c22

I wake up with a jolt, and all of me feels wrong. My whole body feels pinched. My neck is drenched in sweat, my feet freezing cold. I feel sore, like I've been exercising, though I know that's not right. But it's something else that's bothering me, a feeling like I'm lost, like I have no idea where I am. I pull at the comforter on top of me, running my fingers over the fabric, trying to remember it. This isn't the guest room. And then I remember: this is Evie's room. I fell asleep in Evie's room.

I remember the horrible conversation with my mother, the closet, the missing doll. I was bone-tired, like all I wanted to do was lie down and be crushed by a ten-foot wave of sleep. I'd laid down on Evie's bed and imagined the wave flattening me before I could even take a single deep breath. I hadn't meant to sleep here, in her room. Or maybe I had. Maybe it's the only thing that made me feel settled.

I run my hand over the linen bedspread, the familiar shade of sage. And then the memory is floating into my consciousness, bringing me right back to that day last year.

Evie and I had spent the day in her room talking, watching TV, opening mailers from brands who wanted to send her free things in the hopes that she'd post it online. She'd been scrolling through Pinterest on her laptop, making a mood board of everything she wanted for her senior year.

"I want this to be the year where I just let myself go a bit," Evie had said, as if she was sixty instead of seventeen. "Do whatever I want. No more rules. No more worrying about what everyone will say."

"I love that for you," I said, and she had thrust the laptop toward me then, trying to show me the collage of images she had made, the aesthetic she was hoping to mold the next year of her life into. But my thumb moved the mouse when I grabbed the laptop, accidentally clicking on another browser tab. By the time I realized exactly what I was looking at—her bank account—it was all right there in front of me, my brain already making sense of the figures. There was a checking account with just over $4,000 in it, and a savings account with even less.

"Evie," I said, treading carefully, knowing that I had inadvertently invaded her privacy. "I accidentally clicked this tab but…is this your only bank account?"

"Snooping, are we?" she teased, in a way that said she didn't really care if I looked. That it wasn't that big of a deal to her.

But it was to me.

"Seriously, Evie," I pushed. "Is this it? There's nothing else?"

This wasn't right. She should have had hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings and investments, minimum. Seven figures would have made more sense to me. Enough money to put herself through college and then do whatever she wanted to do after that.

"I mean, there's other money, obviously," she said. "But I don't handle that."

My chest tightened.

"Mom does," she said.

"Mom does," I repeated back to her. "She controls all of it?"

"Not all of it, obviously. She pays me every month from what I make—a few thousand, usually, enough to cover basically anything I want." She shrugged, clicking back to Pinterest, to building her dream life. "And then if I want something bigger—the car, for example, I just ask. It's easier this way. What am I going to do with all that money right now? Buy the entire skin care section of Sephora on a whim? Maybe. I wouldn't put it past myself."

A few thousand dollars a month was a lot of money for a teenager, I knew that. But Evie was making so much more than that. She had to be. Still, she seemed so unfazed by my concern, so unbothered by it, that I wanted to believe her. That this setup really did make sense. That my mom really was saving and monitoring her money, safeguarding it for when Evie was ready to go to college, or buy her first home.

"So you get it all when you turn eighteen, then?" I asked. "Next year?"

"That's the plan," she said. "And in the meantime, I can just…chill. I mean, we have meetings, Hazel. She tells me the balances or whatever. I'm not worried about it."

"And then she's no longer your manager, right? You go to college, and you take over everything?"

"Well, maybe," she said.

She was lying face down on the bed, propped up on her elbows, her feet swinging behind her.

"What do you mean, maybe?"

"I mean, it's worked out this long," she said. "And do you know how many horrible influencer agencies are out there? The number of partnerships I would bring a new manager that they'd take a cut of automatically, despite the fact that they had nothing to do with them? Despite the fact that they had done zero work to negotiate them or create them at all? That doesn't exactly seem fair to me."

I considered her point, though I could easily imagine my mother feeding her all of these reasons. Was she right, though? Was my mother more trustworthy than some random manager who had never known my sister before? Could a stranger ever care as much as family? Maybe not.

"Besides, I don't know if college is for me," she mused, like it was the most casual thought in the world. "If it even makes sense, really."

"Of course it makes sense," I said, immediately regretting how tense I must have sounded, how panicked. "It's absolutely for you. You're the smartest person I know."

"Well, thanks," she said, shutting the laptop and sitting up on the bed to face me, her back against the headboard. "I know I could do it. It's not that. It's whether it would really be worth it. I mean, is it really worth doing if most of the reason I'd be doing it is to prove to the world that I'm not actually some hollow, idiotic robot? That I'm intelligent? Does that make sense to you? Because I don't know if it makes sense to me."

"That's not what college is for," I snapped.

"Not for you, maybe," she said. "For you it was what gave you the experience and platform to pursue the career you wanted—the one you're doing now. The one that's going to bring you back to New York, have you working for the Atlantic or something before we know it."

I looked away, studying the cuticle that I'd been tearing on my thumb since we'd started talking about this. I had told Evie the month prior that I had to move into a smaller place because I wanted an apartment that was simpler, more manageable, but I had avoided the part about how I had lost my job. She still had no idea I was back in the same cycle I had left New York to avoid, just as far away from my dream job as I'd always been. Farther, maybe.

"But I already have that platform. I could write a book. Go on a television show. Travel the world for a year. I could do anything. I don't need college to make it possible," she said. "I have the money."

"Well, Mom does," I said, reminding her of how this conversation had started.

"You know what I mean." She rolled her eyes, checking her phone, then typing out a quick message. "Gavin's almost here. We can continue this another time. Are you staying over?"

"Maybe," I managed, still distracted by the conversation. "I don't know."

"Cool, well, we'll talk more," she said, grabbing her wallet from the top of the dresser. "Don't worry about me, Haze. You always did that way more than was necessary. I made it this far, right?"

I had waited until I heard Evie's car pull out of the driveway to walk downstairs and confront my mom. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, a scene that reminded me so much of the mornings I'd leave my lofted bed in the bus and find her editing videos at our tiny dining table that it made me a little nostalgic. We weren't close, not by a long shot, but we were cordial, for Evie. We coexisted peacefully, if not happily. So when I sat down across from her, she looked up, surprised.

"Oh," she said. "I thought you left when Evie did. You're waiting for her to come back, I guess?"

"I wanted to talk to you."

She slowly closed the laptop, like she was curious, then strummed her long nails on the table.

"Okay…" she said.

"What's the deal with the money?" I asked. "Evie's money. I saw her bank account…her savings."

For a split second, I thought I saw fear on her face, but then it relaxed away.

"Well, it's really our money. Evie and I's," she said matter-of-factly. "That's how partnership works."

"Partnership?" I asked. "So, what? It's all fifty-fifty? Even the deals that have nothing to do with you?"

"Something like that."

"Something like that?" I asked. "How much of her money are you taking, exactly? How much have you taken?"

She sighed, standing up from the table and moving to the kitchen, where she filled a glass of water from the tap.

"Enough to make sure you had a roof over your head for years, for one," she said.

A chill ran through me. I knew, of course, that Evie's fame, and to a lesser extent my mother's, had funded our lives for the last few years I was at home before college. I knew this well enough that when my mom had offered to pay for my college tuition, had insisted on it, really, I refused. I told myself I would build a world that didn't include any of that. When I got drunk once and told Sasha that there could have been a scenario in which I wouldn't have had student loans to pay back, I'd expected her to praise me for being principled, for not taking money made from the years-long exploitation of my little sister. Instead, she looked at me like I was the single dumbest person in the world. "That's the most privileged shit I have ever heard in my life," she said. I never brought it up again.

"But you're going to give it all to her when she turns eighteen?" I said. "Right? Half of everything she earned? More than that, I hope? You owe her at least that."

"Well, according to the law, I don't really owe her anything, baby," she said. "There's no law for what we do. No requirement that I have to save money for her when she's older. The fact that I did put money away should tell you that I've gone above and beyond. And trust me, eventually I'm going to get every cent of it back for her."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Get it back?"

"That's actually something I've been wanting to talk to you about. I could really…use your help with something," she said. "Something for Evie."

I blinked at her, waiting for what was next.

"The thing is, I made some bad investments," she said. "A few years ago. My brand deals had started to fade away. I couldn't seem to get the hang of short-form video to save my life. I panicked. When a brand came to me with the opportunity to create a product line, I thought, this…this is the next thing that will build our career."

I placed my hands flat on the table, as if to brace myself.

"It seemed legitimate, I swear," she added. "They pitched it to me as something like Ashlyn's skin care line…it seemed like a slam dunk."

"But…"

"But it wasn't," she said, her gaze focused out the window instead of on me. "I lost…I lost a lot."

"How much?" I pressed. "How much of it did you lose, Mom?"

"Two million," she said quietly.

My mouth went dry.

"Oh, my God," I said, trying to do the math. I had no idea how much money my sister earned in a year, specifically, but I knew it had to be seven figures at least, especially recently. "How much is even left after that…I mean, it still must be a lot, right?"

"There's some left," she said, still staring out the window.

"Define some," I said, standing up.

"Fifty thousand, give or take."

And then I was angry, livid, furious. How could this have happened? How could I have let it happen?

"Where did all go?" I asked. "It can't all be to the product line…what the hell did you spend it on, Mom?"

"I don't know, honey. It just…there was always more money for the longest time. This steady stream of it. I didn't even think about it half the time. There was always enough for your sister's allowance, for whatever she wanted to do. And when you were here, for whatever you wanted to do…it just felt like it wouldn't run out."

"And then it did."

"Yes," she said, crossing her arms in front of herself, defiant. "But we can fix this."

"We?" I asked.

"Yes. We can make it so that Evie never knows about it."

I waited for her to explain, a familiar-feeling mix of resentment and rage stewing somewhere in my gut.

"With the way Evie's partnerships are going right now…the way everything is exploding, I just need two more years. To get back to where I was before. Where we were. Just two more years of working together," she said. "And then she never has to feel like I failed her. Like her only remaining parent has let her down."

And suddenly it clicked for me.

"Is this why she doesn't want to go to college? Why she seems so intent on continuing to work with you?" I asked.

"Well, I don't know how she feels, but that's the goal…yes," she said. "And I think that's what will happen. If you don't keep pushing her."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Come on, Hazel," she said. "You're always pitching college, a real job, some boring nine-to-five that seems important and meaningful on paper. Let's just be honest here. You make her feel less than for even considering that she could keep doing what she's doing, like if she turns eighteen and still does it then she's officially choosing it, instead of it all being pushed on her. As it's always been in your mind, I'm sure."

Is that what Evie thinks?I wondered. Do I make her feel less than?

"I'm not going to lie to her," I said.

"I'm not telling you to lie to her. I'm telling you to let it happen. Let her make the decision. Don't go whining to her about all of this. The money. Just encourage her to do what feels right. I know my daughter," she said. "She wants this. Us, working together. It feels safe to her. Do you really want to take that away? Make her doubt it all? For her to suddenly be on her own when it comes to business, finances? Even if I gave her every dime left right now, she wouldn't know what to do with it. It would be gone in two months."

And you're so great with money, I thought, but another thought was taking up more of my brain: what version of life I'm willing to destroy for my sister, the one in which my sister can still trust her only living parent, or the one in which her sister always tells her the truth.

"Is it really so fun, Hazel?" she said. "To do things the hard way like you are? To battle for a life that you don't even like that much? That's what you want for her?"

"My life is fine," I hissed.

"Right," she said. "So you just moved into that horrible studio apartment in Vegas because you were bored?

"I don't know what you're talking about," I lied.

"She's seventeen, baby. Give her two more years of ignorant bliss. Please. Two years when she doesn't have to worry about any of this," she begged. "I'll make the money back for both of us. For all of us."

For all of us?

"The offer still stands, you know," she explained. "I could still pay for college, even now. Take those student loans off your plate. Give you enough breathing room to go back to New York, find a job that you love, an apartment you like. In a year, we'd have enough coming in for that. Easy. And all you have to do in the meantime is…nothing. Let her continue to enjoy life as it is. Don't push her for more."

Instantly, I remembered Sasha's reaction to what I had told her about paying for college, the way she had looked at me like I was out of my mind. I thought, would this really be so bad? Does leaving things as they are hurt my sister any more than it would if I told her everything when she comes home tonight, if I told her that she can't trust anyone anymore—not her mother, and certainly not herself? Do I really want to create a world where my sister is thinking more about money, about contracts, about the millions of dollars that should be sitting in her bank account but aren't? It might be naive of her not to be thinking about all that money, all its implications, but it's not worse than the alternative, is it? Plus, Evie had offered multiple times to buy me things, whatever I wanted, but I always brushed her off. I didn't need charity from my little sister. I didn't need her to think that I needed it. So was this any different?

I imagined how it would feel to have a massive chunk of debt off my plate, how easy it would be to finally move on, focus on work, create a life that made me feel proud. One that Evie could admire, or maybe even consider for herself. Two years. That's it. I could give her two more years of this world, and then she could move on. Not because she was backed into a corner, or angry at our mother, but because she saw another option. And in half that time, I could be back in the city, far away from all of this. But I knew there was a bigger catch to this, too.

"So, what?" I said. "You want me to just stop coming here, stop talking to her?"

"No," my mom said, looking offended. "Of course not. That would seem a little weird to Ev, don't you think? Do whatever it is that you two always do. Hang out. Chill. Just don't pressure her about college. Don't push her about money. About where it's going. Just let things exist as they have been."

I shook my head. "And then what? This whole cycle starts again? You make all the same money mistakes, and she keeps working her ass off?"

She sighed and moved her head from side to side, her spine cracking. "Obviously not. I've learned. This would be no more fifty-fifty. Everything that I don't need to survive goes to her."

I wondered what, exactly, my mother needed to survive. I imagined it's not a short list.

"Just let things be, Hazel."

"Because that's worked out so well for her…" I scoffed.

"I mean, has it really been so bad, Haze?" she said. "You talk to her all the time. You think she really seems so depressed? So unhappy? Tortured? Please. Let her be seventeen and naive. And next year, when she signs our partnership contract as an adult, and the deals are still pouring in, you can be twenty-eight and debt free in no time. One step closer to the big bad life you're trying to build."

She was staring at me, daring me to look her in the eye. My gaze rested on an enormous canvas on the wall behind her. A black-and-white photo of Evie at thirteen, taken at a shoot for a popular tween clothing brand. I remembered that partnership, the way Evie had described it to me on the phone: six figures for six posts. She told me later that she didn't even like the clothes, but the next year she signed another contract with the brand anyway—that time, for even more money, I was sure. I thought about how quickly that money had materialized, how easy it was for her. "I'll think about it," I heard myself say to my mom, hating the words as they fell out of my mouth, hating myself for not being more definitive.

It should have been the easiest no in the world, but I left the door open anyway. Even this ate at me afterward, when I told myself I had never agreed to anything, or I pretended the conversation had never happened, committing myself to finding other ways to pay off my debt—side hustles, freelancing on top of working full-time at the newspaper.

But I had left the option there, like a part of me knew I wouldn't be strong enough to resist it, not forever. And sure enough, when I lost my job earlier in the year, my mom's offer was the first thing I thought of. I wasn't even waitressing for a week when I called her and asked if it was still on the table. I tried to tell myself that I was giving Evie exactly what she had asked for that afternoon in her room: Fewer questions. Less pressure. I would just step back from this role I was trying to fill, and soon enough, I would have an easier life. I'd be farther away, back in a city I loved, debt free. Evie would want that for me anyway, I told myself. She would.

But in the weeks after, the guilt set in like an illness I couldn't quite shake, a tickle at the back of my throat, then a gnawing. I had only accepted the thing that Evie had always offered—to give me money, to help me out. To buy me whatever I wanted. But I knew it was a betrayal. I knew all the ways that I had protected my ego before I had protected her. In the end, I comforted myself with the same idea my mom had planted in my brain: knowing would only hurt her more.

I am telling myself this now, too, as I lie awake in my sister's bed. Of course, everything is different now. Evie's disappearance means no more seven-figure income for the Davis family, the student loans won't be paid off. A life and career back in New York are out of reach, and not just because I lost my job in Vegas. I was focused on all the wrong things.

I check my phone. Nearly four a.m. now. No point in going back to sleep. I stand up, pacing the room. Desperate for movement, to distract myself.

I walk across the room to the en suite bathroom and flick on the light, my reflection startling me. I lean in close and cringe. Every part of me looks dry, tired. My hair is brittle at the ends and greasy at the roots. My skin is red and splotchy. My entire body seems thirsty. I need sleep, but I want to be out of this house more. I can't believe I ever thought it would be a good idea to stay here. I check my phone again mindlessly, a nervous tic. I feel like Evie is further away than ever, and I'm only falling apart more in the meantime. Becoming less sharp. More fragile. More paranoid. Like I won't be able to handle whatever answers I eventually find.

I open the medicine cabinet, searching for an unused toothbrush, some mouthwash. Instead I find perfectly organized rows of skin care products, brightly colored tubes and matte white bottles of all sizes, each of them mostly full. Unlike my bathroom at home, none of the products are stacked upon one another. They all have their space, their spot.

I take a cleanser out, study its label. Is this the one Evie used every day? I splash my face with water and massage some of it into my skin, scrubbing the grime of the past twenty-four hours from my face, then pat it dry with a soft towel. I grab a moisturizer next, the one that seems the emptiest. Was this Evie's favorite? I try a rich eye cream next, one that I can tell is more expensive than anything I've ever used on my face. I find foundation, a cream blush, eyeliner, and a mascara I know has a cult following on TikTok.

In a haze, I find myself staring at a fully made-up version of my reflection. The white eyeliner tightlining my eyes looks garish and neon. The foundation isn't the right shade; Evie was always just the right amount of sun-kissed. The final effect is undeniable: This is the face of someone trying to be something they aren't. This is the face of someone on the edge.

What are you doing, Hazel?

I wash it all off, scrubbing until my face feels raw and tight.

I'm pressing the towel to my face again when I see something blinking behind me. Or I think I do. A tiny white light—or is just exhaustion? A visual trick from opening and closing my eyes so many times, pressing the towel against my face and removing it again?

But I stare at the spot for a moment, and there it is again. Right inside the air-conditioning vent. I flick off the studio lights over the mirror for a clearer view, and there it is again. A faint light, blinking every sixty seconds or so, barely noticeable, really, but it's there.

I rush to pull in Evie's vanity chair from the bedroom, placing it close enough to the bathroom wall that I can stand on it and be eye to eye with the vent. As I test the sturdiness of the chair with one foot, it occurs to me that I have no idea what I'm going to do next. Remove the vent cover? With what? Stare into the darkness? Why? I climb onto the chair with both hands and turn on the flashlight on my phone, pointing it toward the grates of the vent, illuminating the dark space on the other side.

It takes a few seconds to focus my eyes in the dark, to understand what I'm seeing perched just beyond the air-conditioning vent. A sensor? A smoke alarm?

But the longer I look, the surer I become. It's a camera.