway. I need a cigarette and I absolutely can’t have her seeing me smoke. She’d tell all her friends, and I really don’t want kids thinking of me like this. I’m supposed to be this strong female role model and look at me! This is humiliating.”

  I thought it was a strange thing for her to say, that she didn’t want me to see her smoke, because now I knew she smoked and would probably tell my friends anyway. I definitely would, I decided, because she’d hurt my feelings assuming that I couldn’t keep a secret.

  “Hey, no.” My mom rested her arm lightly on Rachel’s arm. “You don’t have to explain yourself. Justine will stay right here.” She reached into her bag and handed me the iPod and noise-canceling headphones, saying, “This won’t take long, sweetie. And we’ll go back to Ben & Jerry’s right after. I owe you an ice cream, okay?”

  Then I was standing alone holding an iPod in one hand and noise-canceling headphones in the other, not sure what to do next because nothing on the iPod was half as interesting as what I knew was going on behind that trailer door. I sat down on the steps and tried to hear what they were saying, but every word was muffled and garbled by the aluminum walls between us. Cigarette smoke wafted out through the mesh-screen windows.

  I don’t think I would have particularly cared about what it looked like inside a movie star’s trailer if it weren’t for me not being allowed in one. I hated being on the outside, like I hadn’t earned my way in, like maybe I never would. On my mom’s 2002 iPod I listened to Fearless by Taylor Swift, the entire album, and with my eyes closed I could hear just how fearless this girl really was. She poured her awkward teenage heart into each lyric and didn’t care what people thought of it, or, even more fearlessly, she did care but wrote it down and sang it out anyway. I admired the hell out of that. In fifth grade, when I was asked to read “The Sand Locket” out loud for my class, I refused. Just the idea of standing up in front of thirty other students made my legs shake so wildly I knew I wouldn’t make it to the podium, let alone manage to force my mouth open once I got up there. But back at home that night, I’d cried—no, sobbed—because I’d wanted to read my story. I just couldn’t. I wasn’t fearless. And I worried that I never would be.

  As the album played through, I thought about how in 2007 she’d played her first song (and first hit), “Tim McGraw,” in front of Tim McGraw himself at the Country Music Awards. She’d strolled right up to where he sat in the audience and serenaded him on live TV, not a hint of insecurity on her ceramic face, not even the slightest tremor in her voice. Even at seventeen she knew with every inch of herself that she deserved to be there; she knew she’d earned her way in. I thought, if she were me right now, she’d knock down the trailer door and declare injustice on the whole thing, or she’d run away and make them rue the day they locked her out. But I did neither. I wasn’t fearless.

  It was two hours later before my mom finally came out, pulling the door closed quickly behind her, smelling strongly of smoke and perfume. The sun was down and I was shivering, the title track playing for the tenth or eleventh time, Taylor singing: You take my hand and drag me headfirst, fearless.

  “More Taylor Swift?” My mom wrinkled her nose, snatching the iPod from my hand. “Of all the real music I have on there, you choose Taylor Swift?”

  Yes, I wanted to say, and what do you know about real music? You think because she’s new and maybe a little naive and a seventeen-year-old hopeless romantic that her music isn’t real? Did you know she writes it all herself? Did you know she doesn’t care whether you think her music is real or not? Did you know if I could I’d be her right now instead of me and tell you that I’m cold and tired and hungry and that you hurt my feelings leaving me out here for so long and that you owe me an ice cream?

  But instead I said, “Yes. She’s fearless.”

  “Great,” my mom said. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

  I sat quietly in the back seat as she drove us home, and as we passed Ben & Jerry’s I said nothing, my nose pressed up against the car window, practically lusting after the pink neon ice cream cone glowing in the dark. I wanted the ice cream, yes, but there was something I wanted more now: to get on the inside, and to be fearless when I got there.

  CHAPTER 4

  FAME AND ANONYMITY

  Jump to the last day of tenth grade, probably one of the most important days of my life. I was sixteen and still nursing a bruised ego about the night spent outside Rachel Ames’s trailer. Though I tried not to, I still believed that I’d been left out in the cold because I wasn’t important. If I’d been an important person, Rachel Ames would have wanted me in there with her. She would have placed a cigarette in my tiny eight-year-old hand and said, “Okay, Justine, tell me what you think.” Do you see what my mind can do to itself sometimes?

  And it wasn’t just Rachel Ames and it wasn’t just my mom. Growing up in Los Angeles with two parents who rubbed elbows with celebrities—Mom adored it, Dad resented it—put me in an odd Twilight Zone–style limbo between two different worlds: the world of fame and the world of anonymity. Normally, if you’re rich and famous, you don’t ever have to stand in the rain waiting for the bus with a drenched gaggle of teenagers and local schizophrenics who have wandered up Pico Boulevard from the beach, and normally, if you are not rich and famous, you don’t get to stand with your nose pressed up against the glass box in which these enigmatic creatures live. Unless you’re me. I was a non-famous, an anonymous, with front-row seats to the most in-demand show of the century, and never to be allowed onstage. It was fucking surreal.

  You want examples? No problem. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of ten times I was a Hollywood outsider on the Hollywood inside.

  1.  I’m nine years old, taking after-school classes at Brentwood Art Academy. My dad has paid the academy in paintings, not money. Suri Cruise is in my class. She’s four years old but dressed to kill in her multi-patterned sundresses and oversized satin hair bows. I’m jealous of her for everything she is and has, my friends at school are jealous of me just because I know her. I hate being jealous of a four-year-old. Katie and Tom pick her up at the end of each day in Tom’s Bugatti Veyron. My mom wants to know how short he looks in person. I don’t know, I say, he’s taller than me.

  2.  I’m twelve years old and losing friends because I’m the only one developing breasts. My mom meets Joni Mitchell at a party and the two hit it off, end up deep in conversation back at her Bel Air mansion. That year Joni Mitchell calls to wish me a happy birthday and invites me to her next show. News of this makes me highly popular for about a week, before the other kids realize they don’t really know who Joni Mitchell even is, and then forget entirely.

  3.  I’m six years old and obsessed with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Our next-door neighbor is their makeup artist and she agrees to take me to a photo shoot. The shoot is supposed to be set in London, but actually takes place on a set in LA that looks like London. Mary-Kate and Ashley introduce themselves as Mary-Kate and Ashley. They’re sweet and friendly as angels. They smell like daisies and mint and
I’m too shy to say anything. They’re very busy, but if I want I can stay and watch them get their makeup done. So I do.

  4.  I’m ten years old and Rachel Bilson’s cousin starts going to my mom for therapy. Rachel Bilson’s cousin has a bunch of Rachel Bilson’s clothes that Rachel Bilson doesn’t want anymore. She’s a size zero in everything, and at ten years old, so am I. For the next two years I wear designer label outfits rejected by Rachel Bilson.

  5.  I’m eight years old and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son is on my softball team. He’s at all the games. I’m the only one who doesn’t give a fuck.

  6.  I’m eleven years old and Julia Roberts moves into a house down the street. She hires me to water her garden and pays me fifty dollars every time. Emma Roberts watches me from the porch. One day she gives me her Dolce & Gabbana headband. I treasure it forever.

  7.  I’m thirteen years old and my mom is working with someone on the cast of Mad Men, though she won’t tell me who. She gets us invited to the screening of the finale at the Ace Hotel downtown. At the rooftop after-party, she gets lost in a conversation with John Slattery. I wander away and sit alone by the Jacuzzi with the Mad Men logo projected onto the water. A man who says he’s a producer sits next to me and holds out a drink. He says it’s called an old-fashioned and puts his hand on my thigh. Immediately, I hate him for it. I stand up abruptly, accidentally knocking the drink out of his hand and into the Jacuzzi. He’s mad, quietly calls me a cunt. I hurry away and hide in the hallway, crying. Jon Hamm finds me there and takes pity, helps me find my mom.

  8.  I’m seven years old and my babysitter is also Willow Smith’s babysitter. We’re invited to a Labor Day BBQ with the Smiths. I don’t remember being there, but you can bet my mom saved the pictures.