Fake Plastic Girl Read online

  But in the website’s heyday, photographs were organized by night, and each night got a title, word combinations I never understood like “Nylon Let’s Go” or “Spooky Youth Twelve.” I’d realize later those combinations were intentionally nonsensical so it would appear esoteric, vaguely poetic, a code you’d certainly be able to decipher if only you weren’t so out of touch, so out of tune. The truth is, I realize now, those word combinations didn’t mean anything at all, not to Spencer Sawyer (famed photographer and curator of the site) or to anyone. The whole thing was designed to make you feel like you’d never be cool enough to “get it.” You’d click on one and be taken to a page of about fifty photos that would guide you in time from the beginning of the party when everyone is in makeup and heels, to the very end when the makeup is smudged and the heels are off and the cups are empty and the sun is rising outside and people are sitting on the floor and the crowd is disappearing à la And Then There Were None. Normally by the very end it’d be down to four people: Olivia Law (model), London Miller (model), Josie Bishop (beautiful hanger-on), and lightly freckled, moony-skinned, seventeen-year-old Eva-Kate Kelly.

  Eva-Kate stood out among the others, mostly because she was so much more famous than they were. She was a child star turned party girl, one of the most gossiped-about actresses in Hollywood. She wasn’t quite A-list, but almost. What I mean is that her work wasn’t Oscar material, but America cherished her for what she gave them: easily digestible coming-of-age adventure features for the whole family.

  Since 2007, when she’d appeared on the scene in Jennie and Jenny, it was clear that Eva-Kate Kelly was a prodigy. She was, at least in my mind, way too good for the club-kid scene she now dallied in, and I wondered why she chose to slum it with a motley crew of forgettable socialites. They’d be sprawled out on divans and daybeds with red eyes and blue tongues from sucking on lollipops all night and they’d look like hell, washed out and used up, and I knew I shouldn’t want to be one of them but I did, because they were the main characters of this glittering train wreck, the center of Eva-Kate’s world.

  That night I was scrolling through the newest collection, titled “Sentiment Central.” The party was inside what looked like a Swiss chalet filled up with white and silver balloons that bobbed around like detached heads. Many of the girls had bare arms and pastel lips and acrylic nails sharpened to a point like cat claws. The guys had overly styled goatees and baseball hats on backward and leather jackets revealing inky murals on their forearms. There was a photo of a girl with clear-rimmed glasses, tongue sticking out. There was a photo of that guy from Breaking Bad, the younger one, getting up close and personal with the camera, looking fake-confrontational. There was a photo of a Disney Channel actress with a champagne flute, holding it up like a trophy, a heavy, silvery chain bisecting the girl diagonally at her cleavage. Olivia, London, and Josie were there. Of course they were there, lazily leaning on one another, hair in faces, clinking glasses, blowing kisses. There was a photo of Olivia sitting on London’s shoulders while Josie exhaled loose rings of smoke, hip cocked to the side, sapphire eyes fiercely glowing in the dark. There was a photo of London trying to put her hair in pigtails while flipping off the camera with one hand. There was a photo of Eva-Kate Kelly sharing a stick of purple rock candy with A-list singer-songwriter Rob Donovan, his hair perfectly pushed back in what was so obviously a tribute to James Dean it was almost more awkward than sexy. Almost.

  About twenty-five photos in, the party moved outside to a pool surrounded by wet slate and wooden lounge chairs. Josie was the first to strip down to her Cosabella lace underwear and jump in. Others followed, and a game of chicken began. How many rounds of Marco Polo were played, I wondered, how many underwater tea parties? I clicked quickly through until the images began to take on motion and come to life like a flip-book: Olivia and London sat on the pool edge dipping their feet in the water, splashing it at each other, smoking cigarettes and staring off to the city sprawled out below.

  Princess Leia barked—an endearingly ambitious bark—snapping me out of the fantasy and back onto my own porch with the dark canal water and the choiring crickets. My scene was a lonely one. Were it to be photographed, it would convey no motion and let off no heat, do you know what I mean? It would be cold and still like a block of ice. It would be silent. Which is not how a photograph of a sixteen-year-old should be. A photograph of a sixteen-year-old should burst with sound and warmth, energy and radiation drifting off the glossy sheet like the aftershocks of her adventures. I had no adventures. I went to a high school party once with Riley and Abbie but didn’t know how to ask or answer the simplest questions and spent the night standing in a corner with half a flask of Jack Daniel’s someone had handed me—too cautious to even taste it—watching girls in jean shorts rub their asses up against oblivious and undeserving dickheads. I carried around the feeling that something was definitely wrong with me, I just didn’t know what. I’d never had sex. I couldn’t even imagine it.

  Yes, that’s right: Despite what you’ve heard, when the summer of 2018 began, I was a virgin. The image they’ve fabricated of some kind of cold, calculating harlot is just that: a fabrication. And it couldn’t be further from the truth.

  Princess Leia barked again, her nose pointed and twitching at the house across the canal, a modern almost-mansion with tall windows, a smooth concrete exterior, and two fat palm trees sitting on either side. For as long as I could remember the house had been vacant; we’d easily been able to peer in and see how thoroughly un-lived-in it was inside, how empty. But then, suddenly one night, that night, it wasn’t. Someone was in there.

  “What?” I purred back at her. “What is it, my precious baby? Who’s out there?” I looked out into the hedges that separated us from the still strip of water. “Who are you trying to protect us from, huh?”

  That’s when I saw her, my new neighbor. She walked across her living room, switching off lamps and lighting candles in their place. She opened a bottle of something and drank from it, then turned on the TV, which sprang to life in patches of fuzzy, rippled blue that filled up the room like water. It was almost as big as her wall, the TV was. Then there was me, watching from across the canal with the cookie dough I would soon be excavating for its chocolate chips, and Princess Leia, eyeing me suspiciously with each bite.

  * * *

  The second time I saw her was seventeen hours later and in broad daylight. Princess Leia and I walked past the newly inhabited monstrosity-across-the-way for the third time that day when a girl came out to open her mailbox. She pulled open the tinny door and peered in, pouted, then slammed it shut. She turned toward me then and for a moment I was stunned: She wasn’t just any new neighbor, she was Eva-Kate Kelly.

  Yes, the Eva-Kate Kelly.

  When people meet celebrities, they always say, “She was even more beautiful in person!” And yeah, Eva-Kate was more beautiful in person, but what struck me was how her face was so much more complex than on screen. It was somehow both narrow and full at the same time; her bones were delicate bird bones but her cheeks were two peaches sprayed with light freckles, and her eyes the glowing ends of optical fibers. When she saw me, she cocked her head to one side, the way Princess Leia would, and gave me a half smile with her orangey-red lips.

  “Are you my new neighbor?” she asked. Her voice was deep for a girl’s, but soft and airy. The words she spoke had space between them; they were loose and easy, caught in a breeze. My chest caved in on me. She took my breath away, she really did. I guess I have to admit that up front, otherwise there’s no real point to writing all of this down for you (or for me?), no real point to getting the truth down on paper once and for all if I’m not being rigorously honest, right? Truth is multidimensional, that’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, and it spins like a planet thrown wildly out of orbit, making it hard to pin down. But I’m trying.

  “I live over there,” is what I finally said, “in that house,” and pointed behind me, to the bungalow that
sat perched in the massive shade cast by Eva-Kate’s mansion.

  “Lovely.” She ran one index finger over the black velvet line of a choker around her pale neck. “I haven’t met any neighbors yet, I only moved in yesterday so I haven’t gotten to explore. I’m Eva-Kate, by the way.”

  She put out her hand for me to shake. It was icy cold.

  “Yeah … I know,” I said, then immediately regretted it. I’d made myself sound like a fangirl right off the bat, an outsider. But either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care.

  “And you are?”

  “I’m Justine.”

  “Justine…?”

  “Oh. Childs. Justine Childs.”

  “Well, Justine Childs”—she squeezed my hand—“I better get back to unpacking. It was nice to meet you, hope I’ll be seeing you around.”

  She made a gun shape with her fingers and shot me with it.

  I walked home trying to process what had just happened, trying to understand the somehow larger-than-life energy that emanated from her. She was one of those seemingly invincible people: I could imagine her driving drunk down Mulholland and emerging gracefully, more powerful than ever, sticking the landing like a skilled gymnast. And now she was my neighbor.

  CHAPTER 7

  I DON’T BELIEVE IT!

  I spent that night watching Eva-Kate Kelly from my room, a low-ceilinged space with lots of wooden furniture painted white. From my window she was a blip, a radioactive presence inching across my screen. I found Jennie and Jenny on Netflix and made my way through the first season.

  I had watched it as a kid, in the afternoons when my mom was seeing her patients and I had nothing to do. My dad would say do your homework, applying thick globs of paint to one of his canvases, a Corona in his free hand, and I’d say I already did (and I’d be telling the truth), and he’d turn to me with strained patience and say honey, I gotta work right now, can you find something to do until I’m finished and then I’ll take you to the park? So I’d go into my room, close the door, and watch TV late into the night, falling asleep to the Jennie and Jenny opening theme song and Eva-Kate Kelly’s ten-year-old voice vehemently declaring, “I don’t believe it!”

  Jennie and Jenny was a show about a ten-year-old who was part-time inhabited by her great-grandmother’s spirit. Ordinarily, she was Jennie, hanging with her friends and being a regular, well-behaved kid. Then, once an episode, her mischievous, well-to-do, Prohibition-era great-grandmother, Jenny (who she was named for), would have a bone to pick with the way things were and would swoop down into Jennie’s body to try to change it. More often than not, great-grandma Jenny felt that things in her descendants’ lives were too dull, and she’d think of ways to shake things up, using her great-granddaughter as a vessel with which to do so. At least twice an episode, little Jennie would grip her own head and say, “I don’t believe it!” and the live audience would go wild with laughter, maybe not at the line itself but at the precocious ten-year-old delivering the line with the self-aware charisma of an old soul. And thus, a catchphrase was born.

  Looking back, I realize the show was essentially a kid-friendly portrayal of multiple personality disorder. For Jennie, being taken over by her great-grandmother was, in its best moments, funny, wacky, and, like, so weird (!). In its worst moments it was a total nuisance, and just like uggghhhhh, so annoying. Nothing like the actual experience of suffering from multiple personality disorder, which I’m sure is actually devastating and terrifying on a regular basis. Although there was that one episode where grandma Jenny has granddaughter Jennie lock herself in the basement of a building that was scheduled to be demolished in mere minutes. I forget her reasoning there, but I remember the nightmares it gave me.

  I watched the first season, then the second, trying to reconcile the girl I had just met with the girl I’d watched on TV all those years ago. I’d look from my TV to the house across the canal and back again, as if doing so could connect the two versions of Eva-Kate Kelly and create something whole.

  I felt creepy, like I was tracking her. But what was I tracking her for? What did I want from her? I wanted to be her friend, yes; I wanted her to want to be my friend. I stayed up late and searched her name on Google. I scrolled and scrolled. Eva-Kate Kelly at eight years old in stills from Jennie and Jenny, cheeks still plump with baby fat. Eva-Kate Kelly at eleven on the red carpet in a candy-colored two-piece dress, belly shamelessly exposed. Eva-Kate Kelly at thirteen on the red carpet in gray silk, hair pulled back in a chignon, a black leather clutch clutched tight, baby fat completely gone. Eva-Kate Kelly later the same year with her tongue sticking out, stained a shocking shade of blue you’d never find in nature (and if you did it would kill you). Eva-Kate Kelly at fourteen caught making out with sixteen-year-old pop star Rob Donovan on the shores of Zuma Beach. Eva-Kate Kelly at fifteen looking unconvincingly stoic in a yellow silk dress beneath stylistically uneven, asymmetrical lettering that read: EVA-KATE KELLY WANTS YOU TO KNOW YOU’RE NOT ALONE. IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS HAVING SUICIDAL THOUGHTS, CALL 1-800-EKK-TALK. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT FREE AND CONFIDENTIAL. Eva-Kate Kelly floating on a blow-up pool chair with a blond bun on top of her head and Wildfox shades on her face and big neon print in the sky above her reading WHO IS THE REAL EVA-KATE KELLY? It felt like a valid question, but the accompanying article from three years ago talked only about how fourteen-year-old Eva-Kate saw herself as so much more than just an actress, about her jewelry line and her mission to end teenage suicide, about her crush on Kurt Cobain, and about her newfound passion for shabby chic sundresses.

  * * *

  The next night Eva-Kate Kelly threw a party. Those noises, those colors. I’ll never forget. They swarmed her home in the form of partygoers, riotous and thirsty, blue and purple klieg lights crisscrossing overhead, electronic music with a doped-up heartbeat pulsing deep in the water between us. Six times I went to my front door praying for the courage to cross the bridge and let myself in through Eva-Kate Kelly’s front door, which was a mouth hung open, letting in fireflies. Fireflies wearing flower-patterned dresses and cork wedges, hair dyed pastel blue and pink and green. Fireflies in tracksuits. Fireflies in skinny jeans.

  Even if I were brave enough to go, I had nothing to wear. My wardrobe consisted of Gap T-shirts and leggings, Converse All Stars with Beatles lyrics written in Sharpie on the white rubber soles, jean jackets with flowers embroidered, not ironically, on the cuffs and collars. So I went back to my room and laid myself down on this rug I had from IKEA that was in the shape of a big red spiral. I was the eye of the spiral with Princess Leia curled up on my chest and my hands over my ears, trying to block out the nsst-nsst-nsst and bmp-bmp-bmp sounds coming from across the water that were nothing more than sonic representations of my failure.

  My phone rang—Night Owl, none of that default Marimba lameness—and the screen read MOM and I said to myself, out loud, “Agh, why????” but answered it anyway.

  “Hi, Mom, I’m fine.”

  “Hi, my little ladybug, are you okay? How’s Aunt Jillian? Remember to tell her to turn off the air-conditioning if it gets too cold.”

  “I said I’m fine. Yes. How are you? How’s your—”

  “What have you been eating? Make sure it’s enough. I don’t want to come home to find you wasted away.”

  “I’m eating enough,” I said, chewing off a fingernail and spitting it out.

  “I hope so. How’s Princess Leia?”

  “Perfect.” I didn’t mention that she’d been trying to run away, that I’d caught her trying to burrow under the front gate twice now. “Do you want to talk to her?” I put the phone to Princess Leia’s wet mouth and waited about five seconds, then brought it back to my own mouth and said, “Sorry, I guess she doesn’t want to talk.”

  “Very funny, Justine. Are you walking her?”

  “Every day.”

  “Twice every day.”

  “Right, yeah. Twice every day.”

  “And what about sunscreen?”

  “Oh
my God, Mom, what about sunscreen?”

  “Are you wearing it? I read that UV rays have never been higher than they are right now. Or maybe it was that they’ve never been stronger than they are right now. Well, either way, they’ve never been more something as they are right now. You can get skin cancer just by going outside if you’re not careful. SPF 50, at least.”

  “Got it.”

  “And is Jillian taking you home to check the mail?”

  “Uh … sure.” I peered outside at the tin mailbox with that useless red arrow switched to an upright position. “Yeah.”

  “Justine, you have to check the mail, it isn’t going to kill you. If you’re going to be weird about opening it, fine, but you have to get Jillian to drive you home so you can bring it into the house, otherwise when burglars come snooping by they’ll see mail piling up and think no one’s home. It’s just an open invitation for them to have a field day.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll bring the mail in.” I wasn’t going to do it, though. Mail triggered a sense of unease within me that I just didn’t need right now.

  “I have one more thing to ask you but I think you’ll just bite my head off. Promise not to bite my head off?”

  “You’re on the other side of the world, I couldn’t even if I tried.”

  “You seem like you’re getting … moody again. Are you taking your meds?”

  “Of course I am, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You can be forgetful sometimes. I would just hate for you to end up—well, no offense, honey, but you know.”

  “Yep. I know.”