Fake Plastic Girl Read online

  CHAPTER 16

  SEX AND CANDY

  I woke up disoriented and alone, the vague evidence of Eva-Kate in the wrinkled linen by my side. Her red velvet curtains were thick and impenetrable, but nonetheless a searing beam of light cut through the tiny sliver between them, so bright I had to shield my eyes. Blaring music rattled the floor. It was coming from downstairs.

  Beneath my blanket I saw that I was naked and gasped so sharply it hurt my chest. The idea of me being naked in somebody else’s bed was so absurd it scared me. In an instant, the fear transmuted to this vast, grand sadness like a slimy gray liquid circling my heart. I didn’t understand it. I thought I should be happy. Instead I had this feeling like I’d taken something I didn’t deserve.

  I put on my dress and it felt like somebody else’s dress. My feet felt like somebody else’s feet walking down the cold hardwood stairs. The air was freezing; she must have had the air-conditioning set somewhere around sixty-one. She liked it that way. Frigid, she’d said. I want it so cold my teeth chatter.

  Out in the hallway, Eva-Kate’s clear plastic landline was trilling. A pink light flashed on and off from inside the mechanism like a tiny heart on high alert. Tempted to answer it, I stopped myself and hurried on. I followed the thumping drumbeat and found her in the kitchen making French press coffee wearing nothing but heather-gray boy shorts. She was singing along to the music, “Never Let You Go” by Third Eye Blind, tapping her fingers against the counter as if it were a piano and she was playing the melody.

  “Eeeeeeeh!” she squealed when she saw me, performing a professional-level pirouette without a hint of effort. “You’re awake!” She had to scream so I could hear her over the music. I didn’t know how I was supposed to behave after what happened. Had things changed? Was I supposed to kiss her? Tell her she looked beautiful? I wanted to do both, but her flighty insouciance made me second-guess whether anything really did happen.

  “Your phone was ringing upstairs,” I said. “The landline.”

  “Oh, that’s fine.” She shrugged it off. “Sit, sit. Coffee’s almost ready.”

  I sat across from her on one of the bar stools that surrounded the marble island and laced my fingers together, insecure about what to do with my hands.

  She tilted her face up and yelled into the air.

  “LOWER MUSIC!”

  “Lowering music,” a smooth female voice replied, taking the volume down to a more reasonable decibel.

  “So, how’d ya sleep?” she asked with a singsong lilt, snatching a cotton T-shirt off one of the bar stools and shimmying it over her head.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Good, I think. How about you?”

  I had woken up disoriented, a sure sign, when I thought about it, that I had descended deep down into the gorgeously inaccessible crypts of my subconscious.

  “Cream? Sugar?” she asked, ignoring the question and pouring tar-brown liquid into two hammered-copper mugs.

  “Oh … neither. Black is fine.”

  She wrinkled her nose.

  “That’s brutal,” she said. “Do you hate yourself?”

  “No!” I laughed. Although, maybe, I thought. “What’s wrong with black coffee?” It’s how Riley had been drinking it since middle school, getting off-the-walls wired before first period while the rest of us stared into space like zombies.

  “Um, it’s disgusting and you deserve better,” she said, pouring a generous stream of half-and-half into my mug. “Here, try this.”

  The cream swirled in hypnotic tendrils and rivulets through the steaming-hot black, too precious to drink. I waited for the clouds to dissolve then took a sip.

  “Mmm, good, sweet,” I said, though it was still too hot to taste. The song ended and was followed by “Sex and Candy” by Marcy Playground. I’d never heard it before, but the names of the songs appeared conveyed in blue on the sound system.

  “Goddamn, I’ll never get over this song,” she said, taking a big gulp from her mug, eyes lighting up with sweetness. “This is my jam.”

  “I’ve never heard it,” I admitted. I was gradually learning to let myself be imperfect around her. It was better than pretending to know everything and then fumbling to keep up the act.

  “What?” She raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “How is that possible?”

  “Is it … when did it come out?”

  “When did it come out? Oh my God, you’re seriously the cutest. It’s from 1997. It was like a thing at the time, but people have forgotten it so hard it’s like it never existed.”

  “How do you know it, then?”

  “Oh,” she sighed, looking down into the mug. “It was the last song on Now That’s What I Call Music. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “Yeah … there’s like dozens of them, right?”

  “Yeah, but this was the first one. It was in England before, but this was the first one to be released in America. It had some real nineties gems. Janet Jackson and the Spice Girls and Lenny Kravitz … oh my God, Aqua. Do you remember Aqua?”

  “No!” I laughed, “Because I wasn’t alive in the nineties! And neither were you.”

  “No, but my mom was obsessed with the music,” she said with some sourness. “Anything from any part of the nineties … Nirvana, Backstreet Boys, didn’t matter to her, she loved it all. She was really young when she had me and Liza, so this was the music from her childhood, her comfort music. And she played it all. Day. Long. So it became my comfort music too. Now listening to it makes me feel safe; you know that warm nostalgic feeling like being wrapped in a cashmere blanket?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, “I get that.”

  “Which is weird, though, because my mom is a sadistic psycho, so you’d think nineties jams would make me blue.” She twisted her mouth into an amusedly puzzled knot and tapped one finger against her bottom lip as if she had a fun riddle to solve. “But it just doesn’t. Nineties and early 2000s, man, I’m tellin’ ya. One day civilization will look back and know that it was the true golden era.”

  “How was your mom a sadistic psycho?” I’d barely heard the rest of what she’d said after those two words. These were bone-chilling words, but she’d rattled them off without hesitating or looking back.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” she sighed, her energy taking a visible dive. “But the short version is that she didn’t want kids. She was a pill-popping waitress who moved to LA for all the reasons people move to LA. Stupid reasons. Her boyfriend was a married man who ghosted when he heard she was pregnant. So she was bitter about the whole thing before we were even born. And I don’t blame her for that part; getting knocked up and abandoned like that is fucked up.”

  “Awful,” I agreed. Suddenly it felt like we were bartender and customer drinking over our blues in a dark dive bar, the extra grim kind with motorcyclists in leather loitering just outside.

  “But so, fine, hate the asshole who did this to you, don’t hate your babies. It’s not their fault. They didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “She didn’t hate you.” I laughed nervously. “Did she? Did she actually hate you?”

  “Well, I don’t really know what she was like before we were born, but when she had us, something went very, very wrong in her brain. She had this … delusion.” Eva-Kate laughed the laugh of someone gearing up to speak the unbelievable. “I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. She had this delusion that Liza and I were God and the Devil incarnate. That’s what she saw when she looked at us. I’m telling you, this woman was wacko. To her, Liza was God on Earth, an actual angel, and then I was the opposite … the weirdest part is that she’s not even Christian.”

  “That’s the weirdest part?” was all I could think to say.

  “Sometimes I wonder how things would be if her visions had been reversed. If she’d seen pure goodness in me, would I be out there right now living some admirably average life like Liza gets to? Or did she see bad in me because I was born bad? Which came first, you know? Am I bad because she
told me I was bad, or did she tell me I was bad because she saw something in me that scared her?” She looped her hair around one finger and brought it close to her mouth like a security blanket. “My eyes. She said I was born with dead eyes. You don’t think I have dead eyes, do you?”

  “What?” I was outraged. “Your eyes are literally brilliant. Everyone knows that! And what does that even mean anyway, ‘dead eyes’? You were a baby, what were your eyes supposed to look like?”

  “I know, right?” Her voice plumped up with artificial intrigue like she’d just received a delicious gumdrop of fresh gossip. “They say parents are hard on their kids, but Mama McKelvoy took it to a whole new level. And she spent most of my money on hiring the best publicity team on planet Earth. Same people who went on to cover up the Taylor Swift–Conor Kennedy car crash.”

  “Wow.” I gawked, briefly impressed. “I can’t even imagine that. I…” I wavered between wanting her to elaborate and fearing what she might reveal next.

  “I mean, what can ya do, right? At least Liza turned out okay. Or, like I said, maybe it’s not that she turned out okay, but that she was born okay, born the good seed. Destined to be sane and stable. Oh well.” She shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know.”

  “Wait, hold on, do you really think Liza turned out better than you did? She’s a hostess. Do you know how much money she probably makes? Basically none. And—”

  “It’s not about the money,” she sighed. “I’d trade my money for the … I don’t know, the simplicity of her life. And the peace of mind she always seems to have.”

  “But…” I couldn’t understand. What were simplicity and peace of mind compared to everything Eva-Kate had? I had given up on simplicity and peace of mind a long time ago. They sounded nice, but I realized they weren’t worth the effort. “Okay, fine, so you want to make some changes. But you’re a teenager with this talent and incredible success—that you’re totally worthy of, by the way—and Liza’s dating your ex-boyfriend? How good and ‘stable’ could she really be?”

  “Well, according to Rob, very. You know what it is? It’s that she hasn’t been damaged by this fucked-up industry and Rob just adores that innocence. He left me for that innocence. What an idiot. Just because she hasn’t been eroded by fame doesn’t mean she’s better than I am.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Whatever.” She shivered. “They can be together for now. If it lasts too long for my liking I’ll end it.”

  “What do you mean? How?”

  She cupped her hand over her mouth.

  “I shouldn’t be smiling. It’s not funny. Although it’s kind of funny.”

  “What is?” I matched her smile so she’d know I wouldn’t judge. “You can tell me.”

  “Okay.” She glanced around the room with casual suspicion, then leaned her elbows on the counter. “Last year I caught him cheating on me with some fourteen-year-old girl from Campbell Hall.”

  “Ew, what? Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Well, no, because he wasn’t eighteen yet. But hold on, I haven’t gotten to the good part yet. Or, I mean, the bad part.”

  “Okay, sorry, continue.”

  “It turned out he got her pregnant.”

  “Shut up.”

  “No, seriously. And how do I find this out? She came to me and asked for help. She didn’t know who to talk to, her parents would have killed her, for all I know Rob could have killed her. And thank God she came to me before the press found out, now that would have been the true embarrassment. For both of us.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What do you think? I gave her cash to get an abortion and then some more to never tell anybody what happened. Then I pretended like everything was fine. Maybe I should have broken up with him at that point, but honestly, who has the energy?”

  “Okay…” It seemed logical enough. I figured it’s what I would do too. “But what does this have to do with him and Liza?”

  “If I really wanted to break them up, I’d just show her the texts between Rob and the girl. Liza would never be with a guy who slept with a fourteen-year-old”—she rolled her eyes—“plus she’s got that whole anti-abortion thing going on.”

  “How do you have their texts?”

  “I had the girl send me screenshots back when this happened. I told her I needed them as proof that it really was his baby. I had to make sure she wasn’t just some girl looking for money.”

  “And you kept them?” This wasn’t really the part that shocked me, but it was the only part I could easily wrap my mind around.

  “Of course I did. I knew I’d need the ammunition one day. You gotta stay one step ahead of everyone else if you’re gonna survive.”

  “Right,” I agreed, trying not to think about the things Rob had said to me. The world would be a better place without her. I wanted to have never heard this. I didn’t want to have to tell her, but what if having these texts was putting her in danger? Did he know she had them?

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. I wondered how she could tell.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “You just got really weird. You, like, zoned out for a second.”

  “I did? Oh. Well, yeah…” She might shoot the messenger, but it would be a better fate than if she found out I’d hidden this from her. “I have no idea how to say this, so, um, okay, I’ll just … Rob approached me at that party.”

  “Shocking,” she deadpanned. “And?”

  “He … well, he said something that kind of scared me.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “He said the world would be a better place without you,” I blurted. “And now I’m wondering if that had something to do with all of this. Like, maybe he’s worried you’re going to release the texts?”

  Her face fell. She went from smug to devastated so quickly it frightened me. For a moment I wished more than anything I’d ever wished for that I hadn’t said it. But then she closed her eyes and smiled very softly.

  “Thank you so much for telling me,” she said. “Ruby was right. You’re so trustworthy.”

  “Do you know what he meant by that?” I stammered, foreseeing the damage I might have just caused. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it in my stomach, sticky and weighted like molasses.

  “Let’s get away,” she said, in lieu of an answer. “San Luis Obispo. We’ll go Friday. I can’t think straight in this city.”

  I agreed without hesitation. Though, in retrospect, I realize she never actually gave me the option not to. Just a few weeks ago, if you’d told me I’d be going on a trip with Eva-Kate Kelly, I would have dropped dead from blissful disbelief. This was the dream. But now that she’d told me her secret blackmail plan, I couldn’t help but see Rob’s accusations in an unflattering new light.

  The world would be a better place without her.

  She’s not who you think she is.

  She’s a puppet. And the puppeteer.

  She keeps her friends close, but she likes to keep her enemies even closer. You know what I mean?

  CHAPTER 17

  FIFTY SHADES OF HAIR DYE

  Back in my room, I opened the box from Hot Toxic, filled with tubes of hair dye in every shade you could imagine. The options left absolutely nothing to be desired. Their holographic labels read CANDY APPLE, SCARLET, FUCHSIA, FOLLY, AMETHYST, MAGENTA, VIOLET, WINE, LAPIS, IRIS, CYAN, STONE, ROBIN’S EGG, VERDIGRIS, KELLY, MINT, CORAL, TANGELO, AMBER, SUNGLOW. And that was only the very beginning. After an hour of trying to pick one, I was on the verge of a full-blown existential crisis. Which shade was Justine Childs? Which shade was the Justine Childs? Which shade was me? Who was I? The more I asked, the less I knew. I’d have to bleach my hair if I wanted any of the color to show up. With a quiet flash of panic, I felt my essence living in the pigment and feared it getting stripped away. Instinctively, I snatched Princess Leia up from the foot of the bed and held her close.

  My phone rang and startled me half to death. It was my mom, and I almo
st answered it. That’s how on edge I felt. There was a part of me that actually wanted to talk to my mom. I had to remind myself that the mom I wanted was not the mom I had, and that the mom I had would actually make this worse. I let it go to voice mail and kept Princess Leia tucked into the crook of my elbow as I lined the multi-shaded tubes up flat against the bed in ten rows of five spanning from red to violet.

  “Gorgeous,” I said out loud, satisfied now that a sense of order had been restored. I took a picture from above and filtered it twice, first with Fresh on the AirBrush app, then Amaro on Instagram, then hit POST. #HotToxic, #InLove, #ColorMeUp.

  The more likes that flooded in, the better I felt. It was as though a drug had kicked in, each like bumping me up to a higher high. Two hundred, five hundred, nine hundred. It hit one thousand and stopped there. My buzz plateaued and threatened to fizz out. I scrolled hungrily through the comments, eager to stay up here where the fresh, clear, thin air was an inhospitable environment for my anxieties.

  @Byrx.Z25:

  @Byrx.Z25: why isn’t your fine face in this pic?

  @X_Jane_X: Get it girl!!

  @LanaBanana: What’s it like to be friends with Eva-Kate? I would DIE to be you.

  @These_prohibited_pieces: #InLove, huh? Taking it to the next level with Eva-Kate?